Onward and upward how is everyone doing on a fine Saturday this week we are diving into last week's QD which I posted just on Facebook so all of these questions came from Facebook from the Facebook page. Thanks for connecting there on the Facebook page and I'm reading them right now. I see Michael, Sonia, Chris, Rocky, Stuart, Thomas so we're going to get to as many of these questions as possible focused in all about trail and ultra running okay so let's dive in and then I'll get you the QD for next week's Q&A toward the end all right here we go Michael asks in your video about the Speed Go 50k thank you Michael for going back into the archive and finding an old vlog from two and a half years ago I think approximately so I'm glad you found it in that video about the Speed Go 50k you mentioned that you didn't really like the course I think you called it intentionally obnoxious can you expand on that thought I think I may feel the same way what do you look for in a trail race and what is an ideal race layout for you why do you think some people are drawn to unrunnable courses that is from Michael Michael I love that I love that you're tuned in to once again an old vlog and pulling from that here we go why was the Speed Go 50k obnoxious in case you haven't seen that vlog check it out upper right hand corner I'll try to remember to link to it they sent Speed Go to Carl Metzler is the RD the race director and he created the course and basically the course sends you off trail quite a few times where you're not on a trail you're running just from one point to another and it's marked with flags so that's nice but I must say I wasn't prepared for the uneven surfaces for my ankles and my feet on the off trail section so that was one thing that threw me off mentally I must say also Michael there's points in the race where you go up to a point and then you go right back down to almost where you came from I'm talking specifically like the first probably five miles of the course and it's just like ah when you're out there running especially for that's probably why I like Pike's Peak so much the ascent because you have a goal you're going to the highest point on the mountain and with the Speed Go 50k you're going up and then you come back down and then you go up and then back down and it just got a little tedious at times so anyway that's what the obnoxious part was um can you expand on that thought and then what do you look for in a trail race and what is an ideal race layout for you Michael RD's out there please mark the courses of in fact shout out to the Cirque series which I did in Utah last year and here in Colorado no I didn't race it here last year I did it out in Utah last year the best course markings I've ever been to I can't tell you how many times my brother and I have gone to trail races and when you're okay when you're in first place which sometimes we're in first place when we're racing there's nobody to follow and so you are trusting the course markings so you don't get lost we've gotten lost I'm not going to say many many times but I would say a handful of times either my brother or I have gotten lost so I would say Michael make sure you talk to the RD and like drill into them like I do not want to get lost on this course because it's it's really really frustrating okay I'm gonna leave it there Michael great question oh sorry here we go I got a little excited there training for my first this is from Sonia training for my first 50k in April two questions what do you recommend as your longest training run and I love that the plan I am following has a max of 22 miles is that enough and then question number two for daily mileage is it okay to train on roads with hills mixed in saving trails for the weekend where I can actually train on the course thank you that is from Sonia so Sonia that's a great question and for my 50k Sonia I have a lot more confidence going into a 50k if I can hit I know it's I know so 22 miles is good but I get a lot more confidence when I can hit 25 26 and yes I've hit 27 miles in a training run before 50k and I feel so confident that I can actually finish the 30 to 31 miles strong when I do that so that's my I know it's a lot and definitely do it on a soft surface but 25 26 27 miles is the window that I shoot for okay for 50k's number two for daily mileage is it okay to train on roads absolutely and with hills mixed in absolutely I think now obviously watch make sure you don't have a history of bone injuries if your volume is going to be a little higher because you're training for an ultra race make sure you don't have like for me I'd have to be really careful doing too much on the roads going into a 50k because I have a I have a history of stress fractures in my leg so that would be my only advice for that but yeah just make sure the roads have those hills we'll probably get to this later because those that hill training is so key for the ultra distance okay move it on good question chris asked I have my first 100k trail race on the 8th of February the terraria ultra marathon in New Zealand my longest run to date is 62k what's your best piece of trail running advice for me that's from chris chris seek beauty out there I've heard the terraria course in New Zealand is amazing so seek beauty out there just soak it up and my advice would be 62k is good that's a solid solid training run I don't think you need to go much higher than that I guess one piece of advice would be make sure you know the course well which I've talked about in the past on the channel especially with yeah I've just talked about it so if you can study the course ahead of time and get out and preview the course that's great make sure you have your aid station game plan dialed in so where are the aid stations at what nutrition is available at the aid stations and then of course what will you be carrying on yourself on your in your pack in between the aid stations okay and then also chris if you haven't integrated and it might be too late actually it's it's yeah it's it's probably too late okay but for the future make sure you're integrating some pretty good strength training into your regimen I think for 100 k's 100 milers 50 milers I think good leg strength is critical so whether it's in the gym or body weight training at your house all right there you go chris I hope that helps good question move it on to uh let's see to rocky this is interesting any recommendations for what shoes to wear for an eight hour endurance run it's a three mile looped course half pavement half easy dirt trail that's interesting rocky rocky I would if the trail is really buffed out I would actually I would dabble with the idea and I would need to see pictures of the trail I would dabble with the idea of a maximalist road shoe yes the hoka carbon x I would dabble with that I really would I really I don't know now it depends on how making sure you're not climbing too much vertical but it sounds like it's a pretty tamed three mile loop I don't know I actually I'm trying to think if I would what trail shoe I would consider um gosh I mean I guess okay okay the hoka evo speed go the hoka evo speed go that way because it's it's it's got some good lug depth meaning the the outsole traction but it's not crazy aggressive in my opinion that those laws so you could definitely run on the roads with a hoka evo speed goat and it's very lightweight so I guess I'm giving you two hoka shoes as options I'll leave it there good question that is from rocky moving on to stewart here we go I haven't even read this one let's see what percentage do you think it's mind over body when running 100 mile ultra I'm far from the fittest runner you will ever meet but I'm strong willed and made my legs complete uh and made my legs complete 100 mile ultra in April 2019 congrats stewart stewart I mean a percentage you said a percentage so I will give you a percentage but man I think it's really really critical uh to have a strong mind and honestly stewart I dropped out of my first 100 mile race I blame it a little bit on my plantar fasciitis but at the end of the day I'm not sure I was willing to push myself through that pain to get I dropped out at 50 miles and so was I strong enough up here I would say I probably was I also think I had too too high of expectations of finishing let's say like top 20 top 15 maybe top 10 and once that dream slipped away of finishing high I think my my mind really started to beat myself up so stewart I think it's very critical okay I'm gonna go I'm actually gonna say physical is really critical but I'm gonna go 60 physical 40 mental I don't know because you asked I don't know if that even makes I think that's a little hard to answer but I will go six because I do think you need to be ready to rock and roll physically but that brain is really powerful too anyway to at least run it well moving on good question okay let's see from chris depending on the elevation gain of the race you are training for how much elevation should you aim to run each week yes it does really matter what the course is like for me chris in the summertime a good rule of thumb that I shoot for which I realized depending on where you live if you don't I have access to some big mountains here in Colorado but I think a great rule of thumb is like I'm just gonna I'm gonna say that okay I'm trying to broaden the answer to that three to 5,000 feet of vertical gain per week and again depending on the course you're getting ready for if it's a if it's a flat 50k then that could that could definitely come down but um there's nothing like vertical gain to strengthen your legs for the longer races you know anything especially anything over uh the 40 mile mark 50ks are long but anything over 40 miles I think that's when it starts to get really really difficult so good question from chris I'm gonna put out that three to five thousand foot of feet of elevation gain okay moving on here oh my goodness there's so many questions I can't get to all of them this is from Benjamin how many marathons should someone have run before attempting a 50 miler that's an interesting one Benjamin um I would say my gut is telling me three I think if you can get three marathons under your belt I think you could start to think about a 50 miler but Benjamin I would say don't do that go to 50k first okay so go marathon marathon marathon 50k 50k and then start to think about that 50 miler distance because it is it is a long ways I just tell you it is a long ways as you probably already know so I would say don't quite make that leap uh to straight to 50 okay moving on here oh my goodness Brian asks would I consider running the terra uera absolutely down in New Zealand um this is from Tommy this is interesting oh boy and actually we just talked about this on today's vlog that published this morning Tommy asks would a carbon plate trail shoe work and do you think they are in development um I think they would probably work Tommy and I suspect that we're gonna see it happen ah it's an interesting I haven't put much thought into that so it's a good question I yeah I think carbon plates can help you on the trails I'm not gonna argue against that and um I wouldn't be listen if running shoe companies can innovate before other running shoe companies I would suspect that they're going to anything to push the envelope and sell more running shoes so good question from Tommy moving on here um Dan asks how do you manage the transition from having one kid to more than one kid while also training uh okay so that's interesting Dan it kind of connects to trail and ultra running but um um Dan you need to have a spouse that is there for you I'm gonna leave it there that I could go on and on for so long about that Dan but I'm telling you it's teamwork makes the dream work you gotta have a spouse that is really in support of your running if not there's gonna be friction there and that's no fun you don't want that so have a yeah just talk it out with your spouse make sure you come up with a game plan for your training okay moving on here to Josh oh this might be let's see how long is this okay it's kind of it's kind of long here we go I started using my vest this week only have about 20 miles invested into it the ray light uh the the one I have uh race vest is near perfect thanks for the suggestion my only issue is today I noticed my rib cage is getting uh pretty tender to the touch around the area the lower area of the bottle's hit I wore it relatively tight each time and on top of clothes do you have any tips or will this go away eventually my 50k trail race is in April but realistically I don't think I will need a vest um so Josh I think you I think okay that's tough I'm sorry that your your ribs are hurting that's no fun I think you will I remember like when I'm using a vest a lot my I I feel the same pain like you do get a little sore where the bottles