Podcasts about Elgin

Follow Christie: https://www.instagram.com/autobahna/Danny stand up dates below!(normal main with Jake and Shannon will come out Wednesday; sorry just a bit slammed, you'll get your Shake folks!!!!)(15:53) - AITA for cutting off all communication with my ex best friend?(25:11) - AITA for not coming out to my best friend?(41:46) - AITA for standing up for pedestrians in my city?Fri, May 26th 7pm - Carlsbad, New Mexico (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/748113543442497/Saturday, May 27th 7pm - Elgin, Arizona (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/1177775622894280/Friday Jun 30, 7pm - Henderson, Nevada (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/567809062149665/Saturday Jul 1, 7pm- Superior, Arizona (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/543825404539622/Thursday, Aug 10 - Woodinville, Washington (No event yet, contact Danny for deets)Friday Aug 11 - Salem, Oregon (No event yet, contact Danny for deets)Free stickers and submit at: https://aitapod.comJoin us on Patreon! https://patreon.com/aitapodWhat's on Patreon? - 160+ Bonus eps- Discord with awesome community- Call-in shows ($5 tier for call-in, $25 tier for full guest eps)TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@aitapodTwitter - https://twitter.com/aitapodInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/aita_pod/

Stand up dates below timestamps! Thanks for listenin'. (13:33) - AITA for kicking out my husband's roommate?(16:50) - AITA for not speaking to my mom for 4 months after she kicked me out?(24:24) - AITA for trading paint and doing nothing about it?(33:37) - AITA for not honoring dibs?(43:11) - AITA for always getting a separate bill at a restaurant?Fri, May 26th 7pm - Carlsbad, New Mexico (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/748113543442497/Saturday, May 27th 7pm - Elgin, Arizona (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/1177775622894280/Friday Jun 30, 7pm - Henderson, Nevada (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/567809062149665/Saturday Jul 1, 7pm- Superior, Arizona (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/543825404539622/Thursday, Aug 10 - Woodinville, Washington (No event yet, contact Danny for deets)Friday Aug 11 - Salem, Oregon (No event yet, contact Danny for deets)Free stickers and submit at: https://aitapod.comJoin us on Patreon! https://patreon.com/aitapodWhat's on Patreon? - 160+ Bonus eps- Discord with awesome community- Call-in shows ($5 tier for call-in, $25 tier for full guest eps)TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@aitapodTwitter - https://twitter.com/aitapodInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/aita_pod/

TIMESTAMPS FOR SITCHES BELOW + Danny stand up dates (FL, NM, NV, AZ, WA, OR)Follow Brian! https://www.instagram.com/worldwidebri/Brian's pod: https://www.instagram.com/thepassportfilespod/(28:42) - AITA for writing up an employee who catfished me?(41:01) - AITA for knowing my friend is getting catfished but doing nothing to stop it?(1:02:28) - AITA for sulking about my wife not letting me watch my son's birth?Friday and Saturday, May 12th and 13th - TAMPAhttps://bit.ly/vegabrewedworldFri, May 26th 7pm - Carlsbad, New Mexico (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/748113543442497/Saturday, May 27th 7pm - Elgin, Arizona (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/1177775622894280/Friday Jun 30, 7pm - Henderson, Nevada (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/567809062149665/Saturday Jul 1, 7pm- Superior, Arizona (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/543825404539622/Thursday, Aug 10 - Woodinville, Washington (No event yet, contact Danny for deets)Friday Aug 11 - Salem, Oregon (No event yet, contact Danny for deets)Free stickers and submit at: https://aitapod.comJoin us on Patreon! https://patreon.com/aitapodWhat's on Patreon? - 160+ Bonus eps- Discord with awesome community- Call-in shows ($5 tier for call-in, $25 tier for full guest eps)TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@aitapodTwitter - https://twitter.com/aitapodInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/aita_pod/

TIMESTAMPS are below if you don't like all the convo!!! PLEASE see Danny's stand up dates farther below in Florida, NM, AZ, NV, and WA :)(15:24) - AITA for telling my SIL that the party she threw was absolutely a bday party?(29:12) - AITA for opting out of my best friend's wedding bc they didn't invite my GF?(37:56) - AITA for heckling a stand-up comedian?(50:15) - AITA for making my son clean up after he took a shit in a urinal at Taco Bell?Friday and Saturday, May 12th and 13th - TAMPAhttps://bit.ly/vegabrewedworldFri, May 26th 7pm - Carlsbad, New Mexico (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/748113543442497/Saturday, May 27th 7pm - Elgin, Arizona (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/1177775622894280/Friday Jun 30, 7pm - Henderson, Nevada (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/567809062149665/Saturday Jul 1, 7pm- Superior, Arizona (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/543825404539622/Thursday, Aug 10 - Woodinville, Washington (No event yet, contact Danny for deets)Friday Aug 11 - Salem, Oregon (No event yet, contact Danny for deets)

FROM delivers its Emmy contender with a surprisingly emotional episode featuring...a day player?Sharai and Joe love 'Tether' which touches base with every character on the show, addresses the emotional fall-out from living in this town, and seemingly sets up the rest of the season. It's a great episode, particularly for Donna and Boyd, though we still want answers from Elgin and Victor!Connect with your co-hosts:> Show handle: @YouShould_Watch> Sharai: @Misssharai> Joe: @bstolemyremoteIf you like the podcast, please rate, review, and subscribe!Discover more fabulously spooky Anatomy of a Scream Pod Squad shows at anatomyofascream.com and follow the network on Twitter and Instagram @aoas_xx Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's Revenge of the 5th and there's plenty of revenge to start our show! Dean Jagger joins us to talk about the action packed movie, One Ranger from Lionsgate. He'll tell us all about the villainous Declan, how he ended up in Texas, working opposite Thomas Jane and MUCH more! SEE ONE RANGER IN THEATERS OR ON DEMAND NOW! We also continue our series of interviews from the MGM+ series from by taking a ride on the bus. Nathan D. Simmons joins us to talk about playing Elgin on the series. You know we had to ask him about those visions, how Elgin knew so much about where they were going and if we could possibly see him forming some bonds in the town any time soon. WATCH FROM EVERY SUNDAY ON MGM+! The Big Door Prize Season 1 finale is also quickly approaching, so we catch up with Djouliet Amara (Trina) and Sammy Fourlas (Jacob) to talk about the events leading up to it. We talk a lot about why fans love Trina and Jacob so much, where that relationship stands, thoughts about the Morpho and Izzy's recent game-changing reveal. WATCH THE TWO PART FINALE OF THE BIG DOOR PRIZE BEGINNING WEDNESDAY ON APPLE TV+! Did you really think we forgot about Star Wars? We review both Star Wars Visions Volume 2 AND Young Jedi Adventures. We'll also talk about the WGA strike impacts, the Dune: Part Two trailer, a surprise candidate to play Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat 2 and Kevin Cosner official leaving Yellowstone. How did we pack so much into one hour!? Find out! Ready to subscribe or just learn more? Do that at: https://linktr.ee/downandnerdypodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning friends and neighbors. We have all the news you need, the news you deserve and the news you love. If your heart is troubled, take time for yourself to heal. Brett has the local headlines, we have coffee, we have water, and collectively we have each other. Here's the news: - Reclaim your future! Kane County Circuit Clerk & State Representative Barbara Hernandez are hosting one last expungement clinic. The second and last event will be Saturday, September 9th, from 9:30 am to 11 am, and will be at the Gail Borden Public Library in Elgin. Scan the QR codes on the flyer to register. For more questions email: circuitclerk@co.kane.il.us - Free financial coaching as a public service is available from the City of Aurora's Financial Empowerment Center and the Neighbor Project. Help is available in over 150 languages and our counselors are standing by to help you. Visit their office Mondays thru Fridays from 9 am to 5 pm at 712 South River Street or call (630) 256-4552 and schedule your appointment today! - Monday, June 19th the City of Aurora will host the Juneteenth Flag Raising at One Aurora Plaza (8 E. Galena Blvd. The flag raising will take place at 1 pm with many special guests. In attendance will be the famous South Shore Drill Team, Mr. & Miss Black Aurora and Earle, Arkansas Mayor Jaylen Smith. Mr. Smith holds the distinction of being the youngest black mayor in America! Save the date and come experience a great community event! Have a blessed, safe and fun weekend. Aurora's 1st morning daily news show will return Monday of next week. Subscribe to the show on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/c/GoodMorningAuroraPodcast The second largest city's first daily news podcast is here. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday & Friday to our FB Live from 8 am to 9 am. Make sure to like and subscribe to stay updated on all things Aurora. Twitter: goodmorningaur1 Instagram: goodmorningaurorail Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6dVweK5Zc4uPVQQ0Fp1vEP... Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../good-morning.../id1513229463 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora #positivevibes #positiveenergy #downtownaurora #kanecountyil #bataviail #genevail #stcharlesil #saintcharlesil #elginil #northaurorail #auroraillinois #auroramedia #auroranews #goodmorningaurora #news #dailynews #subscribe #youtube #podcast #spotify #morningnews #morningshow #friday --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/goodmorningaurora/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/goodmorningaurora/support

Stories in this episode: Day in History: 1973: Hardee's to take over Sandy's Drive-In An Elgin gas station leaked 10,000 gallons of gasoline. Now the state is suing the owner The world's sweetest fortune teller Rochester Public Schools confirms ransomeware attack; says it did not pay a ransom Triton three-sport athlete Zack Bodenstab 'an inspiration' to teammates, competitors

As part of NBC's programming development, One-point-five Million dollars was allocated towards new shows. The network's first major signing was Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. In August of 1948 they made their Hollywood debut at Slapsie Maxie's. They were soon guest-starring on Milton Berle's TV show, and other comedians thought their Elgin appearance groundbreaking. On December 22nd the duo recorded an audition with Bob Hope. Hope recorded a new set with Martin & Lewis on March 24th, 1949. Things quickly fell apart as the trio couldn't help but adlib. NBC picked the series, marketing the team as the next big sensation in radio. Their agent, Abby Greshler, negotiated a great deal with Paramount's Hal Wallis. They'd receive seventy-five thousand dollars for films and were free to do one outside film a year, which they would co-produce through their own York Productions. The duo also had complete control of their club, radio, and TV appearances, as well as their recording contracts. In the lead up to the premiere of their radio show, Martin and Lewis appeared on the March of Dimes, the Chesterfield Supper Club, the Sealtest Variety Theatre, and The Bob Hope Show. The Martin & Lewis Show finally debuted on April 3rd, 1949. Their first guest was Lucille Ball. It has a similar script to the audition recorded with Bob Hope. But The Martin & Lewis Show was a flop. No sponsor was interested in advertising such a visual team on a sound-only medium. They switched broadcasting locations from Hollywood, to New York, then back to Hollywood. They also brought in new writers and characters. Nothing worked. NBC pulled the plug after the September 6th broadcast.

Good morning friends! We have a great show for today, and also the local headlines you love. Our guests today are Juan Cayestano, creator of The Woodcrafters by Luz & Juan & body-painter and artist Jose Art. We will be discussing culture and their specific art and talents. Let's get ready to learn! Here's the news: - Saturday, May 6th will be the Rotolo Middle School Color Run 5K in Batavia! The Rotolo Middle School National Junior Honor Society is hosting this event. The proceeds will go to Batavia United Way and to better the programs of the National Junior Honor Society at Rotolo. This will be a fun event, shout out to Rotolo MIddle School! Registration is required, you can do so here: https://runsignup.com/Race/IL/Batavia/RMSColorFunRun - Reclaim your future! Kane County Circuit Clerk & State Representative Barbara Hernandez are hosting one last expungement clinic. The second and last event will be Saturday, September 9th, from 9:30 am to 11 am, and will be at the Gail Borden Public Library in Elgin. Scan the QR codes on the flyer to register. For more questions email: circuitclerk@co.kane.il.us - Monday, June 19th the City of Aurora will host the Juneteenth Flag Raising at One Aurora Plaza (8 E. Galena Blvd. The flag raising will take place at 1 pm with many special guests. In attendance will be the famous South Shore Drill Team, Mr. & Miss Black Aurora and Earle, Arkansas Mayor Jaylen Smith. Mr. Smith holds the distinction of being the youngest black mayor in America! Save the date and come experience a great community event! Have a blessed, safe and uplifitng day. Good Morning Aurora will return Friday with more of the very best of Aurora. Subscribe to the show on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/c/GoodMorningAuroraPodcast The second largest city's first daily news podcast is here. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday & Friday to our FB Live from 8 am to 9 am. Make sure to like and subscribe to stay updated on all things Aurora. Twitter: goodmorningaur1 Instagram: goodmorningaurorail Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6dVweK5Zc4uPVQQ0Fp1vEP... Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../good-morning.../id1513229463 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora #positivevibes #positiveenergy #downtownaurora #kanecountyil #bataviail #genevail #stcharlesil #saintcharlesil #elginil #northaurorail #auroraillinois #auroramedia #auroranews #goodmorningaurora #news #dailynews #subscribe #youtube #podcast #spotify #morningnews #morningshow #wednesday --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/goodmorningaurora/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/goodmorningaurora/support

When Mark and I went through the dark season in our marriage, it's no surprise that we sought out counseling. However, what most people find surprising is that our counselor focused more on untangling our childhoods than our skills as a couple. That was exactly what we needed in order to restore our marriage and move forward!We all have a past, but what we don't often realize is how much what happened “then” affects us now. (Even if your "then" wasn't very negative!) This is the topic we are going to dig into in this conversation and it applies to every person, even if you aren't married.Helping me navigate this is Pastor Elliott Anderson, who is the Assistant Professor of Psychology at Judson University and the Pastor at Solid Rock Church in Elgin, IL. Elliott's areas of expertise include counseling, identity formation, sexuality, addiction, adoption, foster care, marriage, family, and the integration of faith and psychology. He's the author of several books and co-host of the podcast Love and Life Media. When I learned about his resources, I couldn't help but notice how similarly he speaks and thinks to Mark and I!In this conversation, you'll hear:Why the key to your future often lies in the pastThe three A's that tear down intimacyThe importance of making the decision to find healingAnd so much more!I really enjoyed talking with Elliott and am eager to share this episode with you!Show Notes:  https://jillsavage.org/elliott-anderson-142

Ashley McMahan joined Moms Take Ten today to bring a different perspective to our podcast--that of the daughter of a foster family. Listen in as she shares how her family became involved in foster care and how that has been a blessing in her life. Ashley and her family started the organization Ruth Project, located in the greater Elgin area of Illinois, that provides tangible and spiritual support for foster and adoptive families. Be sure to check out their website! Learn more about me at https://www.lyssastoyko.com/ Want to say hello? Follow me on Facebook and Insta @lyssastoyko Email me at momstaketen@gmail.com Help other mamas find encouragement through Moms Take Ten by rating and reviewing this show. Thanks!

