Welcome to the first talk this morning and first of all, thank you for having me here and for being such a great crowd. I really enjoyed the talks and on the conversation over the last two days. Thank you. This morning I want to present to you a bit about an extension that I wrote over the last six months. That does neuro-machine translation and so the idea was to have something very simple. With a single click you can translate a document in writer and we're trying to make the translated document to look as good as it can based on the old document. So if you are into corporate identity, I have a title slide for that too. I'll tell you a bit about my background because I'm more coming from the neuro-machine translation side than from the LibreOffice side and then I'll tell you a bit about what's going on with the extension and how I tried to wrap it nicely into the LibreOffice. I would hope to get some input from you on how to make the extension more useful and how to make it feasible for people to train their own models too. So my background is I did some pattern recognition way back in 2000 but then I moved to Mathematics and I spent my PhD explaining the pattern that you can see at the top right. Then I did a lot of entrance-risk modeling and recently I moved to do machine learning and do a lot of modeling there. I have two tiny patches in LibreOffice and so those three buttons here I implemented a special version of those even though... Yeah, just turn it off. The mic ones broken so sorry, yeah. Yeah, okay. If I'm not speaking loudly enough you will just complain, I know. And so these three little buttons, when I first made them they were not looking nearly half as nice as they did now but this was my first patch in LibreOffice and I think you're doing an admirable job at making it easy to contribute a little feature like that. Okay, so the idea is to have a very simple way of translating documents. So I have a sentence in English, the quick rom, fox jumps over the lazy dog and the extension will provide you with a new translate menu and you can just click on English to German and then the text will be translated to German and it will also get some formatting which now appears from magically but usually you have correspondence. I should say and acknowledge that the project was funded by the German Ministry of Research and Technology through the prototype fund some of the German guys know the prototype fund it's a project that gives you a short term six month grant to work on software for the public good and so this extended fit in very nicely. So the first question I thought well I want to do a translation function in LibreOffice the first question I had was how much of a user interface do you really want for such an extension? So on the one hand you want to have a nice user interface on the other hand if you can get by with less user interface make it more seamless if you want that's certainly an advantage So I first researched what other people do and on the right you can see how it looks like in some of the Microsoft products where there is a little thing on the sidebar that pops up and the original text is put at the top and the translation suggestion is at the bottom and then you can hit insert to replace the text but so what is the advantage of doing it then? The only thing I could come up with when I systematically reflected this was that you can see the original text and the translated text at the same time because obviously if you want to edit the translated text there's a more natural place to do it than in the sidebar the natural place to edit your document would be in the document itself So this is what I did with the LibreOffice extension then I took the original text and just replaced it with the translated text and in order for the user to be able to see what was the original text there's something that's not ideally translated there is an annotation with the original text and yesterday evening during the Hackfest I actually worked on making those optional so if you're very sure that you will get good translations from the model you can disable that This is a little example from Wikipedia from the machine translation article in German and you can see the humanity dream probably doesn't strike you as a particularly idiomatic English phrase maybe it's a dream of mankind or something like that but the next paragraph understanding a language without learning is an ancient dream of mankind This is something that you could probably put in the English Wikipedia if there wasn't an already written translation already So in terms of UI, I first had fairly large ambitions so the problem with neural networks in general is that they're kind of a black box and whatever drops out of it you have to accept and so there is research into explaining how the model arrives at its predictions and so this is a work by Strowett at the vicinity of the translation system that I use and for example they have not only the best translation which will be the output of the translation but they also have the most probable alternatives but the question here is is this a useful UI without intervention options by the user if you can just look at it but you don't have the option of saying here I want to have something different all the time I figured that it was not that useful and so I didn't even try to implement a user interface for this in LibreOffice Obviously if you have ideas about how to make this function like this useful I'd be very glad to have a chat because I want to make the extension as useful as possible So who of you knows a lot about neural networks? Yeah, very good. So it's not everyone One of the things that neural networks are supposed to do better than say a dictionary is that you have some context that you can consider and the traditional way of having this context is to have a neural network where you feed in one character at a time More recently if you've heard about some bird model that Google trained or this open AI text generator that was too dangerous to be disclosed that made the news last year that there's a new way and this is kind of an attention mechanism where you have the original text is fed into an encoder and you have some vector representation and now the decoders, they will go one word by one word but they can look at all the encoded vectors and this attention will play a fairly neat role in the following because we can make good use of it in our extension and so what happens is that the decoder is fed kind of a token that says this little s that means go, it's the start token and then it will generate the first output token, DEA and that will be fed back to the decoder and so it will produce one word at a time and so what we get is that we feed in like our sentence the quick brown talks done over the lazy dog we get the translation but we also get those attention weights which essentially are mapped between the source text and the target text and you can see this roughly lining up here of the diagonal which means that the structure of the sentences are more or less the same but you also have some little thing that it always looks at the end which maybe is a few hypothesize that some words like humans understand language we usually have to read the full question before we give an answer to and so it's maybe it's natural to look at the end but what can we do with this attention map well we can take this in order to format our translated text if we have an emphasis for example we want to emphasize the quick the word quick then the attention map will tell us that Schnellen and probably also DEA which is serious and we would have to emphasize the Schnellen at the beginning of the sentence and this is what the extension does we also need to keep the paragraph formatting so that you keep paragraph rates and headlines and things formatted and we currently do this or the extension does this by just translating paragraph by paragraph in fact sentence by sentence this is one of the other things in order to make use of these translation models so there is a library that I've built on but this library needs the text one sentence at a time so you have a pre-processing step where you have to split the text into sentences which can be tricky and particularly like it's not clear whether it works for all languages so I wouldn't know but to do the sentence splitting in Chinese for example so the two things that I used in building it in addition to LibreOffice of course was a framework called PyCorge which is one of the largest AI frameworks in addition to TensorFlow and I personally like it a lot and this is where it contributes a lot and then one of the core developers one of the few independent ones and then there's the project OpenNMT so it's Open Neural Machine Translation which is a quite comprehensive framework originally developed by the Neural Natural Language Processing Group at Hama and it's more a library application-like than many other of those machine translation models which basically are, here's the code to accompany my paper on machine translation so this was a very nice building block to have and with that the extension was developed fairly quickly but now the next question is you have the extension but it will not do anything for you unless you have a model so who's impressed by translating German to English? Two so apparently you would be more impressed by having different language combinations what would you need in order to train something like that the first thing is you need example sentence pairs so in order to train the German to English or English to German model I used four and a half million sentence pairs probably for many other language combinations you don't have as many and this is actually one of the fairly harsh limitations and then you need one of those fancy TPU graphics cards so I used a gaming one that I ran for one or two weeks and this is one of the weaknesses so to train one model you run a TPU for two weeks and this takes 150 to 200 watts so you've spent 30 to 70 kilowatt hours training the model and if you compare this so I have three children and three kids my wife and I and my TPU would take about 400 kilowatt hours per year so if I train 10 models my wife will ask me what's up with the electricity bill at least it's green power but nonetheless and actually I would like to work a bit to get this down maybe half it or something like that get it down to a quarter then the steps that you take to train the models you first have to prepare the vocabulary and if you look very closely you saw that I don't actually feed words into the model but word parts which is kind of one of the fancy things you do in machine translation but this is an easy part then you have the training bit which takes very long and then you have and then you need to do an evaluation you can try to do this automatically and get some score but in the end you will have to just feed it a few sentences and see if it makes sense and this is also why you need someone who actually speaks the language or the languages involved in the translation one other thing that I want to want so I showed you an example of translating Wikipedia and this invariably works relatively well but if you have a special domain for example you want to translate emails within an automotive company or you want to translate legal texts you would do better if you