Welcome back to my channel. Thank you for joining me here today. I hope that you're all doing well This weekend. We're doing a little vlog as you can tell by the title. We're doing a little reset vlog This is it's weird because I want to say it's a slow weekend But at the same time I have so much that I want to do It's not necessarily like things that I have to do but things that I want to do mixed with a few Things here and there you'll see I have a couple things going on today It's a big errands day as you can see I already did my quiet time with the Lord this morning I did it outside, which is really nice. It's actually like in the 60s here today now. It's probably Low 70s, but we're getting into that fall weather, which I love it was actually a little chilly outside Makes me very happy. We're just gonna run a couple errands. I'm gonna take you guys with me I have a dress fitting today For an event that I have to go to for work And so I have a gown and it fits perfectly other than the fact that it's a little too long So we're gonna head to Nordstrom. I have an appointment at one o'clock and we're gonna get fitted for that So I'm gonna take you guys along with me and show you as much as I can I have some furniture that I actually want to try to donate Today and I'm gonna have to do it by myself, which we'll get into that. We'll see how that goes I'd like to go grocery shopping. My hair is in a bun. You know what that means It means it's hair wash day So I want to try to actually get that done and my hair blown out Before I go to the fitting if I don't have time, then I don't have time and I'll do it later We'll see how that goes. I did have plans today They were like tentative plans, but they got canceled and I thought about like maybe trying to come up with Other plans and I was like, you know what? A day to myself Kind of sounds really nice Which is funny because a day without like a Saturday without plans Months ago would have made me so anxious and I probably would have been crying right now If we're being 100% vulnerable or now I'm like I have so much that I would love to do I want to clean out my jean drawer and I want to go grocery shopping And I want to do the thing like I have so much that I want to do and then I need to do so I'm like, you know what? A day to myself kind of sounds really nice. A friend of mine Reached out to me this morning about maybe doing a possible movie night with some friends, some of my friends from college Jury's still out about whether I'm going to do that or not Because who knows if it's actually gonna end up being a movie night Or if they're gonna want to go out and do other things and I just I have an early morning tomorrow I'm not that's not happening for me. So we're gonna see where the day goes But before we do all of that I have something really exciting that I want to share with you guys that I have to kind of get the ball rolling with right now So I'm gonna take you along with me as I do it so as you may or might not know I had braces when I was 10 from 10 to 12 years old and then I got older and Wasn't really good about wearing the retainer thing and so my top teeth stayed perfect my bottom teeth Not so much so you can see it I mean you guys have watched my videos you can see my bottom teeth not so great And I don't want to say that I'm like super self-conscious about it But sometimes I'll like watch my videos back or I'll edit and I see myself talking and I'm like Like it makes me cringe a little bit. So I Decided to do something about it I am in the era of like if there's something about your life that you don't like You have the the opportunities to train to change it. So that's kind of where I am right now So we're gonna go on a little journey. This is not sponsored. I wish it was But we're going on a little journey with smile direct club I have a friend of mine that recommended it said she did it and that it It worked really well for her. So I have to make my moldings right now So essentially take pictures of your teeth, which I already did and I have to upload them and then I take moldings of my teeth Drop it in the mail and then the dentist that work over there Will make trays for me and so I'm gonna do it for about a year But we'll see how long they think I need to do it It's gonna be like Invisalign so you're not gonna really be able to see it But we're gonna straighten these bottom teeth out. Okay, so the instructions say we are mixing The purple putty see purple With the gray putty and we're doing two impressions of the top and two impressions of the bottom So it says to mix these together for about 30 seconds. I think it says until they are Soft and thoroughly mixed and it says if you see streaks Keep folding. Okay, so we're folding it into each other. This is really hard to do with clubs I actually hate this. I might wash my hands and do the other ones without the gloves.  That was the longest two and a half minutes of my life, but look, there's the first molding I hope I did it, right? I think I did it looks like the pictures All right, so there's one done three more to go. My goodness It's like actually really rough on your job. Not really. I'm making it sound like it's awful It's really not but it's not the most comfortable. Okay. Here are my four beautiful Moldings, I think I did a pretty good job. They look exactly like the pictures do so I think I did it, right? I'm gonna let them sit and dry though. I mean They're kind of drying but before I close the box. I'm gonna just let them dry It's really cool. They give you like a pre-printed paid label already It's all I have to do is drop in the mailbox, which we'll do on our way out, but I have Exactly 50 minutes to shower and do my hair before We leave. The place is only like 20 minutes away, but I just want to give myself extra time My appointment's at one. It is 11.40 on the dot. Do we think I can do it? I think I can do it, but I'm gonna be rushing. So I'll see you guys probably in like an hour Okay, guys, I did it. It's a little bit later than I wanted to I wanted to leave four minutes ago But I mean that's like the fastest I've ever gotten ready So I have my moldings ready to put into the mailbox and I have my gown which I'll show you So this is the gown that I'm getting hemmed. It's a nice red off the shoulder kind of gown And it's just it's made for like an Amazonian woman who's like eight feet tall Even though it is a small so I'm gonna go and get this hemmed and I just want to make sure I get there with enough time because The mall that we're going to is huge and I always get lost and I also haven't been there in Probably over a year like it's been a while So I just want to make sure I get there and then I'm not late I have my shoes which are just these nude pumps that I'm gonna wear with it so that I can You know have them measure the accurate height that I'm gonna be that night So yeah, I'll chat with you probably a little bit more in the car Maybe about the event, but we got to get going. So let's do it Alright, so we're gonna have to add another errand to the list at some point this weekend I thought the mailbox near my apartment had a big enough slot for the box for my moldings But it didn't but that's okay. We're just gonna have to go to the actual post office at some point Which is fine, but We're on our way to Nordstrom to the mall So this event that I'm going to I'm going with a bunch of my co-workers It's an award ceremony type thing I don't want to give too much away for security reasons, but yeah We all got a couple nominations our station and so it's a big like gala, right? So it's black tie. So we need gowns. I went last year and I'm blessed to be going again for the second year and A lot of people that I'm like actually friendly with and like closer with are coming this year too So it's gonna be really fun. My mom is coming my best friend from work.  So that's at the end of October So that's what I'm going to get hemmed right now And then I think we're gonna go straight to The grocery store from the mall I'd also like to go to airy to to pick up a thing or two But we're gonna see how long the fitting takes and we'll take it from there Guys, I'm so late This mall is blasting music right now Elevator is taking too long So stairs it is and if you got lost Okay, yeah, I did get lost on the way back to my car But I feel like I quickly recovered so we're fine. We're in the car now. It's already two o'clock. That took a whole hour Listen, I'm grateful. I got it done, but that was a wild ride Basically, I got there and I didn't really know where to go and it said to meet them on the first floor So I went and looked at the section that they told me to go to I asked somebody for help So they moved it to the third floor. I said, okay, so I run to the third floor. I'm like it's like 115 at this point So I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm so late get to the third floor There's nobody there and they're like, okay, I'm gonna call them for you so I guess they call like the seamstresses and My lady was out to lunch So I was like, okay, and she said let me see if I could find somebody else She did she said go meet them on the second floor. I go to the second floor could not find them anywhere So then I asked this wonderful wonderful clerk that was behind the register and He helped me So I went and I changed she was like these seamstresses they come and they just want you to be ready So like get your dress on get your shoes on it's okay, but then I got the sweetest little lady She left thick. I think it was Russian. I don't know a thick Russian accent And she was so sweet. She loved my dress. She was just complimenting me It was so nice, but she was like you need to do something about those tan lines and I was like Yep, I know like I swear. It's gonna be better by then. So I left my dress She's gonna have it until October 23rd, which is like a whole month So that makes me a little nervous and a little uneasy But I trust her she's a professional So and then I went to airy because they had an area at this mall, which I forgot again Haven't been here in so long. So I got two bras that I'm not gonna show you because that's weird There is a post office. I think super close to here. So I think I'm gonna go try to drop off the box of my little teeth mold things and then On to the next thing Just dropped off my package post office everybody's so nice today everybody that I've encountered at the mall and There I just everybody's so nice and pleasant today. It's just putting me in a good mood But I've changed my mind I am gonna go home now Because I want to start loading the desk and the chair that I want to donate into my car because the Salvation Army closes at 530 and that's three hours from now, but I'd rather just not rush So I'm gonna go home and do that and then after the Salvation Army. I will go grocery shopping I think that's what the day is looking like. So I will keep you posted Back home now. So before I move any furniture and load anything into my car Let me just walk you guys through Kind of what's gonna happen. So this desk right here. I've had this desk since probably 2019 had it for a long time. I've filmed on it many times It's to the point now where it looks very like college It looks cheap because it is and I have just outgrown it I really don't sit here anymore So I'm just gonna take it's not much But I guess you got to take everything off the stuff in the shelves all that And put that as well as the chair in my car Now I don't know if they're gonna take it But I'm gonna put it in my car go ask them if they will take it because I've I've heard that Salvation Army like places like that are being a little more selective with the things that they Accept but it's worth a try The next thing this mirror. Hello changed.  