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As I stood out at the lake with my girls happily finding rocks in the sand and Robert on my back in the Ergo, resting his head on my shoulder, I thought, this isn't bad at all. It's a beautiful day and we are having a good time! What was I so worried about?
Not so fast, Jenny.
From the right, he's the second orange shirt. Stayed out there about an hour.
As Jordan was out in the boat with his team practicing, I heard rumblings of regurgitation behind me. I tried to get Robert off my back, but there was no time. He'd had almost an entire pouch of berry applesauce, and he puked it all over the front of his outfit, down my back, into the Ergo, and into my hair. I keep spare clothes for the kids in the van, but we'd taken a shuttle to the lake. I had to take my shirt off and stand around in just my nursing tank top. Since Robert's clothes were covered in puke, I asked Suzi to take her shirt off and zip her jacket up so Robert could borrow her shirt. I had no way of wiping my back off. None of the other spectators came to help me, but I didn't really blame them and was kind of glad. I had to hold Robert for the rest of the time, had no Ergo to use, and Jordan was out in the boat with no phone so we couldn't even take the bus back to the van. To top it off, some of Jordan's coworkers were there to witness our sticky situation.
Luckily Jordan was given a new t-shirt for participating, so I got to wear that home. It was an extra large, but it covered the purple vomit nicely as we waited for the bus and then rode back to the van. I was really happy to get in the shower, and the weekend only got better from there. Also, it was only an isolated incident and not a stomach bug. Thank God.
It's really hard sometimes to think of any good reason I should take the kids out in public by myself.


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For a long time now, the people of the world have known that many Catholic priests have been sexually assaulting children. This happens so often that it has become a frequent punch line to jokes.…Continue
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Hockey world rallies around Jack Jablonskiby Tal Pinchevsky
"I've been to five of my brother Bobby's weddings and 2,000 banquets. I don't see anyone in a white dress here, so it must be a banquet."
It's a joke that Dennis Hull, brother of Bobby and uncle of Brett, typically opens with at most of the events he attends as a spokesman and master of ceremonies. But Hull couldn't use it Thursday at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn., when he presided over a special gala in which close to 1,000 guests and volunteers dressed all in white to honor and raise money for Minnesota high school hockey player Jack Jablonski, 16, who was paralyzed in a junior-varsity game Dec. 30, 2011.
"You guys ruined my opening joke," Hull said to open the evening. "There are about 200 white dresses here."
That change to Hull's opening remarks was only the start of what was a memorable evening. The BEL13VE in Miracles gala, a fundraiser organized by Jablonski's BEL13VERS Fund, raised money through ticket sales and a silent auction featuring a number of items, including an authentic jersey from the 1980 U.S. Olympic team autographed by its players. Initially expected to draw about 500 people, the event drew more than 800 guests, including 40 former and current NHL players.
"Dennis Hull said he's been to over 2,000 banquets and it's the best one he's ever been to," said former NHL player and general manager Lou Nanne, who attended the event and is actively involved in the BEL13VERS Fund. "Jeremy Roenick flew in and took a big part in it. Just an unbelievable deal for this kid."
Since sustaining his injuries seven months ago, Jablonski has become an inspiration throughout the hockey world.
Almost immediately following the injury, the Jablonskis received a phone call from Minnesota native and NHL star Zach Parise. Then Steven Stamkos called, promising to score a goal to honor Jablonski. Eventually Wayne Gretzky called, and visiting NHL teams met with Jack in the hospital before their games against the Wild, who just three weeks after the accident announced that the annual Hockey Day in Minnesota festivities would be staged in his honor. Within weeks of the injury, the entire hockey world was rallying around the Jablonskis, culminating in Thursday's gala.
"The Minnesota Wild couldn't do enough to help make that happen," said John Reilly, a representative of the BEL13VERS Fund. "It was their house and they were the perfect host."
It wasn't the first time the Wild had helped Jablonski. When his high school, Benilde-St. Margaret's, competed in the state tournament at Xcel Energy Center in March, Jablonski was the guest of honor in the suite of Wild owner Craig Leipold. But the halo brace Jablonski had to wear constricted his neck movement, making it difficult to follow the action from the center-ice suite. Leipold switched boxes with another suite owner, moving behind one of the nets to allow Jablonski an easier time following the action. Just three months after Jablonski's accident, Benilde-St. Margaret's won the 2A state title, elevating Jablonski's story to legendary status. But the most inspiring developments were yet to come.
Before the gala Thursday, Jablonski hosted a hockey clinic on the same ice surface where his accident occurred. Back on the ice for the first time since sustaining his injury, Jablonski wheeled around in his specialized wheelchair and casually moved his arms and hands. Later that day, Jack's mother Leslie revealed that her son also had moved his legs. In a video played during the gala, Jablonski was shown rehabbing at the Courage Center, a Minnesota-based rehabilitation center that is part of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. In the videotaped session, the young man who once was told he never would walk again was shown taking steps on a treadmill with the help of a specialized harness and a few staff members.
"We're showing Jack the warrior. He's fighting for his dream to skate again," Reilly told NHL.com. "It's remarkable. This is a boy who wasn't supposed to be able to move his shoulders. He's doing amazing things."
And the hockey world appears determined to be there along the way, demonstrating how tragic events can galvanize a community.
"Hockey's a tight community," Reilly said. "The number of emails and notes going to Jack from [NHL] players was absolutely incredible. I am not from the world of hockey. But In 25 years of working in [philanthropy], I've never seen anything like it."


