Podcasts about mercury cougar

JW gets into the development of the Mercury Cougar and then tells a story about the one that got away. Jerry Wayne's links! https://linktr.ee/JerryWayneLongmireJr

Terry Fulwider was born in Calamus, Iowa and grew up in Waco, Texas. Terry has two grown children with his wife Lynn, and they now care for two cats and two dogs. They married at the 8A1 Guntersville airport aviation museum in 2013. After developing his musical career in Nashville over 20 years, he now makes his home Albertville, Alabama since 2014 where he works supporting the IT infrastructure at a poultry processing company. Terry's Music career is grounded in his talent as a guitar player and his experiences playing the on the Honky-Tonk Highway in Nashville. Terry's also gone on tour with well known American country music singer and songwriter Joe Diffie with whom Terry recorded a live album at Billy Bob's in Dallas Texas. Terry also toured with country soul singer Billy Joe Royal whose song Down in the Boondocks became a hit in the 1960's. Terry now has his own band and operates a recording studio in his home. He continues his service through music as a worship leader for his church.Terry's hobbyist interest in mechanics took flight in his late teens though the restoration of his 1966 Chevelle with the help of his father and continues today with a project to refresh an earlier restoration of a custom 1968 Mercury Cougar. In 2008 Terry's aviation engagement reached a significant milestone when he earned his PPL at Smyrna/Rutherford County Airport (KMQY). Terry is beginning the ambitious effort of building a Rutan LongEZ and is using OpenEZ LongEZ Plans to build Serial Number 0001 of the Fulwider LongEZ.In preparation for this episode, Terry shared with me a story about a time when he was listening to podcasts on a long drive and discovered the CanardCast episodes. He recalled the rewarding feeling of getting a chance to hear the voices of the people he'd been reading about online and through his research in the process of reviewing the plans and preparing his LongEZ build. I found this exciting to hear as it reinforced one of the goals for the CanardCast project. Terry's interests and experiences all come together now: Media production and Sound Editing, mechanical vehicle restoration, Rutan canard builder, Pilot and IT Services support to perfectly cradle his new role at COBA. Let's get to know our new producer, Terry a little more in the first episode of Season 4 of CanardCast!

Cette semaine, notre historien automobile Hugues Gonnot nous parle de la Mercury Cougar 1999-2002.Pour de l'information concernant l'utilisation de vos données personnelles - https://omnystudio.com/policies/listener/fr

Dans l'actualité : Mise à jour sur les tarifs douaniers qui affectent l'industrie de l'automobile Cadillac dévoile une version allongée de son Escalade IQ électrique Volvo dévoile l'ES90 Cette semaine, notre historien automobile Hugues Gonnot nous parle de la Mercury Cougar 1999-2002. Antoine Joubert nous raconte un périple hivernal au volant du Jeep Wagoneer S. L'aventure s'est soldée par un essai agréable, mais également une panne pour le moins curieuse. Antoine Joubert partage ses impressions de conduite au sujet du Kia EV3. Louis-Philippe Dubé fait l'essai de modèles Polestar 2025 sur la glace.Pour de l'information concernant l'utilisation de vos données personnelles - https://omnystudio.com/policies/listener/fr

MCG Trivia Question 4/304.) In the TV Show “The Dukes of Hazzard,” the Duke boys drive a 1968 Dodge Charger. (Easy + 1 Point)  A) TrueB) FalseQuestion 5/305.) Which classic car shares the same platform as the Mercury Cougar? (Med + 2 Points) A) Chevy CamaroB) Pontiac FirebirdC) Ford MustangD) All AboveQuestion 6/306.) Name this song from these lyrics. (Hard + 3 Points) She's American-made, you know what I meanRed on black, she's a street machineSets ten inches off the ground with a custom plateThat says IEATZ28A) RoadRunnerB) Trans AMC) Fast Car PS, If you are interested in Pre-Ordering our In-Home MuscleCards® Trivia Game! Head over to: WWW.MCGTRIVIA.COM Now!

A Youtube video featuring Steve the Guardrail Guy inspires Robert to share a story of falling asleep while driving home after a Metallica concert on January 31, 1993. He hit several guardrails and caused damage to all four sides of a 1986 Mercury Cougar. BMFCE: Insurance producers and adjusters can earn insurance continuing education credit listening to Robert's live webinars. No test required for credit! BMFCE.com.  

Corey Dean Williams was last seen by friends/acquaintances in Upshur County Texas on 07/27/2022 at approximately midnight when he left in his vehicle, 1995 white Mercury Cougar. On 07/28/2022 Williams's vehicle was located stuck in the sand and abandoned in Upshur County, Texas. Upshur County Crime Stoppers posted on Tuesday that they will give up to a $1,000 reward for information on Williams' disappearance. https://www.ketk.com/news/local-news/upshur-county-sheriff-investigating-suspicious-disappearance-of-30-year-old-laporte-man/

Today, Lace and Katherine are re-releasing their interview with their dear friend and comedian, Ben Brown. The world tragically lost Ben two weeks ago. Anyone who knew him, especially his family and the Atlanta comedy scene, will never be the same. Ben taught us all how to laugh at ourselves and how to love hard. Ben was proud of this episode and he let us roast him with delight. We miss you, buddy. Original episode description: Today, Lace and Katherine interview the hilarious and self-described barely educated comic, Ben Brown! Ben's is a classic story of getting caught "fishing off the company pier" as a 21-year-old, MILF hunter working at a car dealership. Did he learn his lesson to never date a Scorpio again? You'll have to listen to find out. FOLLOW US ON IG: CHEATIES PODCAST | Lace Larrabee | Katherine Blanford SHOP FOR GIGGLE GLOSS HERE HAVE YOU CHEATED, BEEN CHEATED ON OR BEEN A SIDEPIECE IN A RELATIONSHIP? CALL TO LEAVE A VOICEMAIL TEASING YOUR STORY & YOU MIGHT JUST END UP ON AN EPISODE OF CHEATIES! 888-STABBY-8 (888-782-2298) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 30 Barbara Johnson-WillardThe team continues to work alongside Delaware County, Oklahoma officials tacking some of their unsolved and cold cases. In this episode, the panel dives into the case of 29 year old Barbara Johnson-Willard who went missing from Jay, Oklahoma on June 17, 1996 after a late night out watching a movie. Ten days after she was last seen, her red Mercury Cougar was found in a ravine near Colcord in southern Delaware County. Someone had attempted to set it on fire. Although Barbara was nowhere to be found, investigators discovered evidence of decaying flesh in the trunk of the car. Barbara was never seen again. It's not clear whether Barbara ever made it to her home the night she vanished, but there was no sign of a struggle or forced entry there. However, police did discover that Barbara's bedding from her bed was missing. A look into Barbara's background linked her to a man in prison named John Lee Weeks, a serial rapist. Evidence including DNA and prints recovered from Barbara's car links Weeks to it, but to date, he hasn't been charged in Barbara's case.If you have any information about the case of Barbara Johnson-Willard, please contact the Delaware County, OK Sheriff's cold case unit You can call (918) 253-4531You can reach Sheila Stogsdill with tips via email @sstogsdill@ksn16.tv or phone at (918)-791-1962If you can contribute to our Gofundme efforts to help solve some of these Delaware County cases, your help would be greatly appreciated. You can learn more about our Gofundme here Want to listen to this episode, and every episode of Citizen Detective AD-FREE plus get VIP bonus access to our show 'The Scrum'? Visit Apple Podcasts to get an AbJack Insider subscription that will grant you VIP access not only to this show, but to every other show on the network; access that includes early and ad-free content, and bonus episodes. Alternatively, you can support Citizen Detective with a Patreon subscription.To find out how to join us live as we record each new episode of Citizen Detective, follow us on Social Media.Twitter- https://twitter.com/CitizenDPodFacebook Home Page- https://www.facebook.com/CitizenDetectivePodcastFacebook Discussion group- https://www.facebook.com/groups/233261280919915Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/citizendpod/?hl=enYoutube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSgvqIuf4-sEF2aDdNGip2wVisit our homepage: Citizendetectivepodcast.comWant to listen to this episode, and every episode of Citizen Detective AD-FREE plus get VIP bonus access to our show 'The Scrum'? Visit Apple Podcasts to get an AbJack Insider subscription that will grant you VIP access not only to this show, but to every other show on the network; access that includes early and ad-free content, and bonus episodes. Continue the conversation about this case with fellow Citizen Detectives over at Websleuths: https://www.websleuths.com/forums/forums/citizen-detective-true-crime-podcast.719/The Citizen Detective team includes:Co-Hosts- Mike Morford, Alex Ralph, and Dr. Lee MellorWriting and Research- Alex RalphTechnical Producer- Andrew GrayProduction Assistant- Ashley MonroeSuzanna Ryan- DNA ExpertCloyd Steiger- Retired Seattle PD Homicide DetectiveThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4610024/advertisement

In this "For the People" episode, Nick talks with Herb Weisbaum, The Consumerman, from Checkbook.org about the latest consumer issues including, the FTC suing Amazon and Publisher's Clearing House, the skyrocketing problems of concert/event ticket scams, and the increase in electric vehicle issues. Then, Nick and Tom Appel, from Consumer Guide Automotive, talk about the return of Alfa Romeo, the dominance of Tesla in the world of charging stations, and the great new Honda Accord. They also talk about hilarious old car ads, including the most sexist ad ever for the 1967 Mercury Cougar and an ad for a car that cost $260. The 4th of July holiday is also covered by Nick and both guests, and Nick's Dad Tells a Joke. [EP155]

Coach is out today but our friend of the show Quenten Moore from On Que Customs https://www.facebook.com/OnQueCustoms and Automotive Group https://www.automotivegroup.biz/ is here. He's a mechanic but also does custom interiors for vehicles, boats, aircrafts, and motorcycles.Recalls: https://www.cars.com/recalls/More than 75,000 model-year 2022-23 Toyota Tundra pickup trucks are currently under recall for upper car seat anchors that may not have been installed sufficiently. As a result, the anchors may not meet the minimum strength required to keep the car seat in place in the event of a sudden stop or crash, increasing the risk of injury.You can find out if your car has a past recall by going to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's website: https://www.nhtsa.gov/recalls and inputting your VIN number. Or find their SaferCar app.News: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a40631862/pony-cars-post-office-stamps/5 Classic Pony Cars Headed to Your Mailbox on New USPS Stamps – you can own Tiny images of the Ford Mustang, Chevy Camaro, AMC Javelin, Dodge Challenger, and Mercury Cougar in August for only 60 cents each. https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2022/0715ma-pony-cars-power-onto-stamps.htmAuto Casey: Nissan SentraShort video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWF1Gh9giFg&t=0sLong version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a91c2y5ik4MQuestions:How often to serviceDash repairWeldingOverdriveCar doorCar seat anchorRecall See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Charles Morgan June, 1977. Somewhere in a remote area of Tucson, AZ. A brand new Mercury Cougar slowly drives down State Route 86. It is almost pitch dark and the driver turns on the dome light to check the hand-written directions. He tunes the CB radio to channel 19, waiting for communication. Pulling off the highway in the San Juan Springs area, he stops the car. This is the place. In the trunk of the car, a cache of ammunition. On the back seat, one of his own teeth wrapped in a handkerchief. In a briefcase on the seat beside him, thousands of dollars in large bills. He zips up his bulletproof vest and scans the darkness around him, thick with the summer's humidity. Inside the holster strapped to his side, is a .357 Magnum. He makes sure the gun is loaded, places it back in the holster and exits the car. These were the last moments of Chuck Morgan's life. You are listening to Murdercast. Thank you to MagicMind.co for sponsoring this episode. For 40% off your subscription and 20% off any order, please visit: https://www.magicmind.co/murdercast and use the coupon code MURDERCAST20

Today, Lace and Katherine interview the hilarious and self-described barely educated comic, Ben Brown! Ben's is a classic story of getting caught "fishing off the company pier" as a 21-year-old, MILF hunter working at a car dealership. Did he learn his lesson to never date a Scorpio again? You'll have to listen to find out. FOLLOW OUR GUEST ON IG: Ben Brown FOLLOW US ON IG: CHEATIES PODCAST | Lace Larrabee | Katherine Blanford HAVE YOU CHEATED, BEEN CHEATED ON OR BEEN A SIDEPIECE IN A RELATIONSHIP? CALL TO LEAVE A VOICEMAIL TEASING YOUR STORY & YOU MIGHT JUST END UP ON AN EPISODE OF CHEATIES! 888-STABBY-8 (888-782-2298) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is a mercury cougar bostonian, what was happening in 1995, who was on the radio, a little history ... --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/eric-abrams/message