You've seen it many many times Especially if you follow me on Instagram It's nice. Okay, I got it from home goods again. I think in 2019 for like 80 bucks It has served its purpose, but I just think I can find one that better Fits so in the places of these two things there are going to be two big bookshelves here. They're not that big I was gonna buy my own But my mom has bookshelves that are very similar to the ones that I wanted and she doesn't want them anymore So she is kindly don't let donating them to me and I'm gonna decorate them all nice It's gonna be very good. They're nice and tall. So I am gonna pick those up next weekend At some point because I have things to do next weekend, but I'm gonna pick them up at some point next weekend So that's why I want to get this gone Before this weekend is over. So I don't have to worry about it during the week And then I am getting a new mirror. I've already ordered it. It's actually coming on Monday So two days from now That's a little bit shorter than this one, but a lot wider and it has a nice black like arch on it It's beautiful. You guys will see it at some point. So that's going there this thing However, I don't know if I can lift this the desk. Okay, so I cleared everything off the desk. I can do It's not that heavy. It's gonna be a little clumsy, but I could do it. Oh, I need to sweep behind the desk That's gross This is doable again, it's gonna be clumsy, but I think I can do it the mirror. Hmm. Let's see All right, let's see. Oh Okay, you know what I thought it was gonna be worse. It's heavy But I could do it. I guess lifting again has come in handy Oh, yeah, it's heavy, but I could do it if I'm being vulnerable and a little honest right now Times like this. We're having a guy here and like a man in my life It would be useful But at the same time I have been known to carry heavy things in and out of this building by myself with no help and When I'm like when I'm determined I could do it If I couldn't lift that I was just gonna ask my dad to come over because I know he would help me I shouldn't say I don't have a man in my life. My dad lives less than 10 minutes from me He would help me, but if I could if I can just do it, I'll just do it I do have guy friends that could help as well, but they're kind of far And I don't think they would come all the way over here So, all right, I'm gonna start loading stuff into the car Well, they took it. It was kind of sad. It was like a little part of my not childhood, but my my young Adulthood like leaving it behind I did a lot on that desk and that chair a lot of YouTube videos a lot of get ready with me is a lot of therapy sessions You know, I did a lot on that desk, but I hope someone else, you know We'll get good use out of it The guy was really nice. He came out to my car and helped me carry it which was really nice So now I am off to do some grocery shopping get some food It's about four o'clock. It's a few minutes to four o'clock in the evening So the day is still young But the list of things to do continues. So Let's get some groceries My goodness, how did I end up at home goods? So weird. I don't know how that happens I want to see if I can find some things for the bookshelves so that next weekend I can start putting stuff on the bookshelves once I get them so they're not just there So we'll see what we find. Okay quick little haul, shall we? I first got this basket that I have everything else that I purchased in so this is gonna go on the Lower shelf and then I have another basket already. That's gonna go on the other bookshelf because remember there are two I have a whole Pinterest like thing that I'm trying to recreate. Okay. I have a vision I have a vision and I like home goods because a lot of stuff is pretty not cheap But like very affordable. So I got three Picture frames and you guys know me and my neutral Schemes my aesthetic if you will so I got this one It's it looks white, but it's kind of white white ish beige. This was six dollars Then I got this pretty arched frame For I think also six dollars maybe seven.  I got a Little box this was on clearance. So it was a couple of dollars.  So I can't show you but that was also on clearance. So we're just trying to get them deals Okay, now I promise this time. I'm actually gonna go grocery shopping. I swear. Okay guys I'm going home before I spend any more money Okay, honestly, no, that wasn't that bad. I did a big grocery haul last week and a lot of it carried over So I really didn't spend a lot not compared to what I normally do on groceries So that's really nice, but I'm going home. My camera's about to die So I need to charge it before I film anything else, but but I go home put everything away And I need to do a little bit of cleaning for the apartment. So that's next on the agenda like change and just chill as I told myself I was gonna go through my jean drawer because like it's Just these pairs came from I don't know what size they are I know there are so many that don't fit me and so many and they're all in really good condition. So We're gonna figure out which ones fit which ones we're gonna donate and Like literally it just keeps it just keeps going because I can't remember the last time I cleaned out the store One more. These are my tried and true American Eagle jeggings. They're skinny jeans. I don't care. I've had these for a while They are kind of big But I feel like I can put like a button Adjuster and then just kind of do one of those and it'll fit better I think these are saying these jeans were fun also American Eagle, but do big So these gotta go all right. These are from Target. It's just this gap here. It's just not gonna work But they fit everywhere else gosh, that's why I hate buying jeans, but these are old so that makes sense So all right, I will donate these these I'm gonna keep I think they're American Eagle and The waist is elastic and you can tie them So I don't know if they sell these anymore. I've had them for a couple years now But they're really really comfortable and because I can tie them I can make them fit perfectly So these are gonna stay Target jeans same thing Gotta go. I used to love these American Eagle. They're like a little cross waist situation, but don't look good So gotta go. I kind of forgot these existed. These are comfortable These are Target and I already have a belt adjuster on them or not belt but button adjuster on them to make it tighter So I guess I've worn these recently, but I don't remember These are these feel like sweat pants. Oh my goodness. Yes, these are staying for sure American Eagle, I believe And big and then these These are my jeans that I wear all the time. I think so These are gonna stay and that's it. Okay. I wanted to do I'm gonna put these in a bag I'll take them down to my car tomorrow. I'm done doing productive things for the day I am gonna start editing this video, but I'm also just gonna like chill my friend was trying to get me to go out, but Honestly, I don't feel like going out. I don't feel like going to a bar or anything after everything I did to it I'm tired. My feet are like throbbing. I sound so old But that's okay. I'm also gonna be out of the house for pretty much most of the day tomorrow anyway So I think I'm chilling tonight and honestly, I'm very okay with it. Hi guys Good morning. I know I'm the worst. I did not finish Vlogging yesterday, but this is gonna be a weekend reset. So it's just carrying into today. I Really just chilled last night. I made some dinner. I watched a movie I let a candle I edited and then I was in bed Not like early or at a decent time like I got a full eight hours today So I'm just putting my shoes on now and then heading to church also look how empty it looks here Without my desk and then that's my donation bag from yesterday that I'm gonna put in my car So yeah, I'm not necessarily rushing, but I do need to leave like Kind of now so I'm gonna put my shoe on and we will be on our way So here is the fit. It's like 70 degrees outside. It's supposed to get a little warmer today But this is what we're doing white fox jeans, which I'm gonna be honest.  