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History repeats itself as prog giants dismiss Benoit over health problems – just as they did with predecessor Jon Anderson
By Martin Haggarty
Yes singer Benoit David reveals he's been sacked over health problems – but the band didn't tell him, leaving him to discover the news through a press interview.
David was hired after Yes sacked founding member Jon Anderson in 2008 over his own health issues. When the newcomer encountered voice trouble last year the outfit brought in Jon Davidson, originally as a temporary measure.
Now Benoit admits he discovered he won't be back when he was reading a magazine. But he refuses to show any bitterness, and insists he's "grateful" for the experience of fronting the band.
In an open letter to fans he explains: "The final three shows of last year's European tour were cancelled due to my ill health. On my return to Canada I was advised to cease touring for the foreseeable future in order to avoid further damage to my voice.
"I had no alternative but to inform my fellow band members I was unable to confirm my ability for our forthcoming concerts in New Zealand, Australia and Japan.
"I did it with a heavy heart as I felt I was letting everyone down. The band members were very understanding and asked if I would mind being replaced for the April shows. I gave them my blessing. I was pleased to learn Jon would be my replacement – he is an accomplished musician with a fine voice.
"I subsequently learned from a band member's interview that I had officially left Yes and that my departure was permanent.
"As this is the situation, everyone should know that I will be eternally grateful for the opportunity I was given, and very proud to have contributed to more than 200 concerts and to the Fly From Here and In The Present Live From Lyon albums."
David adds his thanks to the band's crew and management, and tells fans: "Please continue with your support of one of the world's greatest bands: Yes."
The singer hopes to continue his performing career later this year. His other band Mystery are set to release a new album soon.


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In the tradition of A Long Way Gone and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, a world-renowned journalist presents a haunting memoir of a war-torn Liberian childhood and her return to her native country, 20 years after her family's flight, to reunite with the foster sister they left behind.
Reviews 5
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Cooper has a compelling story to tell: born into a wealthy, powerful, dynastic Liberian family descended from freed American slaves, she came of age in the 1980s when her homeland slipped into civil war. On Cooper's 14th birthday, her mother gives her a diamond pendant and sends her to school. Cooper is "convinced that somehow our world would right itself." That afternoon her uncle Cecil, the minister of foreign affairs, is executed. Cooper combines deeply personal and wide-ranging political strands in her memoir. There's the halcyon early childhood in Africa, a history of the early settlement of Liberia, an account of the violent, troubled years as several regimes are overthrown, and the story of the family's exile to America. A journalist-as-a-young-woman narrative unfolds as Cooper reports the career path that led her from local to national papers in the U.S. The stories themselves are fascinating, but a flatness prevails--perhaps one that mirror's the author's experience. After her uncle's televised execution, Cooper does "the same thing I would do for the rest of my life when something bad happens: I focus on something else. I concentrate on minutiae. It's the only way to keep going when the world has ended." (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Cooper, a descendant of the founding families who developed Liberia in the 1800s, was part of the mixed-race elite. Her ambitious, quirky extended family is caught off guard when one of the numerous uprisings by the downtrodden against the privileged turns into a dangerous coup in 1980. Her uncle was killed, her mother raped, and her father wounded before the family fled into exile in the U.S., leaving behind adopted sister Eunice. Cooper and her sister adjust to life in the U.S., grappling with ignorance of Africa, their lower socioeconomic status, and the typical confusion of adolescence, all the while trying to stay in touch with Eunice. Cooper's intelligence, ambition, and wanderlust lead to a career in journalism as a foreign correspondent with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, although she assiduously avoided Liberia. But when she was nearly killed covering the war in Iraq, Cooper realized she needed to go home to face Liberia and to find Eunice. Cooper's memoir is an absorbing look at the complexities of politics in Liberia and the compelling pull of family ties.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The skeletal remains of Africa's numerous civil wars litter the continent, from the easternmost reaches of Somalia to the western shores of Liberia. It is there, overlooking the picturesque beaches of the Atlantic Ocean, that unknown numbers of human remains - victims of Samuel Doe's reign of terror - haunt the earth. One building that serves as their communal headstone, itself a virtual skeleton, is physical testimony to the civil war that racked Liberia for nearly 25 years. This macabre marker is the house at Sugar Beach. In her masterly memoir, Helene Cooper brings us back to the halcyon years when Sugar Beach, her family's home, embodied the elite privilege and disco-age chic to which Liberia's upper class aspired. The Coopers' mansion, 22 rooms in all, rose in solitude out of the plum trees and vines that thicketed Liberia's undeveloped coastline. Inside was a living homage to the 1970s, complete with velvet couches in a sunken living room, marble floors and a special nook for storing the plastic Christmas tree. Outside, where a carpet of grass stretched to the thunderous Atlantic, multiple servants made their home, and the latest-model American cars - from a Lincoln Continental to a two-tone green Pontiac Grand Prix - awaited their next 11-mile journey into downtown