Meditation Brings Back a Flood of Memories   My fiancee, Howie Baskin and I were on a flight from our home in Tampa, Florida to Los Angeles, California and I was taking advantage of the rare opportunity to indulge in the pleasure of reading a book.  This one was called “Corporate Nirvana” by Judith Anderson.  We were somewhere over the desert and I was getting tired.  The author was detailing her intuitive encounter with a group of business people in which she suggested that they close their eyes and imagine that they were all alone, on a deserted island.  There was no work to do.  No deadlines.  No responsibilities.  No demand on their time.  There was only the island, the sand crunching between their toes and the birds over head.  Their attention was diverted to a beautifully ornate, bejeweled treasure chest in the sand.  As they approach they can see that it is unlocked and they know that inside is their gift.  This gift will be the answer to the question that is plaguing them now.  They will know when they see this gift exactly what it means to them and therein is their answer.   I haven't meditated in the deep relaxed manner that I had been practicing in over a year.  I have been too busy.  Things have been going too well for me to value the need for it.  This seemed like a perfect opportunity to shut the book and try her visualization.  I asked myself, “Why am I always taking on tougher and tougher problems?  Why can't I just say, “enough is enough” and be happy with what I've done?”  Holding that thought, in my sleepy half conscious state, I began the walk down the beach in the deserted island in my head.   Seagulls overhead, palm trees swaying in the tropic breeze, the warmth of the sun on my face and the sand crunching between my toes.  So far, so good.  Ah, there is the treasure chest…going over to admire it…it really is beautiful…I wonder what is inside, but I hesitate.  Do I want to know?  What if I don't find an answer?  What if I do and don't like it?  I stall and ponder the gravity of the moment.  In this box that I made up, in a place that I made up, lays the answer to the one problem that has driven me since childhood.  Here at 30,000 feet, while I look to all the world that I am asleep, I am about to discover the meaning of life…the meaning of my life anyway.   I begin to slowly lift the lid.  There is an aura of purple light escaping from the treasure chest.  “Nice special effects” I compliment to my imaginative self. “I wasn't expecting that.”  I am opening the lid so slowly as if I am expecting some dragon to consume me with its fire breathing anger.  Come on Carole…open the box…its just a box…go on now open it!   Leaping backward from the box as the top swings open I can only see what looks like a purple, fuzzy blanket in the bottom of the box.  Tentatively, I lean forward thinking there must be something under the cloth.  It isn't moving and there doesn't appear to be any real shape to it.  I am disappointed with myself.   “That's it!  That's the best you could do?  You have the opportunity to solve all of your life's struggles in one vision and all you can think of is a blanket!  I must be cold.  That must be what is behind this first thought and my REAL revelation must still be in the box.”  I try hard to see something else in the chest and after a while I resign myself to just being totally unimaginative.   OK then, let's have a look at the fuzzy purple blanket and what ever that could possibly mean to me.  As I am muttering, “purple blanket” to myself I lift it up out of the dark box and hold it full length.  “Well, how about that?” I say to myself as the living material, with a light that gave it the fuzzy appearance, unfolds to the sand.  “It's not a blanket at all.  It's a cloak, shimmering with a life all its own.  It is breathtakingly beautiful!  It is too precious to wear.  No king ever wore a cape as magnificent as this!  I wonder briefly if I am worthy to wear this aura of lavender light?   “Of course I am,” I chide. “I made the thing up.  I can wear it.”  I put it on.  Wow!  I am cloaked in spirituality.  What does that mean to me?  It means that I have remembered who I really am.   I am safe.  I am at peace.  I am at one with God.   Everything I have ever done was leading to this moment.  Every challenge that I ever set myself up for has culminated in this moment of awakening.  All I have ever been trying to do was to reach this moment of spiritual enlightenment.   My driven self said, “OK.  Nice lesson.  Now get back to reading and learn something.”  My spiritual self said, “I am learning now.  I am learning that my drive has come from the need to prove myself worthy, but my spirit has always known that I am and that every lesson in life is about reaching a higher level of Nirvana.”   As if the flood gates had been instantly opened every challenge that had beset me along the way raced through my mind.  I was seeing what was common in every situation:  Every time a challenge presented itself, it was a much more difficult one than the one before.  Every time I succeeded in reaching the goal there were people who I felt were betraying me.  In each case, as the stakes were higher, those people were stronger or greater in numbers than the time before.  It wasn't the tasks or the challenges themselves that were my lessons to learn, but rather, how I would deal with the people who would disappoint me so profoundly.   How I would deal with having betrayed myself.  Nothing on this earthly plane; wealth, fame or fortune means anything.  It is all about reconnecting with God and that is done by reconnecting with ALL of His creation.  Yes, Carole, the people too.  Perhaps the people especially.  It is about remembering who you are and how we are all One.   The author, Judith Anderson  suggests the Piper Principle:   1. What troubles a person most about a situation actually reveals an aspect of themselves (an underlying fear or concern) they don't yet see;  a blind spot. 2. Underlying fears and concerns of leaders, and the unconscious way in which they protect themselves from them, show up in parable form as organizational barriers or blocks to achieving whatever goals are set. 3. When aggravation or blocks show up, a person can pay the piper, investigate the blind spot, and resolve the fear and concern or blame others.  Unproductive patterns reappear until you pay the piper.   I don't think I have ever considered a more truthful thought than that.   Some lessons I just go through over and over and over until I get it.  Once I get it then the next lesson is harder and will keep repeating over and over until I finally get that one too.  Until yesterday I didn't see this pattern of escalation.  I wonder, if I had, would I have had the courage to take on each new challenge, knowing that success ultimately meant a tougher lesson to follow?   Ignorance is bliss, but it is highly ineffective when we know our days are numbered and we have so much to learn in this lifetime.  I am increasingly convinced that we live forever and are doomed to repeat lives of frustration and striving until we each experience our own moment of looking into the treasure chest and discover ourselves and our connection to All that Is.   The rest of this is not meant to read like a resume of accomplishments, but rather as an example of how each of us is presented with unique challenges that we meet to the very best of our ability each time.  Many times challenges have been presented to me that I was incapable of overcoming.  Connecting with people has been the hardest for me.  Sometimes we may look back and think we could have done better, but I don't think so.  I think we are all doing the best we can for the skills we have now and that the only way we will ever “do better” is by learning from each lesson.   My family were fundamental Christians and raised me to believe that we are to strive for perfection, but being human, will always fall short.  The only good news in that was that  God is Love and is capable of loving us even though we are never really good enough or deserving.  This belief was the canvas on which I would paint my life.   I was five years old, naked as a jaybird, cleaning my canary's cage in the front yard with a hose and wondering how a caged bird could sing?  Free birds had something to sing about, but why do caged birds sing?  Caught up in my own reverie and enjoying the summer sun on my skin and the sand between my toes I was quite taken aback by my mother throwing a blanket over me and dragging me into the house, all the while telling me that “little girls don't go out side naked.”  I wondered, “why not?”  I felt so connected to the earth, the sky, the water from the hose, the soft summer breeze in my hair...  “What is this obsession people have with hiding who they are? Cloaking who they are?”   I was a big kid; always head and shoulders taller than my peers, with a shock of short white hair and big blue eyes.  Butterflies would light on me in the playground and every stray followed me home.  I had the same entourage of broken down, unwanted people throughout my life.  All of the kids that were disabled or slow or who just didn't fit in with the “in” crowd flocked around me.  I always tried to help them see what was special about them that no one else had to offer.  It wasn't that I was so understanding and wonderful.  It was because if I could heal them enough to feel that they belonged they would start to fit in with others and would leave me alone.   I preferred the company of the animals and my spirit guides, the two leopard size, glowing white cats who were with me always, but who I wasn't supposed to talk about unless I wanted to merely call them my “imaginary” friends.  It's one of those things that a kid just keeps to themselves when they realize that adults are too scared to talk about invisible, panther like creatures who sound like God when they speak in that still small voice, that carries all of the majesty and power of thunder.   Three years later I am eight and my father is the personal pilot to the governor of West Virginia, Arch Moore.  We live in a trailer park, in a single wide tin can that is always freezing inside.  Our lot looks like the terrain from a hostile planet with its caked, dry and broken clay surface.   Until I was six I was raised by my mother's mother during the day while my parents worked.  At night my parents would pick me up and take me home to sleep and then the next morning I'd wake up back at my grandparent's home.  My grandparents have stayed in Florida and I am still hating this separation from my other parents and the warmth of Florida.  Both of my parents work full time and I have become responsible for taking care of my brother who is six years younger.  There is a seething anger at my situation that seems impossible to me to resolve, and the only respite from it comes from the animals that I rescue.  Taking care of them, takes my mind off what I cannot change.   One day a cat with a couple of bullet holes in her finds her way to my door.  I discover that the man across the street had shot the cat because it was near his trash can.  This man is big (compared to me), has a history of beating his wife and children (Ada), and is ugly to boot.  His face is deeply scarred with pockmarks that indicate a hormonally challenged youth, and maybe one bar brawl too many,  and he is now in his late twenties or early thirties.  He drinks, he swears and he is just about as vile a human as any I have ever encountered.  Until this moment, I have made a point to stay clear of him, even though his daughter and his younger son, have found me to be a safe haven in a life that heretofore was unbearable to them.  It is his children who have come to me and told me that their father shot the cat and was threatening to kill any cat he saw come near his trailer.   Trembling, but fully resolved to make myself clear, I march up to this man and tell him that if he decides to take another shot at a cat, or if I hear a shot being fired and even think it is him, then that gun shot will be the last sound he ever hears.  He just stands there looking down at me, but as scared as I am, I feel like I am in charge of this moment.  I am offering up a challenge, that I have no idea how I will be able to carry out, but I can't let him know that.  After what seems an eternity of staring down this man, through my tear streaming eyes, he turns and goes inside his trailer.  He blinked.  He turned.  He ran from me.  I won!   I never heard another shot being fired.  The word of that confrontation, spread by his own children, earned me a tremendous following in that poor little back woods trailer park.  Now the kids who gathered around me were high school age and I felt like I had the moral support of every kid in the neighborhood.  I used to lead them in money making schemes from selling popcorn and Kool-Aid, to mowing lawns, washing trailers, and making pot holders and such to sell door to door.  Rock bands were making it big and I tried to assemble one, but I couldn't sing and we just didn't have what it took.  I felt like learning to make a living was important and learning to manage others was going to be a crucial part of that.  It felt necessary although I didn't know where it was leading.   I felt like I was in some sort of intensive training for something important.  I didn't know what it was about, but as a child you trust your instincts more.  At school I was quiet and respectful but felt like the public school system was not meeting my educational needs.  There was something important to learn about this thing called life and it wasn't in memorizing multiplication tables.  There were machines that could do that far better than I ever could, so what was the purpose in all of this useless knowledge?  Teach me how to succeed.  Teach me why the caged bird sings…   I wouldn't wear shoes.  You can't be connected to the earth and all of the glorious power that is available to you with shoes on.  It was fortunate for me that we lived in a West Virginian “holler” where going to school barefoot wasn't considered too weird.  After school I went into the forests.  It wasn't your typical kid-playing-in-the-woods so much as going to learn what it was like to be the woods, to be the brook, to be the animals and the wind.  I would climb up as high as I could get in the trees to get a better vantage point on observing everything around me.  I wanted to know how everything worked, how it was all connected.   The teachers would send home piles of homework.  My attitude was that it was a ploy designed to keep bad kids off the street.  If they had to turn in a lot of work the next day they didn't have time to be in trouble.  I wasn't being bad.  I was learning something that I thought was a lot more important and I wasn't going to do class room “busy” work outside of the classroom.  This got me into a considerable amount of trouble with my teachers, but I aced every test and my grades were still As and Bs despite all of the bad marks for refusing to turn in homework.   By the time I was 12 we were back in Florida and I was attending a little private school called Florida College Academy.  There were grades 1 thru 9 there, with one class for each grade level that had 12-24 students.  My great aunt, Mari, was the principal which as her son, my cousin Scott, and I knew was the worst set up possible for a kid.  You were perceived as having special privileges by your peers, and yet the reality was that you were held to a much higher standard because of the fact that relatives see you as a reflection on themselves and they want to be seen as perfect.   It was 1971 and women were burning their bras in the streets a decade before, but our school had held to very antiquated beliefs, that said little girls were to be modest and wear long dresses and never speak out against authority.  I actually bought into most of that but a lot of the girls were not from religious homes and even those that were frequently dressed in pants at home.  They wanted to be able to wear pants to school so that they could play more freely on the playground.  Even though I didn't even own a pair of pants, everyone turned to me to do something about it.  I thought their reasons were sound.  Wearing a dress on the playground was certainly less modest than wearing long pants and so I decided to take the suggestion to the principal.   Not only was my Aunt Mari an authority figure within the family and the school, but she was someone I had observed carefully since I was a toddler in the way in which she dealt with my cousin.  Scott and I were born the same year and day and look like twins.  We have often wondered if we were and just were separated at birth to be raised by two different families because neither one could afford both of us.  My cousin has grown up to be a maintenance man in an apartment building.  I watched his mother tell him he was stupid and that he would never amount to anything his whole life.  By contrast I was always told I could do anything I set my mind to do.  Both of us lived up to our parents' expectations.   I went to my aunt and presented our case and was promptly dismissed as being “un-Christian like”.  I went back to my classmates and suggested that the only way to effect a change in the dress code was to lead an organized uprising against the status quo.  I busily engaged both sexes in my plan and drew up posters and hung them in the halls, held rallies and basically just wouldn't shut up until I got what I was asking for.  I fully expected to be burned at the stake.  Much to my amazement we won.   I went out and bought my first  pair of pants.  (They were plaid and hideous.  It was the 70's after all.)   I kept them for twenty years as a reminder of that success.   Two years later, at the age of 14 I was trapped and raped by three men (Steve & Jim? Crabtree and George Minogue).  They cut my throat and for years I carried a scar that I hid with scarves.  I didn't tell anyone because I fully believed that I was to blame.  If I had not been in a place where I shouldn't have been this would not have happened to me and thus I felt that not only was it my fault, but that it proved I was not worthy as a human being.  I was no longer a virgin and could no longer expect that I would grow up and marry a decent man and live happily ever after.  Within a year I had let this event colour every aspect of my self esteem.  The deeper emotional scarring of this event however came from the betrayal of my best friend.   Cindy Clark Brown and I had been friends since we were nine or ten years old.  I was the innocent; the perfect daughter, cooking and cleaning for my family and joining in working the landscaping business after school.  Cindy was about as wild as they came.  