specialized the general model to a legal German trainless model for example and you would do this by running a few more training steps on a more specialized set of examples and this is one of the next steps in developing the extension is to facilitate for the user to actually run their own model training how many of you do have a GPU computer? so that's far from everyone which is probably one of the things that limits adoption in the end also wanted to talk a bit about what I did to package this extension and obviously and now I already had a lot of hints of what I could do better and if you have some more I'd be most grateful so the situation is that I have those powerful building blocks PyTorch and OpenMMT but this comes at the cost that I have quite a few dependencies and some dependencies will be just pure Python code but some dependencies will also what is called in the Python language extensions which are C or C++ modules that are compiled so I have to find a way to provide those Python modules to the LibreOffice Python instance and my current solution is to build a simple OXT that lacks a lot of these dependencies and then I install the extension into a fresh LibreOffice install all the modules with a Python installation tool pip and then I copy over the folder which contains the installed packages into the OXT zip file and it increases the size by a factor of 5 of the OXT but this leaves me with a problem how can I automate the build while PyTorch are installing LibreOffice and installing packages into LibreOffice is something that probably needs some work to automate the build and so one of my goals here to make this easier would be to shed some of the dependencies and one can also think about moving the extension from Python to C++ in order to make it simpler and the neural network bits would lend themselves quite naturally to do that but if you have ideas, I'd be most grateful There's two more things in UI that he did to do and I'll just show it really quick so you need to install it as an extension just like for every extension so this is quite nice and then you have to install those language models or translation models and what I did was I put a new configuration page in the translation in the language settings and you can download the translation model as a zip file and then when you get new, you get a file dialog where you need to put it in the path which I thought was a relatively reasonable way to distribute those models but if we wanted to do this at scale I mean, how many languages does LibreOffice support? 30 30, yes so if you wanted to have translation models for that the first thing is that you really have 30 times 29 translation models and the next question would be would you want to set up a center repository for translation models or best translate those and make them available to the user? So here's my questions for you so how much is machine translation a desirable standard feature that you wouldn't want to have in the product? You know that for example the Google browser that I will translate this page thing that pops up whenever you look at a page in a foreign language is there a good way to work on something else than write your text? So machine translation in my opinion would best when you feed it sentences some writer was kind of a natural match but one could think about also having it for example and impress but I wouldn't know how to do that yet is there interest in more language in supporting more languages here from user perspective also from providing your own language models and what size of language model would be acceptable so the model that I trained came out with about a gigabyte for the translation model and there's a few ideas how to get this smaller at least by a factor of two again but still I would be fairly large even compared to the not entirely trivial amount of space that the office itself takes I'll have a written quiz on this at the end so other ideas to make this more useful would be better integration with a writer so for example one of the things that I don't do yet which might be obvious would be to set the language property after translation and how many of you would consider training your own language model if you had an easy script so that's a good part of the audience so it's not everyone but maybe a third this would be mostly something that you don't do from within deeper office the way you need to have some sort of well-written instructions there's an initiative that does collect open parallel corpora, open examples of sentence pairs and incidentally one of the sources they have is user interface translations so one could indeed consider whether one can also take bits of the deeper office documentation in order to see such a translation model and then one can try to find things from the current research so there's a fairly influential conference every year that's called WNT and they regularly have challenges where you're supposed to train models or achieve certain tasks and so for example one of the currently one of the challenges is automatic filtering of noisy corpora if you have something where you don't know this is really a good example of pairs or are there mismatches and things they work on detecting which pairs are good to feed into a model and which are not and obviously one of the other questions one might have is can we use traditional dictionaries because currently we just throw all these sentences into the model and then it learns something but there's not much of an opportunity to kind of say well this particular word should correspond to this other particular word like it would have in a dictionary and of course any other ideas you have on this might be very very interesting so my part of the talk would be it's done


Hi in this video, I'm gonna be talking about breakout trading and how traders trade Breakouts now markets go from ranging to trending to ranging. So You know, you'll get a range a sort of trending market and then prices will end up going sideways for a bit a bit directionless and then you might even get a trend continuation to the upside and then a Ranging market of some sort and then maybe to the downside and So on and so forth so if markets go from trending to ranging to trending what breakout traders will look to anticipate is Really a major break of a level of support or resistance now that level of support and resistance Resistance can be horizontal. It can be dynamic. It can be Diagonal so dynamic being a moving average diagonal being a trend line. So You know after and that's really after price has been really been in a directionless market. So What I mean by that is One of the what one of the popular breakout trading patterns is would be a horizontal Breakout so we'll go over some diagonal ones as well But in this case, we draw that line again in this case We're gonna look at a horizontal one and we'll look at some diagonal Breakout patterns in a bit so You have prices are really contained between a Support and resistance level now. We need at least Two touches of a level to really confirm it as a level of support or resistance so when prices are really contained between This area here and this is what we would Probably consider this to be maybe like a box or a rectangle type of breakout. So Traders are wondering where Prices are going to go. So are they going to go to the upside and continue and maybe you know Start a trend to the upside or start a trend to the downside so if traders are anticipating a breakout of a level then if Prices do come down to a level of support then Traders breakout traders will be on alert. So what they really want to see here is a clear or a High probability or high probability that prices may break to the downside and there What they really want to see is a Candlestick close on the their trading time frame. So if this is a bearish candle This would be the open and this would be the close So what they want to see is price and the candlestick close beyond or below the level of support and that would tell them that prices have a decent chance of continuing To the downside and potentially they can be jumping on the beginnings of a Down trend after we've been in a ranging markets and the same thing would apply to the upside So if prices was to come up to here Breakout traders would be looking for a candlestick close Above the resistance level so this would be the open and that would be the close of the candle and the close of the candle Would indicate some sort of momentum or could indicate some sort of momentum to break out traders and They would then take that as a buying signal That prices are going to enter a Trend after it's been in a directionless or ranging type market for a while. So This is what we would call again a box or rectangle type of pattern And we're going to look at some examples of how traders trade this type of pattern on the price chart So here's an example of a break out type trade now The market had been moving sideways for a bit. So we had a level here We had a high and we had a low and then prices came up into the the resistance zone came down into the support zone creating You know Confirmed support and confirmed resistance because we don't know this is if this is support until the second touch Vice versa, we don't notice whether that's resistance until the second touch And then prices if we look at just zooming slightly so We can see here. We had really a directionless market Looking at this traders wouldn't know really what was happening Higher highs and higher lows weren't being made. This was the high and this was the low prices Which were kind of contained in this range this box this rectangle Until we see This candle right here. So let me See This candle right here Now so you can clearly see That this candle closed above The resistance high Kit a clear candle close and then what traders will do is they will Enter on the close of the candle above the Support or resistance level in this case the resistance level and then put their stop anywhere below the Either the candles low So they got a tighter stop or they will put it below the swing which is around here and obviously we Go further up. We can see That the risk reward Was pretty decent. So that's the first way and that's one of the The ways that traders will trade a Rectangle or a ranging type breakout strategy Now here's an example on the pound dollar hourly chart where you have a Arranging market and we have a breakout to the downside. So we have a Level that had been touched at least twice once and twice and the support level would been touched, you know Once twice a few times you can see that With this candle with here, obviously we didn't get a close below and If you're drawing support and resistance support and resistance is never fixed because price will always create new and new levels so once If we look at this in real-time we ignore everything To the right and if you were going through the charts scrolling in real-time this would have been a Resistance zone There would not have been a Breakout trade traders would not have got short on this time frame if the candle didn't close below here That's what you call maybe some sort of a false breakout And I'll get into that a bit later as well if we keep going Now that's the new resistance zone From here to here got one two three touches, and this is the low so if we draw It all the way across