Monrovia. Fate, so it seemed, handed Helene Cooper a "one-in-a-million lottery ticket" when she was born into "what passed for the landed gentry upper class of Africa's first independent country." Both sides of Cooper's family traced their roots to Liberia's founding fathers - freed slaves from the United States who fought disease and the recalcitrant local population to forge a new nation. Their bravery and ingenuity were legendary, and their descendants soon formed Liberia's upper caste. At its heart, "The House at Sugar Beach" is a coming-of-age story told with unremitting honesty. With her pedigree and her freedom from internalized racism, Cooper is liberated to enjoy a social universe that is a fluid mix of all things American and African. "None of that American post-Civil War/civil rights movement baggage to bog me down with any inferiority complex about whether I was as good as white people," she declares triumphantly. "No European garbage to have me wondering whether some British colonial master was somehow better than me. Who needs to struggle for equality? Let everybody else try to be equal to me." The young Helene Cooper oozes the awkward confidence of a privileged adolescent, and it is through her bespectacled eyes that we see the carefree decadence of Liberia in the years just before it descended into chaos. They are also the lenses through which we are introduced to Cooper's distinctly female world. Atop the matriarchy is her maternal grandmother, the unforgettable Mama Grand. Cooper's side-splitting portrayal of this hard-nosed, self-made landowner is nothing short of brilliant. With her gold-capped tooth glistening, Mama Grand is equally capable of dressing down a Lebanese merchant who "thought he was going to cheat me out of my rent" and berating the entire American government on camera for "60 Minutes." The women are the backbone of Liberia in its heyday, but they show their true strength when the country collapses. A subtle, nostalgic ache for a childhood foreshortened is the watermark imprinted on every page of Cooper's story. The idyll at Sugar Beach, with its Michael Jackson LPs and Nancy Drew mysteries, was shattered when a ragtag group of soldiers part of the rebel force that brought down the Tolbert government in 1980, and with it over 150 years of old-guard, one-party rule - arrived on the scene. The stench of their inebriation, of their lust for violence, overpowered the tranquility that still lingered in the bucolic air of Cooper's sheltered world. Her mother would try in vain to exorcise the odor - and the memories - the rebel intruders inscribed on her body and mind after they gang-raped her. Mommee sacrificed herself to protect the innocence of Helene and her other daughters, Marlene and Eunice, locking them in an upstairs room before the soldiers forced her down into the basement. 2003 Helene travels to Liberia for the first time in over 20 years to try to find Eunice. Cooper soon went into exile, joining thousands of other members of the Liberian elite who managed to escape the rebels' murderous pillaging. Mommee and Marlene were also among them. Eunice was not. The daughter of a poor upcountry mother, she had been taken into the household at Sugar Beach when Helene was a lonely 8-year-old in need of companionship. She quickly became "Mrs. Cooper's daughter" and was treated as one of Mommee's own. Yet over the years there were subtle reminders of Eunice's different status. And when it was time to flee, painful choices were made. Eunice was not a blood relation, and so she was left behind. While Cooper's memoir is mesmerizing in its portrayal of a Liberia rarely witnessed, its description of the psychological devastation - and coping mechanisms - brought on by profound loss is equally captivating. The second half of the book tells the story of Helene's reinvention. Her aristocratic Liberian pedigree meant nothing in the hallways of her new school. She became the suspicious immigrant, spending lunchtime hiding in bathroom stalls and the recesses of the library rather than face the scrutiny and ridicule of her American classmates. Cooper's perseverance and immense talent with language eventually catapulted her into a career as a journalist. Her success at The Wall Street Journal and later The New York Times is nearly as noteworthy as her ability to compartmentalize - or, some might say, dissociate. This mental sleight of hand is what affords her the psychological space to create a new life and cultivate her writer's craft. It would be a mistake to see her ruminations over race and class in America as the hypocritical ranting of a once-privileged African. They are, instead, a reflection of her internalized journey, part of the process of becoming whole. The walls holding back the guilt of her early entitlement, the destruction of her childhood, the murder of family and friends, and the abandonment of her foster sister would finally come crushing down under the literal weight of an American tank in Iraq. When the tank destroyed the Humvee in which she was riding, Cooper narrowly escaped death. But once she was extricated from the wreck, her mind traveled to a different war. "At that moment," she writes, "as I lay in the sand in the desert, my chemsuit soaked with what turned out to be oil, not blood, I thought of Liberia." For the first time in over 20 years, she soon returned to her former homeland. There, in the ravaged streets, in the overgrown jungles of yesteryear's plantations, she confronted the ghosts of the dead and encountered the living survivors. With much suffering and loss, Eunice had miraculously endured the hell of the Doe era, as well as the civil wars and deep poverty that accompanied the ascent of Charles Taylor to Liberia's presidency. Eventually, the two sisters were reunited and returned to the house at Sugar Beach. In the defiled shadow of onetime grandeur, Cooper embraced the enormity of her past, and finally came of age. Women, the backbone of Liberia in its heyday, show their true strength when the country collapses. Caroline Elkins is an associate professor of history at Harvard and the author of "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya," which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2006.