Our sponsor today is better help: https://betterhelp.com/aitapodPLEASE see stand up dates in Florida, NM, AZ, NV, and WA :) Thanks for listenin'.TIMESTAMPS:(23:54) - AITA for not wanting my boyfriend to watch p*rn?(24:44) - AITA for telling my family I don't have time to come to them?(30:58) - AITA for saying my coworker drank too much to comfort a friend?(40:31) - AITA for wanting another tattoo?(1:02:37) - AITA for keeping my window open while I shower?Danny's stand-up dates PLEASE reach out to me @dannyvegagram with anything you may need :)Friday and Saturday, May 12th and 13th - TAMPAhttps://bit.ly/vegabrewedworldFri, May 26th 7pm - Carlsbad, New Mexico (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/748113543442497/ Saturday, May 27th 7pm - Elgin, Arizona (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/1177775622894280/ Friday Jun 30, 7pm - Henderson, Nevada (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/567809062149665/ Saturday Jul 1, 7pm- Superior, Arizona (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/543825404539622/ Thursday, Aug 10 - Woodinville, Washington (No event yet, contact Danny for deets) Friday Aug 11 - Salem, Oregon (No event yet, contact Danny for deets)

Thanks for listenin'. See Danny's stand up tour dates below timestamps :)States include New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Washington and Oregon. (21:41) - AITA for deleting a video of my drunk self from my friend's phone?(34:05) - AITA for telling my gf I think I'm smarter than her?(01:01:56) - AITA because I brought a bottle of ranch into a restaurant?Danny's stand-up dates PLEASE reach out to me @dannyvegagram with anything you may need :) Fri, May 26th 7pm - Carlsbad, New Mexico (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/748113543442497/ Saturday, May 27th 7pm - Elgin, Arizona (with Will Hines) https://www.facebook.com/events/1177775622894280/ Friday Jun 30, 7pm - Henderson, Nevada (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/567809062149665/ Saturday Jul 1, 7pm- Superior, Arizona (with Tori Piskin) https://www.facebook.com/events/543825404539622/ Thursday, Aug 10 - Woodinville, Washington (No event yet, contact Danny for deets) Friday Aug 11 - Salem, Oregon (No event yet, contact Danny for deets)

Sharai and Joe kick of season two of FROM with what appears to be part one of a two-parter (annoying!)While Tabitha and Julie are annoying, we're intrigued by the newbies from the bus, including Kristi's girlfriend and mysterious Elgin.Plus: just the right amount of Jade, Victor being useful (and not!), and fears for Donna and KennyConnect with your co-hosts:> Show handle: @YouShould_Watch> Sharai: @Misssharai> Joe: @bstolemyremoteIf you like the podcast, please rate, review, and subscribe!Discover more fabulously spooky Anatomy of a Scream Pod Squad shows at anatomyofascream.com and follow the network on Twitter and Instagram @aoas_xx Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tochi and Zell lament that America won't stop  being the only place on Earth where these tragedies happen.Topics:The shooting of Ralph YarlThe shooting of cheerleaders in Elgin, TXThe killing of Kaylin GillisShould Diane Feinstein retire?On Twitter and Twitch:@TochiTrueStory@AZellWillOn Insta:@Treize64@AZellWill

Everybody's got a story. Listen now as Jeff Bucknam talks with Nick Gaviria who serves with Harvest Students at the Elgin Campus of Harvest Bible Chapel. “Conversations with Jeff Bucknam” is a production of Harvest Bible Chapel. Executive Producer: Wesley Cassford Host: Jeff Bucknam Co-host: Tommy Creutz Guest: Nick Gaviria Video: Wesley Cassford Sound design, mixing, and editing: Wesley Cassford Graphic Design: Wesley Cassford Social Media: Sherri Smith Producer: Sherri Smith

We boldly and confidently pray to our LORD with thanksgiving knowing that Christ intercedes for us (Romans 8:22-23; Galatians 4:6; Hebrews 7:25). Section 2 of Luther's small catechism points us to the daily trust that the Lord hears and answers our prayers at all times (Philippians 4:4-7). Luther gives us basic instructions for prayer in the morning, evening, before and after a meal so that our will is conformed to His Will (I Peter 5:6). All of our prayers are placed into His hands as we ask that His holy angel watch over us with full confidence that He provides and care for His sheep. Rev. Mark Bestul, pastor of Calvary Lutheran Church in Elgin, IL joins Rev. Brady Finnern to study and pray the Daily Prayers from Luther's Small Catechism. Find your copy of the Book of Concord - Concordia Reader's Edition at cph.org or read online at bookofconcord.org. Study the Lutheran Confession of Faith found in the Book of Concord with lively discussions led by host Rev. Brady Finnern, President of the LCMS Minnesota North District, and guest LCMS pastors. Join us as these Christ-confessing Concordians read through and discuss our Lutheran doctrine in the Book of Concord in order to gain a deeper understanding of our Lutheran faith and practical application for our vocations.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on April 7. It dropped for free subscribers on April 10. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoJody Churich, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Breckenridge, ColoradoRecorded onMarch 27, 2023About BreckenridgeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Breckenridge, ColoradoYear founded: 1961Pass affiliations: Unlimited on Epic Pass, Epic Local Pass; limited access on Summit Value Pass (holiday blackouts), Keystone Plus Pass (unlimited access after April 1), Tahoe Local Pass (5 days shared with Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone, Crested Butte, Park City)Closest neighboring ski areas: Frisco Adventure Park (15 minutes), Copper Mountain (25 minutes), Keystone (25 minutes), Arapahoe Basin (30 minutes), Loveland (38 minutes), Ski Cooper (1 hour, 5 minutes) – travel times can vary considerably pending traffic and weatherBase elevation: 9,600 feetSummit elevation: 12,998 feetVertical drop: 3,398 feetSkiable Acres: 2,908Average annual snowfall: 350 inchesTrail count: 187Lift count: 35 (1 gondola, 5 six-packs, 7 high-speed quads, 1 triple, 6 doubles, 3 platters, 1 T-bar, 11 carpets) – Breckenridge plans to replace 5-Chair, a 1970 Riblet double, with a high-speed quad this summer.Why I interviewed herThe audacity of it all. Many ski areas reach. Breck soars. Above the town, above the Pacific Ocean-sized parking lots, above the twisty-road condos and mansions, above the frantic base areas and trail-cut high-alpine - there lie the bowls, sweeping one after the next, southeast to northwest, across the range. Chairlifts, improbably, magnificently, will take you there. Or most of the way, at least. Kensho Superchair – a six-pack, rolls up to 12,302 feet, to the doorstep of Peak 6 – it's a short hike to the tippy top, at 12,573 feet. But Kensho is holding Imperial Superchair's beer, as that monster climbs to 12,840, just 158 feet shy of the 12,998-foot summit of Peak 8.Why don't they go all the way to the summit? Why do you think? Listen to the podcast to get the answer, or go there for yourself and see how those wild winds hit you at the top – or close enough to the top – of America.The Brobots have plenty to say about Breck, Texas North, Intermediate Mountain. A-Basin is where the Summit County steeps live, don't you know? There's some truth to that, but it's a narrative fed by bravado and outdated information. Breck's high-alpine chairs – Imperial in 2005 and Kensho in 2013 – have trenched easy access to vast realms of gut-punching terrain. Beat your chest all you will – the only way out is straight down.Breck is one of the most complete resorts in America, is my point here. And that didn't happen by accident. Since Vail took ownership of the joint in 1997, the company has deliberately, steadily, almost constantly improved it. Sixteen new lifts, including the inbound 5-Chair upgrade (Breck will swap out a 53-year-old Riblet double for a new high-speed quad this summer); massive expansions onto Peaks 6 and 7; steady snowmaking and parking upgrades. If you want to understand Vail's long-term intentions for its other 40 ski areas, look to the evolution of this, one of its original four resorts, over decades of always-better incremental upgrades.Of course, plenty of people know that. Maybe too many. Breck is often – always? – America's busiest resort by pure skier visits. It's easy to access, easy to like, mostly – I said mostly Peak 10, E, 6 chairs – easy to ski if you stay below treeline. The town is the town, one of the great après hubs of North American skiing, thrumming, vibrant, a scene. Don't go unless you want some company.So what becomes of a place like Breck in a 21st century filled with existential questions about what lift-served skiing has become and what it is destined to be? How does a high-alpine but extremely accessible mountain adapt to its parent company's insistence on dropping it onto the budget version of its ultra-affordable Epic Pass? Can the super-modern lifts that these pass sales fuel fix the liftlines that spoil the experience without overloading the trails in a way that spoils the experience? How can a town of 5,000 residents accommodate a daily influx of 17,000-ish skiers without compromising its bucolic essence that drew those visitors to begin with? And to what extent do even our highest ski areas need to fortify themselves against the worst outcomes of a changing climate with ever-more-aggressive snowmaking?Every ski resort-blessed mountain town in the West is grappling with this same set of questions, but Breck, I-70 adjacent and Vail Resorts-bound, is perhaps the most high-profile among them. And where the town and the resort succeed or fail, they inform where our other icons will go. It's a fascinating story, and we're still in the book's early chapters.What we talked aboutUnseasonable Colorado snow and cold; Breck's strong 2022-23 ski season; how late the season could go and what could be available to ski; that California ski life; thoughts on Tahoe's big season; Sierra-at-Tahoe's fire recovery; Alpine Meadows in the pre-Powdr Corp ‘90s; why Alpine Meadows eventually dropped its snowboarding ban and what happened when it did; the early days of terrain parks; reaction when Powdr suddenly sold Alpine; how tiny Boreal and Soda Springs compete in a Tahoe market bursting with mega-resorts; the rise of Woodward; Vail's ongoing efforts to promote women; leaving Powdr for Vail; Breck magic; four giant ski resorts, mere miles apart, but all distinct; the largest employee housing bed base in Vail Resorts portfolio; an assist with childcare; how a ski resort prepares for and responds to on-mountain fatalities; Breck's “better not bigger” masterplan; nudging guests toward underutilized terrain; big plans for Peaks 8 and 9; upgrades on Freedom Superchair, Rip's Ride, and 5-Chair; how a gondola could change Peak 9; a mid-mountain learning center; prioritizing upgrades for Peak 9's 50-plus-year-old Riblet lifts; why Horseshoe T-bar is an unlikely candidate for an upgrade; why Kensho and Imperial Superchair don't go to the very top of Breckenridge; the Peak 8 Super Connect chair detachment in December; how the resort determined that the chairlift was safe to run again; massive snowmaking upgrades and how these sync with Vail Resorts' environmental goals; why Breck is only available on the top-tier Epic Day Pass, but is unlimited on the Epic Local Pass; and why Breck has remained on the Epic Local Pass.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewLate last year, Breck updated its masterplan, as all ski areas operating on U.S. Forest Service land are obliged to do every decade (or so, as it actually ends up working out). Themed “bigger, not better,” the masterplan amounted to a modernization blueprint to maximize the resort's existing footprint with modern lifts and selective trail- and glade-cutting:Breckenridge's goal is to tame its wild peaks. “The structuring vision for the next 10 years at [Breckenridge] is ‘Better not Bigger,'” the master plan states. Noting that the resort's “significant congestion … can diminish the guest experience,” Breck says that its “goal is not to increase overall skier and rider visits on or around peak days, but rather to concentrate on improving the guest experience and better managing visitation.” To accomplish this, the resort hopes to both better move skiers out of its base areas with more and better lifts, and to keep many of them on the upper mountains with a combination of better chairs and a subtly re-imagined trail network.Here's the overview:And a more granular look at what would and would not change in the mountain's massive lift network:The full article is worth a read, as I went peak-by-peak and broke down the proposed changes to each, including upgrades to the snowmaking footprint :So, what better time to discuss America's most vibrant ski resort than at the moment when the folks running it just outlined their vision for the far future? Breck will be an important test case of the extent to which a high-profile flagship can climate-proof and crowd-proof itself in an era of climate uncertainty and megapass maximalism. If Breck can thrive without breaking itself and everything around it – including the town at its base, the county it sits in, and the big road that leads up from the flats – then 21st century skiing will follow, adapt, adjust.Questions I wish I'd askedChurich and I briefly discussed a skier death at Breckenridge from a few weeks ago. Per the Aspen Times:An Illinois man clearing snow from his chairlift seat with the safety restraint up fell out and died at Breckenridge Ski Resort a week ago, the local sheriff's office reported.John Perucco, 60, of Elgin, Illinois, was pronounced dead March 17 at St. Anthony's Summit Hospital in Frisco after the fall, the Summit County Coroner's Office said in an email. He was reportedly wearing a helmet when he fell from the lift.He had not yet reached Tower 1 of Zendo Chair when he fell 25 feet and landed on a hard-packed, groomed trail below, according to the Summit County Sheriff's Office. The department was reportedly notified around 11:20 a.m. of a death at the emergency room.What I would have liked to explore a bit more was the issue of the raised safety bar. This is something I've thought a lot about lately. In New England and New York, all of the lifts have safety bars, and most skiers use them most of the time. Their use is required by law in several states, including Vermont, New York, and Massachusetts – patrollers and lift attendants often aggressively pressure skiers who don't lower them. If you load a lift with strangers and you're not prepared, you're liable to be conked in the head by a down-coming bar – Easterners' etiquette around this is abysmal, as it's polite to at least call out, “coming down.”In the Midwest and the West, bar use is much spottier. Forget the Midwest, where modern lifts are rare and most of the old ones have not been retrofit with bars. But skiing's money is in the West, where most major lifts at most major resorts have been upgraded to detachables, which all have bars. I get a lot of passive-aggressive irritation when I lower the bar (with warning, of course), particularly in Utah and Colorado. This has always puzzled me. What's the resistance? I'm aware of the NSAA research casting doubt on the efficacy of bar use – I'm skeptical, as there is no way to tell how many accidents have been prevented by a lowered bar.Anyway, there is a cultural resistance to chairlift bar usage in the western United States that, as far as I can tell, is unique to the world's major ski cultures. Vail, for its part, retrofits all of its inherited chairlifts with safety bars. So does Alterra. Vail requires its employees to use them at all times. Alterra allows each mountain to set its own policies (Palisades Tahoe and Solitude, for example, require bar use for employees).I want to dig into this more, to understand both why this resistance exists and why it persists, despite the proliferation of modern chairlifts. It's a bigger story than can be explored in a single anecdote, and hopefully it's one I can write about more this offseason. Will this resistance fade, as once-ubiquitous helmet resistance has? Or is this skiing's version of a cultural wedge issue, set to divide the tourists from the locals in an escalating game of Who Belongs Here?What I got wrong* I said that 10 of Vail Resorts' 41 ski areas were currently led by women. The correct number, at the time of recording, was nine out of 41. Here's a complete list (several of Vail's ski areas share a regional general manager: Boston Mills, Brandywine, and Alpine Valley in Ohio; Jack Frost and Big Boulder in Pennsylvania; and Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel in Pennsylvania). With yesterday's news that Beaver Creek COO Nadia Guerriero would move up to VP/COO of the Rockies Region (replacing Bill Rock, who was promoted to head of Vail's Mountain Division), that number is now eight, I suppose. But who knows how Vail will stir up its mountain leadership team over the summer.* I also named off all the large ski areas around Lake Tahoe, to give context to Churich's challenge running tiny Soda Springs and Boreal in that realm of monsters. The only thousand-plus-footer I missed in that riff is Homewood, but here's a complete list of Tahoe-region ski areas. It really is amazing how these smaller spots exist (and seem to thrive), alongside some of the nation's largest and most-developed resorts:* Churich and I also discussed what I referred to as “Vail's new app” for the 2023-24 ski season. Its official name will be the My Epic app, and it should be a considerable upgrade from Epic Mix. The app will be your Epic Pass (no more RFID card unless you still want one), and will feature interactive trailmaps, real-time liftline wait times, operational updates, blackout date info on your pass, weather updates, resort charge, and more.Why you should ski BreckenridgeBecause you kind of have to. Trying to navigate life as a U.S. American skier without skiing Breck is kind of like trying to go through life without hearing a Taylor Swift song. It's there whether you want it or not. Even if you're in the habit of driving past to hit the Eagle County resorts, or you prefer A-Basin or Copper, or you avoid the I-70 corridor altogether, eventually your cousin or your boys from college or your aunt Phyllis is going to plan a spring break trip or a bachelor party or a family Christmas get-together at Breck, and you're going to go.And you're going to like it. This is not the busiest ski area in America by accident. It's a damn good ski mountain, even if it has more people and fewer steeps and less snow than some of its high-profile ski-biz peers. Yes, liftlines at Peaks 8 and 9 can test your patience at key times. And, yes, the intermediate superhighways can accumulate interstate-esque traffic. But it only takes a little creativity to find quiet glades off Peak 10 and 6-Chair and E-Chair, and tucked between the groomers off every other peak. As with any big western resort, you can follow the crowds or you can follow your skis. The kind of day you have once you stand up and push off the top of the lift is entirely up to you.Podcast NotesI've hosted several other Colorado-based Vail Resorts leaders on the podcast over the past year. While Bill Rock and Nadia Guerriero have recently moved positions, these conversations are largely still relevant:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing all year long. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 32/100 in 2023, and number 418 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Hey there, friends! In this episode, Sannah and Amanda magically *aligned* with a common story theme of the unexplained. First, Sannah tells the INSANE story of Evatima Tardo, a real medical anomaly, whom Harry Houdini himself admired. Then in Amanda's tale, she explores the mysterious and… shocking… phenomenon surrounding the Olesen family of Elgin, Illinois. Buckle up! This one is crazy!   Do you have a personal #SHOOKstory you would like us to share on a future episode?    Submit your spooky story here: https://www.shookpodcast.com/shareyourstory.html   Alternatively, you can send an email to shookparanormalpod@gmail.com Let's be friends! All our main links: https://linktr.ee/shookpodcast    Exclusive content: https://www.patreon.com/shookpodcast    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shookpodcast/    YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG5XKSY_rzrBDOeMhz7guhA    TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shookpodcast    Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Shookpodcast/    Every Season is Spooky Season… https://www.facebook.com/groups/1115739589042652    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shookparanormalpod This episode was made possible by Riverside   Sources:    The Extraordinary Body of Evatima Tardo by Bess Lovejoy   The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World by David Jaher   Unsolved Mysteries, S9, E13   Unsolved Mysteries Wiki, Olesen Family

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. We've got a great conversation for you this morning. Our guest today is Carolyn Chiovino, owner of Express Employment Professionals. We also have the news you love ready, and hopefully you checked out the weather! Let's get ready for a great show. Here's the news: - Tuesday, April 23rd there will be an excellent and informational event for you and your family. Sponsored by WESOS (Women Entrepreneurs Secrets of Success), this event is called: Safeguard Your Family's Future. This will be from 6 to 7:45 pm in Warrenville. There is limited seating and registration is required. Friend of the show Annie Kinsley, State Farm Insurance Representative, will be one of the featured panel speakers. Take part in this event! For more information and to register click this link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/safeguard-your-familys-future-speakers-panel-networking-tickets-597648612087 - Reclaim your future! Kane County Circuit Clerk & State Representative Barbara Hernandez are hosting two expungement clinics. The first will be Saturday, April 15th from 9:30 am to noon at the Aurora Public Library, Santori Branch. The second will be Saturday, September 9th, from 9:30 am to 11 am, and will be at the Gail Borden Public Library in Elgin. Scan the QR codes on the flyer to register. For more questions email: circuitclerk@co.kane.il.us - Get ready for a great workshop series for April, financial literacy month. Blossom Society has partnered with our partners of the Aurora Financial Empowerment Center (FEC), The Neighbor Project and FNBO. Join for this 3 part series throughout April. Topics of discussion will be budgeting, improving/establishing credit and home ownership. Guest speakers will be Valeria Loera, program manager of the Aurora FEC & Gabriela Bautista, mortgage lender at FNBO located in Aurora. Registration is free, to do so click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/empower-your-financial-wellness-series-tickets-598488805127 Have a great day! We have much more in store so get ready to see great local news. Be blessed and subscribe to our show on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/c/GoodMorningAuroraPodcast The second largest city's first daily news podcast is here. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday & Friday to our FB Live from 8 am to 9 am. Make sure to like and subscribe to stay updated on all things Aurora. Twitter: goodmorningaur1 Instagram: goodmorningaurorail Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6dVweK5Zc4uPVQQ0Fp1vEP... Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../good-morning.../id1513229463 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora #positivevibes #positiveenergy #downtownaurora #kanecountyil #bataviail #genevail #stcharlesil #saintcharlesil #elginil #northaurorail #auroraillinois #auroramedia #auroranews #goodmorningaurora #news #dailynews #subscribe #youtube #podcast #spotify #morningnews #morningshow #wednesday --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/goodmorningaurora/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/goodmorningaurora/support

Seth Hanford, head of school at Elgin Academy (IL), discusses the importance of connection, community values, and spending time with students during challenging times.