It is a little cropped situation So we're just making sure the pants are are up But yeah, this is what we're working with. I think I might go change my earrings, but then We got to go So I'm a little nervous for church today Because after church I signed up for this class that they give but I don't really think it's a class from what I can tell it's just for like newer people who want to know more about the church to Like meet the leaders of the church and the pastors and I guess meet other people and just learn more about like what the church is about Their visions and and things like that So I'm excited for it. I'm excited to meet new people. I've been going to this new church on and off for Since the beginning of beginning of July So I'm excited. I'm excited to meet new people so that I can you know See friendly faces that I recognize when I go to church on Sundays But at the same time I'm nervous because I feel like it's gonna be I don't know anyone I know like one person So it's kind of kind of be like The first day of school and you have to find kids to sit with at lunch Because I'm pretty sure they do serve lunch at this thing So it's literally gonna be like that and so I'm really kind of pushing myself out of my comfort zone here to just like I'm just gonna have to be friendly and You know figure out a place to sit and people to talk to but it's gonna be fine and I'm excited so Equal parts nervous and excited, but it's gonna be good. So I will keep you guys posted. I'll let you guys know how it goes Okay, guys, we did it It actually went really well. It was really fun. I made friends. I made a friend I like went to the line where everyone was you know waiting to go into the class and I saw she was alone And it was like Target acquired. I went over I introduced myself and so we sat together And that was like my buddy for the day, but I met a couple other people learned a lot about the church And I'm really excited to get involved. I grew up going to church. I Used to being involved and I love it. It's so fulfilling to me. So I'm just really excited about it I feel really really good And God heard my prayers because he gave me a friend. He was like, here you go. Here's your buddy You're not alone in this and yeah, it was really fun. So I'm gonna get going. I'm gonna talk to you I think while I drive so right now. I am obviously leaving church I'm gonna go meet my family at the little like pool Beach Club that we are Members at this is like the last Sunday that you can go before they close it for the season So we're gonna meet there. They're already there actually, but I'm gonna meet them and I think we're gonna have pizza We're just gonna have like an early dinner together. So that'll be really nice I'm probably not gonna Vlog that one because we're not gonna do much in two. I got a lot of questions about why I don't like show Family or like my dad and my videos and stuff a lot of my family just doesn't like to be on camera They it makes them very uncomfortable the whole YouTube Vlogging being on the internet thing and I never want to make anybody uncomfortable That's why I don't even vlog around some of my friends either So that's why but we're just gonna have a nice chill dinner by the water And then I'll head home and close out the vlog But service was so good today all the message was all about how we as people just naturally we Look for fulfillment and satisfaction and happiness in other people and in things like for example How many likes you get on Instagram or looking to a relationship and like begging somebody To love you to feel that fulfillment I did that in my last relationship towards the end where I was literally I had to ask somebody To love me and doing that will never make somebody love you more It's all about just like finding that fulfillment in the Lord and oh, it was just so good It like inspired me to even like use some of the notes that I took to make a podcast episode about it I just think that that's so important And I think that's so relatable that everyone everyone just everybody knows what that feels like so the message Was just so good. So I'm just feeling really good, but your girls hungry.  So Oh, I just realized I'm gonna have pizza for two meals in a row. Well, it's Sunday calories Don't count on the Lord's Day. So anyway, yeah, I'm headed to the Beach Club for the next couple hours It's about 3 30 in the afternoon, but I'll probably check in with you guys When I get Alrighty guys, I think it's time to wrap up this vlog It is almost 10 o'clock. I Feel like it's 2 a.m. I'm so tired But yeah, today was a great day I got home around 9 and my dad Came back with me because he helped me with something here, but it was a great evening with the family So I'm just back home now I'm gonna watch I'm on the second season of a virgin river On Netflix. I've gotten into that. It's actually pretty cute So I'm gonna watch an episode or two of that and then I think I'm just gonna chill and Go to bed. Maybe read a little bit cuz I'm tired But yeah, this was a really packed weekend. I did more than I thought I was gonna do But it was really nice. It was like a nice weekend reset I can't tell you the last time. I Got to just like take the weekend as it came and like didn't have plans It's been like two months the whole summer. I was just non-stop So it was nice to have a Saturday to just do what I wanted to do and then have a family day Sunday And just chill so I'm on the couch now I have a cup of tea right there because we had Costco pizza for dinner, which is so good But if you know Costco pizza, it is greasy And so it's just like sitting in my stomach like a brick right now So the tea should help, but yeah Thank you for hanging out with me this weekend It was a much longer vlog than I usually do. So I hope that you guys enjoyed it Let me know what else you would like to see from me here on this second channel I will have a podcast episode coming to you soon It's gonna be all about how I quote-unquote gave my life a glow up So it's gonna be all about that so Yeah, that's about it for this vlog. Thank you guys so much for watching and for being here and I will see you in my next video. Bye guys


misunderstood. I am under no illusion that the bill is anything other than a starting point. It is the starting point for a continuous cycle of improvement and access to services for BSL users. It aims to raise awareness of the language, to highlight gaps in provision and to identify and enable the sharing of good practice. The Education and Culture Committee heard evidence from witnesses who gave examples of how a lack of awareness of BSL affected their everyday lives. One witness told the committee about going into hospital, having experience of having to wait hours, days after appointments, weeks and months after appointments, without actually knowing what was going on, about being able to communicate what their symptoms were, about being able to get information about their medication and how to take it, because no BSL interpreter was available to help. I hope that that video really service is available for every member of the BSL community who accesses any medical services. Mary Scanlon spoke about the number of BSL interpreters that we have and the debate and discussion around the number. The number that I have is that we have 80 registered BSL interpreters in Scotland, whereas in Finland, a country that has a similar population to Scotland has 750. I hope that, if the bill is passed, the promotion of BSL in public life will lead to a resurgence of the language and an interest among all people in learning it, which will, in turn, cause an increase in the number of interpreters who come into the system. Many organisations have already made great progress. I do not think that anyone would deny that when we hear examples of what the NHS has done with the video really service in considering the needs of BSL users. It is time that experience is shared across the public sector so that others can start to catch up with them. I recognise that it is not possible to wave a magic wand and instantly enable BSL users to start using the language every time they engage with the health service, educational establishments and others. I wish that I could do that, but I believe that the bill is an important first step in putting BSL on a firmer footing and that it will make a positive difference to the lives of BSL users. Over the course of taking the bill through Parliament, it is often mentioned that the Equality Act 2010 is in place and that that should be enough to cover the needs of BSL users. I think that it is important that I state and others have stated that deaf BSL users do not define themselves as disabled. They are intellectually and physically as capable as any member in here and they resent the fact that they have to define themselves as disabled to access services that we take for granted. We do not go to a foreign country and define ourselves as disabled. That is about people communicating in their own language. We have to recognise that there is a minority in Scotland to use a different language that has no opportunity to learn the Indigenous spoken language and it is up to us to address that and adapt to our services accordingly. I hope that the bill will pass. I hope that the bill will achieve that aim and I commend the British Sign Language Scotland Bill to Parliament today. That concludes the debate on the British Sign Language Scotland Bill. We now move to the next item of business, which is consideration of a Parliamentary Bureau motion. I would ask Jo Fitzpatrick to move motion number 14291 on approval of an SSI. The question this motion will be put a decision time to which we now come. Because this is a very important day, we have a very important person, we have Shona Dixon, who is going to sign decision time for us. There are five questions to be put as a result of today's business. The first question is amendment number 14272.3, in the name of Sarah Boyack, which seeks to amend motion number 14272, in the name of Fergus Ewing, on the future of renewables and Scotland's energy policy be agreed to. Are we all agreed? No. The Parliament is not agreed. We move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 14272.3, in the name of Sarah Boyack, is as follows. Yes, 33. No, 72. There were four abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is amendment number 14272.1, in the name of Mardel Fraser, which seeks to amend motion number 14272, in the name of Fergus Ewing, on the future of renewables and Scotland's energy policy be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 14272.1, in the name of Mardel Fraser, is as follows. Yes, 13. No, 96. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is at motion number 14272, in the name of Fergus Ewing, on the future of renewables and Scotland's energy policy be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to a vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on motion number 14272, in the name of Fergus Ewing, is as follows. Yes, 63. No, 13. There were 33 abstentions. The motion is therefore agreed to. The next question is at motion number 14291, in the name of Dolfox Patrick, on approval of an assess I be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. The next question is at motion number 14111, in the name of Mark Griffin, on the British Sign Language Scotland Bill be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. And the British Sign Language Scotland Bill is passed. May I take this opportunity to thank Mark Griffin, the Government, the Education Committee for all their work in bringing the bill to this stage. My thanks to our parliamentary staff who have excelled themselves. Can I also take this opportunity to thank all of our signers today? You have done a fantastic job and the whole of the Parliament thanks you for that. Members can see for themselves the reaction from the blind and deafblind community as to how much this bill means to them. So can I say to members, thank you. That ends decision time. I now conclude this business.