Kirkus Review
A contemplative memoir of a privileged life in a poor place. The house of the title stood, and perhaps still stands, 11 miles from Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Born there in 1966, New York Times special correspondent Cooper (whose beat is now Condoleezza Rice) had the run of that "perfect and perfectly grand paradise," with its five bedrooms and three bathrooms and baby grand piano, all "protected from the ravages of West African squalor and poverty by central air-conditioning, strategically placed coconut trees, and a private water well." Yet, though perched on a hill above the rest, the house was no fortress. As Cooper writes, it was a magnet for rogues--burglars, that is, as distinct from thieves, who "worked for the government and stole money from the public treasury." Lighter-skinned than many of her compatriots, Cooper was also an "Honorable," one of the ethnic and social elite who lorded it over the poorer "Country" people of Liberia. A Country man with a Harvard doctorate, notes the author, would still rank below an Honorable "with a two-bit degree from some community college in Memphis, Tennessee." In childhood games, it was the Honorables who got to shoot the Country people, and the Country people who got to play dead. Such are the perfect ingredients for a civil war, and civil war is what came. When it did, led by Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe, members of Cooper's family were killed, her mother raped, an adopted sister lost, her family scattered and sent into exile in America. These terrible events occur at the book's midpoint. What remains--rendered with aching nostalgia and wonderful language ("Wartime come, when they be evacuating people, you will be glad I not tryin to get on no helicopter in heels")--is a voyage of return, through which the author seeks to recover the past and to find that missing sister, even as the war deepens over the years to come. Elegant and eloquent, and full of news from places about which we know too little. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Born in Liberia, New York Times diplomatic correspondent Cooper recalls the 1980 coup d'etat that nearly destroyed her family and brought her to America. With a nine-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
1 This is a story about rogues. Burglars are "rogues." The word burglar is not in the Liberian-English vernacular. I occasionally used "thief," though only for two reasons: (1) to impress whoever was listening that I knew proper English, and (2) to amplify "rogue," like when yelling out "Rogue! Rogue! Thiefy! Thiefy!" to stop a fleeing rogue. But rogues and thieves were very different animals. Rogues broke into your house while you were sleeping and made off with the fine china. Thieves worked for the government and stole money from the public treasury. Our house at Sugar Beach was plagued by rogues. From the time we moved into the twenty-two-room behemoth my father had had built overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, they installed themselves as part of daily life. It wasn't hard to figure out why: we were a continent away from civilization at eleven miles outside of Monrovia, my mother was hell-bent on filling up the house with ivory, easily portable if you're a rogue, and our watchman, Bolabo, believed that nights were meant for sleeping, not guarding the house. Bolabo was an old man. His hair, which he kept cut very short, was almost white. He had nine teeth, at alternating places on the top rim and bottom rim of his mouth, so that when he talked you could see the holes, but when he smiled, which was a lot, it looked like a perfect set. He didn't have a gun, he had a nightstick. He walked with a bounce and always seemed cheerful, even when he was getting reamed out by my mother in the mornings after the discovery that rogues had once more gotten into Sugar Beach and made off with her ivory. The first time it happened -- within a week of our arrival at Sugar Beach -- I woke up and stumbled out of my bedroom to the sound of my mother yelling at Bolabo outside. Jack was leaning against the wall, enjoying the proceedings. He winked at me. Jack was technically our houseboy, but none of us ever dared call him that because he grew up with Daddy. "Rogues came here last night," Jack reported. Mommee had hauled Bolabo to the kitchen porch for his dressing down. She was in the doorway, her arms punctuating the air with her grievances. She wore her usual early-morning attire: knit shorts that stopped just above her knees, a T-shirt, and slippers. Her hair, originally piled on top of her head, had come undone as she paced angrily back and forth on the kitchen porch, arms flailing. Before her stood Bolabo, his entire demeanor one of remorse. Bolabo: "Aya Ma, na mind ya." Translation: Gosh! How awful! Never you mind, Mrs. Cooper, please accept my apologies. Mommee: "You hopeless seacrab! I should sack you!" Translation: Bluster. "Seacrab" and "damn" were as close as Mommee ever came to cussing. History would show Mommee sacked Bolabo every month and always rehired him when he came back and "held her foot." Bolabo: "I hold your foot, Ma." Translation: An exclamation point that punctuates this heartfelt entreaty. When begging a Liberian's pardon, you can't get much lower than telling them you hold their foot. This went on for about fifteen minutes, until Mommee slammed the door in disgust. Bolabo was extra vigilant for the next few days, making a big show of closing his bedroom door in the boys' house during the day so we would know that he was getting his rest for the night ahead. Then, at around six p.m., he came outside with his nightstick and strutted around the yard, inspecting the coconut trees that surrounded the estate, presumably for signs of imminent attack. He peered down the water well near the fence, as if rogues were treading water thirty feet down, waiting for the family to go to sleep before jet-propelling themselves out like Superman. Bolabo settled into his chair by the laundry room, then jumped up self-importantly when a car drove into the yard, as if the rogues might just drive up at seven p.m. for supper. Invariably, he was asleep before my bedtime at eight p.m. I, on the other hand, was not. Who could fall asleep way out in the bush like that? I went to bed at night wishing we were back at our old house in Congo Town. Liberia is nowhere near the Congo River, but the term Congo is endemic. We are called the Congo people -- my family and the rest of the descendants of the freed American slaves who founded Liberia in 1822. It is a somewhat derogatory term invented by the native Liberians back in the early nineteenth century, after Britain abolished slave trade on the high seas. British patrols seized slave ships leaving the West African