rest on your body now they should be soft flasks I hope you're using soft flasks and so that should help and I think you will get used to it I know I have in the past um and I would agree that for a 50k just so everybody knows I think if you I don't know I've I've raised 50k's with no vest and just a bottle a handheld bottle okay so I think it can be done yeah good question Josh but hopefully let me hopefully your ribs are feeling better soon okay moving on here uh Jin Jin Jung asked when I watched videos of people accomplishing 100 mile races they often have a crew slash pacer team pacer team helping them out is it possible to finish these races without the help of a pacing or a crew and Jin Jin Jung absolutely you can you can run 100 you can run a 200 mile race um but with with no crew but I would say it helps it helps mentally to have a crew it helps somebody to have an accountability uh partner out there when you're when you're just so tired and you hurt so bad and just to talk it out with someone and somebody that knows you really well physically and mentally so critical but Jin just make sure that you find a race that hat that is known for incredible aid station support not just the food that is provided but the actual volunteers at the aid stations um I think the run rabbit run 100 even though I ended up dropping out of that race I was blown away by the support staff at the aid stations I literally somebody receiving me at the aid station like asking me are you okay how are you doing what food do you need where's your drop bag etc etc so Jin um just make sure you find races that have great aid stations and it just takes a little bit of research but um good question I love that question okay moving on here oh boy okay I think we'll take two maybe three more two or three more uh Jeff asked I ran my first 50k in December and we'll be running my first 50 miler in May I love the progression good job Jeff how long do you think my long run should be towards the end of training for the 50 miler should I do back to back long run Saturday and Sunday I'm working on base building again and trying to keep my long runs to 25 to 30 percent of my weekly mileage but realize the percentage might be thrown off for those two to three weeks of longest run so Jeff good questions um for a 50 miler okay I'm not saying I've um I'm not an about 50 miler expert but based on my 50k training and my 100 miler training um Jeff I would say okay I'm gonna I'm gonna tell you that 30 to 35 mile long run range I know it's a lot but I think if you can hit 30 to 35 miles twice no more I don't think you need more than twice in your in your progression up to the the race in May I think that'll set you up for really solid confidence and aerobic base and more importantly uh leg strength okay and okay I should have a big caveat asterisk Jeff and for everyone it depends on how much vertical is happening in these long runs okay if you're doing 10,000 feet of vertical over 30 miles that's a lot that's that's that's like don't do that um so it also depends on the vertical gain in fact one last point I think when not now but when I train for another 100 mile race down the road I personally am gonna focus more on vertical gain over volume obviously obviously depending on the course but I think leg strength from the vertical gain is more important than how many miles I ran on a long run okay so oh food for thoughts I think it's did you ask another question oh yeah back to back long runs love it absolutely love it for those that don't know getting ready for ultra races it's a pretty common practice now uh training training practice to do back to back long runs on uh consecutive days just to so that you run you run you know maybe 22 miles saturday and 28 miles sunday why so sunday your legs are tired and you're starting tired so that when your legs get tired after a marathon and you're only halfway through the race you can adapt your your your body is ready for that that pain essentially uh because it is painful it is painful good question from Jeff those are some some thoughts for you I hope that helps okay oscar asked do you see any benefits to your ultra running performance for having switched to shorter races it's clearly been a smart move as you as you're producing some amazing results at the shorter distances thank you oscar also on a related note what would what made you originally focus on ultras and what made you stop oh oscar great questions great questions oscar so uh for those that don't know i'm now focused on road marathon races why did i switch oscar well i dnf'd at that 100 mile race one of the reasons i dnf'd is like i was tired at 50 miles like and like my legs are kind of small and like compared to all the other guys around me that i was racing i was i'm kind of a small guy and so that was a wake-up call for me like wait a minute is my body really made for this 100 mile distance and then i realized oscar wait a minute i still have a little bit of turnover left i'm 34 now i was 33 when i did no i was 34 when i did amsterdam but i i was i i was doing some time trials here in denver that at a pretty at elevation solo in like 111 some half marathons in one hour 11 minutes and i was like huh that's interesting i wonder what i could do at sea level so it just got me anyway oscar that's why i made the switch is that i want to use the speed in my legs while i have it okay so i'm going to return to ultra races at some point um but that's down the road when i'm a little older and a little i'll just say a little slower okay uh what was the other one um has it benefited 100 so for those that want to run fast go run an ultra race and put your body through some really difficult training mentally and physically and it honestly like the marathon just doesn't scare me at all i got all so that's one benefit of going from ultras back to marathons oscar you that might be my favorite question today okay moving on here one more um let's see from micolage jonashki sorry that's a great i can't say it but that's a great name do you think trail marathons would hurt my prep for a road marathon um and then he goes on with a couple more should i stick to the roads let's say by september or sooner anyway uh it's kind of a long question but micolage i i think if you want to race a fast road marathon you should focus on road racing ahead of time will it hurt you that much not crazy amounts um but i do think that turnover and that speed on the roads uh the the trails i like the trails as i mentioned a couple days ago to help my legs stay healthy uh but i don't think it does not help my turnover and my speed but getting onto soft surfaces with different angles for my feet and my legs and my knees i think is a good thing so micolage i would try to focus on the marathon uh the the the roads before your road marathon specifically a half marathon about three to four maybe five weeks before sorry four to five weeks before your actual marathon a road half marathon okay everyone thank you for the question that was amazing i hope you gleaned a little information there from my experience with ultra running and i'm excited to return to ultra running honestly it's probably another two or three years away yeah where i i'll probably do like a couple fifty k's in the next two or three years but i'm in no rush to return to the 50 milers and 100 milers i'm excited to someday utmb oh man leadville hard rock i'm gonna oh yeah absolutely i want to do all those but right now i'm just excited to go a little faster on the roads i got nothing against the trails in ultra running and that question of the day for next week which i will pull from twitter all right so if you're on twitter you can ask me there and then also down in the comments below this video so cutie here we go what questions you have for me about trail uh training and racing shoes what you know whatever you want to ask about trail racing and it could be ultra ultra racing or it could be uh short races you know five k's 10 k's on the trails those are good too so ask down below all about trail running shoes and trail racing shoes all right everyone thanks for being here thanks for watching have a great weekend and a great week ahead we'll see you next saturday five p.m mountain time for the q and a we're gonna toss it back on the right to last week's q and a all about road running shoes that was last week's q and a that'll be on the right and then i'll connect to the q and a playlist that'll be on the left hand side there all right everyone you guys rock see beauty work hard and love each other see you tomorrow


Hey y'all, I'm Tammy. The cameraman is Chris, my husband, and this is Collard Valley Cooks. We are making our crunchy cornbread today. If you wanna know how we ate cornbread up in Northwest Georgia, well, this is how we did it. Get ready to make some good old cornbread. Now, what Lily Cornmeal is a mix. Now, we grew up just calling it Cornmeal because that's all we bought. And it has a little flour in it, self-rising already. So that helps it rise. You're gonna start out with some melted butter in the bottom. It's six tablespoons. And then you're gonna add two cups of your cornmeal mix, one egg, quarter cup of oil, and sugars. Optional, Chris likes it in there. You want some in there, Chris? No, it's okay. And then this is a cup and a half of whole buttermilk. Now, some of y'all can't get whole buttermilk. And I've told people before, you can use sour cream in your biscuits. You could probably use it in your cornbread too if you can't get the good old buttermilk because it makes a big difference in how it tastes. It is delicious with buttermilk. So you're just gonna mix this up good. I'm mixing it up with a fork so I can get that egg beat in there good. That's about how I like it to look. And we're gonna get this in my skillet.  If you just trust me on this way to make your crunchy cornbread, you're gonna be excited. So you're gonna start your oven at 425 degrees. And you're gonna take some good old shortening in your hand and you're going to grease an iron skillet. Cornbread don't taste the same if you put it in anything other than an iron skillet. It really don't. And it don't have the crust you're gonna want it to have. You don't have to heat your skillet up on the stove or in the oven to get a crunchy cornbread. My mama didn't do this, but Chris did it and it works good. What we do is we sprinkle it with some of the cornmeal mix before we add our mixed up cornbread. Then you're gonna add your cornbread. Now we're gonna slide this in the oven. All right, y'all. Now, we grew up eating savory cornbread. Mama never put sugar in her cornbread and we didn't use the yellow cornmeal with the real sweet cornbread taste. Now, if you go out to eat down here in Savannah or around here, most restaurants serve you that kind of cornbread. But that is not what we grew up eating. We grew up eating a very savory cornbread with the ingredients I've just shown you, all right?  And tell us what part of the country you're from so that we'll know. But down here in Georgia, we make so much cornbread that cornmeal mix is readily available instead of just cornmeal. Some of y'all can't get the cornmeal mix, but here that's what we grew up calling cornmeal because we didn't know any different. All right, we're gonna get this in the oven and we're gonna bake it until it's nice and crunchy at 25 degrees. Cornbread is good and brown.  You should just be able to take a paper towel and wipe out the skillet. So good job. Wiping it clean. And because it had that shortening in there, you can just wipe it out into the trash and have a nice clean skillet that's good and seasoned. Isn't that pretty? Yeah, I'm gonna show you how crunchy the cornbread is. So let me show you that it's crunchy. It's super crunchy, y'all. So you don't have to heat your skillet up in the oven to get it good and crunchy. I promise. Nice and hot and boys, it delicious. This is good, oh, southern cornbread. The way we were raised to eat it here in Northwest Georgia. And it smells so good to me. Now you can let it cool down a little bit and have it with some cornbread and milk. You could put some butter in it and just have a piece of butter or have it with a bowl of beans. Whatever your favorite way to eat it is, it'll be good. Now, our cornbread is also a lot more crumbly than the cornbread that you get, like the Jiffy cornbread that's real yellow. It's more cake-like. Our cornbread is more crumbly and that's how it's supposed to be. So if you've never made this before and we get a lot of questions, why is it so crumbly? Because it's cornbread and it's made with cornmeal, which is crumbly. We love our cornbread down here in the south. And I think you will too if you give it a try. So y'all come back and see us and find out what else we could, like our mama said. We'll see you next time. Love ya. Bye.