Rev. Carl Roth, pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Elgin, TX, joins host Rev. Timothy Appel to study John 17:20-27. As Jesus concludes His prayer on Maundy Thursday, He asks the Father on behalf of those disciples to come who will believe through the Word that will be preached by His disciples. In this, Jesus prays for His Church still today, that we would share the unity that He has with His Father. This prayer of Jesus is answered in the unity that He gives in His Word, not in any man-made attempts. Jesus has given His Church His glory, and in the unity that He gives the Church with Himself and with His Father, the world sees the love of God. Even as Jesus has made known His name to His disciples, He will continue to make it known to His Church still. “The Word Made Flesh” is a series on Sharper Iron that goes through the Gospel according to St. John. The disciple whom Jesus loved wrote his Gospel account as an eyewitness to Jesus' life and ministry. As we read the Word of God recorded by St. John, the Holy Spirit works in us so that we might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and so have life by faith in His name.

hat were the mayoral hopefuls like as kids? Teens? Young adults? Brandon Johnson is the son of a pastor and one of 10 kids in a family who lived in Elgin. Paul Vallas, the second of four kids, started life in Roseland and as a teen moved to suburban Alsip. Reset heard from WBEZ reporters Mariah Woelfel and Tessa Weinberg to learn more about the candidates' backstories.

(S8, EP 9) For this week, I invited Ko Chandetka, an award-winning body builder to the show. We talked about his family's resettlement in Elgin, IL after the Lao Civil War, his development as a body builder, and his recovery from addiction and more. You won't want to miss this episode! Thank you and enjoy the listen! Bio: Born in Mukdahan, Thailand, Ko Chandetka spent his early years living in Savannakhet, Laos. His father was a member of the royal Lao army and his family fled Laos after the Lao Civil War. They settled in the United States as refugees in 1975 and Ko grew up in Elgin, IL.. Ko began working out in his parents' basement after being bullied and inspired by super heroes as a child. He became a competitive bodybuilder in 1991 winning his first NPC title through 2003. Ko would compete in numerous competitions before an injury sent him down a path of drug addiction, depression and alcoholism. After seeking help, Ko was able to return to the sport, earn an IFBB Pro card and place at the 2016 Mr. Olympia contest. He co-founded the Lao American Sports Hall of Fame (www.laoamericansports.com) in 2022 and is the host of the SEA4 Podcast: Southeast Asian Athlete Achievement &; Adversity. Ko currently resides in South Elgin, IL and is a Bodybuilding consultant (www.gkomotivation.com). Sponsored by: VietFive Coffee: Start your day right with VietFive Coffee. Freshly grown coffee harvested straight from Vietnam and roasted in Chicago, VietFive offers rich quality tasting Vietnamese coffee straight to your soul. Visit VietFive Coffee in Chicago to grab a fresh cup and a Banh Mi to go along with it, or go to www.vietfive.com and use the code in all Caps: VMNCHIV5 to get 15% off your purchase. Circa-Pintig: The Center for Immigrant Resources and Community Arts - CIRCA Pintig is a 501c3 engaging communities through the power of the arts to challenge injustice and transcend social change. CIRCA Pintig produces timely works to provide education, activation, and advocacy. For information about upcoming events and to learn about how to get involved, visit www.circapintig.org --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/banhmichronicles/support

Should you pay bills in the beginning of a relationship?    Hosted By Nell  Kal & Cousin Brittany  with Elgin 

Listener discretion is advised. The Servant Girl Annihilator is a notorious serial killer who terrorized the city of Austin, Texas, in the late 1800s. The killer was responsible for a series of brutal murders that took place between 1884 and 1885. The identity of the Servant Girl Annihilator remains a mystery to this day, and the case has captured the imagination of true crime enthusiasts and historians for over a century. The murders began on December 30, 1884, when Mollie Smith, a young servant girl, was attacked and killed in her bed while she slept. Her attacker used an axe to bludgeon her to death and then proceeded to drag her body out of the house and onto the street. The murder was shocking and caused widespread panic throughout the city. It was the first in a series of similar attacks that would continue for over a year. Over the course of the next year, at least six more women were murdered in similar attacks. The killer targeted young servant girls who worked in the homes of wealthy families. The attacks were brutal, with the killer using an axe or other blunt object to bludgeon his victims to death. The killer also targeted men who tried to intervene, and at least one man was killed while attempting to protect his wife. The Servant Girl Annihilator was known for his stealth and cunning. He was able to enter the homes of his victims without being detected, and he was never caught in the act. The killer also seemed to have an uncanny ability to evade capture. Despite a massive manhunt and the involvement of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the killer was never identified or brought to justice. The Servant Girl Annihilator case is notable for several reasons. For one, it was one of the earliest documented cases of serial killers in the United States. It also represents a fascinating chapter in the history of Texas, which was still a relatively new state at the time. The case has also inspired countless books, articles, and documentaries over the years. There are many theories about the identity of the Servant Girl Annihilator, but none have been proven. Some historians believe that the killer was a man named Nathan Elgin, who was a suspect in several of the murders. Elgin was eventually sent to an insane asylum, but he was never officially charged with the crimes. Others believe that the killer was a member of a secret society or cult and that the murders were part of some kind of ritualistic practice. This theory is largely based on the fact that several of the victims were found with strange symbols carved into their flesh. However, there is no concrete evidence to support this theory. Another theory is that the killer was a wealthy or influential member of society who was able to evade capture due to his status. This theory is supported by the fact that many of the victims were young servant girls who worked in the homes of the city's wealthy elite. Despite the many theories, the identity of the Servant Girl Annihilator remains a mystery. The case has been the subject of numerous books, films, and television shows, and it continues to fascinate true crime enthusiasts and historians alike. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the case, and several new theories have emerged. Some experts believe that the killer may have been a woman, citing the fact that several of the victims were attacked in their beds while they slept. Others believe that the killer may have been from a gang of criminals, rather than a lone individual. Regardless of who the Servant Girl Annihilator was, his legacy lives on in the history of true crime. The case has inspired countless works of fiction and non-fiction, and it continues to captivate audiences to this day. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/chucktuck/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/chucktuck/support