coast for America and returned those captured to Liberia and Sierra Leone, whether they came from there or not. Since many of the slave ships entered the Atlantic from the mouth of the massive Congo River, the native Liberians, many of whom happily engaged in the slave trade and didn't like this new business of freeing the slaves and dumping them in Liberia, called the newcomers Congo People. Because the newly freed captives were released in Liberia at the same time that the freed blacks arrived in Liberia from America, all newcomers became known as Congo People. Monrovia is full of Congo this and Congo that. Congo Town, where our old house was, is a suburb of Monrovia. It was filled with Congo People like us. We got the native Liberians back by calling them Country People, far more derogatory, in our eyes. Daddy moved us to Sugar Beach because he thought the old house in Congo Town was too small. It only had three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a TV lounge, a living room, a den, an office, a kitchen, a palaver hut outside, and a huge lawn, where I learned critical social skills from Tello, my favorite cousin and role-model supreme. "Jus' kick your foot de same time you jumping!" Tello, short for Ethello, yelled at me one Sunday afternoon on the Congo Town lawn. It was a typically heavy, soupy day, and my ponytail, drenched in sweat, glued itself to the back of my neck. Next door, the Baptist church people, who spent hours in that church singing their holy ghost songs, had quieted down -- it was time for their midafternoon snack of check-rice with crawfish gravy. The sharp, intense smell of the fish gravy wafted to our yard from the back of the church, making my stomach rumble with hunger. Tello was teaching me how to play knock-foot, a girls' game where players hop on one foot and kick toward their opponents with the other foot. Knock-foot involved intricate maneuvers that need rhythm and balance. The Country People had thought it up. Knock-foot is sort of like rock, paper, scissors with feet. A good knock-foot session between two girls who know what they're doing looks like dancing, with each girl bobbing, kicking, and clapping to a precise beat. There were many variations of knock-foot; one, called Kor, required such precision I knew I'd never be able to do it. All I wanted was to be able to do basic knock-foot. Hop, hop, kick. Clap, hop, kick. Except the clap was on a half beat and the kick was on a half beat. Beads of sweat collected on my forehead as I tried again. Hop, hop, kick. "Not like that!" instructed Tello. She was four months older than me and very sure of matters of correctness. "You kicking before you jumping!" "Aye, I tryin," I whined. Hop, hop, kick. I raised my foot slightly higher, and when I kicked, got her full in the knee, good and hard. She stomped the grass, then turned around, and, with a sucking of her teeth -- that social skill I had mastered at last -- walked back to the house. I chased after her. My escort into high society was mad at me. "Tello!" I said, trailing her into the house. "Na mind." She forgave me when we entered the living room and we automatically headed for the black leather couch to pretend to be our mothers. "I say, it's too hard to find good help these days," Tello said, crossing her legs as she sat on the couch with her doll propped in her lap. "I told Gladys to make up the bed, and you know wha' she did? Cleaned the cupboard instead!" I sighed, in what I hoped was a long-suffering way. "Ma people, I got' de same problem m'self, I tell you," I replied, flicking some imaginary dust off my pants. "I asked Old Man Charlie to cook palm butter and he cooked cassava leaf!" I loved the Congo Town house. It was close to town and Tello visited all the time. There was always stuff to do and people to see, even if it was just picking fights with the Baptist people next door. But Daddy said we were crowded there. I shared a bedroom with my little sister, Marlene, and Marlene's nurse, Martha, a tall Kru woman. There were way too many people in my bedroom at night. "Don't worry," Daddy said. "When we build the house at Sugar Beach, you're going to have your own room." My own room! Wouldn't that show the world how grown I was! "What color do you want it?" Mommee asked me before we left Congo Town. I thought for days and days before finally deciding. "I wan ma room be pink." And so, bought off with the false notion that I actually wanted my own room, I followed my family to Sugar Beach and our grand new home. This was our house at Sugar Beach: a futuristic, three-level verandahed 1970s-era behemoth with a mammoth glass dome on top, visible as soon as you turned onto the dirt road junction a mile away. The house revealed itself slowly, like a coquettish Parisian dancer from the 1920s. Emerging from the road's first major pothole -- big enough to swallow a small European car -- your reward was a glimpse of the house's sloping roof and glass dome, shining in the equatorial sun. Rounding the bend between the dense bush of plum trees and vines, you next got a glimpse of the house's eastern wraparound second-floor porches, painted creamy butter, with a roasted red pepper trim hand-selected for tropical contrast. Driving by the two huts that formed the outermost edge of the nearby Bassa village of Bubba Town, you then caught another tease: the sliding glass doors that formed the perimeter of the second-floor living room. But nothing could prepare you for the final disrobing as you crested the hill that opened up to the panoramic view of the house, back-lit by the thunderous waves and pounding surf from the Atlantic as far as the eye could see. Shangri-la, Camelot, the Garden of Eden -- the Cooper family's perfect and perfectly grand paradise, where John and Calista Cooper could raise their perfect family, cosseted by well-paid servants, and protected from the ravages of West African squalor and poverty by central air-conditioning, strategically placed coconut trees, and a private water well. The upper level had five bedrooms and three bathrooms and a TV lounge and an indoor balcony that looked down onto the children's toy room on the first floor. The middle level had an enormous kitchen with adjoining dining room, the two separated by double swing doors. There was a music room with a rock wall on one side, housing a baby grand piano that overlooked the ocean. There was the sunken living room with its rich velvet couches the color of cognac and its wraparound glass doors, from which you could view the ocean to the south and the bush to the north. The lower level had two bedrooms and three bathrooms and a huge recreation room with a full bar. There was a playroom and a toy room and my father's office. And there was a nook under the stairs for storing our plastic Christmas tree. With the