Welcome to part 4 of our video series detailing beautiful places to visit in Elite Dangerous. In this video we'll be looking at some of Commander Rini's favourite places to visit that are between 1000 and 2000 light years from Sol. If you enjoyed this video remember to subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications and if you'd like to support our work you'll also find us on Patreon. Links to everything you need are in the description below. Here we go then, at 1100 light years from Sol an idyllic destination for the new explorer looking to stretch their legs for the first time, BD 12 1172 the Spirograph Nebula. The system contains multiple landable worlds and a huge bright O-class blue white star. Two of the landables are ringed and the system is peppered with geologic and biologic points of interest. There are also three notable stellar phenomena spots in the system to visit and all of this is surrounded by the small Spirograph Planetary Nebula itself. Next up, CD 261339 the beautiful Robin's Egg Nebula so called because its shape and colour is vaguely reminiscent of a blue Robin's Egg. The system is 1145 light years from Sol and contains no less than 14 stellar objects ranging from an O-class at the centre which is a binary pair with a black hole to numerous N-class stars and brown dwarves, the whole collection surrounded by an eerie blue and purple cloud. At 1249 light years from Sol you'll find HIP 38064, the whole system here is a wash with sites and you might be tempted to stop at the two ringed worlds that are so close to the O-star at the centre of the system that you'll be fuel scooping as you fly past them but we'd urge you to venture deeper into the system. Body 10 for example is a ringed M-class star one of three ringed stars in the system. It has a close orbiting rocky landable that features silicate geysers on the surface you could easily spend a happy few days in this system taking in the sites that extend outwards from the purple hue of the central star.  The latter is home to a large tourist installation which hovers just outside one of the furious little star's polar jet cones. The installation affords some spectacular views of this violent stellar phenomena. There's some strong gravity fields throughout the system and should you choose to land at one of the system's planets be sure to be aware of that before you start your descent. 1,538 light years from Sol you'll find the star dense system of HD78344 a system with no less than 9 stellar objects head to the 7th body in the system and you'll find that rarest of beasts a ringed neutron star. The rest of the system is peppered with landable worlds and has plenty to explore but it's the ringed neutron that is easily the system's biggest showstopper. And finally at 1,597 light years from Sol HD19557 with a huge carbon star at its centre accounting for most of the system's mass with the 3 gas giants in the system making up the majority of the rest of it there isn't much else to see but the view that you get from the closest landable moon of the first gas giant in the system is pretty hard to beat and more than makes the journey worth it. That's it for this series of beautiful places if you've missed the other videos they're linked on screen now we hope we've inspired you to head out into the black and take in some of these sights for yourself. What are your favourite places in the galaxy of elite dangerous did we already mention yours or is there somewhere else that you'd like to highlight let us know in the comments below. That's it for now thanks very much for watching we'll be back later this week with more videos until then 07 commanders follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack we very much look forward to seeing you next time.


What's the cheapest flight you can buy in the United States? I'll show you how you can use a simple trick to get up to $38 off the already cheap prices from budget airlines, ending up with a round-trip ticket for less than $40 total. To find these extra cheap fares, follow the standard advice of flying budget airlines during off-peak seasons, don't pay for luggage or carry-ons or seat assignments, be flexible with your dates, and buy tickets in advance. But there's one more trick you probably don't know, and that's to buy your ticket at the airport. I'm going to show you some examples and explain why that works. Let's look at a flight from Atlanta to Miami. Let's see, I'll pick some dates and search. $66.60 is pretty good, but I'm going to click on Monthview to find the cheapest dates. Ooh, look at these. That gives me a total price of $56.60. Not bad, but there's one more little trick. These airlines try to squeeze every little bit of profit out of the price, and you can use that to your advantage. Scroll down and look at these taxes and fees. You'll see the airline is paying airports and the government $29.16, keeping only $27.44 for themselves. They could just list this as the airfare, but instead they split it up and list it as a $20 carrier interface charge plus $7.44 airfare. They do this because they have to pay a 7.5% excise tax, but only on the airfare portion, the $7.44. By shifting $20 to this other fee, they save $1.50 on that tax for this ticket. So who cares? It's the same price for you either way, but this is where it gets interesting. In order for this little loophole to be legal, this carrier interface charge has to technically be an optional fee. What's the fee for? It's the fee for buying your ticket with an electronic carrier interface, which is just a fancy way of saying the internet. So the fee is for buying a ticket online, and this means you can avoid it by buying the same exact ticket in person at the airport ticket counter. Yes, they're called ticket counters because you can actually buy tickets there, though hardly anyone ever does. And just like online tickets, you can buy them months in advance and for other airports. Okay, so if you do all of that, this ticket will only be $36.60, round trip Atlanta to Miami and back. Here's another example of an allegiance flight from Las Vegas to Bellingham round trip for $29.82 and a Spirit Airlines round trip from Jacksonville to Chicago for $68.02. So what's the catch? It's this, only budget airlines use this tax loophole like Frontier, Allegiant and Spirit. And these cheap flights don't include a seat choice or food or boarding pass or even carry-on luggage for that price. But you can bring one personal item that fits under the seat in front of you. I use this bag, it's exactly the right dimensions and it's big enough for a short trip. So it's probably not worth it to make a special trip to the airport, but if you're there already or you're buying tickets for a handful of people, these savings can add up. But two quick tips. First, these ticket counters aren't open all day just for an hour or two before some flight is leaving from that airport. So plan ahead. Also, you'll need to know the full names and birthdays of all the passengers if you're buying tickets for more than just yourself. Okay, so what's the cheapest you can fly domestically in the U.S.? Two years ago, I got this round-trip ticket for $28.42 when some of us went to San Francisco for the day. Our BART train fare was almost as much as the airfare. And our ferry ride to Alcatraz was more. Another way to measure the cheapest would be cost per mile. The Atlanta to Miami flight I showed you turns out to be 3.16 cents per mile. But I found an even cheaper one by this measure, Santa Ana to Austin for 2.01 cents per mile. So for context, if you're watching this 100 years from now, that's about one gram of gold or about four hours minimum wage to fly a total of 4,000 kilometers. Let me know in the comments if any of you find a cheaper overall round-trip price or if you can beat my 2 cents per mile. Now I should say this isn't for everyone, but if you enjoy a good deal like I do, you might want to give it a try. And I know people like to complain about these budget airlines, but I think many of the complaints are from people not really paying close attention to the policies and fees, and then being upset when they get charged extra to print a boarding pass or change their seats or something. But if you do your research, carefully weigh and measure your bags and know exactly what you're getting into ahead of time, they're not bad for short flights. Finally, I have a cautionary tale for you. Late one night, I was waiting at a ticket counter buying a ticket. I overheard this poor woman standing next to me. You see, she was there on July 24th at 10.30 p.m. to check in for the 12.15 a.m. flight in two hours. Her ticket said July 24th and she was there on July 24th, but 12.15 a.m. was on July 25th. She had missed her flight by 22 hours and these budget tickets are non-refundable, so she had to buy a whole new ticket last minute. So just be extra careful with dates and times when you're buying a non-refundable ticket. The first time I ever signed up for Lyft was because I made a similar mistake with a hotel reservation in Denver once. I was there a day early and they were full. Okay, enough stories. Thanks for watching. I wish you success in finding cheap tickets.


The COVID-19 survey is a free, comprehensive, and user-friendly survey designed to collect data on patient-reported information such as demographics, symptoms, and lifestyle habits. It is intended to be used by researchers to gain insight into the clinical risk factors associated with COVID-19 disease severity and outcomes. The survey is also designed to be easily implemented online, requiring minimal resources and allowing for comparison of data across studies. This article was authored by Sheffali Seesha Verma, Wendy K. Chung, Scott Dudeck, and others.