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I was at the big ISE pro AV trade show a few weeks ago, I yet  again saw several products that were billed as holograms, even though they didn't even loosely fit the technical definition. I am always paying attention to news and social media posts that use that terminology, and once in a while, I come across something that actually does start to align with the true definition of holograms and holography. Like Voxon, which operates out of Adelaide, Australia. Started years ago as a beer drinking and tinkering maker project in a garage, Voxon now has a physical product for sale that generates a visual with depth that viewers can walk around and see from different angles. That product is mainly being bought by universities and R&D teams at companies to play with and learn, but the long game for Voxon is to produce or be the engine for other products that really do live up to the mainstream, Hollywood-driven notion of holograms. I had a great chat with co-founder and CEO Gavin Smith. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Gavin, thank you very much for joining me. I know you're up in Scotland, but you are based in Adelaide, Australia, correct? Gavin Smith: Yes, that's right. I'm originally from Scotland. I grew up here, spent the first part of my life in the north of Scotland in Elgin, and then I went to university in Paisley, Glasgow and then eventually, after working for 10 years in the banking sector, I immigrated to Australia and I've lived in Adelaide for the last 14 years.  That's quite a climate shift!  Gavin Smith: Yes, it is a climate shift. I was speaking to my wife the day before, and it was about 40 degrees there, just now they're having a heat wave, whereas up in Elgin here, it's about 1 degree at the moment. Yeah. I'm thinking, why are you there in February? But on the other hand, why would you wanna be in Adelaide if it's 40 Celsius?  Gavin Smith: I quite like the cold. I prefer to be in this temperature right now than 40 degrees, that's for sure.  Oh, I just spent 45 minutes with my snow machine clearing 25 centimeters of snow off my driveway, so I wouldn't mind being in Adelaide today.   Gavin Smith: Thankfully I can have the best of both worlds. I'm heading back there in about a week and a half time.  I was intrigued by your company. I saw a couple of LinkedIn posts with embedded videos and thought that's interesting and I wanted to speak more. So can you tell me what Voxon does?  Gavin Smith: Yes, sure. So Voxon is a company that started in about 2012-2013, and it came out of two joint research projects. One was me and my friend Will, based in Adelaide, we had a Thursday Night Lab Session, as we called it, where we went to the shed and we drank a few beers and we tried to invent things. It was a bit weird, science-esque. So this wasn't exactly a lab?  Gavin Smith: It was a shed. Let's face it, with a beer fridge and there was a lot of machinery, which was in various stages of repair. We used to get hard rubbish off the right side of the road in Adelaide and take it apart and see what we could make.  It was just amateur invention hour. But it was at the start of that project, we built fairly rudimentary machines, CNC machines and we took apart laser scanners and were just inquisitive about how they work from a mechanical point of view. But that then turned into more of a, let's see how far we can push ourselves and learn new stuff, and we've been inspired by sci-fi, Star Wars, all those sorts of things. So we said, let's try and make the sort of 3D display that we'd seen in the movies and those science fiction movies always had the same type of display, and that wasn't a screen, that wasn't a headset. It was always some sort of floating image that you could walk around and you could look out from any direction and the common name for that in popular media was a holographic display. That's what people called it. So that's what we set out to build, and we very quickly figured out that this type of display had to be something to do with projecting images or dots onto some sort of surface that moved and that's because in order to render these little dots that make up the image, inside a space that had physical dimensions, you couldn't make the lights just appear on air. We figured you, you might be able to do some sort of gas or some sort of lasers and things like that. But the way we approached it was starting off by just shaking business cards back and forwards and shining lasers on them, and then that made a line because of persistence of vision.  I always think that Neanderthal man invented the volumetric display because they probably waved burning embers around on the sticks at nighttime and drew those patterns in the air and those patterns really only existed because of the persistence of vision and the extrusion of light through a volume of space, and so that's what we decided to do, and we realized if you could draw a line, then if you could control the laser and turn it off and on again, you could draw a dot. And so we did that by cutting the laser beam with a rotating CD that was stuck on a high-speed drill with some sticky tape on it. We chopped the laser into little bits, and by controlling the speed of the laser, we ended up having a single dot, which we referred to as a voxel, that's what we Googled that a dot in space is referred to as a voxel and then we extrapolated from there and say if we're building these images out of little pixels of light or voxels, we need more and more of these dots, and when you do the math you quickly realize that you need millions of dots of light or volume to make an image, and that's difficult. And really that started us down the road of experimenting with video projectors, with lasers with all sorts of things and more and more advanced moving surfaces, and eventually, we made a small helical display using a vacuum-formed helix that we basically made in Will's wife's kitchen when she was out, in the oven, and yeah, we created a very small image of an elephant. You might call it a hologram at the time. That's what we called it at the time, but it was a volumetric swept surface image. The terminology I'll go into a bit more detail, but at the time it was just a hologram to us, and we thought this was amazing and we'd never seen it before. So we put a video of it on YouTube and some guys in America who were unbeknown to us doing the same project got in contact with us and push came to shove, we decided to join forces and form Voxon, and that was back in 2013.  So when you created this little elephant, was that like a big ‘aha' moment? Like, “Oh my God, we figured this out”? Gavin Smith: Yes, very much so. We believed at the time, we were the first people to do this. In fact, we weren't. But it was the first time we'd seen this type of image, and it was literally spine tingly amazing, to see a truly three-dimensional object that you could look down from, above, from the sides, from any angle, and it filled a space the same way as you or I fill a space in the physical world, you could measure its length that's spread, that's height and even its volume in gallons or liters. It had a tangible existence in the physical world and not on a screen as other 3D images tend to do. At this point, was this a stationary object?  Gavin Smith: Yes, at this point the elephant was stationary and the way I'd created the elephant was we'd figured out, in order to make this elephant, we first needed to have the swept surface moving. So that was the helical screen, which was spinning at about 900 RPM on a very small electric motor and then we had a video projector that we'd managed to get going at about 1,200 frames per second, and in order to create the images, which were cross sections, helical cross sections of an elephant, that was all done offline. So the way I approached that was, we used software called 3D Studio Max, which is a design software, and in that, I modeled a helix and an elephant, and I then intersected the helix with the elephant in the software, rotated the helix digitally, and then I rendered out the resultant cross-section, the boolean operation of one on the other, and this is like taking a drill and drilling a hole into the ground and looking at just a helical core sample. So really it was like a CT scan of this elephant, but just slice at a time, and then I rendered those images to a file. I wrote some software to convert it to a new video format that we had to invent to compress all that data into this high-speed image stream, and then projected that onto the helix. Now, of course, the timing of the images and the rotation of the helix were not in sync, and so much like an old CRT screen where the vertical shift is not dialed in, the elephant would drift out the top of the display and come back in the bottom, and at that point, we knew that this was all about a combination of mathematics, optics, precision, and timing. And to make it interactive, we'd have to write a real-time computer program capable of generating these images in real-time, and that was the next part of the puzzle. This was a work working prototype basically.  Gavin Smith: This was a working prototype, yeah.  How big was it?  Gavin Smith: The helix was very small. It was about five centimeters in diameter, about an inch and a half in diameter, and about an inch tall. But because the projector that we used was a Pico projector at the time, and it was about half the size of a pack of cards. This tiny little thing that we got off the internet from Texas Instruments, and you could focus it at about one centimeter away. So all those little pixels were infinitesimally small, so it was a very high-resolution display and very small, and we realized to get these number of frames per second, we'd have to take advantage of one of the most incredible pieces of engineering ever conceived, in my opinion, and that is the DLP chip from Texas Instruments invented by Larry Hornbeck who passed away several years ago, sadly, and that is an array of mirrors that is grown on a chip using photolithography, the same process as you create microchips, and that array of mirrors contains upwards of a million mirrors arranged in a two-dimensional array, and they can tilt on and off physically about 30,000 times a second. And that's called a MEMS, a microelectromechanical display or in optical terms, a spatial light modulator. So it's something that turns the light on and off at ultra-high speed, and those on-off cycles are what give us our Z-resolution on the display. So that's the slices that make up the display. Wow. So where are you at now with the company now that you've formed it and you've grown it, what's happened since that very first prototype elephant? Gavin Smith: Following that we realized that my programming skills were finite. I'd spent 10 years as a COBOL programmer in banking, and I wasn't up to the task of writing what was needed, which was a low-level graphics engine. This didn't need a mainframe, no, and we couldn't afford a mainframe, even if we wanted one. So we looked up on the internet to see who we could find in terms of programming to join the company, and there were two programmers who stood out. They were referred to as the top two programmers in the world and were John Carmack of Oculus, and then there was Ken Silverman who wrote the graphics engine for Duke Nukem back in the late 90s, so we contacted Ken. John wasn't available so we contacted Ken and demoed to him at Brown University in Rhode Island where he was working subsequently as basically a computer programmer teacher with his dad, who was the Dean of Engineering there, and Ken really liked what we were doing and his understanding of mathematics and foxholes and 3D rendering really made him think this was something he wanted to be involved in. So he joined our company as a founder and chief computer scientist, and he has led the development of the core rendering engine, which we call the Voxon Photonic engine and that's really our core IP, it's the ability to tick any 3D graphics from a third party source, from Unity, from a C program or something else, and turn it into a high speed projected image, which can be processed in such a way as to de-wrap them when they're projected, so they're the right size. We use dithering in real time to make color possible, which is similar to newsprint, CMY newsprint in the newspaper, and this all basically allows us to project images onto any type of moving surface now and do it in real-time and make applications that are much bigger and extensible so we can plug it into other programs or have people write their own programs for our displays. So you've emerged from being an R&D effort in the shed to a real company to having working prototypes and now you're an operating company with the product.  Gavin Smith: I like to say we've emerged, but I'd very much say we're still crossing the chasm, so to speak, in terms of the technology landscape. After that initial prototype, we spent many years batting our heads together, trying to work as a team in America, and eventually, Will and I decided to raise some money in Australia and set up the company there. We raised about a million and a half Australian dollars. It was about a million US dollars back in 2017, and that was enough to employ some extra engineers and business development, and an experienced COO and start working on our first product, which was the VX1. Now, the VX1 was a different type of display. We decided not to do the helix back then, and we decided to make a different type of display, and that was a reciprocating display and so we invented a way of moving a screen up and down very efficiently using resonance. It's the same I guess mechanical thing that all objects have, and that is at a certain frequency, they start vibrating if there's a driving vibration force. So the Tacoma Bridge falling down when the wind blew at the right speed was an example of when resonances destroyed something. But an opera singer, breaking a glass at the right pitch is another example of something that vibrates due to a striving force, and so we found out if we built a screen, which was mounted on springs that were of a very particular weight, and the springs were a very particular constant of Young's modulus, we could vibrate that subsystem and the screen would vibrate up and down very efficiently and very fast, fast enough that you couldn't see the screen. So that's what the VX1 became, and onto the back of that screen, we project images and those images from a swept volume, and the VX1 had a volume of about 18x18x8 cm, I think it's about 7 inches square by about 3 inches tall, and we have a single projector mounted inside of that and a computer and a ton of electronics keeps it all in sync, and we built a software API for it and a library of programs that come built into it. So it's off the shelf, you turn it on and it works. And so we built that back in 2017 and over the last five years, it's evolved into something which is very reliable and now, you can't tell them apart when they're manufactured at the start, each one might look different with hot glue and duct tape and all the rest of it. But now we have a complete digital workflow. We outsource most of the manufacture of the parts and we do final assembly software, QC, and packaging up and then ship them out to companies we've sold probably about 120 VX1s globally since 2017, and those have gone out to companies all around the world, like Sony, MIT, Harvard, CMU, Unity, BA Systems, Verizon, Erickson, a lot of companies and they've bought them and they're generally going into explorative use cases.  Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like they're going into labs as opposed to stores.  Gavin Smith: Yeah, they're not going into stores. The VX1 is really an evaluation system. It's not prime time ready for running all day long, and the reason for that is it has a vibration component to it, and also the refresh rate of the VX1 is actually variable within the volume. It's hard to explain, but the apparent volume refresh rate is 30 hertz in the middle and 15 hertz at the poles and so it has a little bit of flicker. But in a dark environment, it's really spellbinding and it's actually used in museums. There's some in Germany and a science museum there. It's been used in an art exhibition  in Paris, where the art was created by David Levine and MIT Media Lab and it's frequently used in universities and it pops up in all sorts of trade shows, and it's always a talking point and it always gathers a crowd around it, and what we like to say with the volumetric display from a marketing point of view, or really a description of what it is, it's really about creating a digital campfire. That's the kind of user experience.  It's gathering people around something intimately in a way that they can still have eye contact and maintain a conversation, and each person has their own perspective and view of the 3D data.  The scale you're describing is still quite small and that seems to be What I've experienced with, when I've seen demonstrations at the SID trade show of light field displays. They're all like the size of a soda bottle at most.  Is that a function of just the technology, you can't just make these things big? Gavin Smith: You can make them bigger, and we have since that point. The biggest display that we've made so far was one that we just delivered to BA Systems in Frimley near London, and fo that one, we've gone back to the helical display for that particular one, and it's. 46 centimeters in diameter and 8 centimeters deep. So that's about nine times the volume of the VX1. So that's a much bigger display.  Now you can, with a swept volume, you can go as big as you'd like within the realms of physics, and what I mean by that is with a rotating display, you can make the display as big as something that can rotate at a speed that's fast enough to make the medium kind of disappear. So if you think about propellers and fans, for example, I've seen pedestal fans that are a meter in diameter running faster than we run our display, and with rotating displays, it's easier to do because you have conservation of momentum and you have inertia which drives the display around, and yet you can rotate the volume as well, have it enclosed so that you're not generating airflow as a fan does.  So for example, if you have a propeller-shaped blade encased in a cylindrical enclosure, and that enclosure is spinning, then you don't get the air resistance you get with a fan and the display that we made for BA Systems is ultimately silent and flicker-free because we're running at exactly 30 hertz throughout the volume, which means you don't get flicker, but reciprocating displays, ones that go up and down, scaling them is more of a challenge because you're having to push the air out the way up and down, and as the size of the screen moving up and down gets bigger, if you're projecting from behind, for example, you also have to start considering things like the flexing of the substrate that you're projecting onto. For a front projection display where you project down from the top, we can go bigger because you can make a very lightweight, thicker screen out of exotic materials and those are materials that are very light but very stiff. Things like air gels and foamed metals, and very lightweight honeycomb structure so that way you can go bigger but we may need to move into the realms of using reduced atmospheric displays, partial vacuums, and things like that to reduce the resistance or using materials that are air permeable, such as meshes that move up and down very quickly. And we have done experiments with those and found that we can go a lot bigger.  However, with the current projection systems that we're using, you then have to increase the brightness because the brightness of the image is also stretched out through a volume. If you imagine a home cinema projector projecting 3k or 4k lumens, you have to consider that each of the images that it's projecting is pretty much evenly lit in terms of all the pixels that you're projecting. Whereas what we are doing is we are projecting these thousands of images, we're only illuminating the cross-section of every object. So we're maybe only using 1% of the available brightness of the projector at any one time, unless you project a solid slice all the way across, which is really you're building up this construct, which is how I explain it to people as it's very similar to 3D printing. If you look at how a 3D printer works, we are doing exactly the same thing, except we are printing using light instead of PLA and we're printing thousands and thousands of times faster.  In digital signage, the thing that always gets people nervous is moving parts, and that directly affects reliability and longevity. How do you address that? Gavin Smith: So the VX1 is a good example of moving parts in a display that isn't yet ready for long-running and when I say long-running, we do have it in exhibitions, but we have recently engineered it in such a way that the parts that may break or will break are the four springs that drive the machine, and those have been engineered to resonate at particular frequency. Now after several hundred million extensions of those springs, they can fatigue and they will fatigue break and that's something that we're working on, and that might be a month or three weeks of running 24/7, and so we've made those springs user replaceable. You can change them in two or three minutes for a fresh set. So it's almost like the mechanical profile of something like an Inkjet printer where you have to change the cartridge every so often. And we find with mechanical stuff, people accept mechanical things in their lives as long as the maintenance/utility ratio is at a level they can accept like bicycles, cars, and things like that. You maintain them as long as their utility outweighs the inconvenience of the repair. Now for projection equipment and things like that in digital signage, there are a lot of two-dimensional technologies that are ultra-reliable on those things, big LED panels, 2D video projectors and just lighting. You can turn them on and leave them and you should be okay. So in our rotating displays and we have another rotating display that we're working on, which we can't discuss just now cuz it's still under NDA, is part of the reason we're going down that rabbit hole or going down that design sort of path because we can make rotating displays, which are very reliable, they're effectively like a record player. You turn it on and it spins around and you could leave it and come back in three weeks and it would still be spinning around, and also a rotating display if properly manufactured within tolerances won't cause the vibration, and the vibration is really the thing that can cause the issues because vibration can lead to fatigue and failure in electrical components, electronic components, small cracks in circuits, and things like that. So from our point of view, we're going towards rotating mechanics because that ultimately allows us to make things which are reliable enough to be used in a wide range of industries including digital signage, advertising, medical imaging and gaming, and many more. In my world, there are all kinds of companies who are saying that they have holographic products of some kind or another. As somebody who's doing something that sounds very much like a hologram or close to what we thought of when we all saw Star Wars, what do you think of those things?  Gavin Smith: I don't like to be a troll, first of all on LinkedIn, and so I try to shy away from saying, look, that's rubbish. But what I try to do is politely point out how things work when it's not clear from someone's post how something might work or where it's misleading. Now if you look at the term hologram, it comes from the Greek, hólos and grammḗ, which means the whole message, and in a way, I tend to think of an actual hologram, which is created using lasers, laser interference patterns, and light beams and things like that they don't represent the whole message. Because if you take your credit card out, which is one of the few places you will see a hologram you'll notice that you can't look down on the hologram from above, you can't turn the card over and look at it from the back. They are a limited view of something, and so the term hologram has become, as you say, in popular fiction, and popular media, it's really a catchall for anything that is sci-fi 3D related, right? And it's misused, everyone calls it a hologram, and our staff sometimes call it a hologram. I like to say it's not a hologram because it has a lot more features than a hologram. Holograms have some really interesting properties, one of which is that you can cut a hologram into 10 little pieces and it turns into 10 individual little holograms, and that's a really interesting thing. But holograms from a 3D point of view don't exist in signage anywhere. They simply don't. The terminology used to describe things that you see in signage and popular media is completely misused, and I like to go through them and categorize them into different things. And those are, first of all, volumetric displays of which we're the only company in the world that's making a commercial volumetric display. There's one other company Aerial Burton, who are based in Japan that makes a volumetric display, but it's a very high-tech scientific prototype that uses lasers to explode the air and has very low resolution. And then you've got autostereoscopic 3D displays, and they broadly fit into the categories of lenticular displays which are as you probably know LCD panels, which have got a plastic lens array on them that allows you to see a left and a right image, and those left and right images can give you a stereoscopic view. I would call them stereoscopic displays because they're not 3d. You can't look at them from any direction and they don't physically occupy three-dimensional euclidean space, which is what the real world is, and those types of displays come in different formats. So you get some with just horizontal parallax, which means you can move your head left and right and see a number of distinct views. You've got some that you can move up and down as well, and also get a little bit of vertical parallax as well, and there's probably five or six companies doing those sorts of displays. You've got Looking Glass, Lightfield Labs, Acer, and Sodium, so that area can grow. The physical size of those displays can get bigger, but the bigger they get, the harder it is to move further away because you're pupil distance means it's harder to get a 3D view, and also with any display like that, the 3D image that you see because it's the result of you seeing two independent images with your left and right eye, that 3D image can never leave the bounds or the window of the display, and that's something in advertising, which is very misused a lot, they show a 2D monitor with the image leaping out beyond the border of the monitor, and that just can't happen. That breaks the laws of physics, and so that's the kind of three auto stereoscopic 3D landscapes, and it's hard to say that autostereoscopic, 3D display because people zone out and they go, is it a hologram? And no it's not.  The other types of 3D that are popular just now are obviously, glasses-based display, AR, VR, mixed-reality, and we don't really, we don't really mind about that or care about that because it's something you have to put something on your head, and that's our different thing really. So those offer you an immersive experience where you go down a rabbit hole and you're in another world and that's not what we are about. And then you've got the fake 3D displays, which are not 3D stereoscopically but appear that way, and that's where I get slightly annoyed by those displays, but I understand there are people making types of signage I guess you would say, that is perfectly suitable for a scenario and those are things like Pepper's ghost which is when you reflect a 2D image off a big piece of glass or plexiglass, and that's the pepper, the famous one, the Tupac hologram at Coachella. I met the guy and spoke to him. He's a really lovely guy and I had a good chat about that, and he knows full well that it's an illusion, but it's the illusion that Disneyland has been using for many years, and it's a perfectly good illusion for a seated studio audience because they see someone on stage and they're doing it now with the, I think the ABBA Show in London is a similar type of setup.  They call them holograms, but it's a 2D picture that's far enough away that you can be made to believe that it's three-dimensional and it might exist at different levels like a diorama. You could have a stack of images, on fly screens or whatever, that appear to be layered, but ultimately they are 2D, and then the one that's come out recently, which causes probably the most amount of confusion for people are the anamorphic projections on large billboards, and everyone's seen these displays on LinkedIn and YouTube, and they tend to appear on large curved billboards in parts of China where the rental of the billboards is sufficiently cheap as you can put these big images up there, film them from one particular spot in 2d, and then put that on LinkedIn and have people comment on it and say, wow, that's an amazing hologram. Even though a) they haven't seen this in real life and b) it's not a hologram and it's not even three-dimensional. It's a perspective-based 2D trick, and so one of our challenges is expectation management, and that is people see large-scale fake 2D images, and fake 3D images and then they conclude that it must be possible and they want to buy one, and then when they see yours they go, oh, it's much smaller than I imagined, and you feel like saying, it's real. It's actually based on science, and you could walk around it. And that's the challenge we're at just now. Trying to move away from this feeling that you have to have the biggest display in the world for it to be valid, and a lot of the business for us and a lot of the inquiries we get are from the likes of the Middle East, where they want to build very big, very impressive, very bright, very colorful displays and they say, we want a hologram that will fit in a football stadium and fly around in the sky, and you have to say well, that's great, but that's also impossible using anything that's even imaginable today, let alone physically achievable, and so yeah, we are very much a case of trying to be as honest as we can with the limitations, but also with the opportunities because regardless of the fact that our technology is relatively small compared to large screen billboards, we have got the ability to create sci-fi-inspired interactive displays that you can put in personal spaces, in museums, in galleries, in shopping centers, and they really do look like something up close under scrutiny that you might see in a Marvel movie, and that's the kind of relationship we're trying to find with other companies as well. There are other types of the display as well. You probably talked to Daniel about some of his displays, which are levitating grains of dust and things like that, and the challenge I have with them is yes, you can make a 3D image, but you have to look at how long it takes to make that 3D image and they're really more akin to painting with light. It's long-exposure photography. You have to manipulate something and move it around over a long period of time to bring it, to build a single image, and scaling those types of displays is impossible. It's the same with laser-based displays, whenever you're moving a single dot around, you run out of resolution extraordinarily fast because it's a linear thing, and even with Aerial Burton exploding the air with a laser they can only do about 1000 or 2000 dots every second, and that breaks down to being able to draw maybe a very simple two-dimensional shape whereas to draw a detailed image, an elephant or anything like that, that we've displayed in the past, it requires upwards of 30 or 40 million dots a second to do that with each image, each volume contains millions of dots.  Where do you see this going in, let's say, five years from now? And are you at that point selling products or are you licensing the technology to larger display manufacturers? Or something else? Gavin Smith: So at the moment what we're doing is we're looking for projects that we can scale and one of the first projects that we're working on just now and the technology can be applied to a range of different industries. As you can imagine, any new display technology. You could use it for CT scans, you could use it for advertising, for point of sale, for a whole lot of different things. But you have to choose those projects early on when the technology is immature, and that is low-hanging fruit if you want to use that term, and so our low-hanging freight at the moment, we believe is in the entertainment industry, digital out-of-home entertainment to be specific, which is the likes of video gaming and entertainment venues, and so 2018, we were in the Tokyo Game Show with one of our machines, and we were situated next to Taito at the company that made Space Invaders, and their board came across their senior members and they played with our technology and they really liked it. And so we entered into a conversation with them and over several years, we have built a Space invaders arcade machine called Next Dimension, and that's using our rotating volumetric display with three projectors each running at 4,000 frames per second and a large rotating volume, and we've written a new Space Invaders arcade game and Taito has granted us the license to bring that to market. In order to do that, we're now doing commercial testing and technical testing which involves taking the technology into venues, play testing it and getting feedback from the venues on the suitability of the game and the profitability of it as a product. So with that game, our plan is to follow in the footsteps of the previous Space Invader game, which was called Frenzy made by Roth Rolls. It sold 3000 or 4000 units globally. So if you could do that, it would be a profitable first venture in terms of bringing technology to market, and at the moment, we're looking to raise some capital. We need to raise $2-3 million USD to do the design from the manufacturer for that and build the first batch of machines which would be rolled out globally.  Now, that's really seen for us as a launch of technology using the IP of Space Invaders as a carrier, a launch vehicle for the technology, but once launched and once our technology is widely known and understood, what we then plan to do is build our own revenue generating model and technology platform that can be deployed to venues around the world who can use this as a kind of an entertainment device where you can run different IP on it from different vendors and do a sort of profit share with the venue owners. So a cinema, Chucke CheeseB, Dave & Busters, those types of venues, as well as bowling alleys, VR arcades, and all those types of entertainment venues that currently is starting to grow in strength, largely because people are now looking for entertainment experiences, not necessarily just staying at home.  COVID obviously threw a curve ball our way as well. When our Space Invaders machine was sent to Japan for testing, COVID had just happened so it went into internal testing within Taito, and then Square Enix who owns Taito, their parent company decreed that Taito would no longer manufacture arcade machines but would license their IP only so that kind of threw a spanner in the works and they've come back to us and said, we'd love the game, but we want you to bring it to market, not us. So that's one thing we're working on just now. There's a video of Space Invaders: Next Dimension on YouTube that you can look at, and it's a really fun experience because it's a four-player game. We've added the volumetric nature. You can fly up and down during sub-games. You can bump your next-door neighbor with your spaceship and get a power-up. It really is for us a way of saying, look, this is a new way, it's a new palette of which to make new gaming experiences and the future is really up to the imaginations of people writing software.  All right. That was super interesting. I learned a lot there and some of it is, as often the case, I understood as well. Gavin Smith: That's great. I'm glad you understand. It is a hard thing to wrap your head around, especially for us trying to demonstrate the nature of the technology in 2D YouTube videos and LinkedIn videos, and you really have to see it with your own eyes to understand it, and that's why this week I was over for a meeting with BA Systems, but I took the opportunity to spend several days in London at a film Studio in SoHo, in London, the owners very gratefully let me have a demonstration group there, and I spent two days last week demonstrating the product to ten or so companies come in and see the technology, and it's only then when they really start to get their creative juices flowing and that's where POCs projects kick-off.  So that's what we're looking for just now, are companies that have imaginative people and they have a need for creating some new interactive media that can be symbiotic with their existing VR and AR metaverse type stuff. But really something that's designed for people up close and personal, intimate experiences.  If people want to get in touch, where do they find you online?  Gavin Smith: So we have a website, which is just www.voxon.co. Voxon Photonics is our Australian company name, and you can find us on LinkedIn. Actually, my own personal LinkedIn is generally where I post most stuff. That's Gavin Smith on LinkedIn, you can look me up there around, and then we have the Voxon Photonics LinkedIn page and we're on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube as well. We have a lot of videos on YouTube. That's a good place to start. But if you wanna get in touch, contact us via Voxon.co. Drop us an email and we'll be happy to have a meeting and a video call.  All right, Gavin, thank you so much for spending some time with me.  Gavin Smith: My pleasure. Thanks very much for having me.