All right, I've got five pass, so I think now's probably a good time to start My name is James Blair. I'm one of the maintainers of Zool and I'm going to talk a little bit about What we've been doing over the past six months what we've been doing before then and what we plan to be doing in the future Who here is familiar with Zool Okay, most of you good. So I won't I won't do too much in the way of preliminaries. I will try to All right, so the Six months ago in Vancouver we announced version 3 of the of Zool and We announced that it was a becoming a pilot project under the open-stack Foundation Give me just a minute, sorry Yeah, sorry. Yeah So we announced at Vancouver Summit that we that were becoming a pilot project under the open-stack foundation And that's because we had been using Zool for six years and and We thought that it was time to other people were beginning to use it and it was becoming a more Generally useful application and so we thought it was time to sort of Bring it out from From inside the open-stack project and make it its own top-level project to sort of recognize That that growing community and the broader scope that we were bringing to to Zool. So we we not only We were not at this point only focused on open-stack use of Zool, but we also were sort of Making other users of Zool Sort of a first-class concern in the project and we were adding a bunch of new features to Zool that that reflect this So a few things that that happened before the the Vancouver Summit where we made this announcement. We made Zool Python 3 only so we were we were doing a lot of breaking changes Anyway, so we figured that was the time to say This thing is going to be very Forward-looking and so we we we jumped on the Python 3 train and and haven't looked back It's so much easier to write code for only one version of Python. Yes We added in repository configuration to Zool that was a major change from the way that it had previously worked and and it's It's sort of changed the way that people use Zool Just being able to propose a change and then add Add jobs that begin using that change immediately Is with without without those jobs having to land. Yeah, the fully speculative in in repo job That I'm gonna put this here because I have a large learn. Yeah, you can talk to it from about back here And it'll be better for everybody We adopted Ansible as the job execution engine Because we needed to job execution engine and it turns out that there was a really good one that already existed So we decided to use it instead of writing our own And and ansible playbooks look remarkably like the old yaml from the Jenkins job builder templates that we that we had originally written So it wasn't I mean it was different enough that my migration script was terrible and and only got about 80% of the Migration's done, but similar enough that conceptually as a user It's it's not a huge shift if you didn't already know ansible. Yeah, and yeah And also a lot of people have been using ansible for other things So it just it it's it's worked out if you happen to use ansible already, that's great If you don't it's pretty easy to use or just use it to run a shell script or whatever you need to do We actually have a job that uses it to run puppet. Yeah, because it's testing a thing that does pop it So, you know, it's really easy That's the amount of ansible. It's in there. Yeah, and and it's also We should have put a bullet point up for this but Zulvi 3 sort of natively handles multi-node jobs and ansible is great at orchestrating things across multiple nodes so so yeah, and we We added support for github so Zul supports github and Garrett and It can pretty seamlessly Integrate the two so if you have some projects on github and some projects in Garrett and Those projects have changes that depend on each other. That's fine. Zul doesn't care. It will check them both out We actually just heard from From some folks this morning at Le Bon coin. Yeah Who about as good as either one of us are gonna do. Yeah, I'm gonna keep practicing that. Yeah We're gonna get it right one of these days Who who had you know part of their development org is on isn't Garrett part of it is And github and when they adopted Zul those two groups started talking to each other again. Yeah, so Yeah, so we So since Vancouver We've we've been pretty busy We've made a lot of changes to Zul first up on the list is we Rewrote the web interface, which is actually kind of new in and of itself. Yeah For Vancouver we had written a web interface in it. Well, I want to say I I mostly wrote some terrible angular not knowing what the heck I was doing and That resulted in browser windows eating a lot of CPU and other things like that and so luckily Tristan fixed that by rewriting it in react And rewriting it well in react So now the browser doesn't cause my legs to burn when my when my laptop is sitting on top of it, which is very exciting We've added inline code review comments a lot of people haven't seen this yet because it's very new and we're still working on In open stack. We're still working on the jobs to take advantage of this but But soon if you run a pep eight job in Zul It'll be able to analyze the output and leave leave a comment directly on the line That that is having a problem. So that'll save a lot of round trips We think this will probably save like 600 developer years. Yeah every year But by saving a lot of round trips to the logs to try to dig out what the actual error message is Yeah, it'll already do this now on Zul configuration error. So if you if you push up a Zul job It it it goes ahead and validates the the that YAML and if that's incorrect it'll it'll currently be leaving those as inline comments and then This is sort of an extensible system to take advantage of that for things that aren't built-ins to Disable itself so that a job can define of its own free will You know based on what it is Hey away I can now detect that you have a problem in this line of the code and report that back which is super To fix it. Yeah, well and after that we'll just have Zul writing open stack machine learning Plug that in and yeah, yeah, it's either great or terrifying or both We now build docker images on every commit that we land to the repository and we push those images up to docker hub So you can docker our docker with your docker. You can totally docker the dockers and Yeah, so so that's actually we we I Know some folks are now using those images to run Zul in production. That's I think a perfectly fine way to do it I look forward to doing that myself some day soon We've added Sorry, we upgraded the version of Ansible that we support to Ansible 2.5 We're Zul is very tightly tied to the version of Ansible that it uses That's actually something we'd like to change and we'll talk about that in a little bit But for the moment, we've we've been been at least keeping up with a supported version of Ansible And we plan to keep doing that for the for the foreseeable future We added support for Kubernetes for build resources so you can you can request a Pod from Kubernetes if you say just again using Pepe, you know a linting job as an example If you have a simple job that can run in a container You can request that from Kubernetes and and run it But the other thing you can do is is really interesting. You can request a namespace from Kubernetes with no resources predefined and and so if you're if your task is to deploy an application in Kubernetes and You can get this namespace and then start deploying your app and because at the same time as all this Zul is You can still request virtual machines or or static machines or whatever You can combine those into either one job or a series of jobs so that you could for example ask for a virtual machine upon which you would build your container images and Also ask for a namespace to start up those containers So that's a that's a I think a pretty it's I think we've got the workflow sort of dead-on for for that kind of Building container-based microservices, so I think once we get some examples out there people are going to be able to do a lot of Cool things very easily. It's worth noting for that for those of you who are involved in open-sac development The info team does not currently have any kubernetes so This this is a feature that exists in Zul and that I believe some in fact not and I believe I know that other people are using In their their installations, but it is currently not available to open-sac projects to consume because there is no kubernetes From which to get a namespace That's on the do list. I'm really excited about this actually Yeah, it means that our community is Is growing Zul faster than the community which originated it is able to keep up with the pace of new Features, yeah, so so that's a that's a milestone. Yeah, I think yeah So using those nifty docker images that we upload to docker hub we added a Docker compose quick start To the Zul repo so if you actually go look in our documentation you can see how to get this up and running You can with a single command you can get a complete Zul system up and running in containers I'm not sure I'd we'd use it for production purposes But it's a quick start. Yeah Not an installer right, but it is the thing to get a Zul up and running to that you can just start playing with immediately and the The documentation will walk you through setting up the config the config repo and setting up base jobs and things like that And so by the end you'll have a thing that you can you can experiment with creating your own jobs We added the thing called the supersedent pipeline manager Zul has a Sort of pluggable system of pipeline managers. We've had to since the beginning Dependent which is what you use for gate and independent which is what we use for check the supersedent pipeline manager is sort of Designed specifically for for post jobs. So it's more efficient if you have a a Busy repositories that's landing changes that are publishing documentation all the time superseding will make that a little bit a little bit faster Let's see how are we doing on time? We have seven minutes. Okay We added support for pausing jobs So going back to that sort of container use case again you could you can for instance have a Have a virtual machine that you build your container images on and you can start up say docker image registry on that machine you can then pause the job and Zul will keep that machine running while it starts other jobs Other child jobs underneath that which could then use the image registry that you've set up Do all of their work and then when they complete The pause job will resume and you can do whatever cleanup you need to do after that and We added another feature called skipping child jobs So this is something that that folks who have sort of complex graphs of jobs that they may or may not want to run depending on Exactly what's in a change you can perform you could start off a job graph in Zul But with it with a simple job that just analyzes what the change is doing and then decides what children what child jobs need to run and then Zul can either Basically, you can use this to dynamically decide which jobs are going to run for a change So that That's a new feature a road map. This is where Monty promises you Amazing things which may or may not be delivered Most of these things there's at least something up for review. Yeah. Oh, well that one except for the first one But we know that we need to get that one done So so Jim was saying earlier that we currently support We're tight tightly coupled to enhance a version of Ansible that's running in on the Zul executors And that makes When you've when you've got thousands of repos worth of jobs as we do an open stack Upgrading the Ansible that's going to run all of that content across all of those things in one fell swoop is a terrifying Concept and and not not really one that I'm very pleased with each time we do it because you know, you never know so we're we've been sketching out ways to have Zul support a plethora of Ansible versions and that jobs can select which which version of Ansible they need to To run on so that should allow for more staged and incremental Upgrades of content to newer versions of Ansible as they as they come out And also the