She was a year older than I and was smoking, drinking and experimenting with drugs.  She was always in trouble and would often come stay with me until her family could brace themselves to deal with her again.  She made fun of me for being a goody two shoes and was jealous of my beauty and sense of grace.  People always commented on my air of confidence.  The fact was that my grandmother had always made me walk around the house with books on my head and the result was a walk that had an unintentional  haughtiness to it.   Cindy and I had been out for a walk earlier and she was flirting with three men from the race track.  We went to their house and played cards, while they had both the radio and the T.V. on full blast.  They were all stoned and I watched the scene in amazement.  I had never been exposed to this sort of activity, and although the only part I participated in was the card playing, I was very curious about this sort of approach to life. Cindy was sitting in their laps, giggling and whispering in their ears.  I wondered if they knew how stupid they looked and sounded?   That night, when Cindy and I were supposed to be in bed, she wanted to slip out my bedroom window and go back to their house.  I reluctantly agreed and as we cleared the yard, Cindy said she needed to go back to my room to make a call, and that I should go on ahead of her.  I did as instructed.   They were waiting for me.  What I didn't know, until many years later when Cindy felt compelled to clear her conscience, was that she had told them I was a virgin and had sold me to them for drugs.  The call she made was to let them know I was on the way.   A year later, back in W.Va. I had turned 15.  My mother, who had always been my most trusted friend, and I got into the first fight we had ever had.  She had accused me of having sex with a nice boy I knew and I had not.  I was defending his honour more than my own, because I was so convinced of my own guilt from the rape.  As she was storming off to work she said, “When I get home, I don't want to see your face!”     This was the last family photo before I left home, and yes, I am only 14 in that photo, which explains how I was able to wait tables in bars without being discovered.   I thought she meant that she never wanted to see me again and as fate would have it, I was ready for the next challenge.  A young man named Jim Jones, who I barely knew from Florida, was in boot camp near Washington, D.C.  He had gone AWOL from the army and was driving back to Florida and asked if he could drop by.  I told him I couldn't live here any more and asked if he would take me with him back to Florida.  I packed my cat, my radio and two paper grocery bags of clothes and waited for his arrival.  As we drove away I watched my 9 year old brother playing in the yard and wondered if I would ever see him again?  Taking care of him had always been my responsibility and as much as I hated being saddled with that, I felt guilty leaving him there.   I had known Jim from the skating rink where kids from my church were all taken to be with others of “our own kind”, but Jim worked there and intrigued me.  He was 6 ‘ 4 “ weighed 230 pounds of solid muscle and had long golden hair down to his waist.  He was a genius on skates, if not intellectually.  Running from the U.S. army should have been my first clue that he was never going to be a brain surgeon.  I only knew Jim from the rink and had invited him to one church picnic.  Now I was on the run with him.   I worked bars and restaurants and sometimes held three jobs at once because Jim wouldn't work.   Turned out he couldn't even pass a driver's license test.  He had a bad drug habit and a nasty temper and whenever the two mixed I was caught in the cross fire.  I was always on guard to dodge a swing from a punch that would knock the wind out of me.  He beat me with a bed rail one time so severely that I couldn't go back to work for weeks because I was so badly bruised.  As he swung the rail and hit the concrete walls of the garage we lived in he had knocked huge gaping holes in the concrete as a constant reminder to me of how much it hurt to be on his bad side.  As scary as it was to be with him I believed it was better than the alternative.  I had seen the brutality men could use to crush someone as innocent as I had been and at least there was only one of Jim to deal with.  Jim was the constant validation of my belief that I was unworthy.   Jim decided he wanted to go home and I was driving us there through San Antonio, Florida.  He was drunk and was all over the steering wheel and blocking my vision.  With one arm I was trying to push him back into his seat so that I could see, as I ran a stop sign and was hit broadside in the little Toyota we were driving.  The Mercury Cougar that hit us was later reported to have been traveling in excess of 60 miles per hour.  Drunks seem to never be the victims in auto accidents and Jim was no exception. He walked away without a scratch, once he woke up from the stupor.  I went through the windshield and broke my neck.  I remember getting up and dragging the front bumper of the Cougar out of the road as I went around first to the passenger side and made sure the little old lady was okay and then around to the driver's side to check on the little old man.  He had hit the steering wheel pretty hard, but was able to speak.   What happened next was like the opening scene from the movie, The Gladiator.  When I saw that movie I was awestruck at how it looked exactly as I had seen it all those years ago.  I walked out into a field of tall grass.  The sun was shining.  The wind was blowing softly through my hair, as I reached out with both hands to lightly touch the tops of the waving strands of grass.  Everything was silent and then it went white.   I woke up in a hospital, unable to move.  I was paralyzed and Jim was telling me that he didn't want the doctors to know who I was because he was still on the run from the army.  I remember two doctors standing over me, x-rays in hand, telling me I would never walk again because my neck was broken in three places.  The only hope I would have of even sitting up in a wheel chair was if they fused a steel rod up through my spine.  They obviously didn't know that I was just a child.  I had gotten my first marriage proposal at the age of 12 and had always looked a lot older.   I laid there thinking, “This cannot be my life.  I can't be paralyzed.  This can't be happening to me.”  I suspect most people go through that denial, but I just wouldn't give in to the “reality”.  I had learned from previous efforts that you can't give up.  No matter how big and bad the odds are stacked against you, you just absolutely cannot give up.  Being young and ignorant, I didn't know what these doctors could legally do to me, but I wasn't going to take my chances of waking up and finding that some surgery had left me incapable of ever getting past this paralysis.  I believed I could heal myself, but not if I had a metal rod installed through my spine.   Jim and his friends from the band (Jim said the band's name was Credence Clearwater Revival, but I find that hard to believe in retrospect) came and whisked me out in a wheel chair without telling anyone.  I spent what seemed an eternity at his parent's home unable to walk and only able to drag myself across the room, but I dragged myself a lot.  I wouldn't call my family.  I didn't think I was welcome there anymore.  Jim's parents didn't want to be held responsible for what their son's actions had caused and didn't want the army to find their son, so they were happy to hide me and my affliction.  My grandfather, Floyd Norris, through a miraculous chain of events, somehow found out where I was and got me to a chiropractor who soon had me walking again.   Because I wasn't even old enough to be in a bar, I couldn't work anywhere for very long because I couldn't show the management my driver's license for the employment forms.  After the paralysis I often collapsed and doing that just once with a tray of flaming cherries jubilee was enough for me to think that I needed to find some other sort of work.  I didn't have a high school diploma and was underage but had heard you could get a worker's permit.  Arch Moore was replaced by Governor Rockefeller who decided to replace all of the state's planes with helicopters, but none of the state's pilots, including my father could fly helicopters so my father was without a job.   More as an effort to avenge my father's dismissal from the aviation team I applied for an opening in the state's Department of Business and Economic Community Development and got it.  I quickly advanced through the ranks and became Governor Rockefeller's secretary's secretary.  My job was to investigate officials that Jay would be dealing with and put together photos and bios so that he would look good.  What didn't look good, when the word got out in the press, was the fact that a 15 year old high school drop out had risen through the ranks of the W.Va. government to governor's aide when there were far more “qualified” men and women vying for the position.   1977 was the first time I was in the newspaper as an adult.  Being born the fifth living generation had gotten the family into the newspaper in 1961.     The press made a big fuss of the fact that I moonlighted at a Greek restaurant and insinuated that I might be the veiled belly dancer, Little Egypt.  My boss told me to dress as frumpy as possible that day and wear glasses so that people wouldn't think I was hired for my looks.   Had I known that I was on this learning quest to deal with people issues I think I might have stuck it out and played that hand to the end, but at the time, I thought these challenges were about accomplishments and proving worthiness.  I had proven that I could step out of a wheel chair, out of the smoke filled bars and into the governor's office (and not just any governor, but a Rockefeller) and rise to the top.  I wasn't old enough to run for election.  That would have to wait.   Riding high on this wave of worthiness I drove Jim to his mother's home in Tampa and dropped him and his trailer full of belongings off in the front yard.  I didn't have enough money to get back to my job in W.Va. so I looked through the want ads to find waitress work that would get me enough gas to get back to the job that I was told would still be mine upon my return, despite the media craze that had erupted.   What happened next was one of those near misses.  It is a juncture in your life that is probably meant to happen, but gets thwarted.  I walked into “Our Place” bar on Ben T. Davis beach and was hired on the spot.  20 years later I would discover that my daughter's fiancée (Daniel Capiro) was being raised by the waitresses in that bar and I would have been raising him had I shown up for work, but I didn't.   I had come so far and I just wasn't willing to go back to even a short term job where my ass was constantly being patted and pinched.  Instead, I drove across town to a luncheon spot and was, again, hired on the spot, but I had to have frumpy shoes for the job.  All my feet could ever stand were sandals if I had to wear shoes at all.  I walked across the street to the Zayre's store and overheard a man saying that he needed to hire a clerk to run the automotive department.  That sounded like a new challenge and didn't require stifling shoes, so I asked for and was given the job.  I would work for a couple of weeks, collect my checks and then head back to West Virginia to see where that road would take me.  I never went back to West Virginia.   I was living in a Datsun Pickup truck with a camper on the back.  My cat, Pearlie Mae, who I had had since I was 8, lived with me so I had to park where it was cool for her during the day, but the days were getting hotter and she was going to die in that truck if I didn't find somewhere for her to live.  My manager's name was Michael Eugene Murdock and I spent more time dodging his advances than I did stocking shelves.  He was leaving his wife and moving into an apartment.  I asked if my cat could stay there during the day and I would pick her up at night.  He was happy to trade sexual favours for the cat's room and board.  I hated him.  At night I would pick up my cat, do what I had to do to cover her “rent” and then she and I would back the truck up against a building somewhere so that no one could surprise us by opening the back hatch.   I would wash my hair in the bathroom of the nearest gas station at night after they had closed for the evening.  I tried to maintain my independence for as long as possible, but finally gave in to the pressures of needing a roof over my head as well as the cat's  and moved in with him.   Despite hating Mike, I married him at the age of 17 and gave birth to our daughter at the age of 19.   My mother knew that I was living with a man who was not my husband.  She had just enough psychology in college to believe that if she suggested I marry the man, I would rebel and leave him, which was the result she was really hoping to get.     I thought it was really what she wanted me to do.   I had felt such a loss in the trust that our former friendship had enjoyed and I believed that if I married him, as she suggested I should, then I could be worthy of her love again.  I would do this to please her.  She had no idea how I felt about him.  I stayed with him for eight years, because I was raised to believe that marriage is for life.  When I couldn't take it any more and divorced him, my mother finally revealed that she never liked him and never wanted me to marry him, but had thought that by suggesting it I would run.   Mike was very physically abusive, but clever enough to hurt me in ways that were not visible to the casual observer.  It was again, my sick way of validating my belief that I was not worthy.  Meanwhile my growing and learning self decided to apply for a job at the Tampa Boat Mart in 1984.  The job paid better money than I had made elsewhere and required an interview and an IQ test.  I was fascinated by the opportunity to have my intelligence measured and probably applied based on that aspect more than any other.   The owner's wife did the interview and test and said that I had registered as a genius.  Bolstered by this, I told her I would take the job, but wanted 50% more than the job had offered.  She balked but I could tell that she wanted me for the position, so I made a deal with her.  I would work for the first 6 months at the price in the paper, but at the end of six months she would advance me to the salary that I requested, because I explained that I would be so irreplaceable to her, or else let me go.  She agreed.   I asked her to lay out everything that she could possibly think of as my job description.  When she did, since I was salaried, I asked if it mattered how long I worked to get it all done.  She said if I could do it in four hours that was fine and if it took me ten, that was fine too, but I wasn't getting overtime.  In no time I had automated the process so that I could do it in just a couple hours a day.  This freed up my time to work on a business that I believed was going to be my key to financial freedom.  I left the Tampa Boat Mart in 1985.     This was me working at the Neptune and S. Dale Mabry Hwy Radiant Oil gas station owned by Joe Capitano in 1982.  He had offered me my own station out on Gunn Hwy, but I got the Boat Mart job instead.           At the age of 19 I met and began dating Jack Donald Lewis.  Everyone said he had made his money in illegal drugs, but he told me it was from cutting the axels off trailers for re use by the company and selling the boxes.  While at the bank one day a loan officer told him she had a $20,000.00 mortgage that was in default that she would sell for $2000.00 if someone would just take it off her hands.  Don couldn't read or write above a first grade level, but he could understand getting something for ten cents on the dollar.  He asked her to make a copy of the documents and he brought them to me with the story.  Thinking there must be a catch, he asked me to find out what it was.  I couldn't find one.  If we bought the mortgage for 2000.00 and the people started paying us on the 20,000.00 balance we would be getting a great return on our money.  If they didn't pay and we foreclosed, we would get 20,000.00 at the foreclosure sale or we might even get the house and be able to sell it for more.   We did it and we made more than 20,000.00.  I knew that this was my next big challenge and even then knew that it was just a stepping stone to allowing me to do something far more important than make money, but I didn't know what that was and didn't waste much time thinking about it.  Instead I was calling every bank and loan office in a 5 county area asked to see their bad loans.  They thought I was crazy and I got a lot of resistance at first, but they soon learned that I wouldn't betray their confidence and I would quickly and easily turn their bad loans back into cash for reinvestment.  The Boat Mart gave me the regular paycheck I needed to grow the real estate business so that I never had to take money out of this exponentially growing pot of gold.   I worked crazy hours.  I worked every waking hour.  I divorced the man I hated and lived in a huge house on Lemon Street with lots of rooms that I rented out so that I didn't have to touch my investments for living expenses.  The business had grown to well over a one million dollar value.   I drove an old Impala that I had paid 100.00 for, bought all my clothes at Goodwill and had taken on some investors who were happy to get 12% return on their cash and let me make the difference for growing my portfolio.  It was a man's world but I knew how to play the game.  I started a business called C.Stairs, Investments and told people that I was Mr. Stairs' secretary.  They wanted to deal with a man.  I made one up for them.  I was so convincing that for years after Don Lewis and I married people called him Mr. Stairs because they just assumed I had married my boss.  I had bought into the belief that as a woman I was unworthy of being treated the same as a man.   I am a little hazy on the year, but I was about 27 (1988) when I was driving a drunk, named Bill Benjamin, home from a bar.  My car had stalled and he got out to push it out of the road as I steered.  It was in the early morning hours and a woman who had fallen asleep at the wheel careened into the back of my 1983 Blood Red Volkswagen Rabbit and pinned the drunk to my bumper, while hitting with enough force to give me a concussion and to bend the door frame where my head hit it.   I woke up in the hospital again, but this time with a Viet Nam vet suffering from post traumatic stress who was screaming bloody murder if I tried to leave the room.  