KP chats with worship leader and artist Keith Elgin about finding your identity in the quiet place, the power of connection, and whether or not you should run tracks in your worship service.  Connect with Keith: Web - www.keithelgin.com Music - https://open.spotify.com/artist/0nFhlrZyfZu8WDD2Hd19mm Alive Church - https://open.spotify.com/artist/7IDVfUdpqxp8MtIca8tZd1 Instagram - @keithelgin To learn more about Kurtis' book Worshipology: www.worshipologybook.com or www.kurtisparks.com 

Erick Godsey's newsletter Feasting Friday Free mini-course Secrets of the Seven Stars at ancientastrology.org Emotion Code and heart wall Dark Pixie astrology newsletter Affiliate link for tickets to the Ecstatic Forest Festival in Elgin, TX April 19-23, 2023: https://uniquemindfulevents.com/ref/aprilp/ Ways to Connect with April: Instagram: @thesandboxpod and @april.the.poet TikTok: @aprilific Website to book readings or browse offerings (dream interpretation, card readings, etc.): aprilific.com YouTube channel: @thesandboxpod Patreon: patreon.com/aprilific For book lovers, my novelette Sandra: A Healing Reimagining of the Babysitter from Hell is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. (includes Kindle and Audible). By becoming a patron at patreon.com/aprilific.com, not only will you be supporting this podcast but you'll receive patron-only exclusives. My mission is for you to feel that your gift of $5/month is more than reciprocated by what you get from it. Give it a try? There's no commitment. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thesandboxpod/message

City of Mansfield financial picture improves as final budget nears approval: https://www.richlandsource.com/business/community_development/city-of-mansfield-financial-picture-improves-as-final-budget-nears-approval/article_123e3d5a-bd57-11ed-9133-ab7fabcfbffa.html JC Elgin Co., LPA assists those through the bankruptcy process with compassion and efficiency: https://www.richlandsource.com/business/jc-elgin-co-lpa-assists-those-through-the-bankruptcy-process-with-compassion-and-efficiency/article_f44e3b76-85fa-11ed-9562-cf164eb0720d.html Today – The City of Mansfield financial picture improves as the final budget nears approval.Support the show: https://www.sourcemembers.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark Mazower asks: did the Ottomans preserve the Parthenon and Elgin wreck it?https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/who-saved-the-parthenon-william-st-clair-book-review-mark-mazower/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ashland County Jail trying to keep its population numbers under control: https://www.richlandsource.com/news/ashland-county-jail-trying-to-keep-its-population-numbers-under-control/article_c6155c08-7fc8-5428-acb0-021c776c7dec.html JC Elgin Co., LPA assists those through the bankruptcy process with compassion and efficiency: https://www.richlandsource.com/business/jc-elgin-co-lpa-assists-those-through-the-bankruptcy-process-with-compassion-and-efficiency/article_f44e3b76-85fa-11ed-9562-cf164eb0720d.html Today – The Ashland County Jail has asked law enforcement partners throughout the county to re-evaluate whether offenders should be jailed or not.Support the show: https://www.sourcemembers.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Elgin Mayor Dave Kaptain joins Lisa Dent to explain why he and several other suburban mayors are concerned about a merger of Canadian Pacific Railway and Kansas City Southern Railway and wants federal regulators to take another look at the merger. Follow The Lisa Dent Show on Twitter:Follow @LisaDentSpeaksFollow @SteveBertrand Follow @kpowell720 Follow @maryvandeveldeFollow @LaurenLapka

Leslie and Colleen give a short update on April's case, the efforts in Oklahoma to bring justice to survivors, and the activities happening in Oklahoma next week to support HB 1639, a bill that will help people who were victims of domestic violence at the time of their crime get sentencing relief.     ______ TRANSCRIPTION SPEAKERS Colleen McCarty, Leslie Briggs   Leslie Briggs  00:17 Hey, Colleen.   Colleen McCarty  00:18 Hey Leslie,   Leslie Briggs  00:19 welcome back to the studio.   Colleen McCarty  00:21 I'm so glad to be back here. Bison & Bean with you.   Leslie Briggs  00:25 It's been too long.   Colleen McCarty  00:26 It's been a wild ride,   Leslie Briggs  00:28 guys, we have updates.   Colleen McCarty  00:30 We have so many updates. We never sleep. So   Leslie Briggs  00:34 we do not sleep. It's gnarly. I'm so tired.   Colleen McCarty  00:38 We don't wish this on you. But we're happy to give you all the updates and all the work we've been doing for the last six months since we wrapped our last episode of panic button. The April Wilkins case. Yeah. What's been happening?   Leslie Briggs  00:51 Well, I came to work for you. Oh, that's   Colleen McCarty  00:53 right. Pretty sweet. That   Leslie Briggs  00:56 happened a little while ago. So yeah, I'm the new legal director at OK Appleseed, the nonprofit that puts on the panic button podcast. What do you do at Oklahoma Appleseed, Lesley. Well, I try to execute your vision. protect the rights of every Oklahoman. We're doing a lot of cool stuff. Really.   Colleen McCarty  01:14 Oh my gosh, I know every day I wake up and I'm like, I can't believe I get to do this for a job. And   Leslie Briggs  01:19 me too. I love it so much. Yeah, chaotic, and awesome. Just like us just like just a good time, dude,   Colleen McCarty  01:28 seriously, we strive for a good time. And seeking justice at the same time. Right. And so in service of seeking justice, we we did this big story about April's case that all of you have heard and I hope it has lit a fire under you because it lit a fire under us. And in service of seeking justice for her. We wrote what's called a post conviction relief application. And I'm going to let Leslie talk to you about what that means and and how we're trying to help her get out of prison.   Leslie Briggs  01:57 Yeah, we actually wound up doing that throughout the fall before I came on full time with OK Appleseed. And it's based on new evidence that we uncovered. And we believe that evidence warrants a new trial, or a vacation or sentence, or modification to time served. And that's what we've asked the court to do. We were we lost at the district court, you can go and read all of the pleadings online if you're a legal nerd, or you just want to know more about what the evidence was that we found, but it's currently on appeal. We appealed that district court decision to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. And if we lose there, we're going to take it all the way to the top.   Colleen McCarty  02:39 How long does it usually take to hear back from the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals?   Leslie Briggs  02:43 Oh, I mean, I don't know what the what an average time is, but probably several months, I imagine will be on appeal through the summer at least. And then maybe have a decision at the end of the summer.   Colleen McCarty  02:55 Have you talked to April about how she's feeling about all of this?   Leslie Briggs  02:59 I think April, I mean, April has been through every possible legal hurdle, multiple times. I mean, she has this is her third post conviction relief application. And she's been through the appellate process before so April kind of knows how to temper expectations and just see what happens more than anything, though. I think April is extremely motivated and excited about the other work we've been doing, which I'm hoping you'll ever give everyone an update about which is our legislative push to change the system.   Colleen McCarty  03:32 Yeah, so the nice thing about Oklahoma Appleseed is that we work across multiple sectors of the legal system. So we have been working on multiple fronts to bring justice to April and people like her. That's one of the nice things about the Appleseed model is we work on multiple fronts of the legal system. So we can work in the courts for direct advocacy. But then we also work at the legislative level, and the legal research level and the community organizing level and this project with April and criminalized survivorship in Oklahoma has kind of touched all four of those areas in different ways. We were really trying to think outside the box about how we could help April but not just her but everyone in her situation. And we started looking around the country to see what other folks have been doing. And we found this big group in New York that passed a bill called the domestic violence survivor Justice Act, and that has helped several people since it was passed in 2019. Essentially, people who are in prison who can show proof that they were abused at the time of their crime and that the abuse was substantially related to the crime can apply to their sentencing court and receive sentencing relief or a lower sentence. So we thought about how we could make that something that was really made for Oklahomans by Oklahomans. And we worked with a bunch of groups here in Oklahoma to sort of figure out what survivors need. And we also got several survey responses from over 100 survivors and an Oklahoma prison here where April is called Mabel Bassett. And we've started to put together really what these experiences look like, and how these people are being prosecuted for crimes that stem from their survivorship. And we worked together to come up with some language that we thought would formulate a nice law change here in Oklahoma that would give a lot of these people sentencing relief, but then would also provide a mitigation procedure for people who are currently being prosecuted that can show they can show in a sentencing hearing any evidence that they have of their abuse and get a shorter sentence on the front end of the system, too. So it's not just a retroactive reform, it will do both things which we were pretty excited about putting this together back in the fall, and we were not sure where it was going to go. And then we heard back from a Republican legislator in Oklahoma named Toni Hasenbeck, who's from Elgin, Oklahoma, and she is a fierce champion for women's rights. And she was very disturbed by some of the stories that we were hearing from survivors in prison. And she agreed to author this bill for us.   Leslie Briggs  06:22 So Bill have a number. The bill does have finally   Colleen McCarty  06:24 has a number. It's HB 1639. It's starting in the Oklahoma House of Representatives. And it will be traveling through it's been introduced, and it has language and we expect it to be heard in committee. Next Wednesday, which is the 28th of February, the year of our Lord 2023. At 10:30am. In the rotunda   Leslie Briggs  06:49 Be there or be square. Yeah, right. Yes. We want you to come join us. We have we're doing a ton of stuff at the Capitol next week in celebration and advocacy of this monumental and historic effort that Rep. Hasenbeck is undertaking and Colleen's gonna give you some of those deets.   Colleen McCarty  07:08 Yeah, so we'd love to see anyone who's in the Oklahoma City area next week. We have two capital days that volunteers are free to come and meet us in the Supreme Court hallway. We will have water and snacks and talking points and anything you will need to be prepared to speak to your legislators. That date is February 27. We will start advocating at nine and probably be there all day until five. There's a bus leaving from Tulsa, Oklahoma from OSU Tulsa downtown. That will leave at 830 and arrive to the Capitol at about 10 and leave the Capitol at about three and be back by 430 to make sure everyone can pick up their kids and things like that. So if you need a ride, do not hesitate to hop on the just bus just bus I named it myself if I'm really proud of it.   Leslie Briggs  08:05 Oh man,   Colleen McCarty  08:06 just bus or bust.   Leslie Briggs  08:10 Say that three times. Dude, that just bus bust just bear in Tulsa. You do not want to miss that just but   Colleen McCarty  08:21 I feel like we're gonna I'm gonna set everybody up with a playlist and it's gonna be fire so far. So get on the bus or don't drive your ass down there.   Leslie Briggs  08:30 I don't care. We want to see you there, though.   Colleen McCarty  08:32 We want to see all of your faces, even if it's like, I'm just here because I listen to the podcast. I don't care. I want you there.   Leslie Briggs  08:38 Yeah, we want you there. We think that I mean, just to support this bill to support what rep Hasselbeck is trying to achieve. For survivors of domestic violence in the state of Oklahoma. It's I mean, it's historic. It's something that we need   Colleen McCarty  08:52 it is we just found out that the 2020 numbers showed that more women in Oklahoma are killed by their partners than any other state except one. So we're second in the nation for the number of women being killed by their intimate partners. But then we also know on the flip side, when those survivors rarely are the ones that live in an altercation like that. They're getting life and 30 years and 40 years in prison. And it's not a rare situation.   Leslie Briggs  09:19 Yeah. Which is actually kind of a good segue. But it's a good segue into   Colleen McCarty  09:25 our teaser, we're previewing also today this season two for   Leslie Briggs  09:31 season two, panic button, season two. Should we say the title?   Colleen McCarty  09:35 Yeah, we should say the title. That's a good title.   Leslie Briggs  09:38 Operation Wildfire.   Colleen McCarty  09:40 Yep. Panic Button. Season two Operation Wildfire. We can't spoiler you tonight about why it's called that.   Leslie Briggs  09:47 No sport. Yeah, no, absolutely no spoilers, but we'll just say this that like the question. I think that season two is going to be exploring is a lot of people. Plenty of people We'll have rightly asked, Why didn't April just leave? Like, I think that that's not an a strange question to wonder? Like, why didn't April just get out and get away? And so season two, I think is gonna we're gonna really get to explore what happens when they when someone does. What happens when someone gets away? Yeah. What happens to the abuser? What happens to that person? And   Colleen McCarty  10:25 yeah, I also think it speaks to what happens when people band together to try to stop a violent person. Yeah. And the power in that but also the questions that that kind of like causes   Leslie Briggs  10:43 the obstacles, the challenges and then yeah, like the I think yeah, questions about tactics, questions about results, questions about, I think systemic. I guess failings is the word. But it doesn't seem to really do it justice. It's more like systemic. Like I'm thinking of, well, my sink is broken right now. So it's like, clogs, right? And like the way that the system is just clogged and can't function and you can't get get get the water through to the pipes on the down on this metaphor. It's working. With all these hand motions of sink troubles right now, what's top of mind. But   Colleen McCarty  11:26 I think also, it's just like, this is gonna sound like a rant. But for the majority of human history, people were just killing each other, and there were no consequences. Then we had a little bit of human history where the only consequences for any wrongdoing were death, and everyone's getting killed. And then it was like, Okay, well, we can't kill everybody. So let's wind that back a little bit, and just put people in prison for a really long time. But now, we're to this point where it's like, the only real violence at mass scale that happens in our society is violence against women. And there's really Yeah.   Leslie Briggs  12:08 What about like mass shootings?   Colleen McCarty  12:10 I mean, sure, that is a totally different crime type than what we're talking. Yeah. Yeah. Like a domestic violence call is made every second in America,   Leslie Briggs  12:22 right? I mean, we've seen the data here in Oklahoma, and Oklahoma City, our largest metropolitan area. Yeah. So   Colleen McCarty  12:28 43,000 domestic violence calls made in 2021. And less than 1000 of those lead to arrest. And so it just starts to ask this question about like, this is the most prevalent type of violence that the system is the most bad at responding to   Leslie Briggs  12:46 that I agree with wholeheartedly. Like this violence is so prevalent, and our system doesn't effectively curtail it, or really even punish it, which it's a punitive system. I mean, if it does nothing, well, it punishes people. Well. Yeah, that's this,   Colleen McCarty  13:06 but not this. And then it's like, there are just so many ways to get away with it. Right. And the people who know how to get away with it, get away with really get away with it so much, really get away with it. And it's startling, it really is because like I come from criminal justice reform, where everyone's getting punished for every goddamn thing. Yeah. Yeah. And we're trying to stop people for getting punished as much as they are. Yeah. And then walking into this world of domestic violence advocacy and victims advocacy and saying,   Leslie Briggs  13:44 This is so warped way. So warped, yeah. Like, it's not capturing the right bad actors at the right moment.   Colleen McCarty  13:53 No, and it's not preventing any violence. No, it's actually like, allowing, we talked about this with April's case. But it's allowing these cycles of violence to like, expand and expand and expound because, you know, if you talk to people who work in trauma, or people who try to heal trauma, they will tell you that subconsciously or subconscious wounds are acting themselves out until something happens to cause you to heal it. And if you just keep not getting held accountable. Yeah, it just keeps getting like louder and bigger and more people getting hurt.   Leslie Briggs  14:30 Yeah, more chaotic more untethered. I think and those themes are going to be coming through in season two. Certainly.   Colleen McCarty  14:37 Yes, but you are going to meet some really fun character. So too.   Leslie Briggs  14:40 Yeah. And it's another Oklahoma based story. So we're, we're excited. We're in the research phase. We have two excellent, top notch interns that are plugging away getting us all the details and so they are basically legal research superheroes. I think I called them or Swiss Army Knife interns the other day. I love that they do everything for us there like, I mean, I will message either one of them at like 5pm It'd be like, I need this thing and I'm sorry. It will be like 615 They're like it's done.   Colleen McCarty  15:11 It's done. It's in the file.   Leslie Briggs  15:12 It's good. Love it. So excellent. So shout out. Alison cat. You guys are true heroes.   Colleen McCarty  15:18 Yes. So we don't want to take too much more of your time because we want you to start preparing to come to the Capitol with us next week. There's two days you can do that you can do that Monday the 27th or Thursday, the second we will be conducting community art projects and bringing people together and speaking to the survivor experience in Oklahoma. So we hope you will join us and stay tuned for season two of panic button.   Leslie Briggs  15:47 Operation Wildfire.   Colleen McCarty  15:54 Panic Button is a co production of Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice and Leslie bricks. We're your hosts Colleen McCarty and Leslie Briggs. Our theme music is velvet rope by Guillaume the production team is Lesley Briggs and rusty row were recorded at Bison and be in studio in Tulsa. Special thanks to Lynn Worley, Amanda Ross and Ashlyn Faulkner for their work on this case. If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, use a safe computer and contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at the hotline.org or call 1-800-799-7233 help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Follow us at Oka underscore Appleseed across all social platforms. You can subscribe right now in the Apple podcasts app by clicking on our podcasts logo and then hit the subscribe button. If you want to continue the conversation with other listeners, please join our panic button podcast community on book clubs. Join for free at BIT dot L y slash three in our H O eight. See. Thanks so much for listening

We continue the South Africa Winemaker series today in the company of Richard Kershaw MW of Richard Kershaw Wines (00:00:08) Episode intro (00:01:10) Richard Kershaw MW Origin Story South Africa winemaking overview  Elgin Geography Geology Deep Dive Apples in Elgin and Influence on Grape Production Keershaw Sourcing Policy Winemaking Philosophy and Cellar Decisions If you know someone who would enjoy this episode please share the direct link: www.interpretingwine.com/507 If you really enjoyed it please leave the episode an iTunes review on the same link. Thanks!