other use case Another use case that is great We have some projects in open stack like the open stack Ansible for instance That support multiple versions of Ansible for their for their project and they would like to test those and that means right now they have to write jobs that That use the Ansible that Zul is running to run Ansible on a test node So they can run the version of Ansible they want to run for that test and that's sort of a shame because Given that one of the benefits of Zul using Ansible should be that you can use your real Ansible as Part of your testing for the projects that are based in Ansible They're actually the ones who have the hardest time taking advantage of this feature So we would like for them to be able to have Zul execute the Ansible for their job Rather than having to run Ansible with Ansible to be able to do that So that'll be a cool thing to be able to allow them to do Yeah, so hopefully we'll we'll make it so that jobs can specify which versions of Ansible they want to use when they run We've got more drivers in the works. Yeah, so many more drivers. Those are all up for for review Yeah, every there's actually a patch in review for every one of those. Yeah, and we've got people using the EC2 one in Production somewhere and I think the open shift one I think both of those are being used by people, but they're just still being Worked into into sort of good shape for for landing the Azure driver has been written and we think it probably works But nobody has an Azure account so If anybody knows anybody wants to give us a free Azure account so that we can verify that works before landing it that'd be cool And I think the same thing. I think there's a prospective GCE Thing up there that is in a sort of a similar state It's like no one's actually using it like nobody's tried using because they don't have a one of those So we'd like to land both of those but we'd also like to verify that they work first That'll be a that'll be a thing Those are also well, so we have a patch a working project patch up for Pagier, which is a code review system that the Fedora project uses We don't have a patch at forget lab, but we have a human which is even better than a patch danceable Fest a Lovely human from from F5 was like, oh, I I want one of those and we're like you want to write it He's like sure so so he's I think working on getting set up to do that. So that'll be sitting I've also we've been a Bitbucket drivers have been have been highly requested We don't have a human for that yet, which makes me think that I'm gonna wind up being the human for that So I would love it if somebody wants to come and write a bit bucket driver so that I don't have to Oh, yeah The rest API and web interface will continue to get better. Yeah. Yeah, we've got lots of ideas about Well, we saw a great presentation this morning about About a project called Zuby. So we want to we want to steal all of that and And and and put it into zool. Yeah, so Yeah, hopefully we'll be able to search Have a search interface for zool jobs and roles and just be able to navigate the the configuration Very easily. Yeah We are actually Basically at time So so if anybody has any questions in the next minute You're welcome to ask them and there's a thing there. So, yeah How you doing? I hope this won't take a minute But I was told to ask last time we checked whether it was okay to run zool v3 in our third-party CI I was told that we should not is it ready now Yeah, it's it's ready and some people are doing it and they're running into some obstacles So we're continuing to improve things around that if you're if you're feeling a little adventurous Then then then I would encourage you to to go ahead and get started Yeah, and talk to us in infra and we'll help work through the things And and if you're feeling less adventurous, maybe wait a couple more weeks or something and yeah And and hopefully it'll get a little bit easier working through a couple of the issues that we found from the first Adventurous people that try that it's mainly you wind up having to add more Upstream project references to the zoo then about thing you actually want to track Like you want to track Nova and all of a sudden you've got to add like a hundred and fifty other repos to your dear thing And that's not ideal. So I Mean it's possible. It's just a little more work for you. So but yeah, thanks But there are no really good ways Basically a question about deployment. Yeah, what what deployment options are there for Zool? Yeah It was worth pointing out that BMW actually runs their Zool in in OpenShift And I believe GoDaddy was running theirs in vanilla Kubernetes So that has been done, but we have not so far gotten anything like Helm charts or or like that's on the do list To like actually have some shared versions and I think the people who have started running it in those environments have have talked about wanting to work together on sharing sharing some of those That's the same thing with We we I think want to get some ansible playbooks Put together to do that as well. So It I think that I think the windmill set of Roles and playbooks might be suitable for production at this point, but I haven't used them Yeah, well, I think that's actually I think we need to update is I think that our friend from F5 Started down that road and found a couple of roadblocks and okay, and we need to fix those So there's a couple bugs in the things that are out there, but that's definitely on the on the short short term Yeah Yeah Yeah, I guess that's probably just some at least some documentation for Yeah, I mean part of that's gonna be deployment specific like because generally scaling is is at a new executor, right? Yeah, and so how you do that is gonna be a little bit different to buy a show just clicking on a thing to add more Executors in his open shift that he was very happy about and I was like wow, that's interesting So yeah, we need some documentation around that for sure. Yeah. Yeah We're probably past time now probably past time But we're we're here. We're here all week. That's not true. We're here today and tomorrow, right? So the rest of today and tomorrow so please feel free to find any of us. There's also some little one-pagers and some Stickers up here on the table if that's the sort of thing that you would like to have in your life And after this they will themselves re-migrate back down to the dev Lounge downstairs on the second floor if you miss them here. So anyway, thanks for thanks for coming. Thank you


Delia Brons is a quintessential interdisciplinary artist, really. She is somebody who works in many different mediums. She is a visual artist, painter, ceramics, sculpture, writing, illustration, performance, depending on what the inquiry is, and pursuing the kind of curiosities that she has. And she always has very fascinating curiosities. They take her and all of us into these very interesting explorations of the different perspectives. And we'll see some of what that is today. Odelia has illustrated books. She has, you know, poet books of poetry, books of fiction, and her own book, a very unique book called The Shirtway Story, which is about the triangle shirt with the factory, the terrible fire with workers. And so her curiosity about that and about a grandson of the owner of that has taken her into very interesting places. She's made musical sculptures that actually have found they are in collections all over the world, including The Clintons, Seji Osawa, and many of the musicians associated with the Boston Symphony. She has Beatrice Wood, who is a wonderful ceramist, and many other collections around the world have some of these little magical pieces that one can't resist. There is something in your curiosity that really takes the imagination and pulls it to a different place and makes people really want to feel that. Thank you. So I'm very delious from Odelia. She's part of the reason that I'm here in Plainfield, because she was way, way back in the 70s, was my connection to Combo through her brother-in-law, who, Mark Esther, who taught here. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you. And let's give Odelia a welcome. OK, this is about the cranky and other ill-conceived works of art. So I'll start with the caution. Last summer, a person I don't even know, a fabric artist named Paula Kovar, she went to a museum in Memphis. And I'm sorry to say, but the exhibit included a cranky by the artist Red Grooms. He was a very frenetic sort of New York scene artist. And he did this in 1951 and didn't even know that crankies were called crankies, because they hadn't been called crankies yet. That's Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet, who gave it that name. It was just panoramic screens or something like that. And so he, Red Grooms, cranky was there. And she was so inspired by it that she went home, and she, as a fabric artist, what she was going to do, she stitched a very long scroll like that. That's going to be her cranky scroll. So she stitched that, and she used scraps. And she didn't follow the cranky roll, which is pretty sensible to make it big, bright, and the kind of bold colors. So the people way back there will be able to see it when you won't. But it's what she did. And she took her own path, and she began this obsessive hand quilting of this thing. So it started looking like that. And she had these spidery kind of images that can't be read at a distance. But they're very interesting. And it expresses, she says, her imagery about the government and about media, and particularly watching too much TV.  But then, eventually, she picked out all those threads because she thought it was too unsubtle. But then a friend built this case. A friend built this case. And it looks like an old TV set. And you turn the button, and a machine inside there makes this enormous scroll sort of wind through a complicated series of S-bends. And I looked at that, and I thought, what have we gotten into? Why would anyone want to express themselves by wandering into the cranky minescape? This is a very odd thing. And why am I here? And so let me tell you how I got to this place.  My artistic beginnings were in coloring the underside of my mother's bed. There were slabs under their wood. And I crawled under with a big, fat, red crayon. And I just did beautiful work for quite some days on those slabs. Nobody knew I was under there, because there were a lot of kids. So who is going to notice me under the bed coloring? That was what I started, how I started. And after that, I've had this long, busy life that she described. My public face for decades was me as a maker and a vendor of literally thousands of clay whistles. And there I am at a home on the Vermont home studio days, selling whistles to these ladies. And they called that whistle. And here's what the whistles looked like. Called the corporate whistle. It's rather large. My daughter Eli said, mom, you need a forklift to pick it up. It has the little men's feet, or often many of them are whistles. And the whole body of it was just a big woo sound. And that was oddly enough bought by a corporation to decorate their lobby in a big case. But I was making fun of them, but they didn't realize. That's Risking Walk for Freedom. And this was a whistle about what it felt like to be on a beach in Florida with my in-laws who like fancy places. And five miles away, the boats from Haiti were trying to come in to put people ashore or fleeing for their lives. And they got caught in the surf, enrolled, and drowned all these people. And this juxtaposition of these two horrible things, the fancy beach and the killing beach, were only five miles apart. And I came home, and I made this whistle, about families in boats and putting your little child into a boat. And what did that mean about where you came from? That you were willing to risk your family's life in this frightful way. And many of them died. OK, and there's one other there, I think, yes. This is one that really does show the interior of my brain. This is called St. Francis Preaches to the Banjos. And I consider banjos to be really unruly instruments. I like that. And so that's what that one is about. And they just go on and on like this. I don't plan what I'm making. They just keep my brain out of it. And it's just weirdly weird things come out. And I like them.  