exception of the bedrooms, all of which had wall-to-wall carpet, all floors were marble. A nine-foot-tall grandfather clock stood in an atrium halfway down the marble staircase separating the middle level from the lower level. The five-acre grounds had a lush green carpet grass ringed by hibiscus and bougainvillea plants, and coconut trees. The two-car garage housed the favorites of the moment; the older cars and Daddy's pickup truck were relegated to a parking area by the boys' house. In moving to Sugar Beach, eleven miles out of Monrovia, we were supposed to be suburban pioneers. If the world had worked out the way it was supposed to, Monrovia would have followed us out there, as housing developments, businesses, cafes, and restaurants overran the city and pushed its boundaries farther east from Providence Island, where the first Congo People -- the freed black Americans -- built their houses and established their capital city. My parents, especially Mommee, had both grown up in houses in what was now the heart of inner-city Monrovia. Mama Grand, Mommee's mother, still lived "across the bridge" on Bushrod Island, an area near the port that was now completely overtaken by shops and business. By contrast, Sugar Beach was in the bush on the edge of the sea. Our closest neighbors who weren't Country People were the people at the mental hospital Catherine Mills, about five miles away. There were plenty of Country People living in Bubba Town and other Country villages nearby. Uncle Julius, Daddy's brother, built his house right next to ours at Sugar Beach, so we at least had our cousins -- Ericka, Jeanine, and Juju -- next door. Together, the two houses made up the Cooper Compound. Our house at Sugar Beach was a source of pride and of pain. It was a testament to the stature of my family in a country where stature mattered, sometimes above all else. Liberian society rivaled Victorian England when it came to matters of social correctness. In Liberia, we cared far more about how we looked outside than about who we were inside. It was crucial to be an Honorable. Being an "Honorable" -- mostly Congo People, though a smattering of Country People were sometimes pronounced educated enough to get the title -- meant you were deemed eligible to hold important government posts. You could have a Ph.D. from Harvard but if you were a Country man with a tribal affiliation you were still outranked in Liberian society by an Honorable with a two-bit degree from some community college in Memphis, Tennessee. Daddy was an Honorable with a proper college bachelor of science, but being Hon. John L. Cooper Jr. was a hell of a lot more important than whatever degree he got in America. But the Cooper Compound was far from Monrovia. It didn't take more than two days out there for me to realize that I'd been had. Eleven miles is a continent when you are seven years old and all of your friends live in town and rogues and heartmen rule the nighttime. Radio Cooper, my grandfather, wired Liberia, but his telephone lines didn't reach Sugar Beach, where his two sons had decided to build their houses. "How much longer until we get a phone?" I whined to Daddy on the first day we moved there. "You're seven years old. Who you plannin to call?" "Tello 'them." In Liberian English, saying "'them" after someone's name is a shortcut for including a whole group. "Tello 'them" meant "Tello and her sisters." "Ain't nothing you and Tello got to talk 'bout every day. You can talk to her when your Mommee carry you to church Sunday." I knew not to argue too much with Daddy. He sat at the top of the Sugar Beach hierarchy, with Mommee. Together, John Lewis Cooper Jr. and Calista Esmeralda Dennis Cooper, represented three Liberian dynasties: the Coopers, the Dennises, and the Johnsons. Hon. John L. Cooper's ancestors dated back to one of the first ships of freed blacks that immigrated to Liberia from America in the early 1800s. Mommee's ancestor, on the other hand, was on the first ship. If Elijah Johnson hadn't existed, Liberia might not exist. He and sixty-five others survived the trip to Africa back in 1820. The three white men sent along with the group, along with twenty other blacks, all died within weeks of landing in West Africa. Elijah Johnson lived, and ostensibly founded Monrovia after disease ravaged the group of freemen settlers. When native Liberians attacked the newcomers, Elijah Johnson led the fight back. A British gunboat came ashore and its commander offered to send help if Elijah Johnson would cede to the British flag. "We want no flagstaff put up here that will cost more to get it down again than it will to whip the natives," Elijah Johnson said, in a phrase we memorized in school. Elijah Johnson's son, Hillary Johnson, became Liberia's sixth president. His great-great-grandson, my great-uncle Gabriel Dennis, was secretary of state and secretary of treasury. Cecil Dennis, the minister of foreign affairs, was my cousin, although we called him Uncle Cecil. Mommee took great pride in the fact that, as one of the heirs to Elijah Johnson, she received a $25 check from the government every once in a while. It was his pension, divided up among his descendants. Sometimes jealous people -- Country and Congo -- complained about why a poor third-world country was still doling out money to Elijah Johnson's heirs more than a century after he died. To which Mommee replied, "Excuse me, there wouldn't be a country if it weren't for Elijah Johnson." Daddy had clout, but Mommee ruled Sugar Beach. She was tall and thin and light-skinned, and had the ultimate symbol of beauty in Liberia: long, silky, soft, white people's hair. She had long legs and a long neck and she never went out without her Christian Dior sunglasses propped on her nose. She had the first Lincoln Continental Mark IV ever to show up in Liberia. She could order Old Man Charlie, one of our cooks, to make sure he put enough raisins in the cinnamon rolls one minute, and then turn around the next minute and give $100 to the market women who came to the house to beg for school tuition for the children. Daddy's side of the family, the Coopers, made their mark in business. The four brothers arrived from Virginia as freemen in 1829 -- newbies by Mommee's standards. They bought up land left and right and quickly became one of the most powerful and wealthy families in Liberia. My great-great-great-granduncle, Reid Cooper, became a Liberian navy commodore who helped to fight the Country People and rescued one batch of early settlers up in Maryland County from a group of angry native Liberians. Radio Cooper, my grandfather, was chief of the Liberian Telephone Exchange. My uncle Julius was minister of Action for Development and Progress. My father was deputy postmaster general. There is a photo of the cabinet of former Liberian president