Hello, sir. I have a question. Yes, ma'am. So, you're able to come to many colleges and give many more speeches. And I think it's just a single life, right? And you're able to achieve more than what one can imagine. A big foundation, Isha, Yoga are mine. And many more centers, many more disciplines. It's all in a single life, right? If a government wants to take this by peaceful efforts and hard work, I think it will take at least up to three generations. And you have done it within a single life. So, what's the secret behind your success? As a child, did you blow soap bubbles? So, bubbles. So, when you blew soap bubbles, have you seen somebody got this big bubble? You got only this big bubble.  Everybody had air in the lungs. But somebody got a big bubble, somebody got a small bubble. What is this about? See, when it comes to body, this is my body, that is your body. Hundred percent clear. No confusion about this, isn't it? This is my body, that is your body. This is my mind, that is your mind. But when it comes to life, there is no such thing as my life and your life. This is a living cosmos. How much life will you capture within your system will determine the size and scope of your life? Somebody got a big bubble, somebody else got a small bubble. It went off. You cannot identify where is my air and where is your air, isn't it? So similarly when it comes to life, there is no such thing as my life and your life.   This is a living cosmos. How much life will you capture within yourself will determine the scope and range of your life. What one person can do in hundred years, somebody may do it in ten years. Because of the sheer intensity of life. When I say intensity of life, it may translate in many different ways. See, there are times, for example, certain businesses have grown.  Within three years somebody's billions of dollars of worth of business. Let us say Microsoft has grown or Facebook has grown or something like this has grown. This is largely because of technological breakthroughs and somebody writes that technology. At another time, that would not have happened. So that is different. But if you want to create something really large, really significant, larger, small is not the point, significance, then you need intensity of life. One thing is the scale of life that you capture. There are... this is what I said earlier when I said yoga, obliterating in boundaries of your individuality means in a way you are allowing universe to invade you. When universe is not against you, but it invades you or it's a part of you, then you have abundance of life. When you have abundance of life, you will not hesitate to share. When you share big time, your life with everybody else, people will naturally value it immensely because everybody is trying to hold it, somebody is willing to share it.  This will lead to many things. This will make many friends and many enemies. A lot of people whom you have never met, they are your own enemies, but you don't know why. You never met them. You never had a word with them. But they are swearing that I am his enemy. I don't know why, but it goes on in the world. So when we talk about how so much can be done in a short span of time, it's not a short span of time, it's thirty-seven years. Incessant work, seven days of the week, twenty hours a day, almost for twenty-five years, more than twenty-five years. On an average, I slept only for two-and-a-half hours a day. Not deprived of sleep, just kept my life energy so intense that sleep was not even an issue. There are times when I've gone without sleep for three days, four days, full-scale working. Not because you're on some kind of a drug and not sleeping, simply because of the intensity of purpose and commitment to what you're doing. Today I can proudly say I have created thousands of people around me. All of them have gotten crazy like that. They are all beginning to work like this. Most of them, you don't know when they will sleep, when they will wake up. On, on, on, seven days of the week. No holidays, no vacations, but everybody is joyful. If you come to the yoga center and see, you will see the most joyful faces. But they've never been on a vacation.  They don't have money in their pockets, but they're just joyful. Because drunk with life, literally. Well, it's like this. Have you noticed on a certain day, if you're very, very joyful and blissed out, you're willing to do whatever is needed, no problem, isn't it? Any amount of work. But little frustration, your feet will drag. So I have not known frustration at all in the last thirty-seven years. Not that everything goes right, many things don't happen the way I want. In fact, nothing happens the way I want. That's a fact. Because what I want is up there. It is always an incremental success of everything. But because of the sheer intensity of purpose and focus. When some moments we started and people gathered in millions, somebody told me, a very prominent person in the country, Sadhguru, this kind of crowds happened only when Mahatma Gandhi came. I said, no. See, don't compare because Mahatma Gandhi had a huge advantage. He had an enemy. There was somebody to fight. When you have an enemy, you can gather masses. Now, my whole thing is, I'm constantly reminding people, there is only one enemy in your life, that's you. If you fix this one person, everything is fine with you. Yes or no? You have only one enemy, that's yourself. If you fix this one person, this is a wonderful life. So when there is no external enemy, moving people towards a purpose is very difficult. But people have moved wonderfully, not just in India, around the world. People are putting a lot of pressure in various countries. Sadhguru, you've done enough in India. You must come and stay here, stay there, do this, do that.   Because we have the largest number of young people. If you get the necessary intensity and balance within you, this is important. Intensity without balance will make you go crazy. If you have intensity and balance, we can make a miracle out of this nation. All the problems that we are seeing in this country can be a thing of the past in a matter of ten years' time, not too long. If you look at nations, if you look at the history of this world, the only country which has moved a large segment of population from poverty to affluence in one generation is the China. But they did it with lot of force and pain, too much pain. Millions have died, so much pain, so much force. But today, India as a nation, we are sitting on a threshold that through a democratic process, if all of us do the right things in the next five, ten years' time, through a democratic process, without a gun, without bloodshed, we can move a billion people from one level of living to another. This kind of thing has never happened in the history of humanity. Right now, India is sitting on that cusp that if we do the right things in the next five, ten years' time, you will see this nation transforming. Without guns, without blood, without those kind of revolutions, simply through democratic process we can do, we are sitting on the threshold. It is just that we should not sit on the threshold for too long. We must take the next step and the next step and that is in our hands as a generation of people. We need to do that.


Welcome to this episode of Fort Worth Forward. I'm Michael Crane, and you won't believe what we have in store for you today. We have Mania Shore from the Fort Worth Public Library, Kathy Nice-Brown with the James L. West Center for Dementia Care, Cameron Cushman with the UNT Health Science Center, who's involved with innovation and entrepreneurship issues in the area, as well as Marcus Kiprios with Black Land Distillery. Let's get started. Thanks for joining us today. I'm very excited to introduce to you Mania Shore, who's the director of the Fort Worth Public Library, as well as Kathy Nice-Brown, who is head of the James L. West Center for Dementia Care. Welcome, y'all. Thanks for joining me today. Thank you for having us. Yeah, no, very excited to have you here today. You know, Mania, you've been the director of the Fort Worth Public Library for four years now, is that right? Almost spot on four years. Four years, and you came from... Tell us shortly where you came from and why Fort Worth. Sure. So most recently, I came from the D.C. Public Library in the District of Columbia, but I've been in public libraries for over 23 years, and I was recruited to Fort Worth, and I love it so much that I've been here longer than I have been anywhere in the past decade. Wow, and we hope you're not going anywhere. No plans. Good, good. Well, we have this mutual admiration, I would say, for Libby, my other girlfriend. Why don't you tell the audience who Libby is? Yeah, we don't tell Joanne. Right, so Libby is the name of our e-book and downloadable audiobook service, and it's how people get e-books on their kindles or audiobooks on their phone, which they listen to as they drive, which is what I think you do in your car. And Libby became so popular during COVID that we saw a jump of 40% usage because people couldn't come in for a while and get material. And this year was the first time we passed one million downloads. Downloads. That's great. Pretty amazing, and because I know you love Libby so much, I have a gift for you. It is a Libby mug. Look at this guys, look at this here. A Libby t-shirt? A Libby t-shirt. Oh my gosh, this is Libby. So if you don't know Libby, go check out Libby. It's free on the fourth app or the library app, right? Yeah, that's right. I always say that if you are paying for Audible, you're wasting your money because you should be getting it free from the public library.  That's great. And I know a lot of people appreciate that, appreciate all the things that we did and do to help people connect. I know we have Wi-Fi as you can check out and other things so people can keep learning and rigging and all that thing during different, you know, everything that goes on in our lives, right? Absolutely, yeah. We are here to provide for our community. That's great, that's great. What I also love are a lot of public-private partnerships. That's a private partner. I guess it's public. Collaboration really with Here Fort Worth. Tell people about that. So Amplify 817 is our local music streaming service. So we feature and we pay local Fort Worth musicians to license their music and then people can stream it for free or download it for free. The money comes from the Fort Worth Public Library Foundation. So it's private money that pays the musicians and it's in partnership with Here Fort Worth which is a division of Visit Fort Worth. And so far we have almost 50 artists and we have a curated contest every, twice a year. So we just add on musicians over time and the goal is to bring music from Fort Worth to feature the diversity of Fort Worth music and bring it into people's homes. That's wonderful and I, who are some of the artists that you feature out there? Yeah, so the number one artist that I always think of is Lou Charles. He's amazing. He just did his album was just solely on Amplify at 170. That's right. We just did an exclusive deal with Lou. So he gave us the rights to his album for one month before he puts it on with the regular streaming services. We have a lot of different kinds of genres. It's important. We all love country music but that's not all that Fort Worth music is. Fort Worth is bigger than that. So much bigger. I'm really proud of that partnership and all of our collaborations that we have with our partners. That's great. Well, that segues perfectly into Kathy and East Brown. We've known each other for a long period of time and love what you're doing right now with the West Center. So tell us a little bit what, how the West Center helps people with dementia and then let's talk about the collaboration piece of it. Of course, well, James and West was founded almost 30 years ago by a group of community volunteers from Fort Worth who identified a need to provide support for persons with Alzheimer's disease and dementia. And Mr. West was a Radio Shack Tandy executive who was impacted but had nowhere to go. They allowed him to come to the office and sit in a conference room and his wife said there's got to be more and there needs to be more. So in the Fort Worth way, the collaborators came together and created James L. West