And I really loved it. But one day I left my work room, and I couldn't get myself to return for maybe 20 years, 15 to 20 years. I'm trying to figure out how long it was. But I was heartbroken. And I tried to fill that empty place. And so I allowed a lifetime of secret paintings, remember the bed slabs, to come forward. And so here's what they looked like. Mostly, they were mad overlay of images. That one is called Long Hours in the Library. And it's really overlays and overlays of deeper, deeper images. So you have to peer through it to see what I'm trying to say. And when it looks like a skin disease, then I'm happy. And it all gets kind of blistered in crack, like old Anolia, kind of this weird look. And I like that. I don't ever mean to do a picture that has a narrative.  And I end up with some little story. And I had never intended that. But every one of them does that.  And the brain doesn't enter into the process. I let my hand have the say.  And finally, when they blister and crack, then I think, oh, that's done. This one, that was the underpainting. I never went and finished this picture, because that eyeball got so big it stirred me. That's the more I painted that eyeball, bigger, bigger, bigger. And I thought, I've got to get out of here. I didn't do that one anymore. OK, I was missing doing three-dimensional work with these paintings, because I'm not trained in any of this stuff. I just sort of fly by the seat of my pants, literally. And so I thought, well, maybe I could get back to three-dimensional work. And they had a sculpture show every summer at, back in those days, they gave you cash prizes. I always won one. And that was very nice, but it was at Stowe. And they had a river running through their area. And I would make, whenever possible, I would make my work be in the river or beside the river. This was an elm tree that was out in the pasture. And it had died. And I chopped it up, and I hooked it together with chains, or I made my husband do it. And into the river it went.  And this thing was quite huge. You're looking down at this thing as it moves in the water. So the water becomes an analog for air. And the river tree itself is that pattern of what happens with river topography or alluvial planes. And so I was very pleased with that. And I didn't care how clunky it looked, but I won a prize. That mattered to me. OK, this is the ordinary kitchen chair, putting 18 feet in the air on a thing. And what I noticed is that people would watch a reflection in the water. They'd stand on the bridge and watch that reflection and talk with absolute strangers about what it meant. There were amazing meanings for this chair. It's called high-water chair. But I had no idea, some of the things that people said. I wish I'd written them down. I would stand in just eavesdropping and think, oh, this is pretty deep. Luckily for me, the river wasn't deep there. So I just waited out there and plopped it in. And so the water had tripped people. This is one of just a sheet of real fine cheesecloth that went down into the river. And I was supposed to wiggle down the river, but it didn't just stay straight out. But what happened was that the reflection in the water was so enchanting to me. I really loved it. And so that seemed to me that the water had tripped people into looking at things that works that otherwise they wouldn't have given a minute. And I was very interested in that. That was called spectral laundry. And it went right across the river to a wide place. And when I put it up, it was absolutely clear, poly, whatever it's called, plastic. You could see right through it. And the ghost hung up their laundry. It was a Halloween, actually, or right before it. But in a few days, it all turned opaque. And I hadn't counted on that. So by the time I got the picture, you could actually see the darn things. But people looked at that as if it was art because it was over the water and it had this wonderful reflections going on. So in a similar way, I like a painting to force the viewer to peer through the depths of all this layered translucent crap to what's below it, what's below it, what's below it. And I think that it's interesting to me. And I think it makes my work seem sort of benign to have this little story on the outside. But it's really subversive, because inside, there are all kinds of things going on just like with water. That's what I think. So after possibly maybe 40 solo shows and many, many group shows over the years, I really got tired and lost interest in jurying. And instead, I illustrated books. And this is what the poor man got for this book. It was really frightening pictures. And I made a cranky show. And this was back in 2008.   So as the paint popped off, I started really liking this look. But this cranky never got shown. It never even got finished. The guy who wanted it for the book kind of moved on to other things. So there I was, left holding the bag. So I just put it up in a gallery show around the top of the want room like some sort of insane freeze. Then a couple of years ago, a body of work that I painted over many decades, several decades at least, was revealed as an accidentally created book. And it was published. And to my surprise, then another book began to take form. And that was inspired by a chance complaint. These two are my daughters. And they write that I never taught them the old songs, which they had no interest in at all. I know hundreds of old songs. And so I decided I would make a little homemade book of songs for them. And I chose my favorite ballads, two versions of it, what they had become in their earliest beginnings when they were first written down, and what they became over time when they came to America. So you might have 56 verses of Daring Dune with a Knight. And suddenly it comes to American. It's a man named Old Bangamu goes in the woods and kills a pig. And it's four verses. And that really is what happened, what Sir Lionel became Old Bangamu, and with that kind of reduction in story. And it's a very popular and good banjo song. And so I was working away at that. And then you will remember those clay whistles that dominated my life for so long. And then with this long absence from my life, I woke up one morning a couple of years ago. And I wanted clay in my hands. I couldn't believe it. It's that feeling like when you want to gargling. You don't just like your hands on this itch to get into dirt. And so I went and got some clay. And all of a sudden, dozens of whistles about ballads started coming off my fingers. And since I don't think about what I'm doing, I put it down and I say, oh, there's Jimmy Randall. He's called Lord Randall in other places. But where I grew up was Jimmy Randall. And you know, and Lord Thomas and Sir Eleanor, and the farmer's cursed wife, and all these things. They just all were flinging every one of them. I sang the whole time. Not out loud that I have people that might suffer. But I sang as I worked in my head. And it was a very interesting thing for me. And then things started getting really complicated. My publisher, who has Goddard Roots, said that he wanted to publish this new little book. And I had already finished his heats of whistles. And they were all overshadowed by very long dull essays. But annoyingly enough, the publisher had some ideas of its own. After telling me I could do whatever I wanted, he said, can't the essays be shorter? And not so many of them. And not so academic. And all those whistles, no, no, no. And maybe, how about some paintings? And then he said, oh, no, maybe not. And so Benny, her, painted a cranky scroll of a ballad and had performed it at Marshfield Library, which was a wonderful event. There's pretty poly inside of this little theater. And he was interested in it. And I thought, why have I done this? And because I thought, OK, I noticed how the word ballad makes people's eyes glaze right over. And I wanted to see if singing a long-forgotten song to this moving scroll was as interesting as watching art reflected in water. It isn't, but it does have some possibilities to it. The possibility that I didn't foresee was the publisher saying, why not crankies? And I said, in my book? And he said, yes, cranky ballads, a book of cranky ballads. And I thought, mm, how? And so that brings me to the fix I'm now in. And the burning question of the hour is, what is a cranky? OK, a cranky is a pre-industrial viewing box. It's a box with a window. And that one, the piece of hideous tie-back is covering the window because the scroll is trying to roll through. And this was a hippie-made one. Then see that third wheel? There no one knows what it is or why. It was put there. It's ball bearing action, though. And it really is fancy compared to the rest of the cranky. And nobody knows how to do it. It's a very unworkable, heavy, heavy unworkable cranky box. But it was from the days when crankies were just starting to be reborn. And so through that window, you see a portion of the panorama painted on a scroll and it gets cranked past. And there might be music to it or a narrative to it, or there may not. And crankies were immensely popular everywhere in the 1800s. And they were called panoramic theater or some fancy name like that. And some were very tiny, like this.  And it's a story, it's English, and it's a story about the Boer War, which must have been in the 1880s, something like that. And some crankies were huge. That's in the Boiling Museum in New Bedford. It's enormous scroll, it goes down, it comes back, it goes down again. And it's a Boiling voyage. And you could go into movie theaters or at spares and go into an auditorium. And you would see moving scrolls of this sort of various adventures. There would be a Boiling voyage was this one, a trip down the Nile or a trip down the Mississippi. And then after you left, the next crowd came in. And then they would see going up the Nile, going up the Mississippi, because they didn't want to rewind this thing between shows. And nobody, I have no idea how that was even accomplished. They must have had horses or something. Anyway, mostly forgotten, crankies are still cherished by puppeteers. And here's Peter and Alka Suman, very tiny there. That's smaller than real life, I promise.  And it's also adored by ballad singers and people with an interest in the past. My first cranky experience was a lifetime ago. And it was Peter and Alka Suman and the bread and puppet theater troupe were spending their first summer, their first winter in Vermont, and working here at Goddard. And they put on amazing shows all the time. And there was a cranky called Rats that they put up. They have been really vital, Peter and Alka, and their whole troupe in providing the cranky theater the current term cranky. So here's a real quick look through crankies, contemporary crankies. This is in an old shop front that's been discontinued as a shop front. Then become an adjunct to some museum. Like in not fall'em up, but somewhere along there in Massachusetts. And it's the history of that region. Here is a very mysterious one. This is a guy named Kobe Ford who's gotten lots of awards for his puppets and his innovations in puppet theater. And this is a cranky he's putting on for Appalachian Christmas event. And it's outdoors, so he's lit it with candles. And I don't know how you do it. You probably go shadow puppets with it, but I don't know how you do that with candles in the way, because they might. Well, it sounds excitingly dangerous. And the next one is Carolyn Shapiro, who's local. She's made this long scroll about the Lawrence Phil Stripe, and showed it at the old labor halls. And that's her scroll unrolled on the floor, which is exciting to see. This is a show called The Cabin of Curiosity. And they do everything. They have masks that split open. They have hands that are made of wood but are articulated that one person up there is holding this hand that does things. And they have a musician, and they have a cranky riding along back there. And their shows, apparently, are always very exciting. OK, here's an odd one. This seems like a modern idea, the invisible cranky box. There's no cranky box there. There's just two people holding