Lora DeVore is the author of Darkness Was My Candle. This profound and compelling memoir traces her life as a survivor of child abuse, sex trafficking, illegal pharmacological drug research, and institutional abuse. Now she devotes herself to spreading the word on these atrocities with this personal documentation of her story. With an advanced degree in clinical psychology and recognized as a national expert and catalyst for change, she has witnessed how stories shift consciousness around the world. Her wisdom comes from the field of psychology, transpersonal development, and spiritual psychology. Lora's story is ultimately one of hope and healing, that we believe you will find as powerful and inspiring as we do. However, we do want to let you know that portions of the content of today's show may be emotionally challenging for some of our listeners. Please be aware that this episode contains discussions about sexual assault, abuse, self-harm and suicide at times during the conversation. We just want to empower you, our audience, with the knowledge you need to decide how and if you would like to listen to this podcast content. Learn more about Lora. Learn more about The Passionistas Project.   In This Episode: [01:37] Lora DeVore on what she is most passionate about [02:30] Lora DeVore on her early childhood [15:34] Lora DeVore on her college experience and Elgin State Hospital [24:25] Lora DeVore on her time after Elgin State Hospital [25:15] Lora DeVore on how she became a therapist [27:38] Lora DeVore on her book's inspiration and process [31:47] Lora DeVore on her book's message to survivors [35:00] Lora DeVore on her advice to her younger self [35:27] Lora DeVore on her dream for women [36:22] Lora DeVore on her secret to a rewarding life [39:57] Lora DeVore on her mantra [42:58] Lora DeVore on how it feels to be an angel for others [43:25] Lora DeVore on the story behind her book title   FULL TRANSCRIPT: Passionistas: Hi, we're sisters, Amy and Nancy Harrington, the founders of The Passionista Project Podcast, where we give women a platform to tell their own unfiltered stories. On every episode, we discuss the unique ways in which each woman is following her passions, talk about how she defines success and explore her path to breaking down the barriers that women too often face.  Today, we'll be talking with Lora DeVore, the author of “Darkness Was My Candle.” This profound and compelling memoir traces her life as a survivor of child abuse, sex trafficking, illegal pharmacological drug research, and institutional abuse. Now she devotes herself to spreading the word on these atrocities with this personal documentation of her story. With an advanced degree in clinical psychology and recognized as a national expert and catalyst for change, she has witnessed how stories shift consciousness around the world. Her wisdom comes from the field of psychology, transpersonal development, and spiritual psychology. Lora's story is ultimately one of hope and healing, that we believe you will find as powerful and inspiring as we do. However, we do want to let you know that portions of the content of today's show may be emotionally challenging for some of our listeners. Please be aware that this episode contains discussions about sexual assault, abuse, self-harm and suicide at times during the conversation. We just want to empower you, our audience, with the knowledge you need to decide how and if you would like to listen to this podcast content. So please welcome, Lora DeVore. Lora, what's the one thing you're most passionate about? Lora: I am passionate about love. I think that's the only thing that's going to save the planet and save us as human beings. And I, I've been passionate about love and trying to learn everything I could about it since I was 9 years old when a neighbor named Dale was the first person who ever said they loved me. And it literally came alive in my body and I had this profound aha and thought that's why I was born, to learn how to experience and take in and feel this thing called love and more importantly, learn how to give it, and it really, really changed the course of my life. I think I was on a trajectory where I would've ended up dead because my life was so miserable prior to that, that interaction. Passionistas: Can you talk a little bit about your life leading up to that and how that moment happened? Lora: Sure. I was born from an unwed mother. There's a good possibility that my uncle was my father and we actually lived with him. And I called him daddy when I was 3. And he shot, he had come back from World War II very wounded, and he shot himself one day in front of my mother and I, and my mother went berserk and blamed me for some reason, or at least that's my, what I took in my memory of it and then threw me upstairs—I was still in a crib at the time, but the side rail was down—and left the house. This was in northern Wisconsin and I had a profound experience during the days that I was alone. I got out of the bed at one point because I was so hungry and I went looking for food and luckily I found a loaf of bread on the table. And my uncle's body had been removed. My aunt had come over to give them a piece of my piece of her mind because we hadn't shown up for dinner, and there was a storm that had started up and she saw the dead body, called the sheriff, went halfway up the stairs, but didn't go all the way up, just went halfway up, calling for my mother and assumed that Clinton and my mother had had a fight, my mother had left with me. And it wasn't till 3 days later that my mother staggered in drunk to the memorial service and they then rushed back to the house because my mother had no idea where she'd left me. And what happened is I tried to open the door and a drift of snow came in. I remember sitting on the floor just sobbing and sucking my thumb. And the wind is blowing in because now it's blizzard weather we're, it's, we are literally having a blizzard. So this huge drift of snow blew in. And I could neither close the door nor could I fully open it. And had I been able to fully open it, I'm sure I would've died. I would've frozen to death, but I couldn't get out. And as I'm sitting there, an ethereal present appeared to me that I've never forgotten. And she was very specific. She told me to go back upstairs on my bottom, sitting backwards so I wouldn't fall and get back into my bed and cover up. And that became the foundation of my life and it opened something in me that has stayed open my entire life. But life was very hard. My mother disappeared out of my life for a couple years after that, and I lived with an aunt and my grandmother. And then my mother eventually came back and said she was moving me to St. Louis, had a horrible fight with my aunt and said she was taking me to my real daddy. And so she married a man named Bud, and I doubt if he was my real father. But they were seldom together. There was a lot of domestic violence. There was a lot of drug use. She would prostitute and then he'd get mad at her and beat her up. And so there was a lot of violence. And when I was 9, she sold me for the first time to a man. At that point, Bud was out of our lives and that's what she was doing is primarily prostitution and primarily at Army and Navy bases nearby. And, you know, before I go on, I just want to say my mother had a horrible traumatic history that I won't go into, but I do cover in the book. So I have tremendous compassion for my mother. And when she died, I felt grief for a woman who'd never had a life, who'd never really lived a life. But by age 9, I'd had my first suicide attempt shortly after she sold me to this man. And I couldn't figure out why anybody would possibly want to be here. I didn't know any adults that liked children or that were really nice to children. My guess is my aunt was nice to me, but I, you know, had pretty much forgotten that, it was so eclipsed by the day in day out trauma. And my mother truly, at that point in my life, hated me and was resentful, and frequently told me to get out of her sight. She couldn't stand looking at me, and so I pretty much raised myself and ran wild. One of the things that was lifesaving is one day I heard church music coming out of the local Catholic church, and I wandered into the church, and the choir was rehearsing up in the balcony, and I just had this need to get as close to the music as I could. So I went and sat in the stairwell, and I felt like God was raining down on my head. And after that, I went to all three churches in town. So I knew when the Methodist had choir rehearsal, and I knew when the Catholics did, and when the Lutherans did, and there was something related to transcendence and being able to get out of that psychological space I lived in. It took me to another place that I think helped keep me going. And then at age 9 I, as I said, I had my first suicide attempt. And an upstairs neighbor who'd only lived there briefly, and after an accident one day when I'd fallen through the window when some kids were teasing me, her husband had gone to the hardware store and put in a new window while she cleaned everything up. And they knew that I'd been taken to the emergency room, which was only a block away because they saw the trail of blood up there. And when I got home, her husband had finished putting in a new window and said I should go upstairs, that his wife Dale was waiting for me and had made lunch and made chocolate chip cookies. And she was the first nice adult I ever knew. And she was only there for about another month, maybe at the most, but she'd come looking for me if I was alone and I was, by then, I was frequently left alone and frequently left alone without food. And she was kind to me repeatedly. I still have the key that she gave me, that she called the ‘just in case' key, in case I got scared and wanted to come up and sleep on their couch. And I never did because I was afraid my mother would beat me if I did. But the day she was moving away, I fell apart and begged her not to leave. And she pulled me into her arms and kept rubbing my back and saying I was a good girl and that she loved me. And she made me sit up and look her in the eyes, and traumatized kids have trouble looking people directly in the eyes. But she made me look and she said she had something really important to say. And she said, “I love you, and I would take you with me if you were mine, but you're not.” And she told me that I needed to learn to take better care of myself because my mother was too sick and couldn't care for me, which gave me a huge message. And then she made me promise that I'd reach out to others. And love came alive and a mission. So I started carrying groceries home for people without money and started raking leaves and shoveling snow, and just trying to be kind at that age, which created a whole other parallel universe than the universe I was living in. So that's how that happened. I was eventually taken away from my mother at age 13 after another very violent suicide attempt. We had been court ordered by then to see a psychiatrist who was moonlighting. He worked at a, he was from a local naval base and he essentially became my mom's pimp and was a child molester and pornographer. And that totally broke my spirit in unspeakable ways. And that's what led to the huge suicide attempt. So after that suicide attempt, I probably would have attempted again, if not for a very kind nun at the, I was in a Catholic hospital named Sister Sebastian. And the story of my life, it, it's, yes, it's of darkness and horror, but it's as much about light. It's about the right people coming into my life at exactly the right time. Like Sister Sebastian, who had been in the military, she had been a WAAC in women's armed forces in World War II, and I was a candy striper at that hospital, so she'd gotten to know me pretty well. But she actually told me that she had been raped in the military and that I could survive this and that I would find a new way of living. Which I thought was tremendously courageous of her and so authentic to try to give me hope. And she told me there'd been a time when she was without hope. And then it was at that point that I was taken away from my mother. And then I lived in a number of placements. This was pre Child Protection years. And I was a really good kid. I had poor self-concept, but I was like a chameleon. I would do anything to get people to like me. And so that they'd keep me. And so there was a failure, not because I was doing anything wrong, but from one situation after another. So there were many placements. And then my senior year in high school, I ended up having a lot of problems again, and I ended up having a suicide attempt after prom after I was raped at prom. A prom I didn't want to go to, but the foster parents made me go with a friend of their son. Now I, you know, and I knew pretty quickly why no one had wanted to go with him and was too afraid to tell them, and so my old default was, I can just kill myself. So I ended up in the county hospital. And the court worker decided she was going to send me back to my mother and nothing had changed. So she sold me to some guy the first night I was there, and I learned that I was capable of murder. And it's amazing that I did not kill her and him that night. He was passed out drunk, but there was a billy club, which is a metal object that's wrapped with leather around it. And I don't know why. I don't know if he was a bouncer in a bar or who he was. I'd seen them before, and they were pretty popular back then. Policeman used him as well. I don't think he was a policeman. And after he'd raped me, I got out of the bed and I picked it up, and my mother had lived in a kitchen at apartment and was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette and drinking beer and had watched it, and I was going to bash him in the head. And I knew if I started, I'd kill my mother. So I threw it down and grabbed my clothes and got dressed in the hallway and walked around town all night, and then had a very serious suicide attempt and woke up, I don't know, a week or more later in the county hospital again. And the court worker again came in and she said, “You're not going to manipulate me, young lady. You're going back to your mother's whether you like it or not.” And the medical director of the county hospital came into my room one day, and I had pulled out all the IV tubing and tried to strangle myself after the court worker had left. And he said, “I want to get you outta this bed, but you have to promise you won't run away. And I've come up with a little plan. My nurses tell me you're a bright girl and are supposed to graduate, you know, couple scholarships to college, but I'm afraid that's not going to happen if we don't get you out of here.” So I agreed and he told me his nurse Connie was going to be joining me or joining us, and so he got me out of the bed and we walked up and down the halls a little bit, and then he told me his plan. And it was, if I could pull myself together and bring in my graduation certificate, he would hire me as a nursing assistant. That summer there were cottages out in back of the county hospital. It had once been a TB sanitarium. He said I could live rent free that summer out there. And that's what kept me going. So the day I got out of the hospital and the court worker took me back to my mother's, she just dumped me outside in front of her apartment building. So I grabbed the bag of stuff I had and put it in a locker at the bus station and then was homeless for a month. And what kept me going is that promise. And the day that I graduated and took my graduation certificate to the hospital—I still tear up when I recall this—I walked into the nurse's station and there were banners and balloons and a graduation cake, a small present from the nursing staff as well as Dr. Callaghan. So it was another one of those angels who'd come into my life at exactly the right moment. Passionistas: So, you did start college, right? Lora: Because I'd been homeless and wasn't living anywhere. I never got any mail. And because, you know, I was moving between foster care, foster homes before that, I didn't know I was supposed to sign up for a dorm, and I got to college and there were no dorms. But the Dean of girls was standing nearby when they told me that, that there were no dorms. And I just stepped outta the line and said, I guess I'll try to come back next year. And she came and got me and took me to the guidance counselor, and they were able to find me a temporary place to live with a widow in the neighborhood. And I ended up having to move three times that year. You know, the widow decided she didn't really want a student, and then I lived with a kid who lived in an apartment, but she was on so much LSD and drugs and it was so triggering, and then eventually I moved to another place, but I was working on the weekends at a small hospital as a nursing assistant. They taught me to be a nursing assistant at the county hospital, which was wonderful. And I started getting stalked by the respiratory therapist, a man in his 50s. And he started pulling me into the room closet many times and all kinds of stuff, and then showing up in the halls at school. And one night he showed up at the bottom of my L stop. This was Chicago. And had it not been for a businessman who was coming down the steps, I don't know what would've happened. He tried to pull me into his car, and so I quit my job. And because of exams and stuff, I hadn't even been keeping track of things on the bulletin board and announcements. And then I realized that, and I really went into a funk and felt unsafe. And I had the belief that I was a grownup, so I shouldn't need any help from anyone. And I found that that's true with most kids who've been in the foster care system. With most kids, unless they've come up and have parents who can really guide them. And I realized that they were going to be closing the dorm, and I had no money and nowhere to go. And I tried looking, you know, in the papers for jobs. I couldn't find anything. And I was terrified. So again, my old default was, I can just kill myself. So I did something crazy, like just took a, I don't know, a bottle of aspirin or something—I wouldn't have had anything else. And then after immediately I thought, well, that's stupid. I don't want to die. And so I made myself throw up, and then I went to look for the dorm mother. I told her what I'd done, and told her I made myself throw up, and I said, “I really need a grownup's help.” And she said she was really glad that I came to her and that she could think of a number of places that were looking for students like me for jobs over the summer. But she was going to put me in a taxi and send me across town to get checked out medically. And then I'd come back and we'd sort this out. I was fine medically, but the next thing you know, they're sending me to another hospital. They said just to, you know, have a few days of rest. And I didn't know it at the time, but that hospital wouldn't let me out because they were doing drug research and they had sent out a flyer to all the local hospitals looking for certain research subjects. And every floor did different kinds of research. And I was put on the floor with young adults who had no family support, which meant I had no one who had my back or could look out for me. And I wouldn't take the drugs. I kept spitting 'em out. I had no idea how they figured that out. Then they started giving me shots and liquid Thorazine and eventually I ran away. They got me back, and then they had me committed to the worst state hospital in the system. This was the summer after my freshman year in college. And there was the day that I came back from the court commitment, I…I can't even tell you what that was like, because in those days they committed you for life. And I could hardly think. My mind was like in shock, and I went back to my room, and I just sat. And I couldn't eat. I couldn't move. I can't remember thinking about much of anything. I felt like I was in a fog. And there was a nurse who came in and out all evening to check on me. And around 10:00 or so, she came in and she said, “I'm concerned about you, and my shift ends at 11:00, and I'm going to come and sit till dawn if that's what it takes to get you to have some feelings, because you're not going to survive where they're sending you, unless you do.” And so she did. She was there till dawn. Her name was Sydney Krampitz. And she was getting her master's in nursing at that point and only worked there three days a week on evenings, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. And she told me before I was put on the bus that took me to Elgin, that I hadn't done anything wrong. That she felt what they were doing was illegal, and she was going to do everything in her power to get me out. But there was no way that I could trust that that could happen. How could this nurse override a judge's order? So I was admitted to the worst state hospital in the Illinois system. And I've been told by people who worked there then and a man named Bill Whitaker—who wrote a book called “Madden America” and did a lot of research about state hospitals and the drug Thorazine—that it's a miracle that I'm alive. And I believe that too. And because at that point in history, or not in history, in that point in life in the Illinois area, there weren't as many freeways as there are now. Now you could get out to Elgin in probably an hour and a half, and Sydney lived back then, about 3 hours from there. So every, and she only had Sundays off, and she had three small children and was the Lutheran minister's wife. And every morning she, on Sunday, she'd think, “I really have to go see her.” And then she kept saying to herself, “She was a bright college student. I can't believe she'd still be in there.” And so then she wouldn't go. And so it was about nine months before she came, and it was almost too late. And she said she felt haunted by me. And so she finally decided to call, just assuming that I would've been released and was shocked that I wasn't. And then she came for the first time and then continued to come and really fight them and threaten them with a lawsuit, which she said she never could have done because she didn't have the money to have a lawsuit. But she threatened them enough and became enough of a pest that eventually she helped get me out after I'd been there for 15 months. And then many years later, Sydney and I reconnected, and we went back there and we did archival research at the state, in the state capital, and found out that they were actually doing, during the time I was there, the legislature had created a committee to find out why they were having so untimely, many untimely, unexpected deaths at Elgin State Hospital. And one of the reasons was they were always short on staff. The wards were all run by AIDS and orderlies who had never been trained in medication management. And they had one physician, many of which were not licensed at all, or could practice medicine. But they were called physicians, and one of them per anywhere from 500 to 1,000 patients at any given time, and the same with nurses. And so the orderlies were, and the ward I was on was primarily orderlies. And not only were they afraid of the patients, they would over drug us all. And Thorazine is one of the primary medications, and what the report revealed is that because of the overuse of Thorazine, which causes horrendous constipation, and many people had bowel obstructions, had sepsis and died from sepsis. It was just, it's a horrendous document about this thick, and I still to this day haven't been able to read it all the way through. Passionistas: So once you got out, where did you go from there? Lora: I had to be released to a legal relative. And a cousin of mine who was only seven years older than me, who was brand new, married, and had a baby, she was willing to take me for a few months, and then I was able to go back to college. But eventually, I left the Chicago area. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington and you're listening to the Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Lora DeVore. To learn more about her work and get a copy of her book “Darkness Was My Candle,” visit LoraDeVore.com. Now here's more of our interview with Lora. Passionistas: I don't know how you survived all this trauma. You are an amazing human being. Did all of this trauma, is that what inspired you to make the decision to become a therapist? Lora: No. Not directly. It might have on someone conscious level, but it didn't directly. I was a teacher first, and I was working with deaf blind children in a program in South Dakota with visually handicapped and deaf blind children. And we were off during the summer, and I had a boss, an incredible boss, who gave out weekly awards called the the Annie Sullivan Award. So if we'd have a breakthrough, major breakthrough with a child. And I got a lot of those Annie Sullivan Awards, and I was just really good with the most disturbed kids. And she bet me that, she said, “You've gotta go back to school and get a master's degree.” And I said, “I'm not smart enough.” I still carried the, you know, this old internal message. I didn't learn to read till the end of third grade. I wouldn't have even read at all had it not been for a substitute teacher who was the first to ask me why I thought I was having trouble. And one thing was they were always put in the back room and I couldn't see, I needed glasses and then I just fell into what's called learned helpless. You know, you try so many times and have trouble with it that I just couldn't get it, I gave up. And so during a very brief time, I think she was there a week, she got me to read, and I became an avid reader. So Marge really pushed me. And so I took a couple of graduate school classes that summer and I found 'em so valuable and that I loved learning and had more confidence in myself than I'd had even when I went to undergraduate school. And so I stayed in. And I think I thought what had happened to me was an anomaly, and so I was in, and I was interested in helping people and interested in understanding people, and particularly interested in understanding families and children. So I think that's what at least consciously motivated me. But it wasn't till many, many, many, many years later that I really began—when I was writing the book—that I really began to learn about the dark history of psychiatry. And the book that I wrote is not the book I set out writing. Passionistas: Tell us about that. So, so what finally inspired you to write a book and what was that transformation throughout the process? Lora: You know, I was good at writing. Actually, two of the scholarships I won were because of writing an essay when I was in high school. And I was writing a very different book. I was writing a spiritual autobiography. And I had found a mentor, a woman named Dina Metzger, who's written probably 30 books herself, and she had agreed to be my mentor, and she was having me do some extraordinary practices to get ready for that, which I learned a lot about myself. She had me go back through all my old journals in my memory bank and look at, she was trying to find where the story really was and what contributed to the story. And she believes that spirit talks to each of us in different ways, and then that there are patterns. And so she was having me look through my memory bank and my journals, as I said, and notice any times in which I had gone into joy or bliss because of something that had occurred, or any time there was synchronicity or any important dreams that I had. And because I'd kept a journal since junior high, that wasn't so hard to do. And then she began to help me to see the pattern in my life. And then one summer, we'd been working probably for a year, year and a half, and she always takes a sabbatical in the summer to write her own book. She writes a book every year. And she said, “What are you doing for the summer?” We were having our last session online. And I said, “I don't know. I have all this paid time off. I'm thinking about a road trip.” She said, “Where to?” And I said, “I don't know.” And she said, “What do you think about a road trip out to see me?” I said, “That sounds like fun.” She lives in California, in Topanga. And I said, “What do you have in mind?” And she said, “I want to interview elders on the Yakima Reservation in Washington state, and if we can get in, usually it takes a couple years to get a reservation. I want a go to Hanford nuclear site, and I'm looking for a driver and a scribe.” And so I agreed. So I drove out to the East coast. I love long distance drives, and I was working at her house for about three days before we were to leave on the trip. She had asked me to do some research for her related to some research that was done on native Americans at the Yakima Reservation and also any research that came up related to Hanford nuclear site or research related to that. And as I was doing the research one day, all of a sudden on the screen, Elgin State Hospital came up. I was in shock. I had not thought about it or talked about it. I mean, I talked about it in therapy years before, but not since then. And later that day, Dina asked me how the research was going, and I said, “It's okay.” And she said, “What's going on with you?” She said, “Is it too hard?” I said, “Well, it's pretty dark research, but I saw something in my history come up in it.” She said, “What part?” And I said, “When I was committed to a state hospital the summer after my freshman year in college.” And she looked at me with her eagle eyes and she said, “And why did I never hear you were in a state hospital?” And that became a defining moment. And I realized all those years later—this was like seven years ago—I still held shame about that. And by the end of our trip together, it became clear, there was this sense of feeling compelled to write about that history and explore and do research and understand it as well as I could. And it almost felt like a spiritual mandate. So the book then became a very different book than it had started off, or I thought it was going to be, although a lot of that early material is in the last part of the book, the transformation part of it. That's how it changed. Passionistas: What do you hope that survivors who read your book take away from it? What's the biggest message? Lora: The biggest message is hope. And that no matter what kind of trauma you've experienced, you can fully recover. So that's one of the biggest messages. And, you know, the other big message is around love and kind. You know, I think we're in a period of history in which everything which has been hidden is coming up to be looked at. And I think unless we look at and examine history, we make the same mistakes going into the future. So I see that as a very good thing. And I think this time that we're in, you know, still with COVID, off and on, et cetera, has caused many people to go into self-reflection and to change patterns, et cetera. And I would invite people to really pay attention to self-love and how important kindness is, to be kind to themselves as well as to others. And so often with trauma, trauma kind of takes over the brain and that's all we can see. And there's a lot of beliefs that get formed around trauma. Like my belief was, “I must have done something wrong,” and “Why do these things keep happening to me? Must be something bad about me.” And I think most trauma survivors part of that have things like that. I've worked with rape survivors and trafficked women, and often the belief is, “I shouldn't have been dressed in that or if I hadn't been walking down that street or if I hadn't looked that way.” Because we hate feeling powerless, so we try to make up a story about how it was our fault. So if we can figure out what I did wrong, then maybe I can keep it from happening in the future. But one of the things that a Native American elder who was a spiritual teacher of mine many years ago suggested I do is, she said I needed to go back through my memory banks and find all the joy markers and literally do a graph of that. And I was on a women's retreat on her land for a month when she suggests that I do that, and I started to remember all the angels that came into my life with human skin wearing the face of compassion. And it begins to change the trauma narrative. So I strongly suggest anyone that's been traumatized do that. Because our life isn't just one thing. It's a rich tapestry of so much more. But it took that exercise for me to begin to focus on that so much more, and it blew me away. And since then, if I work with trauma survivors, I ask them to do the same thing, and always, it's an astounding exercise. Passionistas: If you could go back to those early days, what advice would you give your younger self? Lora: I think at this point, because I've really, really been practicing self-love, unconditional self-love, I think I would say to her, she is just fine, just the way she is. And that she's smart and funny and creative. And that what's happening isn't her fault, and that she's going to grow strong and resilient and learn and grow through it. Passionistas: What's your dream for women? Lora: My dream is that they find out, they really step into loving themselves unconditionally and knowing how beautiful and bright they are, and creative. And I think women intuitively are nurturers, even women who don't have children. There's something about feminine energy that's rising up like never before now. And I hope women can all tap into their own brilliance and step into who they're meant to be, to help begin to make the shifts that need to happen happen on the planet. And I think it's going to take—I hate to say the word army, because I don't like war—it's going to take a collection of many, many women who do that. Passionistas: What's your secret to a rewarding life? Lora: For me, it's gratitude. I practice gratitude every morning. It's also, you know, I thank the trees when I go outside in the morning and the sun coming up and the grass growing and the sound of the birds, which sort of sets my day. And at the end of the day, I usually go through a gratitude list, as well. So I think gratitude, for one. The other thing that I have discovered, and it was a hard course to get there—I had COVID a year ago and nearly died. Had two near death experiences, was in the hospital for a month and then came home on oxygen and told I'd never, I'd probably never get off of it and couldn't walk. And I think since I was a kid, there's this determination, if somebody tells me I can't do something, I say, “Watch me.” And so here I am walking and talking and not on any oxygen, and my lungs have been healed, and all the rest of it. And then on top of that, I was just getting better and recovered from the COVID, or mostly recovered. I was diagnosed with breast cancer. But each of those experiences, what they did is they reopened a vulnerability that I'd had as a kid that I had never totally worked through and didn't even know that I'd worked through it in therapy, but, but I hadn't cried as much as I needed to. And I have an amazing coach that helped me through that time, continues to work with me. And I made a commitment that, no matter what, to be vulnerable and to be transparent, and I realized that that's my superpower. And my life has shifted because of that. And that very vulnerability—was sort of like ripping off the band aids that were still covering old scars—has dramatically shifted my life. And I would like all women to know that our transparency and vulnerability really can be our superpower. And I've just been blown away, absolutely blown away by people's response to that vulnerability. I also, when the book was first coming out, I had a, oh, I don't know, a week or two of freak out. It was like, “Oh my God, this book is raw. I mean, I tell it all.” And I kept scaring myself, and then I caught myself one day. I was saying to myself, “I'm going to feel so exposed.” And one day I sat down, I looked at the word exposed and I thought, “I need a different word.” And the word that came to me was ‘revealed.' And then the sentence that came to me is, “I choose to reveal myself as loving presence in every moment, in every situation.” And that shifted everything. And so now interviews, no matter who they're with or what they are, feel pretty effortless. But I had to stop scaring myself. So I think the other thing I want women and others to know is it's really important to pay attention to how we talk to ourselves. You know, we can really defeat ourselves in so many ways, and language is really important, and our nervous system takes it. Passionistas: Do you have a mantra that you live by? Lora: Every year I set a goal and I've had the same one for the last two years. And that's luminous presence. I want to be a luminous presence on the planet, and I want to be an inspiration and guide to others. And there's a quote that's a favorite of mine as well, and that's, “There is someone somewhere who has a wound that is the exact size of your words.” That's by a man named Sean Thomas Doherty. “There is someone somewhere who has a wound that's the exact size of your words.” And when you really let that sink in, I think it automatically brings up kindness. An amazing experience at Starbucks not long ago, there was this young woman who was falling apart, and you could tell it was her first job on the day on the job, and she was just a mess. She kept making mistakes and they were really busy, and there wasn't anyone right behind me. And I looked at her and I said, “Do you know you have the most beautiful eyes? Has anyone ever told you that?” And she said, “No.” And I said, “Well, you do.” and then she teared up, and I said, “Is this your first day working?” And she said, “Yeah, can you tell?” I said, “Yeah, but everybody has a first day. You're doing fine. Just take a few deep breaths. You're going to be okay. I would be crazy if I was behind that booth. You know, you're multitasking constantly, so just be kind to yourself.” She said, “Can I touch you?” And I said, “Sure.” She reached over and held my hand, gave my hand a squeeze, and now when I go through that drive-through, she always thanks me. And in the same Starbucks, one of the guys there named Joe, he said to me one day, he says, “You know, you are always so kind to the people who work behind this window, and I just want to thank you, because it really sets their day. Some of these young people, they just get so, you know, depressed and feeling like they can't do it, et cetera.” And he said, “And you've also made a difference in my life. I said, “Really?” And he said, “Yeah, I'll tell you sometime.” And then one day I went through, he says, “We've gotta talk.” And I said, “Okay.” And I said, “How do we do that?” And so we set up a time, and it turns out that he was a sexual abuse survivor himself, and he had bought my book. And so he wanted to tell me that and tell me how my book had impacted him. I mean, we just never know. We just never know. Passionistas: How does it feel for you now to be that angel that were these people that peppered through your life, that helped you get through these moments? What does it mean now for you to be that person for so many other people? Lora: It's a very humbling experience. I feel like the most fortunate woman on the planet. It feels like it was my destiny. And I didn't know that at the time. I became aware that writing “Darkness Was My Candle” was an act of love, but I don't know that I knew the full scope of it until the book came out, the interviews started, et cetera. Passionistas: Where did the title come from? Lora: I just woke up one morning and I tend to trust my intuition and there it was. But I think primarily through the years of transformation work and spiritual work, I've learned that oftentimes we go into, you know, John of the Cross used to call it the dark night of the soul, or this, you know, other, other spiritual teachers might talk about it as like the void. And what I began to appreciate is that that period of growth is much like spring before it blossoms. At least in the Midwest, I don't know if you have dramatic springs on the West coast like we have out here, but it's like everything is pregnant, and there's this sort of, it's a fertile void. You know, there's never a time in which there's a winter that's too dark, that doesn't hold spring's promise. You know, you just have to wait till all those little buds begin to push themselves up, whether it's the tulips or other blossoms. And it feels like times of darkness in our life are exactly that. And I've also come to realize in my own life, and I believe many trauma survivors, is that trauma can become a portal into a very different kind of life of if you have the right kind of support and really do the work that's required. It's not just that another, some other shitty thing happened to you. It literally can open you to a much more magnificent life. And I think it's through the dark in which we ask the big questions like, “Why did this happen to me?” You know, “Will I ever feel different?” We ask the existential crisis, the existential questions, which are both psychological questions and spiritual questions. So another part of the book is, I'm on a mission to not just disclose the dark history of psychiatry to psychiatrists and anyone in the mental health field—and I feel excited about the way that's happening—but also we have got to bring together a world of psychotherapy in which we merge and bring together spiritual psychology and transpersonal development as well. I think it's essential. Because especially with trauma survivors, you can't fully recover unless some of those deeper questions that are in your soul, they tend to be soul questions. You know, “Does life have any meaning?” They can't be answered psychologically. They're spiritual questions. And we leave out a huge equation of what it means to be a person if we don't bring the notion of spirituality. And I'm not talking about religion, religion's how people can choose to practice their spirituality or learn in community and celebrate in community. But we all have a spiritual essence, and that's fed in different ways. For some people, it's a walk in the woods. For some people it's in community. For some people it's in deep meditation, and there are hundreds of meditative techniques. It's different for all of us, but we all have that. And that's who we really are. This is who we live. This is what we are and who we live in. But our spiritual essence is magnificent. And I think we're in a time where more people are finding a longing for that as well as a longing to change the way they're, that we're all living our lives. Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Lora DeVore. To learn more about her work and get a copy of her book “Darkness Was My Candle,” visit LoraDeVore.com. If you or someone you know needs help, dial 988 or call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which offers free and confidential emotional support around the clock to those experiencing a suicidal crisis. You can also get support via text by visiting suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources. According to the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization, RAINN, "Every 68 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. And every 9 minutes, that victim is a child." If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, help is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Please call the free and confidential National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 or visit rainn.org. And be sure to visit ThePassionistasProject.com to sign up for our mailing list, find all the ways you can follow us on social media and join our worldwide community of women working together to level the playing field for us all. We'll be back next week with more Passionistas who are defining success on their own terms and breaking down the barriers for themselves and women everywhere. Until then. Stay well and stay passionate.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It is a cold Friday, but it is Friday nontheless and we made it. Our guest today is Mr. Thomas Hartnett of the Fox River Academy here to tell us about upcoming "Java Jams" at @Java Plus on Waterford, Sunday, March 12th. Let's get ready to learn! Here's the news: - Saturday, February 25th from 6 to 9 pm will be the blacklight art gallery featuring Johnny Felix, better known as Talento creations! This will take place at 2 S. Stolp avenue, the Artesan Lofts. Be sure to check it out! - The housing counseling team of The Neighbor Project has great workshops for February, also Black History Month which will be of benefit to the whole community! The next event will be February 9th will be: Getting Your Credit Swagger & February 16th will be: Roadmap To Homeownership. Use the links posted and shared to register for the online events and please share! For questions or more information call (331) 300-3566. - Thursday, February 9th from 5 to 6:30 pm join our friend Anthony Ortiz For Elgin City Council at Dream Hall in Elgin for a fun meet & greet! Anthony Ortiz is a candidate for Elgin City Council and a USMC veteran. For more information please email: anthony@anthonyforelgin.com Have a great day and a safe weekend! Subscribe to the show on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/c/GoodMorningAuroraPodcast The second largest city's first daily news podcast is here. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday & Friday to our FB Live from 8 am to 9 am. Make sure to like and subscribe to stay updated on all things Aurora. Twitter: goodmorningaur1 Instagram: goodmorningaurorail Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6dVweK5Zc4uPVQQ0Fp1vEP... Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../good-morning.../id1513229463 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora #positivevibes #positiveenergy #downtownaurora #kanecountyil #bataviail #genevail #stcharlesil #saintcharlesil #elginil #northaurorail #auroraillinois #auroramedia #auroranews #goodmorning #goodmorningaurora #news #dailynews #subscribe #youtube #podcast #spotify #morningnews #morningshow #friday #foxriveracademy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora/support