as a residential care facility. Then about 10 years ago, caregivers were calling by the volumes asking what do I do with my person? And the Sid Richardson Foundation started the education program at James L. West. So in 2022, we'll celebrate 10 years of support for caregivers in the community. Fully underwritten by philanthropic donations, we spend about $600,000 a year on education programs and community collaborations to support caregivers and train healthcare professionals as well. Because diagnosing dementia is incredibly difficult, so by and large, you have more than 50% of our aging population with dementia but undiagnosed. Oh, okay. And so the West Center has identified that community need and addressed it. And partners like Mania, who also dream of Technicolor and love to collaborate, helped to bring about the memory box project that we're always collaborating. So we're working with Fort Worth ISD as well, training certified nurse aides as the first clinical partner in the post-acute space nationwide to work with the high school to address training for the future. Yeah, so let's talk about this memory box. I think it's important for people to continue to exercise their memory, right? Sure. And that helps Alzheimer and dementia patients sort of maybe stretch out a little bit longer before, so if they're doing that. So how did this idea come about and how does it help? Well, this idea, the memory box idea, started in Effingham, Illinois in their library. And the Effingham Public Library has a forget-me-not resource center. Okay. And the memory boxes are an important part of the resource center because it's the long-term memory that you're tapping here. So short-term memory is often, you know, here today, literally gone this afternoon, gone within an hour, but these memories of scents and smells and tactile things that they use all their lives. And when you have one person with dementia, you really have two, because you also have their caregiver. Sure. And so the caregiver is walking the same road and suffering in a very different way than the person living with dementia. And so these memory boxes are focusing on content areas that every single one of us enter into our lives, whether it's construction or cooking or games, arts and crafts, those type of things. And they are conversation starters for caregivers. Yeah, that's what they get to expect as part of this. They're conversation starters. Yes. Yeah. It gives you a tool because often times you don't know how to carry on a meaningful interaction with someone with dementia. And so this can work for someone in the very early stages or the more advanced stages because you have the sensory side to this box as well. So I guess the idea behind that is it does, maybe for me personally, you have a smell and it reminds you of something or it takes you back something and maybe it gives you a little bit about of your functionality back. Exactly. Or brings back and the senses remain when the memories are gone. And that is a big part of people with dementia as well. And so it is an opportunity for me to talk to you, Michael, about cookies that are made with cinnamon, things that smell with cinnamon. Fall is the time when cinnamon usually arrives, those type of things. You can take this spoon and spatula and talk about their uses, but they also make noise. Noise is a super popular thing. And opening and closing the lid on the Rubbermaid container talking about these. You can use these as an arts and crafts type of item as well as a baking item. You can also talk about the colors and the textures and the patterns because tactile becomes way more important when people are advanced in their dementia. And so each one of these can be used in a very different way. Interesting. And you train the caregivers to talk about this. We'll host classes in library locations at four different locations to talk about the use of the memory box. These are extensively on loan through the Fort Worth Public Library, but you can create your own. So part of the class will be creating your own memory box with things that are important to your loved one. These are very generic. And this was funded by the Junior League of Fort Worth. Great. Good shout out. They did great work. Why is it important for the library to offer these types of things? Because we are everywhere. One of the things that Kathy and I talked about very early on is how difficult it is for someone who has a family member with dementia living in their home and them not knowing what to do, which is why she has the education arms for James L. West, but they can't be everywhere all the time. And we have 17 locations across the city. So we can move these around. People can check them out. And then we can host the workshops at any location that is convenient for people. We have a lot of programs about coming downtown, either to the Central Library or to James L. West. They can go somewhere near their own home. That's great. Are there any other sort of programs that the library offers to help dementia Alzheimer's? Well, we are... I asked Kathy to help me remember what it's called. We are certified as age and dementia friendly. We went through a program with Kathy to make sure that our staff understand how to identify a patron and how to help them, how to engage them. Because there can be high emotions when you're working with someone with dementia. And then this past year, do you want to talk about the virtual program? Sure. James L. West transitioned as everyone did with COVID to provide online education. And we hosted an event with Tepa Snow, who is a national educator. Tepa talks about the practical care of persons with dementia and communication and those type of things. We had over 400 subscribers to that program through the Fort Worth Public Library. Again, offered free of charge. And it's just one of many programs that James L. West offers. James L. West is also a Tepa Snow certified training organization. Okay. And so that was a great partnership. The city of Fort Worth is also age friendly and dementia friendly. And made that pledge under mere price. And so this continues that commitment as well. I think where we go from here with James L. West, I'm not exactly sure, but like we always say, we have this mutual admiration society. And we're really committed to our residents who have dementia and the families that support them and figuring out how we can be a part of that. That's great. Well, thank you for being here today. How can people find you? Where can they find you? Of course, James L. West has an online education portal at Fort Worth Library.org. And then James L. West has a website, of course, JamesL. West.org. And James L. West is in the library system. James L. West is in the schools. It is important to remind your providers that there is a free resource in James L. West for dementia education and diagnosis. And the library, of course, is everywhere. Yeah. So people can find us at Fort Worth Library.org. They can also find us on social media, of course. We're very active on Facebook, on Instagram. And then I would just remind everyone that we don't just serve our senior residents. Many families who have parents who have dementia also have young children. So we have programs for young children. We have a story time at every location at least once a week. So Fort Worth Library.org is where you go to see everything we have offered. And Libby will be on there, too, right? And Libby's on there, too. There we go, guys. Thank you all again for being here. We'll be right back. And now I just want to do a quick shout-out to Pat Finch and Donna Walker for a very thoughtful gift. Pat was my high school student council sponsor. And she and Donna got together and gave me these great bottles of cake bread wine. They had them engraved with some of the sentiments I made the night I was sworn into the city council. This one says Moving Fort Worth Forward. And it says when those who are less fortunate succeed, we all succeed. I'll say this. We all have teachers that have probably made a difference in our life that we haven't told. Reach out to them, send them a letter, call them on the phone, an email, whatever it is, and let them know that they have made the person that you are today. I know that's the case with Pat. And so thank you all very much for continuing to cheer me on in all the things that I'm doing. Now it's my pleasure to introduce you to longtime friend Cameron Cushman, who is assistant VP of education systems at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. Glad to have you here today, Cameron. Thanks for having me, Michael. It's great to see you. It's like I'm in your living room. It's a little bit, right? This is fine. It's great. You can't see the big green screen that's really behind us and all that other. Don't tell the audience. Magic of TV, right? Well, thanks for joining us. I know you're very busy and doing a lot of different things here. I've long appreciated your work on our entrepreneurs here in Fort Worth. So tell us a little bit about the ecosystem. Why entrepreneurs are just very important to the ecosystem of any city?  And if you think about there's really three things that entrepreneurs do for us. They bring new products and services to market. They create jobs for people and they build wealth for our society. A lot of people will criticize their trades or the Elon Musk of the world because they're billionaires. They make a lot of money. How much money have they made for people? How much wealth have they created for our society because they brought new things to market and they gave a whole lot of people jobs and our society is definitely better off because those people, those entrepreneurs did what they did and it's the same thing here in Fort Worth. We talk a lot about how do we get the next corporation to move here? Bring those jobs from somewhere else to Fort Worth. But you're not actually creating any jobs at that point. You're just moving them from one location to another. We also talk about retention, right? How do we make sure that company that's growing? That company that needs more space or they need more people? How do we help them stick around? That's a very important part of economic development. What I focus on is kind of that third leg of the stool which is what I call the grow your own approach, right? The entrepreneurs, the small businesses, how do we help them get started and then kind of rig the system so that they can grow faster, create more jobs, make more innovations to market faster, avoid failure and continue to do those things that entrepreneurs do for our community. They kind of foster them through the process. Exactly. Starting a company is probably the hardest thing anybody will do in their entire lives and yet they're so important to our economy. So we need to figure out how we can do everything we can in our power as a city, as a government, as a academic institution, really just as a community to help those people succeed. I know at the city level we've done a lot of partnerships, collaborations, etc. In one of those collaborations you're very heavily involved in. It's called SparkYard. It's a collaboration with the City of Fort Worth and TCU. So tell us a little bit about that and why it's important. Absolutely, yes. I spent some time, I'm a Fort Worth native, but I spent some time in Kansas City before this and SparkYard is built on a platform created by US SourceLink. We changed it to make it a little bit more Fort Worth. You know, if you think about it, every business starts with a Spark. The center of commerce in Fort Worth was the StockYard, so we changed it to SparkYard. Very creative. But it really does one important function. It creates a way for entrepreneurs to connect into our local ecosystem. There's a ton of resources out there, most of which are free for companies, existing small businesses, and people that have an idea, but they don't know where to start. You know, they wake up in the middle of the night, I've got this idea, I've got to go raise venture capital. There's all kinds of resources from what we call our resource partners here in town that people can access, talk to, find a mentor, get maybe some startup capital instead of some of that later stage capital. SparkYard is really a function that helps them find that right resource at the right time in their