William V. S. Tubman, taken just after his inauguration in 1944. My great-uncle, Gabriel Dennis, secretary of state (Mommee's side), stands next to my grandfather, Radio Cooper. I see my mother's, and my own, flat mouth in my uncle Gabriel. I see my father's, and my own, deep-set eyes in my grandfather Radio Cooper. Their pedigrees matched on paper, but in reality, Mommee and Daddy were from different planets. Daddy took nothing seriously. He drank like a true Cooper -- beer with raw eggs for breakfast, gin for lunch, whiskey for supper; Mommee thought a sip of brandy was deliciously naughty. Mommee went to church religiously; Daddy treated church like it had a black snake inside. Mommee was hypersensitive and quick to take offense: her college epitath was "Calista Dennis, Lah to us; Nice and friendly, willing to fuss." Daddy was an incorrigible jokester who prized his wit and whose favorite brag was: "I lost a million dollars by the time I was thirty." Daddy was light-skinned, too, with those big round fat Cooper cheeks. He had a beard and a goatee mustache and deep-set eyes. Mommee called him a shorty, because they were the exact same height and he was always trying to stop her from wearing high-heeled shoes when they went out together. After Mommee and Daddy in the family totem pole, at least as far as I was concerned, came me. "Helene, the great," I called myself. "The Joy of my Heart," Mommee called me. "Hard-time Biscuit," my brother, John Bull (same Pa) said. "Cracky Cooper," my cousins said. I was darker than Mommee and Daddy but still light-skinned by Liberian standards. I weighed eleven pounds thirteen ounces when I was delivered by cesarean on April 22, 1966, at Cooper Clinic in Monrovia. When the doctor whacked me to check out my lungs, I growled like Barry White. Mommee, who only weighed 118 pounds at the time, was too tired to get a good look at me after the operation. "Is it okay?" she said, then fell asleep. When she woke up, the nurse said: "Are you ready to see your monster?" I was living proof that Mommee could conceive. She was thirty-two when she had me, a full two years after she and Daddy got married. That's old age in West Africa, where girls are married off as soon as they come back from the Grebo bush. We were civilized Congo People with American roots, so nobody was sending Mommee off to the Grebo bush when she was fourteen to get circumcised and to learn how to be one of umpteen wives to some husband. But even in civilized Congo Liberian society, thirty-two was old to be having your first child. She swaddled me in wool before taking me home, bundled warmly to protect my mocha-latte infant skin from the African sun. And the mosquitoes. "You are the joy of my heart," she told me, again and again. No question about it. I was special. Nobody was more special than me. But I came out with Mommee's flat Dennis mouth. That's what we called white people's lips: "flat mouths." African lips are full and juicy. Daddy had full juicy African lips. His lips wrapped around a forkful of palm butter and rice, and he chewed, and his lips moved up and down, with moist palm oil oozing out before he licked it back in with his tongue. I loved watching him eat. It made me hungry. Nobody would watch me eat like that, because I had a flat mouth. Five years after me came Marlene. Marlene and I are same Ma, same Pa, a critical distinction in a country where men routinely father children by multiple women. If a Liberian asks about your relationship to a sibling, you can always just answer "same Pa" meaning "we have the same father, not the same mother" or "same Ma." "Same Ma, same Pa" implies you share the same blood from both parents. Marlene was a chubby, white, green-eyed, silky soft hair, Chinese-looking Buddha-baby. We were all lined up in the upstairs TV lounge at the Old House in Congo Town on the day she was born, waiting to hear whether Mommee had had a baby girl or boy. Daddy came trooping up the steps. I held my breath. I didn't know what I wanted, a boy or girl? I already had two sisters through Daddy's first marriage -- Janice and Ora -- and one brother, John Bull. Daddy looked at us and grinned. The suspense was too much and Janice finally yelled. "What Aunt Lah got?" Daddy looked at me. "Your Mommee had a baby girl." We erupted into whoops and cheers and took off out of the house and down the street, chanting: "Baby girl again! Baby girl again!" The original baby girl was me, but now there was another one, who would always be the babiest baby girl. The people who lived near our house in Congo Town came out into the streets. Some of them danced with us and some just stood on the side of the road observing our antics. "You see how these Cooper people crazy?" one woman said. Daddy took us to Cooper Clinic to see Marlene the day after she was born. "Wha' she look like?" I asked him excitedly, as we marched up the steps to the second-floor maternity ward. "Like a Cooper," he said. Translation: fat and white. Marlene could easily be taken for white if it wasn't for her African features. She had a big wide African nose and Daddy's lips. Those fun-to-watch-eat-palm-butter lips. She was always hungry. Marlene ate things that I wouldn't consider putting in my mouth, like kernels from the palm trees, which she dug out of the yard. She had two nicknames, both given to her by the servants at Sugar Beach: one was "PlurTorTor," which meant pepperbird, and the other was "Mrs. Palm Kernel," except in Liberian English we don't say "palm kernel" we say "pam-kana." I didn't immediately adjust well to being usurped as the reigning baby girl. One time Daddy caught me standing over her crib pinching her fat butt. I got spanked, and was banished from my parents' room, where Marlene was sleeping. Fortunately, there were other distractions at Sugar Beach. Janice (same Pa) was Daddy's oldest daughter, five years older than me, from his first marriage. She was the shortest one in the family, with a smile that always somehow looked fake. Janice could sit for hours on the floor cross-legged, each leg on top of the opposing knee like some kind of deranged yoga instructor. Then she smiled that fake smile at you and you knew that whatever had been going on in her head was a matter best left alone. She spoke with a British accent because she went to boarding school in England: the Queen's Park School for girls in Oswestry, Shropshire. She was geeky before she went to boarding school, but once she started going, she became a "been-to." A "been-to" in Liberia meant you'd been to America or Europe. Going to visit for a month or so didn't count; you had to have lived there. When longing to be a "been-to," I never really considered the part about actually living away from home. It was always much more about arriving back in Liberia, to great fanfare, after