we can now see that prices Broke and closed to the downside that would indicate now a Potential change in the state of the market so rather than going from a directionless ranging market Breakout traders once they get that close on their preferred time frame Then they would look to get short and as you can see the market, you know did go lower So let's look at another type of breakout type pattern so this breakout trading pattern is what is known as the Rising and falling wedge. It's like the wedge pattern, right? So this would be what you would call the rising and this would be what you would call the falling So the rising wedge as you can see you've got you know resistance and support and prices contained within this wedge type pattern and The falling is obviously the opposite direction now A rising wedge is making steady higher highs Right see what steady higher highs another higher high here But the higher lows are Rising faster and steeper than the higher highs and it basically creates this This this this kind of triangle type pattern this wedge type pattern where Again traders are kind of caught between Support and resistance and then at some point Traders will even look to trade this wedge pattern to the upside as prices So as prices Getting squeezed and slowly squeezed there should be and pride and traders look for some sort of Breakout to the upside or a breakout to the downside and it's the same thing as prices get squeezed in the wedge then traders will trade a break of Either the resistance or support levels So let's have a look at the wedge pattern the rising wedge and the falling wedge on a price chart So here we have the rising wedge pattern on the Euro Canadian dollar to 40 chart and we can see here that prices are making Steady higher highs, but the higher highs are Not as steep as the higher lows are being made so we can see here we have a High and a low here And you can see the higher lows or a steeper angle then the The higher highs so prices are steadily being squeezed between the Lows and the highs creating this wedge type pattern and then what we see is a break so Traders Would be looking to enter on either the break above This level or a break below this diagonal support level and as we can see prices broke below the diagonal support level and So on the close of the candle Traders would enter put their stop somewhere in a safe location and then Trade to the downside and again the same thing would apply to the upside any breaks of diagonal resistance With a bullish candle and traders would get into the upside So here we have the falling wedge pattern on the New Zealand Canadian dollars 60 minute pair where we have Prices are steadily making lower highs and lower lows But again the key to this is that the lower highs around here the angle is a steeper angle then The lower lows so the lower lows you're making steady ones here and here But it's more of a shallow angle whereas the Lower highs are making Steeper Is making a steeper kind of angle again and prices are being squeezed into a wedge and then prices Would either break out to the upside Or break to the downside now we can see here and this candle here is our Breakout candle and this is where traders would look to enter So let's get rid of that and then zoom in On this candle here again, so we get a close below our Diagonal support level and then traders would put their stop-bloss in What they deemed to be a safe place and then price goes to the downside and the same thing would Apply regarding the upside if prices broke above this Diagonal resistance level Traders would wait for a candle close or two candle closes a clear candle close above that level To get involved in that trade So this triangle pattern is called the pennant pattern spell PE double n a n t and it pretty much is Where prices get squeezed and prices neither making higher highs or higher lows again, it's directionless So you've got a high here and you've got a low here and this is making a Lower high And this is making a higher low. There's no direction As to where the market may want to go so prices being squeezed into This kind of Tip of a triangle type pattern and then Traders are looking for prices to either break to the upside or break to the downside In a trend either Continuation if prices have been coming down this way This could be seen as a trend continuation pattern or if prices had been going up and then started creating this pennant pattern then Traders could see this as a trend continuation depending on whether it breaks past the Diagonal Resistance or the diagonal support so Let's have a look at the pennant pattern in action on a price chart So here's an example of the pennant pattern on the Australian Swiss Frank 60-minute pair now you have a high here and you have a low here and price is making Steady lower highs but higher lows so you can see the Triangle pattern formation and prices getting squeezed in between the two diagonal Support and resistance levels until prices break out right here so this candle we can see is quite a negative bearish candle and Traders would have entered on the break of that candle there. So if we were going for a short position Traders would have entered here put their stop somewhere above any of these swings possibly above the actual pennant pattern itself and Then gone for their their their profit target Which is somewhere down here So that's an example of the pennant pattern breaking to the downside the same would be said to the upside It's pretty much the same. You would wait for a candle close Below or above that level in the case of the upside and Again traders would enter on the close of the break out candle So this break out pattern is what we would call the ascending and descending Triangle, so this is the ascending and This is the descending So what you have is it's similar to a wedge pattern but what you have is a horizontal level of a resistance in an ascending Triangle pattern and Prices the prices are not making, you know, higher highs They're just literally bouncing off that horizontal level and then you will have basically higher lows being made Until price gets squeezed into a Level and then price will even break out from the horizontal level Sorry about that or it would break down So it would break that diagonal Support level or it would break the horizontal Resistance level so obviously prices are making higher lows But we're not making higher highs and it's the same thing with the descending triangle So we're making that would be maybe a high and that'd be a lower high And then this would be another lower High, but price isn't making lower lows. It's just bouncing off of this Sorry about that. It's just bouncing off of this these levels of Support so again Traders would either look the price to break to the downside so they break horizontal support or Prices to break above the diagonal resistance zone So let's have a look at the ascending and descending triangles on a price chart Here we have the Euro Australian dollar on the four-hour chart a 240 minute chart and we have an ascending triangle. So we have a level of Resistance here. You can see it's been touched a few times and We have higher lows being made so this would have been the high This would have been the low and we can see that prices are being squeezed and Squeezed and squeezed and this is the this is a higher low right here Until we get to This candle here So this very bullish candle would have been where traders would have entered again, stop placed below or In a place where you think is safe and that swing there probably would have been the safest place for traders to place their Stop loss and then we can see that prices eventually continued making Higher highs and Higher lows so prices continue to To go higher So again, you can see where prices are making Higher lows steadily, but prices can't make or not making Higher highs so prices again are being squeezed through here and price will either break to the upside or to the downside so Again, if you were looking for a break to the downside what we were looking for is a bearish candle to break past the level of Diagonal support this trend line here and the same principles apply as soon as the candle closes Above that level you get quite a bullish candle or a bearish candle in the case of if it was breaking past Diagonal support, then you would enter or traders would enter on the candle close So in this example, we have a descending triangle Breakout pattern on the Australian dollar Japanese yen 15 minute pair and we can see that price is being supported horizontally Here so we've got a touch one two three of the level and then we have Lower highs being made. So this would be the high and we have a lower high here and obviously we connect the the lower highs and create this some this Diagonal trend line to the downside now where traders would Enter would be on the break of the diagonal Resistance level or if prices broke the horizontal support level, but in this example we had prices This candlestick here broke to the upside So traders would get long and Put their stop-loss Around here or anywhere where they think that their stop-loss would be safe Then go for the risk. So like I said this one was a descending triangle that broke to the upside but Descending triangles can also break to the downside and the same principles would apply where you would have probably a bearish candle would break past the The horizontal support level prices are being squeezed And then there should be some sort of breakout either to the upside or the downside So I hope you found the breakout trading useful and Informative and if you want to ask me any questions, just send me an email at info at trading 180.com


I'm gonna put on my jacket. Let me show you guys the patio. Let me show you guys the patio. Check this out Okay, so we've got a good look on it before it's all built up again, right? I bought some more chicken wire that I'm gonna Do some work around here again close up some stuff and build up some other things chicken wire this type of chicken wire I think this is one inch Really comes in handy. Okay. I use a lot of this I'm gonna to support the grapes That you see on top here the canopy I'm gonna go get some wood and Put a post up. Okay. Tie it to this that's solid, right? And then have a 2x4 maybe not 2x4 is too big 2x2 or something like this going across and then tie it to the To the wall here Okay, that way it gives support to the grapes the grapes have reached the level where They're getting heavy so the rope is not going to be enough because I have it for three years now How to just connect it to the wall with rope and it was given a fair bit of grapes so I'm gonna have to fortify it a little bit. Okay. We have some chard and the planter over there. We've got some Here's some parsley From last year that survived the winter. So we're gonna grow this we're probably gonna grow more parsley Italian parsley that made it. Okay through winter and then we got planters we got some chard that made it through some Chives that made it through and stuff. We're gonna the planter here. Okay, so that's the look of the patio right now Before I start working in it