development. Built on top of that, there is an event calendar, so you can find all kinds of events going on around different topics. We've also done some research on our entrepreneurial ecosystem. How are we doing as a community? How do we rank against other Texas cities? Talk about that, the data. I know you all have a lot of metrics around that. We were kind of shocked when we started that there weren't many metrics around this. Nobody was really tracking it. Other cities do, everybody does a little bit differently. I would say we really tracked it on three metrics. One was the number of companies that are started. If you want to think about where to start, what's the top of the funnel look like? We started in Fort Worth and Tarrant County every year, and we lag other big Texas cities in that, so you're not putting the companies in the pipeline that can then go on to the next step, which is raising early stage capital. We really rank far behind in that category. One way to think about it is we're the 13th largest city in the country by population, but through some data and analytics that we did using a platform called Pitchbook that we have access to at the university, we found out that we really rank about 40th when it comes to early stage capital. So we're a really big city, but our local startups aren't raising money like they should, and that's a problem. So we need to kind of think about how to close that gap. Were there ideas behind closing the gap that you would have? Yeah, and we can talk about some of those, but a lot of it's just private investment. You've got to have the companies to fund, you've got to have the entrepreneurs that are starting the companies, the universities that are seeding into that with research dollars and experiments and things like that, and then you've got to have the funders, the venture capitalists, the angel investors, all those people that fund things along the way in the life cycle and the development of the company. And then the third thing was Inc. Magazine tracks the fastest growing companies. So Fortune 500 tracks the biggest companies, the Inc. 500 tracks the fastest growing companies, and Fort Worth only has about 10% of those companies in the DFW area. So we're just not getting the companies started, and then the ones that are getting started aren't growing as fast as some of the other ones, even Plano, Frisco, some of those cities outrank Fort Worth and we're a way bigger city than they are. Interesting, interesting. Well, lots of I think work that we need to do there, and I know the city's committed to finding those next generation Fortune 500 companies that are already here, aren't here yet and are here, but maybe it's someone's garage or somewhere else to foster them, and I'm glad Sparkard exists to help them through that process.  I think this is an older medium of being in front of cameras, but podcasts are this new medium where you can listen to things on the go and you have one called Innovate Fort Worth. Tell us a little bit about that. You know, who's on it? What are you trying to feature? What's the mission? Tell us about it. Well, it's funny because we're actually about to launch or release our 50th episode and so it feels like we've been around forever, but yes, so many of these kind of podcasts and shows have popped up just in the real recent past. So, we really started this podcast with a very specific thing in mind, which was to say that there are so many people in Fort Worth and you talk to them all the time. They're doing cool things. They're starting new businesses. They're thinking about solving problems in totally unique ways and nobody covers them.  Nobody's going to, nobody in the traditional media is going to cover you and you don't have any social media followers because you just started last week or last year. We really wanted to shine a light on some of these innovators and entrepreneurs that are doing really cool things in Fort Worth that nobody knows about. So, our hope is that these are people that are starting companies that this may be the first time they've ever really had this kind of an exposure. And it's not just about, we try to cover the whole ecosystem. It's not just about the entrepreneurs. It's also about the researchers that are doing some really cutting-edge work on this. It's also about funders. What are they funding? And then it's also about some of the legacy folks that have been doing this work for a long time. Our fourth guest ever was John Adams, the founder of Musinex. Nobody knows that Musinex was started here in Fort Worth.  Exactly. And it was created right here in Fort Worth. So we're trying to tell that story that, hey, this is a cool place that you can innovate, right? We invented hydraulic fracturing. We had Radio Shack for a while. Who are those next companies that are going to be the next Musinex, the next Radio Shack that'll start and grow right here in Fort Worth? Well, I'll say that part of the reason of this program was to tell cool Fort Worth stories and some glad of any avenue, medium, etc. that's doing that, because we do have a great place. And we probably don't tutor Horn as much as we should so the rest of the world knows about us and knows about that this is a great place to innovate and just live life. One thing I want to talk about too is you've written a white paper called Startup Fort Worth that was really maybe a call to action to us as city council members, the rest of the community. What drove you to write that paper and give us some key factors in it? Yeah, it's a great point and I do want to stress too, it wasn't just me. It was a team of several of us that work on this and think about this all the time. We're nerds, we admit it, but you know from your time in DC a white paper is something that you write to call attention to something and then recommend a course of action. And with a brand new mayor who was super young and talked a lot about innovation and entrepreneurship during the campaign and of a new city council, I think what, five out of the nine seats turned over? Well, if you include the mayor, yeah. Yeah, so it was a big chance that we saw. So we saw a chance that hey, this is an opportunity to rewrite the narrative and start the conversation. And plus too, a lot of times what happens is we need to study this issue. Don't study the issue. We have some ideas about what we can do to get this thing going. So we threw this thing out there. We built a little website. We put it up there and we created an opportunity for people to comment and a polling function. We know we don't have all the good ideas, but let's get the conversation started and jump in and see if you have a better idea for us. So really we broke it down into three sections. One is the government, right? What can the city do? What can the county do to help some of these entrepreneurs have more success to rig the system to tilt the playing field in their favor so that they can get to market faster and create the jobs we need to create. The second was just the community, right? I worked at the Kaufman Foundation in Kansas City. Wealthy entrepreneur died in 1993 and left his fortune to building the entrepreneurial community in Kansas City and the rest of the country. We don't have that person here. It's not to say that Fort Worth's not generous. We have plenty of philanthropists, but it just has to be oriented in that way. Not someone solely focused or a foundation solely focused on that area. And then you have big companies, right? BNSF, Lockheed Martin, American Airlines. Great companies, right? A lot of jobs. A lot of great services they provide for our community, but none of them have really been oriented in this pro-innovation, pro-entrepreneurship kind of way. So how do we steer them? What are some things that they can get involved with? And the third one was just education. If you don't know who the startups are in your community that are working, you don't know how to help them, right? And who are the startups? Do they know how to go raise venture capital? Do they know the steps that they need to do to even start their business? Much less grow it, hire people, take those next steps. So we have a few programs in there that people can take a look at to see, hey, does Fort Worth need this? Is this a gap that we need to try to fill? Wonderful. And you brought up Mayor Parker, one of the things that she's done and it was announced today, actually, that we're looking at different pieces of how we run our committee structure at the city level and they've not been run the same way. So she's created this entrepreneurship and innovation committee that she's appointed me to from the city council perspective that can help maybe continue to shepherd some of these things along from the government.  The government plays a role, but there are many people that need to play or organizations that need to play a role. We just need them all around the table talking forward, right? Yeah, and if you talk to some of the people like Kerry Crow from Melt Ice Cream and these iconic brands that make Fort Worth special, those are small businesses, right? Those are entrepreneurs who took a risk. And if we like the cool, funky hotel dresses and the Melt Ice Creams, we need to encourage more of those kind of people to start companies, make sure that they stay in business and can weather things like global pandemics and things like that because that's what makes Fort Worth cool, that's what makes Fort Worth funky, right? And you and I love living here for those very reasons. Let's make sure those guys have all the right tools that they need to be successful. Sure. And I think that also will help across the board with smaller business, diverse businesses that make Fort Worth special. Right, that's great. I know you're spending a lot of your time on Global Entrepreneurship Week and you have this cool little button there, I say pin. Tell us what would you like. I would. I would. There you go. You have one for me? I got it. There it is. So tell us a little bit about this button here. Sure. What it means about Global Entrepreneurship Week, why it's important to Fort Worth. You brought it here, started here, so tell us a little bit about it. Yes, so Global Entrepreneurship Week has become this global phenomenon that is going to happen the second week of November in 170 countries around the world, which is just kind of mind-boggling. There's going to be about 40,000 events that happen all around the world that just shine a light on entrepreneurs, the start-up community, the people that take the risks, the innovators, the funders, everything that's involved in this what we call ecosystem to try to move this forward. And Fort Worth had an effort several years ago and it kind of died away. So we brought it back, this will be our fourth year coming up here in the second week of November and last year we were actually the number one location in the United States. We had I think 93 different sessions all focused on entrepreneurship. It was all virtual, of course, because it was 2020 and that was a weird year. But this year we're going to have, looks like about 110, 120 different sessions going on in locations all around the city. We're also going to have a base camp actually in my office at 550 Bailey on the campus of the Health Science Center and we're going to have a bunch of virtual and kind of hybrid events as well. So all over the city, people can watch online or get online. There are some just solely online, right? There's some pre-recorded content. There's some interactive content that you can watch online or you can show up in person if you're comfortable and been vaccinated and all those sort of things. So yeah, so we would love for your viewers, your people in your district to come and just learn about entrepreneurship. Hear some of the stories about people who are doing really cool things in our city and also figure out what they need to help their own businesses succeed. So the website is www.fortworth.org. It's real simple. Global Entrepreneurship Week, GEWfortworth.org and sign up, come to some sessions and we'll see you in the second week of November. That's great. Well, thanks for being here, Cameron. Appreciate it. Appreciate everything that you do in the city, especially highlighting people I know that need that exposure so we can build those new companies and