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. We have a great show for you today. Our friends of the @Quad County Urban League and the Aurora Regional Chamber of Commerce are here with us today. Let's get ready for a great show! #goodmorning - Saturday, March 11th from noon to 3 pm will be the Chili Cook-Off happening at Java Plus on Waterford (1677 Montgomery Road). Competitors must complete an application, plus a $20 fee for entry. For customers there is a $5 fee, and that includes sampling all of the tasty submissions! All applications must be completed and submitted by March 1st. For more information and to receive an application you can call (331) 212-6665. - Learn english with @World Relief Chicagoland by registering and enrolling in classes. Free english classes for immigrants are available. You can learn in person and online, scan the QR code on the flyer or call (630) 888-0023 with any questions. Register here: https://worldrelief.org/chicagoland/education/english-classes-in-the-suburbs/ - Thursday, February 9th from 5 to 6:30 pm join our friend Anthony Ortiz For Elgin City Council at Dream Hall in Elgin for a fun meet & greet! Anthony Ortiz is a candidate for Elgin City Council and a USMC veteran. For more information please email: anthony@anthonyforelgin.com Have a great day and tune in to Good Morning Aurora Friday morning for more news and more Aurora. Subscribe to the show on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/c/GoodMorningAuroraPodcast The second largest city's first daily news podcast is here. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday & Friday to our FB Live from 8 am to 9 am. Make sure to like and subscribe to stay updated on all things Aurora. Twitter: goodmorningaur1 Instagram: goodmorningaurorail Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6dVweK5Zc4uPVQQ0Fp1vEP... Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../good-morning.../id1513229463 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora #positivevibes #positiveenergy #downtownaurora #kanecountyil #bataviail #genevail #stcharlesil #saintcharlesil #elginil #northaurorail #auroraillinois #auroramedia #auroranews #goodmorning #goodmorningaurora #news #dailynews #subscribe #youtube #podcast #spotify #morningnews #morningshow #wednesday #QCUL #aurorachamberofcommerce --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora/support