What's the word y'all game 2 has wrapped and here we are talking about it might be the shortest Rambo Post game thing we've ever done here because it's not much to say When we did episode 1 or game 1 in the series We talked about a band by the bio is gonna miss any time it is a GG's wrap it up because there's not a single person They can even come close to Anthony Davis where they be J crowd of Kelly o Lenny Myers Leonard It did not matter today because Anthony Davis was feasting Absolutely feasting so shout out to Anthony Davis for seeing this opportunity and taking advantage of it Be sure to leave it like and subscribe. You know we doing these pretty often I actually dropped the video earlier today as well if you missed that go check that out But this is let's fit. Let's finish this one because you're gonna have time here Anthony Davis was just dominant Absolutely dominant so much so that they had Kelly o Leonard try to get the match up They tried Myers Leonard the airsposters like we just have to go into his own because on the 101 this we can't do anything About it and then that's what Anthony Davis went overdrive and this is why this is why I don't know Who's gonna win finals MVP because though he was the the dominant one and it was like it was in our eyes Look, I don't know what the box score says, but at the end of the day LeBron LeBron 33 9 and 9 Didn't even feel like it. So I don't know if they end up closing the series out and right now I'm sorry. He nation. It's just it just feels that way This is there was no moment in this game though They kept it kind of close at times There was no moment in this game where the heat was on the run and I was like here They come it was just like this is a Lakers win from very early on and That's kind of been the field for the entire series So I I don't want to cross anybody off But it's it's feeling that way LeBron's team has never been two and oh and the finals is a crazy stat And now they're two and oh, I don't see I don't see them blowing the man ended up with 33 9 and 9 didn't even see that They didn't feel that so I don't know I mean, I guess LeBron might win finals MVP because he's got the 9 and 9 and the Anthony Davis at 32 14 though. This is the funny thing last series I was a heavy criticizing of Anthony Davis because he had multiple games We had like five rebounds and for a guy like Anthony Davis that is unacceptable We know he can be one of the best rebounders in the league that he saw today. He's like that Kelly Olanek. Okay I'm just gonna jump right over him. Oh a J crowd is trying to box me a spin move like I'm Khalil Mack on The d-line or something he was just getting through it again many offensive rebounds putting them right back up So it's Anthony Davis for just being the great person the great player that he is I love seeing this man I love seeing this From him specifically LeBron underrated 33 9 and 9 again I had no idea he was doing it like this in the moment in the moment Rondo, let me see something. Let me see something. They shot 34% I knew they shot over 30% you remember the stat I told you the last video that we were talking about the series the Lakers have not lost When they shoot over 30% from 3 it is an insane thing to say and today I shot 34 And it felt it felt like they shot even higher Rondo was unstoppable and the reason Rondo was unstoppable Let me let me fill you in first of all, I remember the first game Rondo was back. He was terrible And people are like, dang Rondo ain't got it. We not getting play of Rondo, but ever since that day He has turned it up to the highest the highest of degrees But the reason Rondo was so phenomenal today. He ended with a double double off the bench, bro Oh my god, the reason he was so phenomenal today It's because he was wearing a pair of Reeboks That's the only explanation That's the only listen listen that is the only thing I can think of or why he was so phenomenal today not only that The specific Reebok that he dropped or he was wearing are ones that they are Rumoring to read drop. Listen, I am a Reebok Question maniac. I have like four pair of those shoes They're the most bulky kind of the ugliest shoe of all time But alan iris award them. So I want them and they feel cool And rondo had the Kobe edition Beautiful beautiful beautiful shoe look it up if you have to but that was the reason he was so good. I mean Yeah, those are the most bulky shoes the heaviest shoes in the world, but they look good and he played good at them Um, yeah, they just felt like they weren't missing. I mean 34. It's not amazing. It's actually not amazing at all But in the moment it felt like they were they weren't missing They threw that zone out there and again lebron is literally the worst player in the world That you can run a zone against because he is going to pick it apart. He's gonna be like, hey Uh, alice caruso, go right there. Just right there. Easy. Easy. Easy. Boom. Here's that pass or vice versa I've seen I saw lebron in that dunker spot ease in his way on the baseline until he got a pass And then went straight up the zone is not something you want to play against lebron And it's not something you want to play against rondo because you have games where rondo would get a tennis This game or lebron would get a nine. It's this game like you saw today I mean, though it was never really close and it didn't feel like it I gotta give a lot of credit to jimmy baller. He tried to do his thing I mean, he came into this game beforehand He was like, I got to look for my shot more and I don't know what he finished the way I know he had a close to a triple double, which is cool 25 25 for jimmy baller is good 25 13 and 8 um kelly olenek Ended up having a 24 and nine game But I promise you that means nothing because he couldn't defend anything Anything he couldn't defend anything. So sure 24 points is a great amount of points for him But if you're just giving up 30 on the other end, who cares if you had 24? That's what it felt like from kelly olenek today. I mean They had it offensively. They were putting up points There's no reason why the l.a. Lakers should have had a hundred plus points going into the fourth quarter They just didn't have the drive. They didn't have the hustle defensively is like They were just very flat and that's probably what you heard from udonis haslam when he was really mad udonis haslam like he's about to pull his hair out when he was given a speech Um, they just didn't have it defensively And this is not a team you could do that against this is not I mean if they play better defense, this is a different game ended up being a 10 point victory But it felt like way more than that felt like way more than that Um kindred none couldn't stay out of foul trouble um Duncan robinson who was barely playable at this moment It's just like man, it just doesn't it just doesn't feel like the nba finals It sucks Like these are gonna be the last couple games. We're going to get Before 2021 and then even once we get to 2021. We don't know where In 2021, we'll be back to games. I don't feel like it. I hope that the heat can make some noise They didn't say that bad mother bio was crossed out for game three They didn't even say if he was questionable or not, but I hope that we get bad mother bio back I just hope we do because that that is the only way that might mean he have a chance Is if a bad mother bio is on that court because without him being on the court Anthony davis is going to average 30 this series and he's going to have a 40 piece Just the way it is Just the way it is. So that's a jr. Smith for getting some minutes Danny green shot one for eight And I didn't need the box score for that because I had a friend We were watching the game together virtually Social distance and virtually watching the game together and he had bet the over on Danny green threes Um, he hit one And I told my boy like listen if you're going to be betting on games Please ask me for my advice because I would have told you straight up. Danny green is not hitting anymore threes He doesn't do it anymore. He hasn't done it for a while That was that you didn't you shouldn't have bet the over on that with my brother They said Mike my boy Mike. I'm saying he gonna hit a couple. They don't call him dad shot for no reason Yes, they do call him dad shot for no reason Yes, they do Because he don't shoot anymore He don't hit his shots no more. I'm sorry. He doesn't That's it. Like I said, this is going to be the shortest episode, but if there's nothing there's no story lines There's those there's nothing to even talk about So if you enjoyed it leave it a like hopefully the Miami heat come back in game three And jimmy puts up 40 or 50 because they're gonna need it


Start us off the day. We're going to hear a little bit from Charma Bonanno from the Westin Playhouse To share a little bit about their experiences in Westin to kick us off. So thank you. Oh good. My clicker's here That's so awesome, but look it's already clicked. Good morning. My name is Charma Bonanno I'm from the Westin Playhouse Theater Company And I think the most important distinction that you should know is that there are two separate things the Westin Playhouse Oh good. It works. The Westin Playhouse is an historic building. The Westin Playhouse Theater Company are people, right? And I think that's Present for my story today You know like many of you in this room The Westin Playhouse Theater Company was greatly impacted by Tropical Storm Irene and in the days the weeks the months that followed The Westin Playhouse is on the village green in the middle of Westin. It's a town of approximately 550 full-time residents. It is a 300 seat proscenium theater. So a proscenium like the one that's here That was converted from a congregational church back in 1937 and a professional acting company was Brought in that summer under the guidance of Boston Conservatory's Harlan Grant for the very first time so a professional theater company Established in this historic building the building as it is today is Reconstructed after a 1962 fire in that fire all that Survived was what you see here. Was this facade? Oh, we're a little hazy there But in this facade with the Greek revival building The flood that following Tropical Storm Irene was the second major flood in this building Although with its back to the West River in Weston, which runs through the village. It has endured numerous minor floods On August 28th 2011 the Westin Playhouse Theater Company was in production of a world premiere musical called Saint X It was about the life of the author of the Little Prince Saint Exupy This the cast of this show had 11 actors and five musicians and Simultaneously on our second stage. We were presenting Annie Baker's three-person play the aliens on our second stage One mile north of the Playhouse on Vermont Route 100 The company also had other staff members on campus at this time artistic administrative technical Weston owns two houses used for company housing and we supplement in Supporting our visiting artists and staff with another that summer was about another 10 rented houses And because there's not that much rental houses in the town of Weston our company is spread out over in Weston in London Dairy in Ludlow surrounding towns As well. This is our 2011 company, so this is the summer company at the time of Irene some of these contracts had ended We were probably down by 30, but I estimate that the company was probably about 75 people when the storm hit in a town of 550 people That's a significant number for us Good so the Playhouse