I stayed by his side constantly, even though I only knew him as someone I had bought a rug from a few days before.  Both of his legs had been crushed and he was in a lot of pain.  I felt guilty because it was my car he was pushing out of the road.  I had to do something to feel guilty.  It wasn't in my paradigm to go without that cloud of unworthiness hanging over my head.  I was so caught up in Bill Benjamin's drama, that I didn't realize that I didn't know who or where I was.   My secretary (Anne McQueen) found me in the hospital.  I had been missing for days so she had done the obvious and called everywhere until she located a Jane Doe.  Was my name Jane?  When she gets me on the phone she asks where my daughter is.  I have a daughter?  A baby?  “Oh my God, where's the baby?” my mind screams.  Sensing my fear she tells me that maybe my daughter had been living with my husband.  I have a husband?  Then who is this man?  All of a sudden I am aware that I don't know anything about whom or where I am.  I just can't describe that.  I have seen some films since then that try to address what amnesia is like, and nothing really conveys what that fear is like.   She takes me home and there are people living there who say that I own the house.  I walk into an office full of file cabinets, papers and ringing phones and I do not recognize any of it.  I answer the phone and people are asking me questions and giving me information that means absolutely nothing to me.  I spend hours reading every file, looking at photos, meeting my daughter, for what seems like the first time, talking to my secretary and one of the women who lives in my house (Mary Young) to try and reconstruct my life.   Over the next weeks and months I get a handle on it and things start coming back to me, but I never know that something is forgotten until I try to fill in a blank spot or until some revelation comes to me as a memory and I sit there wondering, “Was that in this life?”  At the time I thought it was a very unfortunate setback, but in retrospect it just seems to be another challenge that I posed to myself to see if I could rise to above it.   This time I was betrayed by my own memory.   I discover that when I touch people I see their lives, or what I imagine to be their lives.  I am always confused, still, when I get a rush of feeling, if it is theirs, or if it was mine from long ago, just now surfacing.  One of the most dramatic instances of this happened years later when a volunteer (Crazy Gary) introduced me to his room mate.  I shook the smiling man's hand and immediately fell to my knees sobbing.  The despair was overwhelming.  I was embarrassed by the incident and brushed it off to both of them as just being over worked, but the next day the room mate put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains all over the ceiling.  Crazy Gary told me he knew that his room mate was sad, but had no idea of the depth of his despair.  I knew.   Don and I married on October 10, 1991 at ten minutes after 10 am.  We lost one million dollars in our assets to settling with his wife and one and a half million in assets to settle with his girlfriend, Pam, who was trying to have him brought down on Racketeering charges so that she could keep our 3 million that was in her name.  I had always allowed Don to hold our money because I believed he would give me what was owed if I were ever to ask for it.  There were a lot of real estate transactions for Pam and her trust in 1991-1996, but they began to taper off and 2004 was the last entry I found for her doing business in Hillsborough County.  She had satisfied a mortgage made by our ex secretary Luba Myck.  I knew Richard Dery was in Camp Pam, but didn't know Luba was.  1995 appears to be her last actions in Pasco County, with one suspicious document between her and Jack Martin.     Since Don could barely read or write he didn't know that she had put the properties in her name, or so he said.  What had been 5 million dollars worth of my work was now reduced to half that, but I could rebuild it and did.  I had learned how to negotiate the best deals and had learned how to do all of our foreclosures, tenant evictions and get people out of the bankruptcy courts when they ran there for protection.   I learned by going to the court house and reading every file I could lay my hands on, copying the language and forms the attorney's used and then setting up charts that showed me what the appropriate times between filings were.  I spent  hours in the law library reading cases and making copies of those that were particularly pertinent to my cases.  I sat in on every hearing that the judges would let me sit in on.  I befriended several of the judges who would afterwards give me their summary of what had just happened.  A lot of the judges did not like that I represented myself pro se and would  hold me to a much tougher standard than the attorney's were being held to, but none could make me give up.   When attorneys were hired to combat me they usually fell into the trap of underestimating my preparedness.  In all these years I only ever lost one case, and I won it on appeal.  Even the judges who had initially tried to run me off ended up being very supportive and would often compliment my ability over that of my licensed peers, which didn't make me very popular among members of that profession.   I was a 30 year old multi millionaire real estate tycoon by anyone's definition, and undefeated in the legal arena.  Everything I touched turned to gold, but I still felt unworthy.  What was next, a billionaire?  Would that make me feel better?   This wasn't working.  Maybe if I could change the world.  Maybe then I would be worthy.  Maybe then I would say, I'm OK.  I belong.  I can be at peace.   Consciously I began looking for a way to give back to God all that He had given to me.  Unconsciously I was setting myself up to fail and validate that long held belief that I was unworthy... or win and prove once and for all that I was worthy.   All you have to do is wave the wand of intention to bring it into your life.  Before I knew what happened we were rescuing cats from fur farms, drug lords, circuses and unprepared pet owners.  I was writing books on exotic cat care and my articles were being published in magazines and newsletters all over the country.  There were more than 200 animals depending on me for support and the IRS said I couldn't call it an expense, despite the fact that it was costing me about 300,000.00 a year, so I called it a non profit in 1995.   Two years later, my husband has disappeared off the face of the earth leaving me as the accused of an unknown crime, and all of my assets are seized by the courts upon a petition by the children of his former wife, and my secretary, my only girlfriend for the past 17 years, who I discover has put nearly 600,000.00 worth of my assets in her maiden name and changed my husband's insurance policy to make her the owner of a one million dollar life insurance policy, just four months before his disappearance.  She tells his children that Don and I were having marital trouble and suggests that they appoint her as conservator of his estate.     His estate!  I don't think anyone knew better than Anne that Don spent all of his time in dumpsters and cruising neighborhoods after yard sales to bring home van load after van load of trash.  I had been trying to get him to an Alzheimer's specialist but Don said Anne was telling him that I was trying to have him committed.  This can't be happening.  This can't be my life.  Sound familiar?   The courts only allow me to use 125,000.00 of my income each year, for the next 5 years, to support the cats, because the courts are “preserving the estate” in case my husband wanders back into town.  In the first years after his disappearance I discover, through the private detective I hire to find him, that my husband, the man I have adored since I was 19 has had a string of girlfriends, mistresses and even prostitutes.  Women come out of the wood work claiming that Don told them he would leave everything to them or their illegitimate children by him.  I discover that the love we shared was a lie.  I was betrayed.   Our expenses are far more than double what the courts will allow me to touch and there is no where for the animals to go.  I get to learn a whole new set of skills in running a non profit, but I haven't chosen just any charity.  No.  I chose the one type of charity that sees less than 1% of all donated dollars.  I had to pick an animal charity.  People give more money to art than to animals.  In retrospect, this would only be a good test of my worthiness if I could overcome insurmountable odds, right?   The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PeTA, brought me a video clip of a lion being beaten senseless with a baseball bat while restrained within the confines of a small transport cage.  They explained that this abuse had been video taped undercover and sent as evidence to USDA, but that when the perpetrator had told his USDA inspector that this was considered a standard training method for big cats nothing had been done to stop him.  The question was posed to me asking if this was, in fact, a routinely accepted practice.  In front of all three major television stations I said that the sad fact is that this sort of brutality is frequently visited upon these innocent animals by people who have USDA's stamp of approval, but that it was inhumane and USDA was negligent in their unwillingness to enforce the animal welfare act that my tax dollars were paying them to implement.   A few weeks later I was served with a summons.  In disbelief I read the case style:   The United States of America versus Carole Lewis.  Being bludgeoned into unconsciousness with a bed rail all those years ago did not take my breath away like reading these few words.  My country.  The one I had pledged allegiance to along with Captain Kangaroo each morning of my earliest remembered years.  The country I sang songs about, even when I wasn't in school.  The one that bore the flag; the mere sight of which could raise goose flesh on my skin with pride and adoration.  My country had not only abandoned me, it was attacking me, and it was doing so because I spoke out against cruelty.   Some pencil pushing bureaucrat was going to show me to keep my opinions about her doing her job to myself and she was in a position to levy the entire nation against me…or so it seemed.  Maybe America did have tanks and jet fighters and nuclear weapons, but I had the truth on my side and was not going to take this lying down.  Our supporter list had grown to about 3000 people and I sent out a newsletter detailing what the charges against me were and why I felt the USDA had taken this action.  More than 2000 people wrote in on my behalf and for a long time I didn't hear from the USDA.   Then I found out how they work.  If they don't have a legitimate claim then they make an accusation and never follow through on it.  This way they can always point to the accusation and say that they cannot comment on pending litigation.  They never have to prove their case.  I would never be able to clear my name of the ridiculous and unfounded charges unless I took control.  So I did.  I learned all I could about how to represent myself in a Federal lawsuit and I called for a final hearing.  I was stalled several times and when the day my “day in court” arrived, I got a call from the Federal judge who said that the USDA had decided to dismiss their suit against me.  Then he asked if I would please let my supporters know to quit sending him mail and calling his office.  With such a victory you would have thought I would have felt vindicated, but all I felt was betrayed.   Over the next five years the court appointed co conservator and attorneys ate away at my estate, in the name of preserving it, until there was only a fraction of it left.  Then they declare my husband dead, when there is nothing left under the court's control to take, and tell me to have a nice life.  Meanwhile the cats are costing nearly half a million dollars a year to care for and the nation is in a recession following the stock market crash that sends everyone scrambling into real estate as the only safe investment.  Having that much money diverted into real estate by people who know nothing of the business drives the price of property through the ceiling.  The government steps in to try and pull the economy back up onto its feet by lowering the interest rates and giving loans to anyone who will take them at rates lower than they have been in my lifetime, makes my niche a little difficult.  I loan at 18% and buy distressed properties at a fraction of the cost and then resell them.  With all of the stock money now in real estate there are no deals and almost no one has to borrow at 18%.   Stress has made me fat and irritable and I drive to the Keys every two years to spend the weekend crying in a hammock on suicide watch until it's time to get back to business Monday morning.  I learn how to raise money by begging; something I wouldn't do when I was living out of garbage cans as a 15 year old run away, but I have to do it now for the cats.  I learn how to manage people and put together a team of volunteers that become world renown for their ability to work together.  I run through a string of low life boyfriends that continue to validate my belief that I am not worthy of the love of a good man.  I lose 70 pounds so that I can be more effective at getting out the message that exotic cats don't make good pets.   The last 20 of those pounds were the hardest and after exhausting every diet known to man, I tried hypnotherapy.  I was just starting to read about spirituality, healing, past lives and was willing to try anything.  I remember that first session like it was yesterday.  In the meditation the therapist asks me to walk down the beach and notice a little girl sitting by the shore.  He tells me to go up to her.  I don't want to.  He urges me on.  I don't want to.  I finally give in and of course, she is me, about 5 years old, full of innocence, big blue eyes and white hair.  He tells me to hold her and to tell her that I will never betray her again.  I will protect her from anything and anyone else who tries to hurt her.  I made a pact.   My life changed again.  Suddenly I find myself asking, “Is this my life? Can this really be my life?  I didn't think I deserved a life this good.”  Enter, Howie Baskin.  He's a brilliant 52 year old bachelor who makes my heart skip a beat.  He is the kindest, most loving, genuinely wonderful spirit I have ever encountered on the planet.  He personifies integrity.  He is way out of my league which, of course, just adds to my desire to have his love.  To Bask-In his love.  (I just couldn't have made this up!) But he is more than just the next level higher of a challenge.  He is both my reward for reaching this level of understanding and my partner in learning to love mankind.  Becoming one with him is my first step in becoming One with all humanity.   I am reminded of a Bible principle that says man's greatest love for God is expressed in being a living sacrifice.  Nothing defines a living sacrifice better than Howie.  His friends all tell me that he is the most wonderful, loving person in their life.  He lives for others.  Watching him, marveling in who he is and how he is, causes me to look inwardly and challenges me daily to be more understanding and more loving.  He says his goal in life is to help me love people the way I love animals.  I thought I took on big scary goals, but this man knows no fear!   Now things are looking better than they ever have before.  I have finally paid the piper in this lesson of betrayal.  I had betrayed myself when I accepted the notion that I was not worthy and the even more erroneous notion that I could achieve worthiness if I overcame the obstacles that I invited into my own path.  I was going to deal with being betrayed by the people I trusted, and loved the most, until I understood. My fortune cookie tonight even confirmed the presence of God in the statement, “You never hesitate to take on the toughest challenges.”  It was as if He said, “I am here with you and this is just my humorous way of letting you know that I am as real as the piece of paper in your hand.”   The real estate business is recovering.  The sanctuary managed to break even on operating expenses, if not capital expenses, for the first time ever last year (2003).  I have been elected as the Vice President of the Association of Sanctuaries and am serving on its Board of Directors.  (From the future: I don't remember I have the opportunity to influence legislation that will protect wild animals and the physical and moral support of a team of family, volunteers and the man I admire most in the world to help me achieve those goals.   What I notice about each of these hurdles is that I was focused on the subject matter. While I may have been successful in dealing with that aspect, what I failed, almost universally, to do was to learn from the interaction with the people.  In most cases I saw the people as the problem and bulldozing them aside was my methodology.  It seems abundantly clear that I will continue being presented with challenges that are stressful and painful until I pay the piper on this issue of loving people other than those in my innermost circle.   I wonder how I could go about this learning in a less painful and ineffective manner?  Maybe it's time to put on the fuzzy purple blanket (to give myself the warm fuzzy I have longed for), the cloak of spirituality, and take a look at reality from a different, non judgmental, perspective.   I've been writing my story since I was able to write, but when the media goes to share it, they only choose the parts that fit their idea of what will generate views.  If I'm going to share my story, it should be the whole story.  The titles are the dates things happened. If you have any interest in who I really am please start at the beginning of this playlist: http://savethecats.org/   I know there will be people who take things out of context and try to use them to validate their own misconception, but you have access to the whole story.  My hope is that others will recognize themselves in my words and have the strength to do what is right for themselves and our shared planet.     You can help feed the cats at no cost to you using Amazon Smile! Visit BigCatRescue.org/Amazon-smile   You can see photos, videos and more, updated daily at BigCatRescue.org   Check out our main channel at YouTube.com/BigCatRescue   Music (if any) from Epidemic Sound (http://www.epidemicsound.com) This video is for entertainment purposes only and is my opinion.