Today, we have Carl Zha from the Silk and Steel Podcast joining us to discuss the Opium wars. Show Notes0:00:00 - 0:03:12 - Introductions0:03:14- 0:05:20 - Opium BeginningsOriginally, opium was ingested orally. However, ingesting it in large quantities lead to death because it stopped breathing. However, after Europeans colonized the New World, they brought back tobacco from the Americas. Particularly, the Spanish and the Portuguese, who brought it to the Philippines and Malaysia, both countries had a significant Chinese diaspora. Later, when the Dutch colonized Indonesia, they, too, brought tobacco. Now, Opium was mixed with tobacco and it could be smoked allowing for consumption in larger amounts without death.0:05:21- 0:07:08 - Damn British and OpiumOpium, itself, is not grown in china. It is grown outside of China and had to be imported. India grew Opium. In the Late 18th century when the British Colonized India, they forced the farmers in India to grow opium. Their policy of making Indian farmers grow Opium was responsible for many famines. The British East India Company (BEIC) would license the opium through their opium monopoly. They would sell the opium to individual traders who would carry them into China, because the British want plausible deniability. If someone every questioned them, they would say, “Oh, we are the venerable British East India company. We don't we don't actually believe in the opium trade.”0:07:08- 0:08:01 - Smoke and MirrorsThe BEIC ships the opium, but the individual parcels will be parceled out and sold to employees of BEIC. A famous opium smuggler is William Jardine, who started as a sergeant under the BEIC. As an employee of the BEIC, he got his own cargo space on their shops which was used to ship opium that he sold to China. 0:08:02- 0:09:48 - China's Opium EpidemicOpium was illegal in China and soon the Chinese government realized they had a crisis. Initially, opium was a luxury good because it was not grown in China. However, the innovation of the BEIC flooded the market with cheap opium. Now, laborers could afford it. It blossomed into a full-blown opium crisis.0:09:49- 0:13:42 - Limits on Foreign TradeOriginally, foreign presence in China was curtailed. It was limited to a few port ciites and the British could only stay for 6 months before having to go to the island of Macau. The British weren't happy that they could only conduct trade in the city of Canton. The British had to resort to selling opium because originally their product was not competitive. British had developed a taste for Chinese tea, and they needed silver to trade because China had gone into the Silver standard. 0:13:43 - 0:14:48 - The Magic FormulaSoon, the British hit the magic formula of selling drugs to the Chinese to drain China of it's silver. The British ran a trade deficit with China prior to the massive operation of opium smuggling. According to some estimates, 50% of the silver mined in the South America is from the 18th and 19th century, ended up in China. The British just decided to sell drugs to drain the silver. 0:14:48 - 0:18:28 Enter AmericansDuring the founding of the United States, most of the New England old money was made in the opium fortune. There was Astor who has an area in Queens named after him: Astoria. Other families who made their fortune through the Opium Trade:* The Forbes Family whose descendant John Forbes Kerry was Secretary of State under Obama.* The Delano Family - FDR's Grandfather.* HSBC bank During a famine in Guangzhau, American traders hid opium under bags of rice. All the Ivy league universities were also heavily invested in the opium trade. That's how America was founded on: Drugs and Slaves.0:19:24 - 0:25:47 China Fights BackChinese officials tried to tackle the problem by banning opium. The first few bans were ineffective because the British had paid off many officials. In the 1830s, the sends his minister Lin Tse-Hsu', who is known to be a very honest, upright official to Guangzhou, specifically put a stop to the opium trade. The British gave up the opium, but they were very indignant. William Jardine returns to London and buys up many newspapers and starts to agitate a media campaign against China in order to start a war. He hobnobs with UK politicians, especially Lord Palmerston, to urge for war with China. There was a lively debate in the British Parliament about morality of going to war with China over opium. But, in the end, they decide to wage war against China for Opium.0:25:47-0:32:12 The First Opium WarThe British sent their troops from India and landed in the port city of Guanzhou. The British had obtained Mysore rockets and their arsenal was significantly better than China's. While Britain had industrialized, they did so by destroying more advanced industries in India. Britain decided to bombard the Chinese coast and went up to the mouth of the Yangzi river. they decided they're going to apply pressure by raiding other Chinese coastal towns. So the sale of the salt from the South China Sea and bombarding the Chinese coast totally. And if they go that went up to the mouth of Yangzi River near Shanghai. They took over some islands to create big their headquarter for opium smuggling. And more importantly, they threatened to cut off the north-south traffic at the Grand Canal. At that time, most of the Chinese shipping was along the coast under the Grand Canal to sail from Nanjing to Beijing. Beijing, in 1839, had a population of more than a billion. The plains around Beijing was dry and couldn't feed the population. The British Navy blockaded the area around Nanjing, threatened to cut off the the rice shipment from from the south to Beijing to basically to starve the population. At this point, China capitulated. They paid large indemnity for the pleasure of being invaded and also recognized Hong Kong as a port.0:32:12 - 0:36:16 Treaty of Nanking * China Ceded Hong Kong in Perpetuity* Indemnity was paid to British ships* Opening up China for foreign exploitation.* Chinese law did not apply to British missionariesSoon, the french began negotiating with the British to allow a little colony in these areas. The city of Shanghai, British, France and even the US got their own concessions. The British and American concession eventually merged into the international Settlement of Shanghai. The colonialism was so bad that there needed to be a Chinatown in Shanghai. The Chinese were restricted to the Chinese city, where the Chinese law would continue to apply. But for the rest of European concessions, British, French, and American laws were applied. British imported Sikh police from British India to police the Shanghai concessions.0:36:16 -0:38:20 Modern Day Colony in OkinawaThis is eerily similar to Okinawa in modern day Japan. American soldiers can rape people in Okinawa. There is nothing that the Japanese government can do to them. The Japanese government is also a culprit because they don't want American soldiers on the Japanese mainland. So they stick them in Okinawa because, they never treated Okinawans at the same level as the Japanese citizens in Japan. Essentially Okinawa status is like it's a double colony of Japan and United States. 0:38:20 Century of HumiliationA Chinese person at this time was a second-class citizen in your own country. A very famous scene in a Bruce Lee film illustrates this:Some Western historians tried to disprove this as an urban myth. But, what they discovered was that there was that the sign actually said “This park is reserved for Europeans only, dogs not allowed.0:42:00 - 0:45:16 - Second Opium WarThe British were not very happy with the settlement for only $21 million. The opium was not fully legalized. So they waited for another opportunity to start another war. This opportunity came during the “Arrow Incident”. British authority had granted all the vessels registered in Hong Kong, British registration. So there was a cargo ship called Arrow. It was used by Chinese smugglers to smuggling opium again, which was captured by the Chinese authorities. The Chinese authorities arrested the crew and executed them for drug smuggling. Because the ship was flying a British flag, the British used this as an excuse to start another war. In another incident, proselytizing was illegal. A French priest decided to ignore this regulation and went to the interior. He got in trouble with the locals who killed him. The French used this as an excuse to align with the British to form the Anglo-French consortium. Now, the French-Anglo forces used Hong Kong as a launchpad to start another attack on China. The British just had finished fighting a war in India against the Great Sepoy Mutiny. They had shipped off mutineers to Trinidad, Guyana and other British colonies to work in bonded labor. 0:45:16 -0:49:29 Chinese Coolie TradeAround the time slavery was formally abolished in many Latin American countries, but there was still a demand for the docile labor force. British and Dutch traders set up shop in Hong Kong. They recruited Chinese peasants They will have these the British and Dutch traders, they will set up shop in Hong Kong and they will Chinese peasants with the promise of jobs overseas. When they went abroad, there conditions were terrible and slave-like. Bruce Lee's dutch great-grandfather was part of this. 0:50:13 - 0:59:07 The British Loot BeijingAfter Britain captured Guangzhou in 1856, they decided it was not enough, so they decided to bring in more pressure. They sailed up to the port of Tianjin, just outside of Beijing where they defeated the Chinese coastal defense. They send in their last remnant force led by the Mongol Prince Sengge Rinchen because they were poorly equipped. At this time, the British decided to send an envoy to negotiate with the Chinese side. But the Mongol Prince, Sengge Rinchen, was so mad at the defeat that he had the British envoy put to death. And now the British were out for revenge. They decided to sack Beijing and the Chines emperor fled the palace. The British commander Lord Elgin (the son of the famed Elgin marbles) decided to loot the Beijing summer palace and ordered the complete destruction of it. Today, the ruins stands. Everything within the summer palaces was shipped to Britain. A clause was inserted so that foreign priests could go anywhere in China to proselytize anywhere in China and British ships were allowed to carry indentured Chinese servants to the USA to work. 0:59:07 - 1:05:19 - Opium and the devastation on the Population* Foreign missionaries said nearly 40% of the adult male population were addicted to opium.* One doctor said, “There is no slavery to that compared to opium”Carl Zha tells us a personal anecdote about how opium ruined his grandfather's family.1:05:19 -1:14:12 KMT, Opium, CIA and the Cold WarAfter the communists seized power in China, the United States was sponsoring the remnant KMT troops who escape from southwestern China to northern Myanmar into this place now with nice golden triangle to start opium and heroin production over there. When the communists took power, opium was outlawed. They burned all the crops and now food such as size could be grown. Around this time, western pharmaceuticals started to develop more potent forms of opium to market it to the masses such as Heroin and Morphine which was treated as a cough remedy for Children.1:14:12-1:17:21 Heroin Crisis hits homeSoldiers who were in Vietnam became addicted to opium and it was shipped back home. 1:17:21 -1:23:20 -Getting back Hong KongWhile Hong Kong was leased in perpetuity, areas around Hong Kong was given a 100 year lease which would expire in 1997. At that time, Margaret Thatcher ran many scenarios to see if they could defend Hong Kong against Chinese forces. When she went to negotiate for Hong Kong, the Chinese government cut her off and flatly said no. They ran many scenarios and they realized they could not defend against an actual Chinese military.In the 1980s, a lot of fear was whipped up by the capitalist class. So, to assuage them, China did One Country Two Policies Get full access to Historic.ly at www.historicly.net/subscribe

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It is Friday and we hope you are all well and looking forward to the weekend. We have the news you love and special gifts for our listeners. Let's get ready for a great show. Here's the news: - Saturday, March 11th from noon to 3 pm will be the Chili Cook-Off happening at Java Plus on Waterford (1677 Montgomery Road). Competitors must complete an application, plus a $20 fee for entry. For customers there is a $5 fee, and that includes sampling all of the tasty submissions! All applications must be completed and submitted by March 1st. For more information and to receive an application you can call (331) 212-6665. - Saturday, January 28th from noon to 3 pm our friends of Mental Revelations Spiritual Community Center NFP will host a paint & sip at Java Plus (1677 Montgomery Road). This is a family friendly event and titled; Making Dreams True. Come enjoy the fun, fellowship and great coffee! Scan the QR code on the flyer for tickets and more details. - Thursday, February 9th from 5 to 6:30 pm join our friend Anthony Ortiz For Elgin City Council at Dream Hall in Elgin for a fun meet & greet! Anthony Ortiz is a candidate for Elgin City Council and a USMC veteran. For more information please email: anthony@anthonyforelgin.com Have a great weekend and we will see you all on Monday morning for more news and more Aurora. Subscribe to the show on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/c/GoodMorningAuroraPodcast The second largest city's first daily news podcast is here. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday & Friday to our FB Live from 8 am to 9 am. Make sure to like and subscribe to stay updated on all things Aurora. Twitter: goodmorningaur1 Instagram: goodmorningaurorail Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6dVweK5Zc4uPVQQ0Fp1vEP... Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../good-morning.../id1513229463 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora #positivevibes #positiveenergy #downtownaurora #kanecountyil #bataviail #genevail #stcharlesil #saintcharlesil #elginil #northaurorail #auroraillinois #auroramedia #auroranews #goodmorning #goodmorningaurora #news #dailynews #subscribe #youtube #podcast #spotify #morningnews #morningshow #friday #javaplus --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningaurora/support

David Bear, Owner / Operator of the McDonald’s on Larkin Avenue in Elgin, joins John Williams to talk about the history of his family’s franchise, how his father designed the first dual lane drive-thru in the world, how much of their business is done using the drive-thru, how technology is changing the customer experience, and […]