dowels and turning them. But that actually is the ancient concept of crankies. They still do it in India and in other countries. They might have a vertical scroll, might have a horizontal scroll, but they're just turning the paper with their hands. OK, and here's one of the most common ways that people do crankies is to paint a scroll or glue on cutouts that are just silhouettes. And this cranky, obviously, is going to be a vertical one. So that lady's going to fly about her flower bed, I guess. But that's a common way of doing things. Her name's Pali Sunek. And here's one in Puerto Rico that is a very good little idea because if you're doing outdoor activist work and putting on a cranky, you might have to run. And so this thing can just be picked up, folded like that, and off you go. And you're out of there before the danger gets to you. And this is a high cabinet, pretty fancy. I can't remember the name of the person who's doing it. But I can see some troubles with that. Nobody, more than two feet away, will be able to see what's going on up here. It looks like it shows how fanciful we can get. And the last one is a one that I did. I call it my very popular Brecht Theater because it's so apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic. But it has a, I do a lot of these sort of cut out some things that are very lightweight so that I can pick them up. It's some wall insulation, you know, that kind of silver paper on it. And then I coat it with bits of fabric because my dog eats sheets. So I have lots and lots of fabric to use. Yeah, she goes through those sheets. OK, so that brings us to the cranky of the hour. And the cranky of the hour this morning is knotting on town. And I'm going to tell you about it a little bit. OK, this is what's called the Lost Ballad. And it survived in England on a piece of paper. But it hadn't been sung for hundreds of years, literally. People knew it existed because of it being written down. Musicologists knew. But for some reason, it had died out entirely. And this is sort of a speculative piece of history I'm going to do now about what required this song banished the way it did. And most ballads from anywhere, but particularly the Scots-British ballads, arrived in America over and over. They were brought by waves and waves of immigrants coming through. And the song catcher is what he was called in Appalachia, of Cesar Sharp, called Cecil in England. Cesar Sharp and his accomplice, Maude, came from England and traveled to isolated communities looking for old songs. And they described travels. Next one. They described travels so arduous that they said there were no roads.  And excuse me, that one. I come from that sort of world. And so he discovered in 1917 was when he was at the height of these explorations in Appalachia looking for new songs. Because people didn't realize that the British songs had come here. And so this was a real big deal for musicologists. And he was back in some horror. And he discovered that these old songs were honored by the families who had brought them over and treated them as family heirlooms. These are their treasures. And they were glad to sing them to him. And he would write them all down. Choke. He would write them all down. And he ran into one family called the Richies. And they had a daughter, Una Richie. They had 14 kids. And the third oldest was called Una. And she and her cousin sang a song for him. They were in Viper, Kentucky. Imagine being from Viper, Kentucky. That's great. And Una also has a Goddard attachment because she married a man who taught at Goddard. And that was a lifetime ago. Definitely. She's no longer alive. But they lived in Plainfield. His name was Tom Jacob. And anyway, they sang this song for him. And he thought, oh my goodness, it's not in in town. It's still alive. It's still being sung. But not in Europe, not in England, here in Appalachia. And it was a pretty astonishing moment. And their family lore said the song had been passed down since their arrival before the Revolutionary War. And they believed it was a song about the Great Plague. And so that's the family of all the, that's 11 of the kids. There's Pa and Ma. And then they had three more. Next one. And that's their baby, Jean Richie. And she grew up and recorded that song in 1957. I think for Alamo Max or somebody she met him and he recorded her singing. I think it was Smithsonian Records that put it out. And because of that record and thanks to her, that song returned to England and now is a part of their folk repertoire. They have no idea it spent 300 years out of commission and that it ever came here. It's theirs as far as they're concerned. Okay, so Nottingham Town is a kind of a riddle song. Riddles were very popular before better entertainment were invented. And a lot of old songs have riddles in them. You probably know some of them yourself. And most of the ones with riddles started off with pretty gruesome ballads. And all that's left now is, I gave my love a cherry. That was in a rather obscene song, actually. But the obscene parts have all been stripped away. Anyway, Nottingham Town. And I always sang it Nottingham Town because I thought people made a mistake and were saying it wrong. But they didn't. It was Nottingham Town.  And this is a poster from the Levelers who I'm gonna talk more about in a second. But the Levelers did these amazing posters on very cheap paper and just spread them everywhere and sold them for very cheap because it was their way of getting their political message around. And that poster shows pretty much the basis of why the worlds turned upside down. They felt everything was wrong and going wrong. And so cats were being chased by rats and the house is upside down and the man is being pushed by a cart and he's got his boots on his hands. That kind of thing. And this song, the contradictions in it and the contraries can be seen. I think sociologists have coined this term rights of reversal. And it's a term that describes ritualized events like a party that you do every year, a ritualized event in which violations of social norms is allowed. So it's sanctioned misbehavior. And for instance, it's Saturnalia which was a Roman leftover that has got remnant still in England. It was a festival that allowed misbehaviors. There were backward actions of all sorts. And you see the man riding whatever that is backwards. That was like part of the party. And over here is a man wearing a donkey's head but he's also a crowned himself king.  And in the Feast of the Bean King, this is a custom that still goes on. I have Norwegian relatives who have a, at that time of year in the winter, they have a porridge for breakfast that has an almond in it. Whoever gets the almond is the king for the day. And in my family tradition, not directly from now, those people, there's a bean or a piece of un-cooked carrot cut like a little crown that's in the lental soup or whatever you're serving for dinner. And then that person is king and gets to order everybody else around. And so pretending you were the monarch in these days would have been a very dangerous thing to do unless you do it on those days. Peter Bruegel, the younger painting, and it's called The King Drinks. And though that guy's drinking, so it's probably him. Anyway, these sort of hijinks were supposed to relieve social tensions. And they were purposefully invented to relieve social tensions. And they're most often seen in societies with a high level of internal stress. And we have examples today in our culture, casual Fridays at work, where you get to pretend you're in the Bahamas for the day or whatever you want to wear, or Halloween costumes at work. It's very recent, maybe within 20 years, that I've, on Halloween's my birthday, so I notice Halloween. And you go into a bank and all the clerks are dressed like cows. And they're having a lot of fun, but this is sanctioned by their bosses. And kids wearing backward clothing for school, they have a backward day, or they have a pajamas at school, they're all designated days. You can't just do it any old time. It's designated. And it's an old idea that's still around as to implement stress relief. And it's orchestrated by the people in power exactly for that purpose. And so it is generally, this song points out a lot of contraries of that sort. The whole song is that. And it was also said to be a riddle, but it's also a political statement. It's generally agreed, and it might not be so, that the Nottingham Town song emerged in England in the late Middle Ages, and that would be 1350. It was a time of appalling social stress, and political complexity, and lots of warfare. They were fighting constantly, internally, and all over the place. And so it was a miserable era, and it was made worse by horrible weather, really unspeakable weather, and famine, and plagues. And the plague is the main actor here. This is a bubonic plague, and it swept through England, it's called the Black Death, in 1346, and in one year, half the population was dead. Now that's neat. I can't imagine what that would be like to have whole families, whole towns disappeared, and even wars stopped for a little while, trade stopped, and people were very frightened, and wouldn't go and do anything, and tried just to hide out so they wouldn't get the plague. But a real important thing was that the amount of land under cultivation just plummeted. It was a precipitous drop in how much was, how many fields were being cultivated, and that resulted in famine. And the workers, who weren't very many of them left, and they realized suddenly that they were a valuable commodity, and they demanded actual wages, not just a bite of food, and all a little ratty hovel to live in, but actual wages. And the landowners were horrified and resisted, and there were resulting resentments of that that were very fierce, and they built very slowly over a long, long time, because there were always punishments for this kind of misaction not happening on the designated day. And so these people were asking for something they weren't allowed to ask for, and so it took, it was a very long, slow burn that started up with this kind of, with the plague. Okay, the plague returned again and again. It had its own schedule. You never knew when it was gonna show up, but maybe 10 years after the great plague, 10 years later it came back again, and that, and then again and again, and that increased the sort of helpless terror of the populace. They never knew what was gonna hit them in when. And one response was that obsessive art began, and you've seen these, a dance of death is a theme, and okay, here's the plague. This is from an old manuscript of medieval, manuscript of them burying the dead, very skinny corpses, and that's a very skinny, but it's an interesting picture because it's so unlike most medieval art, it's got this sort of obsessive quality to it of scratch, scratch, scratch, you know, of emotion. Yeah, there's a dance of death. That was in a church in Slovakia, I think they got in Rome during World War II, but it's a very long freeze of all kinds of people of every description, and a death is courting each one of them or dancing and holding hands with them in a long, long, long line. And I, so everybody was doing it. Here's what I got, another one. Yeah, here's Hans Holbein, the younger, and he carved these little wood blocks that are very repetitive.  