GM is going ALL EV all the TIME by 2035! They put the EV in ChEVrolet! Also, Raffi's 1967 Mercury Cougar is on Bring-a-Trailer and more on this week's CLUTCH RADIO! Tune in LIVE on FB and YouTube every Saturday AM at 10 Pacific time to watch the show live. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Resources:cassie.codestwitter.com/cassiecodesAmelia's TwitterNate's TwitterKurt Vonnegut and Narrative ArcsSara Soueidan's Post on SVG Filters: The Crash CourseWelcome to the newline podcast. Our show is a conversation with experienced software engineers where we discuss new technology, career advice, and help you be amazing at work.I'm Nate Murray and I'm Amelia Wattenberger and today we're talking with creative coder Cassie Evans.In this episode we talk about something often neglected in web design today: how to bring whimsy and joy to your usersIn our chat we talk about how the old web had entry points to programming and where we might find find that today.And open with a story about how she, as a child, sold animated cursors for donuts, which felt like magic - and how even today snippets of code feel like magic spells.We loved our conversation with Cassie, and think you will too, let's dig in!Cassie Evans PodcastAmelia: [00:00:00] Welcome to the newline Podcast. Nate: [00:00:08] Our show is a conversation with experienced software engineers, where we discuss new technology, career advice and help you be amazing at work. I'm Nate. Amelia: [00:00:17] And I'm Amelia Wattenberger. Today, we're talking with creative coder, Cassie Evans. In this episode, we talk about something often neglected in web design today, how to bring whimsy and joy to your users. In our chat, we talk about how the old web had entry points to programming and where we might find that today. Nate: [00:00:35] We open with a story about how Cassie as a child, sold animated cursors for donuts, which felt like magic. And how even today, snippets of code still feel like magic spells. We loved our conversation with Cassie and we think you will too. Let's dig in. Cassie: [00:00:53] We're not Nate: [00:00:54] live and so we just it to be fun. One of things is I really love your talks and you talked about how the web needs more whimsy. I just love that so much. In one of your talks, you mentioned that you sold neopets pages for donuts. Cassie: [00:01:11] Yes. Nate: [00:01:11] Like when you were a child. Can you tell me more about that? For context, I think you and I grew up with some of the similar early web stuff. For example, when I was younger, I once got on the Internet for hours and then my parents were furious, because my dad had gotten an accident at work and his boss was supposed to call. I'd been tying up the Internet, because I was on dial-up for hours. Yeah, I just love the old classic web style, like Myspace and neopets. We can get into that some, but can you tell me about how you sold neopets pages for donuts? Cassie: [00:01:40] Yes, definitely. Yeah, firstly you mentioned dial-up. I missed that so much. It's so close to my heart, because I remember we had one computer at home, that was our home computer and I was only allowed to use it for educational things for a lot of times. I used to wait until my parents were asleep and then I'd creep downstairs with blankets and I'd have to wrap the whole computer up in the blanket, so that it wouldn't make the noises, so that I could dial-up to the Internet. I just sit there clutching it to my chest, trying to dampen down the noises, so they wouldn't wake up. Why Nate: [00:02:15] were modems so loud, right? Cassie: [00:02:17] So loud. Nate: [00:02:18] Yeah. Cassie: [00:02:21] Even that noise now gives me anxiety, because it sounds like being downstairs, terrified that my parents are going to wake up at any moment. I love that. Yeah, the donuts. I didn't have money for the tuck shop when I was younger. I got school dinners. I didn't have packed lunch boxes and they weren't really into giving us sugary snacks. They were quite healthy. I got quite jealous about all of the other kids having donuts from the tuck shops. Around that time, everyone started making Myspace profiles and neopets pet pages. My one was really good and lots of people asked me whether I could make them sparkly cursors and stuff. I started up a little side hustle and swapped sparkly cursors for donuts. It was excellent. Amelia: [00:03:11] What is the deal? Is it one cursor for one donut? Cassie: [00:03:15] Yeah, I think it was something like that; a cursor for a donut. This Nate: [00:03:19] is amazing. I don't actually understand how this would work. How much programming was it? Were you finding GIFs? I'm interested in particularly one, for the entrepreneurship side, two, because it's on-brand that you're adding sparkles. Then three, is the learning programming aspect. I love this idea, for example, that some of the best ways to learn are just when you're self-motivated and you're just trying to do stuff. I learned how to program, because I was tweaking web pages this similar way and I worked my way down. I'm interested. I didn't actually use neopets necessarily, but what were these cursors and how did that work for as much as you remember? Cassie: [00:03:53] As much as I remember. I think it was very much accidental. I don't think that I realized that I was coding at the time. I didn't really have much of an awareness of what coding was. I used to play The Sims me other early games as well and they had cheat codes that you could type in. I saw it as the same thing. It was Internet cheat codes that you went to some websites and they had pictures of different sparkly cursors, or different backgrounds, or different CSS effects and you just copied a cheat code and then you put that cheat code onto your – and I didn't really know that that's what the building blocks of the web were. I didn't understand that at the time. I thought that they were a little magical snippets that you just – I mean, they still are. Nate: [00:04:42] Right, they still are. They still are Cassie: [00:04:43] magical snippets, aren't they? I still feel like that nowadays. Some new CSS comes out and I'm just like, “Wow, another magical snippet. Amelia: [00:04:52] This is amazing.” They keep making them. Cassie: [00:04:54] Yeah. Nate: [00:04:56] I learned some early programming, we would play these old games, they were called MUDs. You'd Telnet in. It's before SSH, you Telnet. It's like SSH, but insecure. You Telnet into these servers and play these text games, where you're go to the sword shop or whatever and you buy a sword. Then I remember that what we would do is we were like, “Oh, we could host our own server.” It's the same thing. We didn't know we were We were just copying and pasting these codes, make our own server and then we're like, “Oh, we can give ourselves our own items.” We're copy this snippet and then you realize now you have these God-like powers of playing this game that you enjoy and then realize like, “Oh, shoot. What else could I do with this power?” That was actually one of my entry points to programming too. I think that's really special. One of the things that you've talked about too is well, I don't know. What are some of these entry points that people have now? What could we do to give this, serendipitous entry point into coding for kids today? Cassie: [00:05:46] It's really difficult, because I've looked around and I haven't found anything that has that same accidentally educational aspect to it. There's some really amazing things that have the same sense of community, because neopets for me and Myspace to a degree had this community aspect, where there were lots of other young kids who were all hacking around and changing things and you learnt things from each other. I think that we definitely got that in platforms like CodePen and Glitch. They're really great, because they lower the barrier to entry. They abstract away all of the fiddly setup and build tools and all of that stuff and they allow people to just jump in and start making things and remix things that other people have made and fork things that other people have made. I think that's really great, but I don't think we already have any of those accidentally educational things around anymore, which is a shame. People have to be a lot more intentional. They have to want to learn and know what they're there for in order to start off. I Amelia: [00:06:58] also think about this with cars. I think it's a little bit related. When I first started dating my husband, he had a – it was 69 Mercury Cougar, a really old car. He could work on it, because there's no computer, you can understand what the parts are pretty easily. You can just look at them and be like, okay, this turns and it turns this other thing. I think the Internet today is so much more complicated. The bar for what's cool on the web is so much higher that when we were kids and we made a sparkly cursor, even our parents would be like, “Oh, wow. How did you do that?” It's hard to make something impressive now and it's just so overwhelming. I think that's also part of why Glitch and CodePen can be so helpful, because they take care of the nitty-gritty for you, so you can focus on being creative. Nate: [00:07:51] I'm optimistic. I think that I've seen some movement there with Minecraft maybe, Roblox is interesting. Yeah, there's some interesting ideas happening there. There's even some interesting, like more deliberate code for kid tools. There's one called Microsoft MakeCode Arcade. It's like Scratch, but it's designed for building games. Even that, board is on educational. I think there's something special, where it's not deliberately educational, but you learn from it that it's important. Cassie: [00:08:19] Scratch is so cool. I really love Scratch. The Harvard computer science course, the first thing that they get you to do is a thing in Scratch. When I started that, I was like, “Oh, I bet this is really – it's really hard. It's that like Harvard computer science course.” Then they were like, “We're going to build a game in scratch.” Wow, it's Nate: [00:08:39] cool. You're like, “I can do this. Yeah.” I hope that there's more tools that come out, particularly on tablets, because one of the things I notice with my kids is that they're using an iPad a lot more frequently than they're using a computer. I think just the ethos and the ecosystem of tablet apps is it's a lot more locked down. You can't necessarily look under the covers, like you would with Vue source on a webpage. I think any tools like that that let you learn are really interesting. There's a scratch junior that my kids use just to build little stories and little animations and I love that, but there's not too many tools yet, but I'm hoping we can create more. I Cassie: [00:09:15] feel there's some stuff in the hardware hacking, crafting worlds. I think that coding and crafting, the intersection of that, there's some quite interesting stuff happening, because I think you can fall into that accidentally as well if you're interested in hacking around with things. You can end up, “Oh, well. I want to make these lights flash and oh, I'm going to have to learn Python in order to do that.” I think that that's still yeah, accidental gateway Amelia: [00:09:51] into things. Yeah, I love that. I think some of the people I used to work with, they would spend time with their kids making a Halloween skull with an Arduino that makes its eyes flashed. It's such good bonding time, and because it's fun for everyone. I enjoy doing that. Cassie: [00:10:05] I was Amelia: [00:10:06] like, “I need a kid, so I mean, Cassie: [00:10:08] I can have an excuse Amelia: [00:10:09] to do Nate: [00:10:10] this.” Right. Yeah, I know. Right. But our kids are doing that now with cosplay stuff, is they first were doing little paper craft creatures. They would print off a template and they cut it out and they'd be like, “Oh, we want to make our own,” so then they're learning how to use blender to do their own 3D modeling. Then use, there's this tool called Pepakura, which you can use to slice 3D models down into a little papercraft, like Minecraft creature or whatever. Then they're learning computer skills for using Figma to edit the templates and they're using Blender to learn 3D modeling. They're not good at that yet, but you can see the progression. They're going to take over the world. Yeah. I recently watched one of your talks on CSS filters and it totally blew my mind. I've been programming for since we talked about since dial-up, and I didn't even know that SVG had filters. I thought that was so fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about your recent work on doing paintings with SVG? Cassie: [00:11:05] Yes. I've really been loving SVG filters recently. I got into a little bit of a slump at the beginning of lockdown, where I wasn't feeling creative at all. The idea of programming, coding sounded not so much fun. I wanted to do something a little bit more relaxing. Yeah, I find SVG and SVG filters really fun to play around with, because it's more declarative. You have some filter primitives and filter primitives they work – well, filters they work a lot like audio programming, where you've got inputs and outputs. You can chain things together. You have different filter primitives inside a filter element and you can feed the output of one into the input of the next one and the output of the first two into the input of another one. That means that there's infinite possibilities. Ultimately, all you're doing is just changing a couple of values and some attributes. It feels like putting Lego blocks together. You don't really have to think through any intricate logic. You can just put some filters together and see what happens. Yeah, I find that really fun, the randomness that you get not being able to predict the outcome. I've played around and I accidentally ended up with something that looked a little bit like a pencil line. Then I just riffed on that and made some things that looked a bit like hand sketched paintings, which was a lot of fun. Nate: [00:12:42] It's gorgeous. It is one of the most beautiful SVGs I've ever seen. We'll put a link in the show notes. It was just delightful and mind-blowing. I think that yeah, your talks on SVG are really a Cassie: [00:12:55] delight. That's so lovely to hear. When you have the chance to play with these things, is Amelia: [00:12:57] that all through just side projects? I know when my – at least my job title was developer, most jobs you don't get to play around or do something super creative. Is this something you get to do in your day-to-day job, or is it mostly just side? Yeah, what is Cassie: [00:13:16] your day job? My day job, I am a front-end developer at a company called Clearleft in Brighton. I'm lucky, because my job we have a mixture of client projects, but we also – well, not so much right now, because of the pandemic, but we also do events. The event sites are a chance to flex your creative muscles a little bit, try out new things. I get to explore things creatively through the event sites and then focus on building accessible, solid front-end websites for Amelia: [00:13:55] my day job. Oh, that's a nice balance of the more focused and the more creative. Are you usually working with designers? Cassie: [00:14:02] We have a lot of really good designers at Clearleft. It's hard, but we try to avoid pigeonholing people into just one role. If people want to explore a little bit more design, but they're a developer, then they try to give people space to do that. I'm currently working on a little side project site at work. I'm getting to do design and stuff on that, which is really nice. Nate: [00:14:28] You mentioned that you used to draw a lot and I feel that , experience in your work. Your chameleon, for example, is just adorable and obviously done by someone who has art skills outside of programming. What does your process look like? Are you sketching out ideas for what you want to see on paper, or do you just go straight to SVG? How does that work? Cassie: [00:14:48] It's very much technology-driven, rather than aesthetics first, actually. I tend to get ideas, because I'll be looking at a particular technology and then I'll think, “Oh, how could I demonstrate that? Or how could I play with that in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, or fun?” The chameleon, I wanted to play around with getting colors from a webcam. I did that and it was just changing Amelia: [00:15:16] a rectangle Cassie: [00:15:17] on the screen to different colors. I was like, “Well, that's fun, but it would be so much more fun if it was a chameleon.” Nate: [00:15:25] I love that in your work. Amelia does this too, I think, in that you build something and then it's like, okay, that's fine, but how do we make that more fun? Then you'll take the time to put in those details and it's really delightful. Cassie: [00:15:38] Yeah, I am such a huge fan of Amelia's work. Your article about the SVG viewBox, I have directed so many people at that. I had a whole lengthy explanation in a workshop that I did about the viewBox and then I was just like, well, actually just look at this wonderful article, because it explains it a million times better than I could. That's so Amelia: [00:15:59] good to hear. I feel like I do these things for myself. I'm like, okay, well I need a little toy example. Then I'm like, well, I might as well make it into a telescope. Might as well just let other people use it, I think the way you described your processes, it's very just like, playing around for your own personal benefit. Then just like, “Well, if I enjoy this, other people may also enjoy this.” You released your new website recently and I feel like it got a lot of attention, especially for the bottom. You have a little SVG of yourself and the eyes follow the cursor around. It's just really delightful to play around with, because there's so many websites out there. It's nice to even stumble across one, where you're like, “Oh, this person didn't just make a nice looking well-designed website, they took the next step to make it delightful and take a chance to connect with the user.” Cassie: [00:16:56] I love that so much. I'm not a huge fan of really whiz-bang websites, so websites that you land on and just everything animates and your cursor gets hijacked and your scroll gets hijacked and all of that thing. I find that really overwhelming. I absolutely love it when I'm navigating around a website that looks on the surface, like it's just your average website and then you hover over something, or you click something and it does something unexpected and joyful. It makes you smile. It makes the website feel a lot more human. Amelia: [00:17:32] I think you have to really understand how the web works to create a website that's both really easy to read and accessible and also has that next level. I feel it's easy to do the scroll-jacking, or just animations everywhere, but to have a little bit of restraint and to make it so that people with slower connections, or using screen readers can even navigate it as well. I think that's really awesome. Cassie: [00:17:58] Yeah. I think I had a head start, because I was using 11T. You get out of the box just a lot of performance benefits there. It's a static site generator. I think the tagline is it's a very simple static site generator. Nate: [00:18:12] On the tooling side, I've noticed that you use GreenSock for a lot of your animations. I've never really used GreenSock, but I've seen that a lot of CodePen people use it. Can you just talk about GreenSock a little bit, like what you about it and explain to me why it's so popular? Cassie: [00:18:29] Yeah. I have to start with the disclaimer that I don't work for GreenSock and GreenSock don't pay me any money. Because whenever I get really excited about GreenSock people are like, “She's got to be selling something.” Yeah, I love GreenSock so much. There are a whole bunch of different animation libraries out there, like JavaScript animation libraries. I think if you're doing things with HTML DOM, or say you're using a JavaScript animation library to trim some 3JS stuff, you're mostly just concerned with changing some numbers and a lot of the animation libraries handle things exactly the same way. The problem with SVG land is different browsers handle SVG transforms differently. You can end up with things moving around in unexpected ways in some older browsers and GreenSock, they have gone above and beyond to iron out all of these browser inconsistencies. You can be very sure that your SVG animations are going to work the way that they should do. They Amelia: [00:19:31] a lot more. They'll make really nice animations between things. They have this new scrolling library, right? Cassie: [00:19:39] Yeah. This is another really cool thing about GreenSock is that they've got the core GreenSock library. Their licensing model gets a bit misunderstood, because they're one of the only JavaScript animation libraries that aren't open source. But their core animation library is free for the majority of use cases. I think if you're selling an end product to multiple users, then you have to pay for it, but for 99% of people, it's free. Then they have these additional plugins. The core library does everything that you would need it to do and then the plugins are extra fun and some of the plugins are free and then some of them are behind a membership fee, but they've got a whole bunch of different SVG-specific plugins. They've got ones that help with SVG stroke animation and they've got ones that do morphing. Yeah, they've just released scroll trigger, which is amazing. I've played around with it a little bit. It uses one event listener behind the scenes, so it's really performance and just really intuitive as well. I think that's, yeah, another thing that I really love about GreenSock is the docs. They're just really good. They've got so many good animated examples in there and the forums are really, really friendly. It's like the opposite of stack overflow, can I say that? People are nice there. You post a question and I think as a newbie, I started off doing banner ads animation. That was my first job. I didn't have anyone to learn from and I had no idea what I was doing and I'd post on the GreenSock forum and someone would just jump in and help me out immediately. Yeah, it's really good. That's a Amelia: [00:21:22] really interesting business model. Cassie: [00:21:23] It's difficult to explain to people, but I understand why they do it, because it means that they don't have to rely on any external sponsors. They can just focus their time purely on updating it, which is why a lot of the other animation libraries don't have the time to put in the effort to make sure that things work with SVG cross browser, whereas GreenSock do. Oh, Amelia: [00:21:45] and it also looks like you can use any of the plugins on CodePen? Cassie: [00:21:50] Yes. It's super cool. That's the coolest thing. I think that's why so many people on CodePen use GreenSock, because everything's available to use on there. Amelia: [00:21:58] Yeah, that's super cool. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but it seems like it's – just a really great way to lower the overhead of if you're like, “Oh, I want this button to have a particle system and explode, or I want it to morph into this other thing.” It might just be too much work Cassie: [00:22:13] to do. We all have deadlines at Amelia: [00:22:14] work. If anything, even haves that effort, it might just make it worthwhile. Yeah, definitely. I think there's been quite a few times where people have gone, “Wow, that's Cassie: [00:22:23] a really cool animation that you've done.” Then see that it's five lines of green top coat. That's all Amelia: [00:22:32] it takes Nate: [00:22:33] sometimes, though. Yeah. It's Cassie: [00:22:35] also a lot easier to tweak your animations with green chords, or just an animation library in general. I've struggled with very complex animations with CSS, because you can't chain them together. It's really nice to have a timeline and all that. Amelia: [00:22:54] Yeah, are there any other tools like GreenSock that might be really useful for someone who is new to the more creative coding Cassie: [00:23:02] space? I don't Nate: [00:23:03] know. I'm curious on how to learn how to do SVG animations as well, because I feel the things that actually both of you create just feel like black magic to me. I don't really understand SVG super well, or particularly CSS animations. Golly. I am not good Amelia: [00:23:18] at Cassie: [00:23:19] that. Golly. Amelia: [00:23:21] I thought of one, which is similar. I've always felt like I've seen 3D stuff on the web. I don't know what wizard you have to be to have this 3D scene in a web page, but I will never be there. Then you discover 3JS Cassie: [00:23:38] and it's like – A frame as well. A Amelia: [00:23:41] frame. Cassie: [00:23:41] Yeah, A frame is really cool. It's a web framework for building virtual reality experiences. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Amazing. Amelia: [00:23:51] I love it. I love how these libraries make even, just you have three lines of code and you're like, “I have no idea how I did this either.” Cassie: [00:23:59] I remember when I made my first Taurus knot in 3JS and I was so excited about it. I think pretty much out of the box, you have to import Amelia: [00:24:10] a plugin, but you can rotate it, you can zoom in and out, you can pan around. It's definitely magic. Cassie: [00:24:16] What's the D3 version of that? Is there a good entry point into D3? I Amelia: [00:24:23] have this spectrum in my head of things that are really complicated, but down to the metal. You can do whatever you want with them. Then the other end is a chart library that'll make a chart for you. You say, do a line chart with this data and it'll make a line chart. D3 is definitely on the former end, where it's like, it gives you tools you need. There's a lot of tools and you have to dig into each one of them. I feel if you want that oh, my God. This is magic feeling with D3, a lot of people, especially at the beginning, they'll just look up, there's so many examples online. They'll copy the code and then they'll paste it and then over two years, they'll understand what each line is doing, which I think everyone who learns D3, this is the way they learn it, just because those end examples are so cool and you're like, “I want this. I'm going to have it.” Then you take it and don't really understand all of it. Then there's also the chart libraries that make it super easy to do a really fancy chart really easily. Nate: [00:25:23] We talked a lot about this when we were working with React and D3. I mean, D3 is like React, in that it's a ton of different little modules that all work together. If you try to use for example, D3 with React, it's obnoxious, because D3 also takes over rewriting the DOM for you. One of the things that I would complain to Amelia when she was teaching me this is that to use D3 with React, you basically use React to form all the SVGs and you almost don't need D3, except for the utility functions. I don't actually know what is a good tool that's magic for D3. There's Amelia: [00:25:55] React chart libraries that you'll get something really amazing and be like, “I did this.” We're all on the shoulders of giants. Cassie: [00:26:04] I remember looking into D3. We got a solar panel installed on the roof of our work and I wanted to hook in. Well, you could hook into the API, which is really cool. I wanted to do that and see what we'd saved. I looked into D3 and it terrified me. Then I ended up making an illustration of our office building in SVG. I've set it up, so that with every certain amount of CO2 we save, it grows another plant out of a rooftop garden. Amelia: [00:26:44] I love how this was easier. Nate: [00:26:46] Yeah. Cassie: [00:26:49] It's like reaching for the tool that you understand. It's really difficult to make yourself learn new things. I was like, this is a great opportunity to learn D3. Then about 24 hours later I was like, “I'm going to make an SVG.” I think about this a Amelia: [00:27:05] lot where the flow state is in between something that's really boring and something that's really challenging. If something's too challenging and overwhelming, your brain will just shut off. You'll be like, “I can't learn this.” Then if it's too boring, your brain also shuts off and it's like, “I can just do this in my sleep.” I think a lot of people when they first look at D3, the needle goes all the way and they'll like, “This is overwhelming. I don't know where to start direction.” Then I think even with SVG, that was probably not in the boring area for you, even though you know SVG it was in the middle flow state of this is a good challenging. Cassie: [00:27:45] Yeah. Nate: [00:27:45] Cassie, in one of your talks you mentioned this idea that limitation breeds creativity. Could you talk a little bit more about that and your thoughts there? Cassie: [00:27:53] I have quite bad anxiety. I'm quite bad with procrastinating as well. I overthink things and I procrastinate. When I was learning how to code, there were lots of times where I'd sit down and stare at an empty VS code screen and just be like, “Right. I need to make something.” Then not knowing what to do. It felt a lot like when I was younger. I really loved drawing. At a certain point, I started doubting myself a little bit and overthinking it. My mom started what we called the scribble game. The scribble game was great. She'd take the paper from me and she'd draw a scribble on it, so that the paper wasn't blank anymore and then she'd hand it back to me and I had to make that scribble into something. It was a challenge, but there was a starting point. I think that that's so important when you're trying to make some things, to have a limitation and a challenge and a starting point. If you've got those three things, I think it's a lot easier. Amelia: [00:29:02] I love that. I Cassie: [00:29:03] love the scribble game. Yeah, it's wonderful. How Amelia: [00:29:07] can we apply this to code? How can we do a code scribble in order to lower that barrier? Cassie: [00:29:14] I guess, that's what you're saying about D3 having examples that you can copy and paste and start with. CodePen as well, like other people's pens that you can fork and Glitch has things that you can remix. I think that's a really great place to get started with something new, is just start with something and then see what you can make it into, or see how you can break it. I think it's a good way to learn things. Amelia: [00:29:40] Yeah, I think that's great. I was also reading an article yesterday. I've been meaning to learn 3D modeling, like you're talking about, Nate, that your kids are doing. It was this article, someone did a 100 days of 3D modeling to learn. They had a few things where it was like, one day they'll do a tutorial and the next day they'll make something with that knowledge. Every other day, they're doing a tutorial and it's an easier day, or every other day they do something easy and then they do something really hard. That's a good idea, because otherwise, you're either burning yourself out, or you're not learning as much as you could. Nate: [00:30:17] I feel like we are so early in programming education in that there's not really – I'm lumping 3D modeling into this too. There's not really a good place that you can go that will give you this off-the-shelf curriculum to learn 3D modeling, as you learn D3. Cassie: [00:30:32] Yeah, it's definitely a tricky thing. I find it really hard, even just trying to figure out what I need to learn to be a good front-end developer nowadays, because I feel there's just so much and I inevitably just go off on rabbit hole tangents all the time into the stuff that I'm really interested in. I'm like, “I should be learning webpack, but I'm going to learn some 3JS instead.” Amelia: [00:30:59] I feel whenever I try to write an article, I turn into a grade school version of myself that would tweak the PowerPoint slide styles, instead of actually writing my presentation, where this is the only reason idea in my blog posts have something fun in them is I don't like writing. Cassie: [00:31:16] I'd rather Amelia: [00:31:17] just do something fun, like scribble on the page with SVG. It's also a strength, I guess. Because most of these things I do, I'll end up using them Cassie: [00:31:26] in work. I work with someone who uses the phrase procrasti-working. That's when you know that you're really bad at procrastinating. You have a couple of things that you want to do. Then if you're not doing one of them, then you're going to be doing the other one to procrastinate them. Right, Nate: [00:31:43] procrastinate doing something else you should be doing, so that at least, you're moving Cassie: [00:31:48] I was to Amelia: [00:31:49] my friend about this. She said, she cleans when she has a deadline. That sounds like such a superpower. At least something's clean. Cassie: [00:31:57] Before I do a talk, my house is the tidiest it's ever been. Everything is alphabetically organized. Everything is polished. Nate: [00:32:06] Can you tell us about how you prep for your talks? What does that workflow look like? I prep with Cassie: [00:32:11] great difficulty, is the honest answer. I'm very lucky, because there's a lot of people at Clearleft who do a lot of public speaking. Jeremy Keith being one of them and he helped me huge amounts with my talk writing. I think that the first ever talk I did, it was just a little talk at a meet-up. I was just doing a show and tell, basically, of some of my CodePens I clutched a glass of wine for the whole thing and just showed people the fun stuff I was working on. Doing a conference talk, it needs to have a little bit more structure than just a list of things. I think that it's very rare that you see a talk that's just a list of things that is engaging. I think Jeremy really helped with that, because he's very good at telling stories and he said to me, what you need is you to make sure that your talk has a narrative structure. You need a flow to it. I wrote down everything that I wanted to talk about on post-it notes. Then Jeremy prompted me with different narrative structures. One being the hero's journey, I think was the one I used, so you've got a hero. The hero learns something along the way and overcomes something. I looked at all of the notes that I had and tried to arrange them into different narrative structures and then, eventually found one that I was happy with. Amelia: [00:33:39] What are the other narrative structures? What do you even google find this story to narrative arts? Nate: [00:33:45] The Wikipedia page on the hero's journey is pretty good. There's another one. There's a graph. I'll link to this in the show notes. There's a blog called Reedzy, and they've actually diagrammed out. There's a talk by Kurt Vonnegut, where he actually goes through all these different narrative arcs. One of them that he talks about is the hero's journey, but they actually plot out Cinderella. Here, I'll send you the link. Cassie: [00:34:10] I love graphs of Cinderella. Excellent. Nate: [00:34:14] Yeah, so Kurt Vonnegut, he wrote Slaughterhouse-Five and he also gave this really fantastic talk. There's a YouTube video of it, where it's Kurt Vonnegut graphs the plot of every story. There's actually a database of these different narrative plot lines. Dativism Cassie: [00:34:28] storytelling. Yeah, this is right up my street. Yeah, I love cart when I get as well. Amelia: [00:34:34] I also found this chart of how happy Harry Potter is throughout all the books. It looks like he just gets progressively less happy. Yeah, Nate: [00:34:42] progressively sadder the whole time, right? Amelia: [00:34:44] Yeah. It's pretty dark by that in there. Cassie: [00:34:47] What are some other narrative arcs? Oh, the rags to riches. That's a narrative arc. Oh, rags to riches has two, so there's the rags to riches rise and riches to rags full Icarus, where you rise and then fall. I feel that'd be such a Amelia: [00:35:03] disappointing book. Cassie: [00:35:04] Yeah. Amelia: [00:35:04] Everything's happy until the end. You definitely wouldn't want to choose that for a conference talk. Right. For a conference, you got to end on the up. Yeah, Cassie: [00:35:08] definitely. Amelia: [00:35:15] Yeah, I love the concept of using storytelling in talks, because I think, especially with technical talks, it can be very like, all right, people want facts. I'm going to tell people how to use this thing. I'm just going to have slide after slide of here's a fact, here's a best practice and then it can be really hard to sit through an hour of that and keep paying attention and just keep learning things. Cassie: [00:35:39] I think it's the human element, isn't it? Again, you need more whimsy and more human elements to things. I think some of the best conference talks that I've seen have been – I learnt this thing by doing it wrong for ages. This is what happened, because I was doing it wrong and I learned this lesson the hard way. I think that that's really good, because it feels – you have empathy with them. It feels more relatable. Amelia: [00:36:06] Brain, it's like, I can avoid this pain myself. Cassie: [00:36:11] Everybody likes to laugh at other people's misfortune as well. You Amelia: [00:36:16] just started a creative coding meetup. Cassie: [00:36:19] Yes. Amelia: [00:36:20] Right before lockdown, right? Cassie: [00:36:23] Yeah. We had about three meet-ups and then lockdown happened. It was really great. There's a conference in Brighton called FFConf and Charlotte Dan did a talk. She's amazing. She does lots of really cool generative art. She makes degenerative jewelry as well, which is very cool. A lot of my Brighton nerd friends, we all went to this conference and we saw her talk and she talks through pen plotting and generative art with CSS and generative art with JavaScript and using hardware and creating physical things, like jewelry and stuff. We were all really inspired. Afterwards, we were like, “Let's have a meet-up,” because it's really hard to find time to do all of that stuff and motivation to do side projects outside of work. We decided to do a meet-up that wasn't the normal talk structure, where you go along and watch people talk and then leave again. It was more of we call it a knitting circle for nerds. Everyone just goes along and we all have our laptops and we just tinker on projects and help each other. Then do a little show-and-tell at the end and eat crisps. Sometimes there's a very, very small dog. A very, very small dog. Very, very, very small chihuahua. Amelia: [00:37:48] [inaudible] . Cassie: [00:37:50] Yeah, now that's all moved online now, because of the plague. It's been really lovely, because we've got this little Slack community that has been there the whole time the lockdown's been happening and quarantine's been happening. It's just been such a great bunch of people. Creativity without the pressure and coding without the link to work and career development and stuff. It's just feels a very free space. Everyone there has been super open about feeling a bit creatively restricted, or battling with balancing out life stuff and coding. Yeah, it's been a really, really lovely group of people. Chris, one of the people from Brighton Generator, he is just a project machine. Even when everyone else hasn't been making stuff, he's just been knocking out projects pretty much every week. It's been wonderful watching what he's been making. That Amelia: [00:38:51] sounds so nice to just have that group, especially in these times. On Twitter, I feel a lot of people are having just such a hard time with a lot of people get inspiration from nature, or talking to people, or going places. It's just so hard when you always stay in the same house, if you see the same things and the same people all the time. Yeah, definitely. I think that that's fine. People shouldn't be outputting stuff all Cassie: [00:39:18] the time. You shouldn't feel like you have to constantly be producing things. Sometimes you have to take time to absorb stuff. If that's reading books, or watching tutorials, or going for walks, or that thing. I think it's all just as important. Amelia: [00:39:34] Totally agree. Cassie: [00:39:35] Ooh, if you're wanting to learn more about SVG filters, Sara Soueidan has an amazing set of articles on Codrops, which I Amelia: [00:39:43] learned everything from. They're really great. Nate: [00:39:45] One of the things I appreciate about you is that you remember people's names. I've noticed that in your talks as well. When you are saying, you're not just like, “Oh, there's a blog post on SVG filters.” You're like, “Sara Soueidan wrote this filter.” You should know her as well as her article. I really appreciate that. I think I would like to see more of that in general. Cassie: [00:40:06] It's so important. One of the things that brings me the most joy, which I've started doing is there are a few times where I had made a CodePen or something, or written a blog post and someone actually just sent me a direct message just saying, “Oh, I just read your article and it was really helpful. Thank you for that.” I do that now. Every time I read something and it's useful, I get hold of the person directly and just say, thank you. It's such a small thing, but yeah, I think it's really nice, especially for people who don't have analytics and tracking on their things, because I don't. I don't really want to know who's on my blog, because I get a bit too overwhelmed with numbers and statistics. But it's really nice to get a message from someone saying that they enjoyed it. Amelia: [00:40:51] I love that. Also, I feel for me, the better something is, probably the less likely I'll reach out to someone to say that I enjoyed it, because I'm like, “Oh, there's so many people who are telling them that it's great.” As a creator, it's so nice to get any message. I think being on the other side has helped that anxiety. Cassie: [00:41:12] Yeah. I think we put people on pedestals and don't reach out for that reason. I think we should stop doing Amelia: [00:41:19] also recently released new newsletter. I think it's monthly. What was your motivation behind starting it? I think it's solely focused on SVG, which is just a great niche. Where do you find inspiration for that newsletter? There is Cassie: [00:41:36] a little patch of time where GreenSock were hosting the CodePen challenges. I mean, it was about a month. Every week, Jack from GreenSock got hold of me with a whole load of CodePens for me to look through and judge. I just loved it. It was so much fun. I spent every Sunday evening just going through all of these different CodePens and writing people messages and telling them what I liked about it. I got so many lovely messages back. It just felt so joyful and so lovely to be able to signal boost some people who are making really cool things and give people some feedback. I basically just loved it, so I thought that I would like to carry on doing that. Then I had also, just before lockdown happened, I did a workshop in Brussels and I met Louie, who's also putting the newsletter together with me and we've been Internet friends for quite a while, but it was we met in person for the first time. We just got along really well. We decided we wanted to do a little side project together. Yeah, he's been writing some SVG tips for a while as well on Twitter and I've been looking at those and thinking, “Oh, it'd be great if we could get these tips out to some more people.” Amelia: [00:42:50] Oh, I've seen those. They're so good. Cassie: [00:42:52] Yeah, I learned things. Amelia: [00:42:54] Yeah, Cassie: [00:42:57] me too for sure. He's a creative coding tour de force, he is. Nate: [00:43:00] Cassie, thank you so much for being with us today. It was really delightful. Cassie: [00:43:04] Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. It was lovely to meet both of you, and especially because I've been such a huge fan of Amelia: [00:43:11] Amelia's work for a while. Nate: [00:43:19] Thank you. Hey, you made it to the end. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Amelia: [00:43:22] If you have a minute, a review on iTunes would help other people find the podcast. We have a lot of great content coming up. To be notified of new episodes, hit that subscribe Cassie: [00:43:37] button.