has a balcony off the back lobby Overlooking the West River and this picturesque waterfall that falls over the mill dam Ahead of Irene the National Weather Service anticipated three to seven inches of rain and Sustained wind speeds of 30 to 45 miles per hour and gusts of up to 65 miles per hour We canceled the Saturday evening performance and Sunday matinees ahead of the storm and Prepared the basement of the Weston Playhouse Which includes a 60 seat restaurant a 70 seat cabaret Dressing rooms orchestra pit prop shop. We prepared the these spaces for up to three feet of water but tropical storm Irene as we know shifted and We did not get the anticipated high winds and instead got almost no wind But 11 inches of rain. This is the back of the Playhouse building during the storm So not quite at the crest of the West River What we had was the the crest of the river came and backed up right over the windows of the basement so here's a different view and you'll see the balcony there with the columns and Just below that balcony are the windows down into the restaurant in the cabaret space so the river crested just above those above those windows and It jumped the banks of the river Obviously flooded the town of Weston and washed out Vermont Route 100 which passes the main thoroughfare through town So what happens in this moment the power goes out Cell phone service even on a good day is pretty spotty And we have 75 company members that are in our care at this moment So then managing director Stuart Duke assembled a handful of senior staff and sent them to all of the company houses to check on the residents How are they doing? How are they faring? Some people had to be evacuated others You couldn't get to because the bridge to their house was washed out, etc But eventually we got there we got into contact social media was a great help in that moment and Thankfully everyone was all right Let's see what we have here. So this is the entrance the outside entrance to our restaurant I'm not sure. This is quite high water. This was maybe after the rain slowed And of course it continued to go up at that moment And this is inside our restaurant after the flood you see good You see that the windows are we're completely pushed in so it wasn't even a matter We've added since then storm windows to block some of flood water that comes in But you see that it just pushed the window out of its way to get into the basement the high water mark in this area was about five feet and Interestingly, it's not just water that poured in as so many of you know it was river bottom that came in so What it left was? significant mud In the bottom of our basement it left inches of mud on everything And down into our this is our orchestra pit It's a swimming pool and that large object in the center is our baby grand piano floating upside down in the water The orchestra pit and new dressing rooms were put in at the beginning of that summer We did nine hundred thousand dollars worth of leaseholder improvements in the Western Playhouse and This was at the end of that summer So it was not a great day for us there and with those leaseholder improvements Lot of that work was done in a subbasement So it's even lower and that watermark was really at the ceiling in those subbasements And and so you may remember I said earlier we prepared for three feet of water We're not new to flooding, but this was beyond anything we did experienced and again. It was not just water It was mud we were in the middle of Producing so the basement was costumes props Wigs, you know all of which were put up high, but we're swimming and floating in water So there's the piano floating The piano was in pieces afterwards electric keyboards and the prop shop Was just swimming. It's many dollars worth of equipment as I'm sure you can appreciate in that moment and The next day what we experienced was an outpouring from the community And this is a common story around Vermont is It's residents and communities pulling together to help out institutions like ours in recovery So the next day it was like the cavalry arrived and dozens of community members in our very tiny community who were fighting Their own disasters at home came out to help us clean up We started pumping out water out of the basement the fire Department the volunteer fire department showed up with their pumper and actually pumped what mud and water out of the basement And so many community volunteers showed up to help us hose off So much looking like here. We are looking like the world's most disgusting tag sale Right on the green in the middle of a Weston This gives you a bit of the scope. I mean this doesn't include the the kitchen Equipment etc was all Down the down on the other side of the building But the amount of staff that we had on hand was key for our recovery also volunteers The Vermont Country Store, which is one of our best benefactors sent over Outdoor grills food staff and they cooked meals for those doing cleanup every day Well, we did it. We managed to reopen St. X just a few days later in sort of a concert version. We couldn't use most of these costumes in this photo were Destroyed at that moment, but we did a concert version on the stage just four days later Which was astounding it never could have happened without the community helping us to clean up in that way Meanwhile the Weston Playhouse staff the senior staff met every morning first thing they got together and Determined marching orders and assignments for volunteers and staff someone to coordinate though that work That happened every day and that varied from shoveling mud to hosing down furniture cleaning wigs cleaning clothing cleaning restaurant equipment Contacting the press Communicating with ticket buyers the state agencies insurance companies the outside world and all the time Ensuring the safety and comfort of our company members We were also blessed with a quick grant from the Ford Foundation, which helped us in recovery And We were the recipient of a Vita loan so monies came in right away to help reduce some of that renovation a Group of recent company members organized a benefit concert in New York City Where news of the flooding was on the front page every day if you recall Irene was supposed to hit New York so every newspaper in New York saved their front page to talk about the storm and then they had no story the Story was in Vermont so the newspapers in New York ran on their front page pictures of flooding every day in Vermont and This benefit really helped Capitalized on that press. This is where communication becomes so key in recovery But truly we were the most fortunate To be receiving Help from our community that was really what got up us up and running the fastest Obviously repairs continued over the next nine months or so in the Western Playhouse where we redid you know stripped everything down to the rafters sanitized everything to the ceiling and Rebuilt all that renovation, but there was absolutely no way without that quick community response That we would have been able to reopen our show So I know a lot of you have had the same sort of experiences and again our communities are our biggest strength in that moment and That's my story So thank you We're here to provide and I'm an archivist, so I'm all about context So we want to give you a little bit of a sense of how this network has come to be in Vermont and why it's maybe happening now my primary role as historical records coordinator is to Go about the state offering technical assistance to historical societies museums town clerks public libraries with history collections local history collections and other I've worked with some private individuals other places that have Stuff primarily historical records paper-based stuff And one of the things I found as I went around is there was a real interest in getting more training and Support around emergency preparedness and response Tropical storm Irene was still fairly fresh in people's minds even if they had not been directly affected as Sharma was in Western There had been Networks in the past in Vermont. There was a cultural heritage and art Their acronym was V chart if you think Vaktarn is awkward Culture cultural heritage and art recovery team and there are some folks in this audience who were part of the forum that they put on Ten years ago at the Billings farm to get that network launched. I wanted to Bring that network back to life and make it a bigger umbrella not just collections based repositories But to bring in other arts organizations performing arts organizations places where events happened Studio artists, how can we all together because this is not a big state. They're not that many of us And we want to try to make this a sustainable network. So we need more people involved and There also happened to be a funding opportunity available the performing arts readiness project had funding from the Mellon Foundation a cool $2.5 million worth of funding to support performing arts organizations in being better prepared for disasters like what happened in Western and We applied for Regrant from performing arts readiness to get a new network going We were successful and we decided we wanted to do a really intentional process. I Come from the stuff side So I approached the arts council and was thrilled to have Amy and Michelle say that they would love to join and Co-lead on this project and we decided we would use our funding to bring in a facilitator to really guide us through this process To not assume. I know anything about Vermont. I'm not a Vermonter. It came from Massachusetts and to really get some assistance in Identifying what it is this network might do Who we might serve and how we can make sure it's sustainable over time I'm so thrilled to see people in this audience that have been helping us with this process since we had our first meeting last November And I'm also Delighted to see people I don't know out here Who I hope will continue to be involved and be active and know and let us know how we can support you through this work Thanks so much for being here today And don't hesitate to talk to us Ask questions Participate give us your ideas and now a little bit more about what we're doing as A network and where we came from what our guide was Meg was our guide in part today's Gathering to formally launch the new cooperative disaster network is the culmination of 10 months of study Dialogue and leadership by a planning group of committed state agency staff and a mix of stakeholders from the arts and culture and emergency sectors in Vermont in Fact it is also the outcome of nearly two decades of pioneering efforts at the national level To catalyze a readiness movement through new community-based infrastructure So to contextualize the formation of that darn, I'd like to briefly Give you both a snapshot of the back story and the bigger story of network building now underway Over the past 20 years at the national level there have been two distinct strands of emergency management network building activity initiatives to safeguard collections and cultural property on the cultural heritage strand it Involved it would focused on protecting art artifact archives and other physical assets The focus of the other newer strand is protecting people and operational assets There has been some cross-fertilization between the two, but they've mostly been functioning