you just help people out. So appreciate what you do. Thanks for being here today. Thanks for having me. That's awesome. Thank you. And now we'll shift from talking about entrepreneurs to talking about entrepreneurs. I'm thrilled to introduce my friend Marcus Kiprios who is a recovering attorney and now owns Black Land Distillery. Marcus, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on. Very excited to talk to you. It's great. Well, I want to warn our audience that some of these bottles are half empty. We have not touched any of them. That's true. Yes. This is my day-to-day life of just going out and tasting and promoting the product and that's what happens. Well, that's great. I mentioned that you're a recovering attorney and at one point you said, I want to open a distillery. Yeah, let's talk about that process. What are you thinking? I'm from Fort Worth. I was born and raised and I was an attorney but at night I went to culinary school. Then after I graduated from culinary school I got into wine and part of the sommelier exam is Distilled Spirits. Then I went to five schools around the country to learn how to make alcohol. I saw it was very much like cooking and so then I left my firm and built the distillery and here we are. That's great. So your distillery is... Where is it located? It's right behind Montgomery Plaza on Wisenberger Street. We have a really cool cocktail lounge for those that have never been there. It's a great place to have a drink before or after dinner. A really special place. Tell us about it. I've visited it, obviously, and done a tour but for our audience you've got all your vats, it's a full production facility and then in the front we have the tasting room and right now we're in the middle of an expansion so we're adding another 5,000 square feet for really more barrel storage and then a new bottling room as we grow. That's great. What does the Distilled Spirits look like here in Fort Worth and in Texas in general? As you've launched this brand and been out there, I know huffing it to sell the product. I would just say Texas in general is a pretty young whiskey distillery state in comparison. When we talk about the oldest whiskey distilleries in Texas are Garrison and Balcones and that's 2008 which is just not that old when you think about Kentucky or think about Scotland or Ireland. We're sort of on a new landscape here and a lot of new places are opening up but Texas whiskey is like everything that is Texas is becoming its own individual thing standing out from everywhere else and we're certainly on the upswing right now. Which of these did you develop first and how did that progress? Well the vodka is usually the first spirit that you make because it's the fastest and it's the easiest. It's not always the best because I know we've all tasted bad vodka but... Maybe the morning after. Yeah maybe. I try to tell everyone please drink my vodka but if you don't drink good vodka. There's plenty of both out on the market and life's too short and then the gin was just next because the clear spirits are quicker and easier because they don't have to age in a barrel over time and then the bourbon and the rye and our latest creation which we released last November was the Texas pecan brown sugar bourbon which has become our number one seller and is really great around the holidays too. It is great around the holidays it's great. It's beautiful enough to just drink by itself I think people put it in hot chocolate and other things to give it a little different flavor. Yeah we've seen hot chocolate we've seen coffee, certainly eggnog around the holidays, I support all of it. There you go, what about your other drinks that can be made with your... You can do some special drinks at the tasting room. Yeah because we have five spirits we can curate a pretty incredible cocktail menu that's seasonal around the spirits and so of course we have old fashions we have a lot of classics in the tasting room really it is a sophisticated cocktail lounge is what I like to say. And I know you spend a lot of time and it's always a comment about how beautiful the bottles are and you spend a lot of time sourcing these finding these so talk a little bit about that process.  So it's the gateway for us to the brand it's the attention grabber we always get great shelf placement we're not going in the well with a bottle like this especially because it says black land it says Fort Worth people like that and that's really been great for us not just here but all over Texas. Yeah so a lot of people don't know this and even I growing up here didn't we live in the Black Land Prairie there are seven eco regions in Texas and the Black Land Prairie runs north of Fort Worth all the way down to San Antonio and it got its name because hundreds of years ago there were frequent wildfires causing the soil to be black and charred and I like that because we age whiskey in charred barrels I like the geographical connotation and I like that you know that's where we live. Interesting, interesting story. What's next? What are you thinking about for Black Land Distillery and the rest of this into the next year what is the future of Black Land look like? Well we're growing quickly which is great we've just introduced these 50 milliliter bottles for the holidays which is a great gift set that you can buy in the Distillery they'll be available and then we are now available in Texas but in January we'll be launching into eight new states Louisiana, Arkansas Mississippi Alabama, Kansas Colorado, Arizona and I'm sure I'm forgetting one at this point. That's interesting you can sell these I think it's a limit still two bottles that you can buy in the the state law prohibits us to selling two bottles per person per month which is the equivalent it's really 1500 milliliters just think of it as 30, 50 milliliter bottles 30 small bottles or two large bottles or one in 15 I wrote a chart out for my staff I'm confident we can get through the the holidays Well thanks for that I'd like to just talk about owning a small business and advice to other small business owners that might be wanting to take a leap and want to be an entrepreneur but maybe there's things that they need to overcome but what would you give yourself advice five years ago or whatever when this was all started Well first I just encourage everyone to follow their dream and their passion and go for it and then secondly on that same note make sure that you're fully funded and it will always cost more no matter what business plan you implement you can't possibly foresee all of the costs and expenses and you certainly can't plan for natural disasters or worldwide pandemics and so I would just whatever you think you need double it that's true that's true well you talked a lot about we talked about the tasting room but where else can people find your products yeah so we're available in over 1500 liquor stores in the state of Texas so the big box stores of course but I like to support the independence especially here in DFW and then we have a lot of relationships and support from bars, restaurants, hotels all over Fort Worth you can usually find one or two of our spirits on the shelf and that just grows every week okay great where can people find you yeah so you can go to our website and then you can order through a third party called reserve bar it's on our website and it will ship anywhere into Texas awesome news well congratulations on such great products I've personally tasted all of them myself on a routine basis and share them with friends so appreciate what you do and appreciate all that you do for our community too thanks Marcus for being here today no problem thanks for having me thank you for watching this episode of Fort Worth Forward if you have someone or something that's happening in the community you'd love to see highlighted on the show send us an email at district3 at fortworthtexas.gov again thanks for joining us we look forward to seeing you soon


A Ukrainian court sentenced a Russian soldier to life in prison today for killing an unarmed civilian in the first war crimes trial arising from Russia's February 24 invasion, Vadim Shishmarin, a 21-year-old tank commander, had pleaded guilty to killing 62-year-old Alexander Shalipov in the north-eastern Ukrainian village of Shupakivka on February 28 after being ordered to shoot him. George Sehir Agafanov said Shishmarin carrying out a criminal order by a soldier of a higher rank had fired several shots at the victim's head from an automatic weapon. The Kremlin did not immediately comment on the verdict. It had previously said that it has no information about the trial and that the absence of a diplomatic mission in Ukrainian limits its ability to provide assistance.


Item number SCP-3313, Object Class, Keter, Special Containment Procedures. SCP-3313 is once recovered to be kept in a high value containment chamber on Floor 46 of Site 88. This chamber should utilize at least two of the extant overlapping Scranton Reality Anchor Fields on that floor to suppress the reality-altering effects of SCP-3313. Individuals are not allowed to come into direct physical contact with SCP-3313, until recovered, communication from any national or private space program's orbital assets are to be reviewed by Mobile Task Force Capit-12, the French courtiers, for information regarding SCP-3313. Any information recovered in this manner is to be utilized in locating and recovering SCP-3313. SCP-3313-1 is, once recovered, be kept in a standard humanoid containment cell at Site 19. Description SCP-3313 is the severed penis of Benjamin Franklin, hereby referred to as SCP-3313-1. Despite having no biological support system, SCP-3313 appears resistant to both damage and decay. When in physical contact with any individual, SCP-3313 provides that individual, with reality-altering capabilities roughly analogous to that of a Class II reality-altering entity. SCP-3313's provided reality-altering capabilities are vocal in nature, and individuals incapable of verbally communicating requests are believed to be incapable of utilizing the object in this manner. Requests made by individuals in physical contact with SCP-3313 are, when within SCP-3313's capacity to grant, fulfilled immediately. These requests are generally fulfilled in an exact and literal manner. SCP-3313 was recovered as part of a previously unknown collection of SCP-3313-1's personal effects from its time in Paris, France. The object's anomalous properties were immediately discovered once the object itself was identified. Foundation DNA testing confirms that the object belonged to either a close relative of SCP-3313 or SCP-3313 itself. Incident Omega-54, however, has provided enough context to conclude that SCP-3313 was in fact SCP-3313-1's penis. On July 3rd, 2017, the Chaos Insurgency completed a ritual to resurrect several members of the United States Founding Fathers in an effort to complete a coup of the U.S. government included in this ritual were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and SCP-3313-1. In dossiers recovered by the SCP Foundation indicate that in addition to various anomalous properties possessed by these five individuals, SCP-3313 possessed no penis. Further information on these anomalous properties may be found in Document Omega-54-J. All five individuals escaped Chaos Insurgency custody by July 6th and are currently at large. Prior to this incident, SCP-3313 was kept in a standard containment chamber in the Low Value Containment Division of Site 88. On July 9th, SCP-3313-1 gained access to Site 88's Low Value Containment Division and was allowed to come into contact with SCP-3313. The methods by which this was achieved are still unknown and audio records of the incident are not available. Four seconds after physical contact was achieved, SCP-3313 began to generate thrust in a similar manner to that of a chemical rocket engine, and both SCP-3313 and SCP-3313-1 escaped the site upwards. This escape damaged all eight of the above floors, though SCP-3313-1 appears to have avoided physical harm. Calculations indicate that SCP-3313 and SCP-3313-1's acceleration was insufficient to gain true escape velocity, though the parabola will take several months to complete. The projected landing location is currently unknown. On July 9th, SCP-3313-1 gained access to a site. On July 9th, SCP-3313-1.