And this is supposed to be instructional for you about these guys in escape, how are you going to? And what do you need to do to trick death into not taking you? And so next, yeah, here's Bosch, a wonderful scene of a death bed scene and both an angel, the good and the bad are both fighting for this man. Down here, it shows what he used to be. He had armor and stuff, and then he became a miser. There he is putting what my children called, when they saw this, when they were little girls, they said, oh, he's got a devil in his toy box. But the devil's under the toy box, but the toy box is still, oh yeah, no, there's one in there. He's an hoarding gold, and then there's a little tiny faint ray of light coming from a crucifix up there, trying to get his attention from all these other things that are much more compelling. And it's supposed to suggest to you that maybe sin isn't worth it. It's not worth the price, and the sin here is green and avarice, but people were singing ballads like The Wife of Us as well about loss and death of a lady about bargaining for your life against death. It doesn't work. And there were mummers plays about morality plays and Morris dancing that took on these themes, and those groups have been around since the beginning of time, as far as people know. And artists began to produce a lot of art for the masses, not just for rich people, but for the masses. And these were these broad fives, posters, things like this. These were very inexpensive and widely available. Okay, here's a piece of Leveller art of chicken roasting the man, basting him a little bit. And that is pretty typical of the art that started coming out of this sense of indignation about an attempt to politicize what they believed and under very, very huge obstacles. And so many organized radical factions came ripe over these years, and they rose gradually out of those long decades of reoccurring plagues and growing social discontent. And they had names like, okay, you've heard of many of them, the Calvinist, the Puritans, the Diggers, the Ranchers, the Quakers, the Shakers, and Seekers, and they all had different opinions. And Diggers thought you should be able to farm on public land if you didn't have land of your own. And they got clobbered for that. But the one group that I am most interested in is the Levellers because of their art and this world turned upside down theme. There's a little tiny one of a fish fishing for a man. I don't know what's going on over here, but the fish up in the tree and the bird in the water, it's all, everything's backwards. And the Levellers were a very vigorous democratic movement dedicated to leveling society and social inequalities and political inequalities. They wanted abolition of the monarchy. They wanted agrarian reform. They wanted equality for the sexes. They wanted religious freedom. They had all kinds of outrageous demands. And by the mid 1600s, so we've had quite a stretch of the rate play, beliefs that had only been very cautiously expressed during medieval days were now openly, were out in the open with these posters going up all over the place. And there's a butcher, the butcher's the cow, the meat is the man. And so these images, they just sold these things everywhere. They were everywhere. And it was, to some, these images suggest that the ballot in Ottoman town was a level or creation. But it actually is loaded with medieval imagery and probably the ideas in the song had over time become commonplace with the working people. So it became of everybody who was poor, just about everybody, had these feelings in the back of their mind if they didn't come right out and say them. And so this long, slow burn that had been ignited before the great plague culminated finally in the English Civil War, which oddly enough began in the town of Nottingham, which I think is red herring, but anyway, the monarchy was toppled and Cromwell began a very vicious and oppressive rule. And the Levler beliefs, they had backed Cromwell. They thought he was a man of the people. And it turned out once he got power, he was the most bloodthirsty despot imaginable. He became, after he got powerfully, became a fanatic Puritan. And anything that was fun was forbidden. And anyone disagreeing with him should be killed and work was killed. This is a mass grave being excavated now in Durham. These are Cromwell's debts. He slaughtered people and just, they were just shoveled into mass graves and nobody ever had any record of it. And now it's known that this is, because they're finding them and finding tons of people in there. In Ireland, he killed the men and did, they ended up like this, but the women and children in towns that he was conquering were sold into slavery and the Barbados and never were heard of again. Hundreds and hundreds of women and children. And so he was a- What time is that? That would have been 1651 maybe? Around 1650, sometime during those times. And so some levelers clearly escaped the mass executions that they were on the end of and they made it to the colonies. And I imagine the Ritchie family bringing this precious, not him in town with them, maybe was part of that exodus from, that flea from Cromwell. And I say this because it is very well documented that leveler doctrines played an enormous role in creating our constitution. One man, one vote, equality under the law, all those ideas that were put purposely and knowledgeably by the people who wrote it. They were leveler concepts and all the years I went to school I never heard of the levelers or that they had a part in making our constitution. So to me, that was very interesting. And the ballot, not him in town, not him in town was surely one of Cromwell's intended victims because it stopped. It was not sung from then on in England. And but it escaped with its singers to hide out in Appalachia and got to be an heirloom. So the interpretations of this ballot are to me, the outstanding feature of the ballot is that it offers a lot of freedom of interpretation to the listener. And some say that the words are just tomfoolery left over from a medieval mummer's play. That it's something that nobody, never made any sense, it was always just a joke. Others say, as the Ritchie family said, that it had to do with the desperation and confusion of the plague years. And Charles Upton, a metaphysics poet and a scholar said that in the 14th century, the ballot nottingham town would have been considered as a mystical map. And it showed the path to universal wisdom. This is a map of this scheme. It shows a path to the universal wisdom that's found at the heart of all spiritual thinking. And so it's apparently one heart for us all, but this is a map to get there. And Upton said all the characters in the song are allegorical and would have been considered allegorical to a person in the 14th century. And all the colors have meaning and the poetry is all coherent and it's complete. It's not nonsense. And all the seemingly contrary symbolism represents the necessary steps on the road to transmutation. So anyone who rolls their eyes at this, which is awful lot of people that I know, they're not considering how people felt about alchemy in the 14th century. It guided their life and their worldviews. It was how they sorted information. Yeah, there's a part of an alchemical map drawing and it's not about not in Upton, but everything means something in this picture. He has on red boots, that's not an accent just because it looks really pretty. There are things mean things in the alchemical world. Okay, there's an alchemical painting more recent than the medieval times, but it shows a very fanciful idea of what you call the alchemical laboratory next. Okay, here, these guys, up to now. These are, this is Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia. Robert Hunter said that Nottingham Town was his model for songwriting. That the strong imagery and the symbols, his meaning can be varied or open to personal interpretation and he liked that and that was what he wanted was that kind of option for the listener. And he called, and Garcia called what they were trying to do with their music, psychedelic alchemy because they said you take rhythm and melody and lyrics and lots of drugs and you can meld your followers into one state of cosmic consciousness and that's what they wanted. Now we're not gonna have that happen with Nottingham Town sadly enough. But we could, but we won't. Others saw that ballad as an opportunity. Bob Dylan snatched the tune and the mood of his song for Master's War. And for me it's just the love of a haunting melody and a mysterious story. It suits our unsettled times and I made that my interpretation of this. When I do the cranky, you'll see that I'm not doing a medieval scroll. It's, the man comes to a town where no one will look up or look down. And I thought, well, who are these unhelpful people? He has to be given directions to where he already is and then they won't help him. And so next, please, I decide, oh, they're all on cell phones. They can't look up or look down. They're busy. And so that's a feeling that you get now if you go into a cafe and not a single person has their head up or is talking. They're all in some sort of screen. And I thought, well, this, I decided to make this song now become a discussion of what technology's done to human relationships. And then from there on it goes downhill. I dressed the protagonist in black and white.    And despite Cromwell Morris Dancing has remained a popular street entertainment and it survived since the most ancient times long before not a mountain was conceived. Is there another one? Yeah. A hobby horse. Thanks to this one back up. See the little gray horse in the song, the man rides a gray horse.  And I thought, oh, I'm gonna make the horse be a hobby horse. That'll be the horse in my song.  It looks like. And so hobby horses have remained the beloved creatures of off base theater since way back. I made the queen and the king into puppets and they're manipulated by drones and puppeteers. And the powerful ending of my scroll there is a standard nightmare of our era. And so now for the cranky. And then afterwards if anyone has any specific cranky questions about how to make one or anything like that, I'll tell you. So we have to move things.  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. In Ottoman town, not a soul would look up, not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down, not a soul would look up, or show me the way, to show me the way to fair and Ottoman town.  She stood so still. She threw me to the dirt. She tore my heart. She bruised my shirt from bridal to saddle. And on the cantos, I rode over the plain. Yes, on the cantos, I rode over the plain. I met the king and the queen. And the company mare, a riding behind. There a marchin' before, I met a stark-naked drummer. Come beatin' a drum, his hands and his pockets gonna keep himself warm. And when I got there, not a soul did I see. They all stood around, just staring at me. I called for a, and to stifle the dust for it rained the whole day. Sat down on a coal, a coal frozen stone. 10,000 stood around me, 10,000 stood around me. And yet I said that never was born. 10,000 that never was born. And did it work? Were you more interested in hearing a ballad if it moved? Mm-hmm.


So, I've been working on maths craft. This is trying to engage people who wouldn't normally engage with mathematics, so this could be from young children who think maths is boring in the classroom, through to older people who perhaps left school, haven't engaged with maths since, and we're trying to engage with them through craft. So, anything from origami through to crochet and trying to explore some quite complex ideas but do it in a way that's accessible, you get them involved by being hands-on and once they're exploring things that's tactile, they can start to see some quite complex ideas. I mean, I had an eight-year-old at one event, surprised me when I was very much skimming over the maths of something and she just looked at what I was talking about and looked at and went, well, that's obviously because of blah, blah, blah, blah, and she'd really taken what I'd seen, what I'd shared and because she could see it and touch it and feel it, she was able to understand it. This started off as a pilot last year at the Auckland War Memorial and we thought we'd maybe get a few hundred people through and we managed to get 1,800 people through over the course of a weekend and we were stoked at that. We then got some funding to take it on the road, so to speak and had various events and we were in Christchurch about a month ago and we thought, well, we won't be as busy as Auckland because it's a smaller venue. We had 1,800 people through in one day. Maths is all around us in the world. We live in a society where technology is moving forward at a fast pace. We need mathematics to help us with this and if we don't have a mathematically literate society then that's not going to be able to happen. We will struggle. So seeing that passion coming through in children and letting them see how exciting mathematics is really important.