in parallel a little bit more about the network building initiatives to safeguard collections in 2003 Heritage preservation launched the Alliance for Response program. It was a groundbreaking program to foster connections with and integrate cultural heritage institutions museums, historic societies, historic sites, archives, libraries, preservation groups and others into the emergency management infrastructure within a city, county, state, or region Over time 26 chapters were catalyzed including one in Vermont This program is now coordinated by the F A I C which stands for the foundation for Oh for advancement in conservation change the day change the acronym in 2007 F A I C itself began an outreach program to train and deploy a new volunteer network of conservators and other professionals For both online and on-site triage assistance for collecting institutions during and after a disaster Vermont based art conservator M.J. Davis was one of the lead trainers in this program, which is now called national heritage responders 100 responders were trained including a handful of Vermont professionals who have helped large Institutions and small throughout the country deal with floods fires, etc Turning to the network building initiatives for the creative community in 2006 in response to the devastation of hurricanes Katrina and Rita on the creative communities and creative economies of the Gulf Coast a Group of major arts funders including the national endowment for the arts other types of arts agencies and foundations and major arts services service organizations participated in a summit To address the lack of an organized safety net within the arts sector particularly for artists These 30 arts leaders had served as arts responders many for the first time and a few had a long history of emergency support such as the craft emergency relief fund or surf a National artist service organization based in Vermont Indeed the summit in DC was organized by surf in cooperation with Americans for the arts Surf which has evolved into surf plus the artist safety net is one of the few full-time Arts responders for whom emergency management is central to the mission From the summit was born a small voluntary national task force called and Caper which stands for the national coalition for arts preparedness and emergency response For the first ten years surf continued in a leadership capacity Including the management of several initiatives initially The task force focused on artists issues But soon realized that to accomplish systemic change it needed to adopt a more comprehensive approach the early discussions Were about artists issues, and then there was the recognition that it we really needed to adopt a more comprehensive approach because Disasters don't hit disciplines or types of stakeholders i.e. artists arts and culture organizations and arts businesses they hit zip codes and The arts and culture sector is really an ecological system where there's a deep Interdependence of all the stakeholders all the way from individual artists up to large-scale institutions From the discussions during the early years also emerged recognition of core problems Due to a variety of awareness gaps first creative communities are under prepared for emergencies Not only because they lack information specific to their operations, but they also lack an understanding of emergency management infrastructure Secondly creative communities are underserved by the general leaf providers when disaster strike because they lack awareness of our needs and Finally creative communities are under recognized by the Emergency management community as key agents and resources in post disaster community healing recovery and rebuilding The task force produced various policy and planning guides to address these issues The first was a blueprint to strengthen disaster safety and build a national readiness movement in the arts and culture sector Which was released in 2010 as a green paper for Americans for the arts 50th anniversary among the core concepts were the disasters are local in terms of their impact and recovery process and Building resiliency meant activating new communication and support networks within our sector that emphasize both local service delivery and mutual aid in 2011 the Coalition and produced a primer for managing arts relief Programs for novice arts responders The essential guidelines was actually a first step towards a bigger long-term initiative a Planning guide for developing an advance community-based arts emergency management systems The cultural Placekeeping guide was a seven-year project which I directed in my capacity of surf plus's director of special projects Working with arts emergency management specialist Amy Sir Amy Schwarzman surf plus produced a draft Publication called the arts responder handbook it drew on the initial vision vision outlined in the 2000 blueprint and practical information developed for the essential guidelines It went through a few iterations most significantly after being field tested by culture aid a Coalition of arts and culture groups who came together after Hurricane Sandy to do future disaster management planning in New York City The lessons learned from heritage preservation and FAAI sees efforts to build and sustain cultural heritage emergency Networks also influenced the final version of this new playbook for emergency planning at the community level As part of the revision process we all we decided to change the name And we coined the term cultural placekeeping to signal that it's a corollary of creative Placemaking a movement Promoting the central role of arts and culture in community planning and one that had gained Attraction in American cities and towns in recent years and secondly that it is a collective enterprise Which draws on existing assets social capital and social networks to safeguard and strengthen Local arts and culture communities So that's a quick overview of the back story now the bigger story What's significant about the creation of VAC darn Within the arts and culture sector it knits the two strands of disaster planning and coordination into a holistic network and Also from the get-go. It is being organized as a cross-sector Bridge building an education initiative between the arts and culture and emergency management sectors in Vermont Vermont is one of ten sites around the country integrating the cultural heritage heritage and producing presenting And service assets of their arts and cultural community into a more comprehensive Emergency management network six of these are already are expanding existing networks and Four are building new ones and as you can see from this quick list. There are different kinds of there in different kinds of geography There's an island there is a state. There are a couple states their cities This planning work as as Rachel said is happening through grants from the Performing Arts readiness project a National three-year initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to improve emergency readiness and recovery both at the organizational level and at the community level and Caper is one of the participating partners in this project But grants to foster cooperative disaster networks are only one component of a multifaceted Technical assistance project which encompasses new online preparedness materials webinars conferences and on-site trainings There's a very exciting development in California with the support from the California Arts Council par project staff including Jan Newcombe who is somewhere in the audience Hello To train staff of local arts agencies in network development in nearly all of their counties using the cultural place keeping guide So besides the ten networks around the country and culture aid What California one of the most disaster-prone states will have 20 new county level arts emergency action networks So we have the beginning of a community of practice Thus the initial vision spelled out in the 2010 blueprint is Beginning to take shape that is a nationwide network of community based readiness relief and recovery networks That address the full spectrum of specialized needs of our sector and are linked into the larger management Emergency management infrastructure But just to close out this quick overview of the significance of this network I want to say that in Vermont's changing 21st century economy for the first time Creative the creative economy is emerging from its minor position to being considered now as one of the state's major drivers However, concomitant with the growth of the creative economy are the increased threats of natural and man-made emergencies That could undermine its stability So the formation of back darn is timely and critical now more than ever. It's vital to have a mobilization System to keep our cultural community intact Great Meg Meg has really been such a leader in this work around the country and for such a long time And we just really wanted to have a sense of how we got to this day And my job right now is to kind of talk to you about how how we got to today working within the state I was thrilled to get a call from Rachel in 2018 to let me know about this opportunity to to work on this project. I grew up in Rutland, Vermont My I'm the I'm the baby of five. I'm the only one who moved away I by 91 year old father and 89 year old mother are still in Middlebury So I was very happy to have a chance to kind of come back I just have to interject and say you went to high school with Joseph Watson. I did and We discovered through this process that we were in bye-bye birdie together 1979 folks, maybe you maybe you saw it anyway Do we have the the slides that I? Submitted are they I don't Don't see anything coming up anyway But anyway, I got the call from Rachel to kind of come up in and working from this cultural place keeping guide that Meg Talked about we thought okay. It's time to design this organized safety net. Thank you for Vermont We've seen repeatedly as Sharma said You know artists and arts organizations and libraries playing these really important roles post disaster And this was really a time for us to kind of put our own mask on first To kind of prepare ourselves to move into that role in a more coordinated way And that's my kid at smirkus camp several years ago So using the place keeping guide it this guide is really tremendous Actually for this and kind of spells out a number of steps to take in all the things that you should think about and trying to Organize yourself to be better prepared working with Michelle and Amy and Rachel We set out to design a process that would use this as a guide but keeping in mind that this was a guide developed in New York City and in kind of a tight region and that we were Going to be looking at doing this statewide and we would need to adopt this for the way So that it would work in Vermont We also said about kind of identifying volunteers to help us in an organizing group to move forward on the effort so our first meeting was in the end of November and Barry hosted by Eileen Corcoran and We gave us a chance to meet each other to hear some stories other stories of people running cultural organizations Who've experienced disasters so we could kind of be grounded in reality To hear from Meg about you know kind of this movement writ large across the United States and to begin to kind of identify Our