What's up guys welcome to today's video. So today what we're going to be working on is cutting a triangular graduation or Bob if you want to call it that. Now what makes this triangular Bob unique to the other ones that I've done in the past is that today we're going to start on our weak side and then we're going to work our way over to the strong side. So we're really setting ourselves up for success. It's a new technique that I've been trying out and it's been working really really well so I think that you guys are really going to like it. We're definitely going to be able to use it in the salon. Now before we get started with the video if you're seeing this version of this video then you don't have the FSE now apps. So go to freesaloneducation.com create a free profile and download our app on the iTunes or Android store and you'll get instant access to all of these videos before anybody else. So at the end of this step by step I'm going to share with you guys a video all about the app so you can see what it's all about. It's super cool. For now I'm not going to waste any more of your time. Let's get started. Here we go. Alright guys so the focus of today's video is going to be cutting a triangular Bob. Now a couple new things about this particular technique is I'm going to be working from my weak side to my strong side. Now that is something that I picked up recently and I loved the tip. So I want to go through the sectioning sectioning is straight down center back and then that first parting that I'm taking is going to mimic the jawline. So really stay focused on that but we're going to keep the sectioning nice and simple. So mimic the jawline and then clip it up and away. Now notice I push that hair with the comb. I get the grain of the hair, the base of the hair going in the same direction and then I just slide a clip up underneath. That makes it easier for sectioning later. Now you'll also notice that I'm wearing gloves. I'm wearing gloves because of our current situation in the industry. I'm personally practicing cutting hair with gloves because I want to see how it feels. I want to get used to it. I definitely know that maybe it's not a forever thing but it's a right now thing that we probably will be cutting hair wearing gloves. So the angle at which I'm cutting. This is my weak side. My fingers are pointing down. My elbow is up and whenever your elbow is up it wants to fall. It wants to fall with gravity. So that makes this my difficult side because I tend to have it end up a little heavier. So what I'm doing with this is I really get to concentrate on what angle I have and not trying to match it to the other side. So that is why I think this technique is so beneficial. So notice that I'm following the head shape, working my way through. My finger is going to be basically pointing towards that jawline area and it's parallel to my parting.  So I go through, I section through, I comb everything over, comb it up, clip it away and then I go through and I take my angle. So that's a couple things that have always been difficult for me when doing this haircut is just staying consistent. So now notice that my elevation is not really changing a whole lot as I work up the head shape. I'm keeping a nice low elevation. The head shape is turning. So that's why that graduation is going to start to build up. So we basically start the bottom of this haircut at a 90 degree angle and then as I work up the head shape, it drops. It gets lower and lower and that graduation starts to get heavier and heavier. So just be aware of that. If you've got a client with thick hair, you might want to elevate slightly more than somebody that has fine hair. I might keep it at a nice neutral 45 degrees for that. So just working my way through staying consistent with it. I'm going to just let you guys watch this part of the video. We're going to go through it and then I'm going to talk to you when we get to the opposite side. So one thing I do want to remind you guys of as I'm working towards the side of the head, the elevation is going to change because the head shape is changing. So right here, I'm elevating to keep that above zero degrees. So straight down, straight out would be zero. I'm pulling it up just a little bit. But then as I work my way over to the side of the head, it drastically changes. So now my elevation is just slightly up. I want to build a little bit more weight on the side. The density is different. So as I work to the side, I drop my elevation down. So I start with a higher elevation and then I work my way to the side. The other key thing that I want you to notice is as I worked up to the top part, the top part of the head with each section, then I moved into a little lighter, more of a point cut than a blunt cut. Now you can blunt cut no problem, but if you have a client that has thicker hair, medium hair, this is a technique I like to do to just soften the edge because no matter what, we're going to go in dry and we're going to soften it anyways. So I do a little bit softer point cut instead of blunt so that later on I don't have to do as much work when I go in on the dryer. This you'll get a good angle of how much I elevate. It's not a lot, but I elevate it just slightly so it softens the edge. Now we're going to move on to our strong side. So this is where my fingers are pointing up. My elbow is pointing down. I can stay way more consistent this way and I just work through. One other thing that you can see is I'm using the wider teeth of the comb. I don't want to pull a ton of tight tension. That's just the way I like to do. I like to have a little more freedom in my shape. So I use the wide teeth of the comb. They're not that wide. It's a YS Park 336 comb. Actually, this might be a 334 comb. Sorry about that. YS Park 334 comb and I go through and I cut it using those wide teeth. So working diagonal forward through the section. Combing everything. Clipping it away just like the opposite side. So we're going to work our way all the way through. Try to stay as consistent as possible with our elevation. And then I'll catch you on the dry cut portion. Alright, so now we're going to move into the style portion of the video. This is the Joyco Defied Damage Protective Shield. Basically it guards against any thermal or UV damage. So I'm going to work that through. I'm going to be doing not only a flat wrap blow dry. So working the hair around the head. But then also going through with an iron. And working that with a flat iron as well. To smooth the hair out and get it ready for the dry cut. So work that flat wrap all the way around. Let that product kind of keep the hair nice and shiny and healthy. And then we're going to go in and start our dry cutting. So one thing I want to quickly go over as we get into the dry cut. Is that I was taught in school. That you really focus kind of on that outer perimeter during that wet cut portion. And what I've learned later in learning hair cutting and watching other hair cutters. That it's so important to focus on the outer perimeter last. And really stamp that in. So what I did was I go through and I just kind of customize. And develop that outer perimeter as I go through. So I use the tip of the scissor. Go through cut and define that line. And now I'm going to work into the back. Doing a little extra elevation and a little extra point cutting. Just to soften that graduation. It's kind of hard to tell sometimes in the wet cut. Exactly how that's going to fall dry. So as you go through you just use a couple techniques that help soften that edge. And then you have it laying nice and soft. So I work my way through. All the way through the back. A little bit deeper point cut towards the crown area. So that lays even a softer veil over. And then I finish it off with the Joyco JoyMist medium hold hairspray. This is their number six hold level. And you can see here's the end result. Nice consistent triangular graduation. Hope you guys like this. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions. There you go.


A change in temperature can easily alter the course of our day, but for some reptiles and fish, it can set the course of their lives, deciding whether they emerge as male or female when they hatch. Basically, temperature affects whether the early gonad becomes a testis, making male hormones or an ovary, making female hormones. It's called temperature-dependent sex determination, and it was first described in the late 1960s, but only now are researchers close to understanding how this phenomenon works on a molecular level. A new study reveals the genetic circuitry behind this type of sex determination in red-eared slider turtles. Researchers recently discovered the role played by an epigenetic regulator known as KDM6B, which can control whether a gene is turned on or off. KDM6B is required for the expression of the sex determination gene, DMRT1, which leads to a male anatomy. When KDM6B is absent, as it tends to be at higher temperatures, male genes are not activated and would-be testis transform into ovaries. Interestingly, expression of the KDM6B gene is temperature-sensitive. The gene is only highly expressed at cool temperatures, which leads to the formation of males. So what controls KDM6B expression? In other tissues when decorated with a phosphoryl group STAT3, now PSTAT3, can switch KDM6B expression off. Could this be happening in the turtle gonad? The group showed that STAT3 is only phosphorylated at the high female producing temperature. To test whether PSTAT3 represses KDM6B, researchers blocked the protein in gonads from red-eared slider embryos, incubating at male or female temperatures. This experiment had no effect on gene expression at the lower male temperature, but at the higher temperature, which normally activates PSTAT3 and sets the genetic gears in motion to produce females, levels of PSTAT3 dropped. And the expression of KDM6B and the male-determining gene DMRT1 increased. Those findings were replicated in living turtle embryos. Of 23 eggs incubated at the higher female producing temperature and treated with a PSTAT3 inhibitor, 16 showed an ovary-to-testis shift in sexual trajectory. So is PSTAT3 the ultimate lever when it comes to temperature-dependent sexual determination? Not quite. Further experiments highlighted the central role played by calcium channels. Using a calcium dye, the researchers visualized how much calcium was internal gonad cells at different temperatures. With increasing temperature, the cells became brighter, indicating an increase in calcium. But it isn't yet clear exactly which ion channels are in control, or whether calcium directly or indirectly promotes the activation of PSTAT3. Temperature-dependent sex determination is a fascinating example of how a varying environmental signal translates into a permanent change in gene activity and tissue identity. This isn't unique to turtles either. Plants of animals, including humans, experience changes in gene expression in response to stress and other life events. Reliance on temperature-dependent sex determination has grave implications for many species in this era of global warming. Scientists hope that a better understanding of this process may improve our ability to intervene and support species adaptation and survival. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 185-4642. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.