There’s a whole lot of car news to get to in this On the Move, and hosts Matt Avery and John Kraman don’t waste any time diving in to dissect Ford’s reveal of the all-new 2021 F150 pickup truck. The guys were enamored with the vehicle’s focus on innovation, including features like the Max Recline Seats that offer almost 180 degrees of recline, the available Pro Power Onboard that brings generator levels of power to job sites and the 3.5L PowerBoost full hybrid engine that is claimed to have a range of around 700 miles on a single tank of gas. The Blue Oval banter continues with the brand’s announcement of the F-Series Super Duty 7.3L V-8 engine, known as Godzilla, which is available as a crate motor. John talks about how he thinks that’ll open up a whole slew of restoration and Resto Mod projects, including what generations of trucks he expects to see it in. To wrap up, there’s talk of Ram’s highly anticipated 2021 TRX that boasts the Hellcat’s supercharged 6.2L V-8 engine. It’s coming this summer and, as the guys explain, will be red hot with lead foots and enthusiasts. Next, Kevin Marti of Marti Auto Works calls in, giving listeners a behind-the-scenes look at how his company all began with him as a teen looking for a classic Mercury Cougar, a car he still owns today. The enthusiast talks about the services his team offers, including the curation and preservation of Ford documentation and paperwork and the all-important Marti Report. He ends his time with a bang, going into how he was involved with bringing the historic Bullitt Mustang to light. He explains the smoking gun, which, as it turns out, was the galvanic reaction of the vehicle’s aluminum VIN tag. Kevin also gives his thoughts on the car’s momentous presentation and record-breaking sale at the 2020 Kissimmee Mecum Auction. Wrapping things up, John and Matt turn their attention to talk about all things COPO. These classic Chevrolets were the brand’s ultimate muscle cars, having been processed via a Central Office Production Order. Matt shares from his many years of research for his book on the subject, detailing exactly how these wheeled icons got created. Along the way, he explains the instrumental role of key figures like corporate brass Vince Piggins, dealer partners like Don Yenko and Fred Gibb, and speed consultant Dick Harrell. He also explains the rise and fall of the backdoor program, as well as its pinnacle of horsepower, and clarifies a few myths and misconceptions.