perception of risk what we thought were risks to the work that we did so we could understand what we thought was important in moving forward Our next step then was to again go back to the place keeping guide and think about what this network was going to do What were the actions that we thought needed to happen to motivate people to get involved and to really help increase people's preparedness? So using this as a guide we got together in March at the Bethel Town Hall and Went through a process to kind of brainstorm what those actions might be Working in these broad categories that were identified here whether they be research or advocacy or education and training We we worked to identify potential actions and also did Talked about what potential resources there were that might be already be feeling these functions This is a terrible slide But what happened after that March meeting was we took that brainstormed list and sent it out in a survey to this Organizing group and had them rank it give us information based on three things How how big a priority how important a priority that action might be how much impact they thought it would have if you could Sorry identify a grid, you know high impact to low impact and how much they thought it would cost We thought if we could identify high impact things that were of low cost That was a no-brainer but also to understand what might be more costly but important to do in terms of moving forward We took the information from that survey and brought people back together to then kind of try to hone in on the top 10 list of things that we thought was important for this network to move forward on we also talked about how this network would organize itself and we picked a name we went through lots of different Possible names, but we thought that this kind of incorporated a number of elements that again tied together this various elements of the Who would be participating and and what we intended to do as a group? And then again a slide with a lot of text, but I wanted to just throw this up here I'm not going to read it, but these were kind of the top 10 Actions that were identified by that group that was working and we use this as a guide to kind of set up today You know so that there would be some practical hands-on things there would be ways for us to build Relationships there would be ways for us to learn about some of the existing resources in Vermont We'll come back to this and part of the thing of the network development is we want to hear from a broader community too in terms of What's important to you, but this is kind of our our operating framework moving forward in trying to figure out How we can be most helpful to each other both to prepare and in responding in terms of any potential Activities or disasters natural or man-made that will come up so That's kind of how we got to today I think we have time for maybe one question because it's 943 one or two questions If not, we will move in to hearing from Jen new come We're gonna yes here Wait, yeah We have a microphone And please if you could say your name and if you're affiliated with an organization let us know all right my name's Richard Doolin I'm with the Randolph school district I'm also the emc for the town of Randolph and Excuse me logistics for a brain tree the EOC's So the question is the information that you have up here. How can we obtain it and also? Do you have like a listing of before storms? What should we do as a community to safeguard our town halls our museums and etc? Do you want to respond to that sure? I think we don't yet have a place where this information will live But one of the priorities that came out of our discussions was having inevitably kind of an online presence where resources would be available supplemented with a lot of hands-on training and and on-site walk-throughs assessments and Identification of how to how to work together is it how to build a team and how to work together as a team within your community So that's I'm glad that's what you want and that's one of the things we're hoping to provide And I and I do think can we make sure that the people who are attending today get the slides from presentations? We'll check with the speakers to make sure that's okay, but certainly you know we can distribute this


We're still in that region, the Southeast Nigeria, and Governor David Umahi has warned that the region may begin to boycott voting for people who should change in aid from clenching the position of president of Nigeria. Umahi bears his mind today during the meeting of President Bohari and Southeast leaders in Abakalike. He said if equity, justice, and fairness were the yardsticks for choosing the region to produce the next president, then the Southeast region is most qualified to occupy that position. Let me say that all those angling for one position or the other can only have it if there is Nigeria. And Mr. President has been fighting for the unity and peace of Nigeria. And that's why irrespective of political leanings he has treated all states equally. And so I want their likes to put patriotism, the nation ahead of each and every of our aspirations. This is very important. This is very important. And so if equity, justice, and fairness must be the yardstick the Southeast will support. But if not, it will be depicot for Southeast to be changed and continue to vote for those who will not. Notified about fresh news updates.


Yes, it's that time again and we're at the track covering the sport of Kings in the show this week a Sir David seal three-year-old colt unstoppable in the R seal sprint trophy at the garson savannah in Barbados in Jamaica three-time Champion trainer Antonin Ulysses legit boss aces the war zone sprint for her first win in over a year at Kamala spark where the four-year-old emperor of the cats shrugs off a six-month layoff with a fluent win in the Wufa sprint we flashed back to TNT's nursery stakes where champion trainer John O'Bran Advertises another champion and more success for top Barbadian's up north Trainer sappie Joseph jr. With a Tampa Bay down stakes win and jockey Patrick husbands with stakes tramped number 16 in the 2023 woodbind season plus some weekly stats on Caribbean success on the North American continent or opening story from Barbados Here's Sir David seals major Dan with Ray Williams aboard the favorite for Friday's main event on the garson savannah night card The RL seal sprint trophy major Dan consistent But win less since mid-April the six to five favorite for the twenty five thousand dollar event over five and a half furlongs The betting otherwise pretty competitive the three-horse binary code the winner last time out the second favorite at eight to five Number four let it be me the Guinness winner in June is at three to one So to the five-horse sovereignty coming off a late November win Neil Gill in the comm box picks them up early in the sprint We're for those after travel and it's major Dan and Ray Williams standing tall in the saddle in front Nobody a length from on the inside that has let it be me then comes binary code Harley's dream on sovereignty is Barley outpace at this stage three for those left to travel and it's still major Dan and let it be made Going right next to him Gap of about three or four lengths to binary code another four lengths back to Harley's dream and then a length back to sovereignty as they pass the mile marker They've done the opening quarter in twenty five and three and it is still major Dan in front Ray Williams no answer him to go on and he does so quite well with us about a furlong to go And it is major Dan in front the others are running for second place here comes binary code But really get there. It is all major Dan here comes Harley's dream with a run But it's all over bar this out in a very easy performance Major Dan the Guinness runner-up in June snaps a four-race winless streak for his third victory in 12 lifetime starts all of his wins Over five and a half furlongs Ray Williams aboard for the four length win in the RL seal sprint as the Henry Bino trained major Dan clocks one minute twelve point four zero seconds in the week ahead of his owner Sir David seals 86th birthday the eight to one bet Harley's dream second and sovereignty at three to one third Two Jamaica's came out as part now where there was a two-meat weekend kicking off on Saturday with a war zone sprint trophy as the main event Run in honor of the Hall of Fame inductee the 1996 horse of the year and triple crown winner war zone 11 horses going five and a half furlongs Here's ace commentator Bran Rickman watching the seven-to-one bet legit boss in control and eyeing her first win as a three-year-old The jet boss narrowly by a length of a joys golden awesome Anthony moving up to take them on Sensational move is passing horses on the extreme outside Volatility is the one racing on the rail as they have left the half mile marker But Zynga is also right there too as they go charging up now toward the final three eighths of a mile a Breakback to me loss burning Valor making some progress Ella Fortunado is next and last of all It's a kind of the girl as they've left the 516th about to come into the top of the lane legit boss has to be caught Sensational move now beginning his run on the outside awesome Anthony is down against the real joy is golden running on the spot With Lady Abhimala buzzing her out wide But it's still legit boss showing them his rear end without for long to run Sensational move now trying to grind the leader down But legit boss continues to hold the advantage awesome Anthony trying to close up on the rail It is legit boss fighting them off legit boss and radish Roman will take the warzone sprint trophy Jockey radish Roman and an afternoon double and five wins in three race days Trainer Antonin Unis also with a double this Philly had not won since November last year in the picked three super challenge When beating Mamma Mia and Talita who both went on to win classics this year Legit boss in her first three-year-old wins splendidly prepared by trainer Nunes to snap a nine-race win Let's streak in a win by a length and a half at seven to one odds over awesome Anthony with a favorite sensational move third 107 and two-fifths the winning time for the five and a half furlong warzone sprint Good pace also decided Sunday's main event the Awufa Sprint with a four-year-old Gelding Emperor of the cats grabbing the lead early as the favorite in the hands of Siobhan Townsend Emperor of the cats putting on the speed leads them by now some four lengths God of love trying to chase with KP choice They're all in a tight grouping as they charge away now toward the final five 16th Emperor of the cats stretching that leader God of love and a KP choice on Rulee boss and race car now coming to the lane racing out wide But it's Emperor of the cats who has it as they've sprint past the 316th Emperor of the cats in control at the moment God of love in the red with burl up in the yellow cap just in his inside KP choice scrapes paint against the rail race car is Outwide, but they're inside the final furlong and it's Emperor of the cats mirror mirror on the wall Who's the fastest of them all Emperor of the cats is an Emperor of the cats will win the Awufa sprint Emperor of the cats in his first run since May is Unchallenged in a smooth win here by four and a half lengths last year's Prince Consort steaks winner and 2000 in his third place are behind blue final and brings Completing back-to-back wins and nine lifetime victories The eight to five favorite Emperor of the cats the conduit to complete an afternoon double for both claiming apprentice rider Siobhan Townsend and trainer Carl Anderson also the winning owner and breeder Skillfully bringing the gilding back to the races after over six months in unbeatable condition 113 even the Awufa six furlong sprint winning time Trinidad at Tobago's December two meet at Santa Rosa Park Was of course highlighted by so far harmonious winning the stewards cup highlighted in last week's show But there was also the nursery stakes for two-year-olds that served up another headline story Winning the stewards cup was only part of champion trainer John O'Brien successes on the card here in the nursery stakes His big one-to-five favorite headlines again is unstoppable on a champion jockie brand bull ram sing Despite breaking away from her handlers before the race and forced to make the long trek back to the starting gates a Riveting jockies title race unfolding here as well reigning champion boot ram sing here with both feature race victories and with 11 wins trading Dylan Kello on 13 and Tristan Phillips 12 So boot ram sing is within two of the jock is lead despite spending six months away in Canada a Brand horses have now won four of the last five nursery stakes races Ruth When smith's headlines again by three and three-quarter lengths for her second win in two starts chased by authenticity Clocking 101 56 for the five furlong sprint Barbadian sappie Joseph junior is number 12 on the trainer's leaderboard in all US and Canadian racing this year Remarkably, he has won the last eight consecutive Gulf Stream Park trainers titles his later stakes trams coming though from nearby Tampa Bay Don'ts SAP is entering Saturday's City of Ocala, Florida Sars steaks as a seven-year-old mere blue field on the rail here with jockie Sammy Comacho in the red silks stalking the lead and gearing up for a winning run in the $100,000 event Dream concert midway around the far eternal length and a half to the good of atomically in second Bluefield continues to ride the rail from third down toward the inside Charlie's wish has a three deep trip and fourth Hi, hello, how are you has made a little bit of progress is up to fifth now as dream concert in Antonio Gallardo turned for home in front Bluefield trying to work off the rail She comes to the outside of dream concert as dream concert sets for sale for home Here's bluefield drawn within a length and a half on the outside two more back to atomically down the far outside Charlie's wish dream concert digs into the 16th pole bluefield gonna try to make it close in these final 70 yards Here's bluefield on the outside of dream concert bluefield surges to the front dream concert bluefield 15 steaks wins on the current season now for saffi Joseph as bluefield with reigning champion jockie Sammy Comacho wins the Florida star steaks over seven furlongs in one twenty two forty seven Her first steaks victory by a neck as a nine to five favorite over dream concert third Atomically whose owners group includes former champion owner in Jamaica Michael Bernard And finally no rider at Canada's Woodburn racetrack this season has as many wins as Patrick Couspens the Barbadian Boosting his tally this past weekend to 16 with a win and the love profile yarn steaks with a favorite Fashionably fab the 50-year-old husband second and green silks having closed most of the trips stalking the front running Straga But watch now as husband's rout is the three-year-old Philly and turns the eight and a half furlong run into and no contest As they come down to the final quarter Fashionably fab racing up on the outside of Straga in third Tito's calling from my girl sky and to the inside talk to You later as they sprint for the judge Fashionably fab has raced away Fashionably fab got out in front by a length and a half or two in second Tito's calling knuckling down and then came talk to you later Fashionably fab in front. It is fashionably fab clear talk to you later running at a second spot And as they go down to the wire another steaks win Four consecutive steaks wins this for fashionably fab scoring the lap prevoy on by two and a half links as the one to two Favourite 145 60 fashionably fab's winning time for trainer Kevin Attard Our usual tally of wins for Caribbean racing men in the USA and Canada before we go I've counted in the past week since our last show 24 victories among them the Barbadian jocky Reshawn Lachman with a Thursday double at Charleston where he remains a top four rider and the Jamaican jocky Romero Ramsey Mirage He had four wins at aqueduct where the guy needs trainer Randy Prasad won twice. We've been at the track Covering top stores and exciting races in the sport of kings Check us out again next week


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Folks once again, I bring you absolutely shockingly good breaking news with regard to elections that took place in The state of Texas now. I'm kind of spoiling it with our thumbnail here being displayed on the TV behind me Nonetheless, we're gonna pause and get to the really big news in a moment But first I do want to start off with the bad news so we can end on a more positive note so Maine also voted today and there was a Competitive Democratic Party primary taking place and in that race you had two people who were attempting to Be the one to take on Susan Collins in November who needs to go so you had Sarah Gideon She's a more centrist pro-corporate Democrat who endorsed Joe Biden over all the other candidates and You also have Betsy sweet. This is the justice Democrat This is the individual who's been endorsed by brand-new Congress. She was the more Bernie Sanders like candidate and Unfortunately, she was defeated but not all hope is lost in Maine because Maine as many of you know by now Has ranked choice voting and in November there will still be a progressive option on the ballot Lisa Savage. She is a Green Party candidate. She's extremely progressive just as progressive as Betsy sweet She supports Medicare for all a Green New Deal. She's pro-labor and What you can do is you can rank your choices You can have Lisa Savage be your first choice and make Sarah Gideon your second choice So you're voting your conscience, but you're not inadvertently spoiling the election at the behest of Susan Collins this is Really an option that I hope a lot of people look into in Maine And I hope that Betsy sweet will use, you know, the campaign that she built To mobilize for Lisa Savage so we can still get a progressive option in there So there's that when it comes to local races in Texas There was a competitive race in Travis County for district attorney and the incumbent Margaret Moore was ousted by a candidate who was endorsed by DSA Jose Garza and this is truly a huge win now when it comes to house races We had some really important races taking place Two races that I was watching really closely where the races with Mike Siegel and Donna. I'm am I've had Donna on the show multiple times I had Mike Siegel on these are candidates that are absolutely Excellence they're pro labor. They are pro Medicare for all pro union They basically check all of the boxes if you are a democratic socialist or you know, even a social Democrat These are phenomenal candidates So when it comes to Mike Siegel, he defeated the establishment backed Democrat Pradesh Gandhi in a landslide with 54.5% of the vote to Gandhi's 45.5 with 77% reporting at the time that I record this video This is almost a 10-point difference and this is absolutely huge if you don't know about Mike Siegel This is someone who Truly knows what he's talking about like he has a solid campaign and running in Texas the way that he appealed to people They're using Policies like Medicare for all like he wasn't hiding from Medicare for all He was using that as a selling point and having conversations with people and convincing them like actually changing hearts and minds So the campaign that he ran was phenomenal. I'd encourage you to watch the interview that I did with him He was endorsed by Bernie Sanders. I mean this is someone who truly, you know, he had his work cut out for him He was the underdog and he won now when it comes to Texas's 31st congressional district Donna I mem was an even bigger underdog because not only did she lack support from the Democratic Party establishment Really the only public figure who gave her any time was Andrew Yang So this is someone though who is a phenomenal Candidate she supports Medicare for all.  So the fact that she didn't get more attention It's criminal to me. So I had her on the show three times. I love Donna I'm him and um, she Absolutely Obliterated her opponent. She beat Christine man in a landslide with 56.6% of the vote to man's 43.4% with 62% reporting that ladies and gentlemen is a landslide that is a landslide Victory and if you you know weren't paying attention to Donna I'm am's race now You're gonna want to pay attention now She's got your attention because this is an individual who is absolutely what the left needs Like if we had her in Congress The difference that she'd be able to make is remarkable and the fact that she pulled this off in Texas with no institutional support no media coverage. I mean when I saw the results I was honestly emotional because you know, this is Exactly what we need we need to show people and show the establishment and America that progressives and left-wing Politicians they can win anywhere including in Texas. Now. There's another semi victory. I'm gonna count. This is a victory So in the 24th congressional district of Texas Candace Valenzuela Defeated Kim Olson in another landslide winning by almost 20 points with 60% of precincts reporting now in this race the better candidate won Kim Olson was a horrible candidate We're talking Scandals to the extent that she's culpable for Iraq war Profiteering allegedly. I mean, it's it's not something that You want if you're trying to win in Texas, right? Like you want a Democrat who is strong So Candace is the better candidate on top of that. She has a really good story. She was previously homeless So I think that you know what she was saying speaks to people Although I will say she doesn't support Medicare for all if you go to her website It says she wants to you know, expand access to healthcare and she supports the affordable care act She was endorsed by people like Kamala Harris Elizabeth Warren not Not great I mean the the fact that she doesn't support Medicare for all honestly is kind of a non-starter But I am still happy that she beat Kim Olson because Kim Olson was an awful candidate But I mean overall The real victories here for me Mike Siegel Donna. I'm him. These are victories that weren't necessarily expected these were the underdogs and They didn't just win They won in landslides both of them. This is huge not to mention, you know The district attorney race with Jose Garza I mean, this is a good night for progressives and you know Maybe I'm just a little bit too cynical because I wasn't necessarily expecting to be making this video right now I wasn't expecting to be talking about progressive victories in Texas But here we are and I am I couldn't be happier