How did I get this piece of steel? #savingup #butitsmine #cougar

Jeramy Burt was last seen on February 11th, 2007.  Ninety six days later, the vehicle he had driven off in, his ex-wife's Mercury Cougar, was discovered abandoned and torched in the Bruneau desert in Southwest Idaho.  The discovery of the car caused the Boise Police Department to officially launch an investigation into his disappearance.During the course of the investigation they examined his bank and phone records, revealing details about his final moments and the days after he vanished.  His ex-wife, Kim, who he had been dating again at the time, married another man shortly after Jeramy disappeared, raising many suspicions.  His former girlfriend, and ex-lawyer, Jeannie Braun, became a person of interest for almost everyone associated with the case, but was there more to the story?In the conclusion to this story, host Steven Pacheco examines the investigation, missing audio files, polygraph tests, suspects and a possible link between Jeramy's disappearance and that of another Idaho man, Ahren Barnard.For more information please visit: https://www.trace-evidence.comhttps://www.patreon.com/traceevidence Social Media:https://twitter.com/TraceEvPodhttps://www.instagram.com/traceevidencepod/https://www.facebook.com/groups/traceevidencepodMusic Courtesy of: "Lost Time" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Sources: http://charleyproject.org/case/jeramy-carl-burt | https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/cold-case-spotlight/idaho-family-seeks-answers-11-year-search-jeramy-burt-n848676 | https://www.idahostatejournal.com/members/american-falls-man-missing-since-mother-believes-he-was-the/article_72af6916-b64a-11e3-9843-0019bb2963f4.html | http://thecontextofthings.com/2014/04/14/is-the-disappearance-of-jeramy-carl-burt-tied-to-jeannie-braun-or-jeannie-el-bakri/ | http://boiseguardian.com/2005/08/30/jailhouse-lawyer/ | http://www.missingveterans.com/2007/jeramy-carl-burt/ | https://www.websleuths.com/forums/threads/id-jeramy-burt-35-boise-11-feb-2007.78166/page-2 | https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/police-still-searching-for-boise-man-who-disappeared-10-years-ago/406781673 | https://idahonews.com/news/local/cold-case-jeramy-burt-of-boise-missing-since-february-of-2007 | https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/idahostatejournal/obituary.aspx?n=kimberly-george&pid=180633550&fhid=6418 | http://mydeathspace.com/article/2018/01/20/Kimberly_George_(41)_took_her_life_nine_years_after_her_husband_Jeramy_Carl_Burt_(33)_went_missing | http://blackfootjournal.com/case-of-missing-man-with-ties-to-s-e-idaho-gets-national-attention/

Episode 0046 - Emotional Car Projects and Diagonal Cutting Tools   Woodchuck and Lefty talk about tools, emotional projects and when to move on from a stalled project.   Show Notes: 1:40 Channellock Diagonal Cutters: https://www.amazon.com/Channellock-368-Leverage-Linemens-8-Inch/dp/B004WQZWLU/ref=pd_sim_469_5?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=RB6HV9VM2R6AK7JGPTR1   2:06 Knipex Diagonal Cutters https://www.amazon.com/Knipex-7401200SBA-Leverage-Diagonal-Cutters/dp/B000X4OFUE/ref=sr_1_2?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1504843607&sr=1-2&keywords=kNipex+8%22+Diagonal+Cutters   16:55 Snap-on Tool box prices https://store.snapon.com/Tool-Storage-C700030.aspx   17:12 International Tech series Tool Boxes http://www.spginternational.com/en/products/tool-storage/tech-series   Previous Tool Episode - Episode 0002 - Intro to Tools http://bsquadhotrod.libsyn.com/episode-0002-intro-to-tools 20:43 Mercury Cougar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Cougar#First_generation_.281967.E2.80.931970.29   27:20 ‘79 Kz1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawasaki_Kz1000   28:05 Branded title explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_title_branding   41:05 Mumble software: https://www.mumble.com/mumble-download.php     Thanks for listening, downloading and subscribing. For questions, comments or complaints please e-mail us at: Hosts@BsquadHotrod.com Twitter and Facebook - @Bsquadhotrod And if you really want to help us out give us a review in your podcast app of choice.

Direct Download URL:  http://traffic.libsyn.com/insidethefff/Bonus_Content_MP3.mp3   My first Bonus Content shows. Here I share with you the interviews I gathered at the show. I will also share some behind the scenes audio and back it all with some cool music.    Interviews include:   Jacob and Christian - Talk about the FORD GT GTLM Race car   Robert Thompson - Talks about the FORD display of vehicles and his passion   Dan - Talks about his very special unique 1969 Mercury Cougar with a 428 Cobra Jet    Sebastien Bourdais - Special conversation   Myself, Bob Beck ( Host of GAAS Great American Auto Scene) and Glenn Eldridge (AutoAdix) got up on the main stage and took to the microphones. We started sharing our adventures out on the show floor, talking with people and giving a little history on the cars we encountered.  In our discussions we chat about how you can be a part of the show planning for next year. So sit back, relax and enjoy the Bonus Content.    If you would like to advertise with us, promote your car show or have us come out to your event.  Please use the email address below to contact us.   We would love to hear from you!  Please, let us know how we’re doing!  You can contact us at the following places:   Our email address is:  insidethefff@gmail.com Give us a like on Facebook at:  Inside the FFF Follow us on our Twitter feed:  @OEMInsidetheFFF Check us out on Instagram:  InsidetheFFF

If you've ever wanted to vibrate at your highest level, to attract health, wealth, and happiness into your life, then do we have the show for you! Today I'll be talking with Tommy Rosa, a once-plumber who survived a near-death accident that took him on a fantastic journey. He wrote about it in a beautiful book, I once interviewed his co-author Dr. Stephen Sinatra about, Health Revelations from Heaven and Earth. Today we'll talk with Tommy about his journey, what he learned, and 8 revelations he learned that can help us each, live the most charged, high vibration life possible. That plus we'll talk about guardian angels, perpetual sunsets, whether unicorns are real, and what in the world a 1976 silver Mercury Cougar has to do with anything. Self-Improvement, Spirituality & Self-Improvement Topics Include: How Tommy Died in 1999 & was resuscitated 5 times What Tommy experienced after he died. What Tommy's Heaven experience was like. How do we let go of fear? How do we raise our frequency and vibrations? How importance is self love? What do we do to increase our self-love? What animals did Tommy see in Heaven What was he taught about healing? What can we do to get healthier and to heal ourselves? Do we see our loved ones again after we die? What is free will? How do we generate more self-love in our lives? What's the meaning of life and the importance of being here? What's our divine spark and how do we crank it up? What does positivity have to do with anything? What's the power of forgiveness? What does it mean that we're all connected? Are angels real and do we have guardian angels? What's the most important thing we can do while we're here? A guided meditation Tommy Rosa on How to Shine Brighter & Raise Your Vibrations from his Near Death Experience! Inspiration | Motivation | Spiritual | Spirituality | Heaven | Guided Meditation | Inspirational | Motivational | Self-Improvement | Self-Help | Inspire | Love For more info visit: www.inspirenationshow.com

This week on Hemmings Motor News Radio, I am joined by Senior Editor Matt Litwin who offers a Buyer's Guide on the 1970 Mercury Cougar and Cougar XR-7. In the second segment, Senior Editor Jim Donnelly offers a profile on automotive icon George Barris. Rounding out this episode, WBTN air personality and classic car owner Dennis Dell'Angelo and I have a conversation about his experiences collecting classic cars. Give us a listen here on Hemmings Motor News Radio and email us at radio@hemmings.com