an extended stay "abroad." In my fantasy, I looked fresh and hip and American or British as I swept off the plane after a year living in the States or London. Everyone would greet me at Robertsfield airport like I was a celebrity, and I would speak with an American accent, just like Janice spoke with a British accent whenever she came home from boarding school in England. I wrote Janice letters telling her how boring life was at Sugar Beach, so far from town. She wrote me back that she had a white girl for a best friend, Jane, and how they ate four times a day in England because of tea. We only ate three times a day at Sugar Beach. How could anyone eat four times, I thought, shaking my head in wonder. When Janice came home to Sugar Beach during her summer vacations, Marlene and I followed her around the yard mimicking her British accent. "Whatever are you up to!" we said in high-pitched voices. "Bloody hell!" John Bull (same Pa) was Daddy's only son, also by his first marriage, and four years older than me. We called him John Bull because he was thirteen pounds twelve ounces at birth and he ate and ate. His only rival when it came to eating was Marlene. John Bull's favorite game was Boofair. If he said "Boofair," while you were eating and you didn't have your fingers crossed then John Bull got your food. John Bull hid cans of corned beef in his room and at night, Marlene went in and the two of them snacked right out of the can. Marlene was in love with him and wanted to marry him. She told everyone she could find that she planned to marry her brother. John Bull was husky and tall and had the Cooper round cheeks. When he went to boarding school at Ricks Institute up-country, we sent him care packages: cardboard boxes filled with Spam. Eventually he switched to the St. Patrick's all-boys Catholic school in Monrovia. He flirted briefly with teenaged cavorting around, before he became a born-again Christian at age fifteen and stopped going to movies and dancing parties. He started hosting Bible study classes in the TV lounge at Sugar Beach. I asked if I could attend but after a while I got bored and stopped going. Victoria Yvette Nadine Dennis added the "Nadine" herself because she liked it. Vicky was Mommee's niece, the daughter of Mommee's oldest brother, whom we all called Bro. Henry, short for Brother Henry. You run the two words together "BrHenry." Vicky's mother was a Gio woman named Season, who was Bro. Henry's girlfriend while he worked briefly up in Sanniquellie, up-country in Nimba County. He didn't own up to Vicky until she was two years old, when his brother, Bro. Gabriel, discovered Season and Vicky in a shop in Sanniquellie. Vicky had the trademark flat Dennis mouth, which quickly gave away what Bro. Henry had been up to while in Sanniquellie. Faced with the obvious, Bro. Henry confessed. The whole extended family trooped up to Sanniquellie to ask Season if they could raise Vicky and send her to school. Vicky moved to Monrovia to live with my grandmother, Mama Grand. Soon thereafter, Bro. Henry, still a bachelor, was appointed deputy consul to the Liberian embassy in Rome. The job came with a nanny, so he took Vicky. When they came back, Vicky went back to live with Mama Grand -- a single man in Liberia couldn't raise a child. Mommee was living with Mama Grand at the time, rapidly approaching old maid status at thirty. When Mommee finally got married to Daddy, she brought with her into her marriage a trousseau, a lot of land from her father, and seven-year-old Vicky. Vicky was cursed, as far as I was concerned, because she saw spirits. Late one night at the old house, the first year my parents were married and before I was born, my father was eating dinner by himself in the dining room downstairs. Vicky and Mommee were upstairs watching TV. "Who's that man there?" Vicky, seven years old, asked my mother. My mother looked at the doorway, where Vicky pointed. No one was there. Mommee decided not to answer Vicky. But Vicky persisted. "Does he live here?" Mommee started screaming, jumped from her chair, and raced downstairs yelling: "John! John! The child's seeing spirits oh!" Vicky ran behind my mother. Neither of them would go back upstairs until my father accompanied them, and Vicky spent that night in my parents' room. Vicky continued spirit-spotting at Sugar Beach. She saw them playing in my hair. She saw them dancing outside the dining room. It got to the point that whenever we saw her getting that faraway look, we'd all jump and run. Vicky often wore her hair in an Afro, and platform shoes and bell-bottom pants. Her skin was the deep brown color of milk candy after you fry the sweetened condensed milk. Sleeping was her favorite hobby. And that -- Mommee, Daddy, Marlene, Janice, John Bull, Vicky, and I -- made up the family half of the house at Sugar Beach. In Liberia, servants are called "boys." Occasionally you might call them "old men," like with Old Man Charlie, the cook. But most of the time, they're called boys, no matter how old they are. At Sugar Beach, all the men who served our family lived in the boys' house, about two hundred yards from the main house. Fedeles, the driver, had the most clout because he drove the cars. Mommee and Daddy could both drive so Fedeles mostly drove us, the kids. He was from Ghana: tall, thin, and always wearing tight jeans. He was my first crush; I was fascinated with how he looked in his tight jeans. In Liberia we called butts "boneyhinds." Jack was the houseboy, but that was too disrespectful a term for him so he was just Jack. Handsome and from the Kpelle ethnic group that populated the area around our family farm, Kakata, he grew up with Daddy and had been with the Cooper family all his life. Jack always wore skinny black pants that stopped right before they got to his feet, so you could see his white socks. He looked like Sidney Poitier. He vacationed in Spain with us. Jack nursed me with bottled milk when I was a baby and cleaned my room and made my bed. He always reminded me not to give him cheek because he "used to clean my poopoo drawers." He organized the household and saw to it that Mommee's orders were carried out by the other boys. After Jack came Old Man Charlie and Tommy, our two cooks. Why did we have two cooks? One came from Daddy's side of the family (Old Man Charlie) and one came from Mommee's side (Tommy). Old Man Charlie, grumpy and irascible, also worked for Uncle Julius, next door. But Uncle Julius's house was often empty when my cousins, Ericka, Jeanine, and Juju, went and stayed with their mother, Aunt Millie, since Uncle Julius and Aunt Millie had divorced. So Old Man Charlie would come and cook for us, which was a good thing, since Tommy, our other cook, who had worked for Mommee's family for decades, often disappeared for weeks at a time. Tommy's disappearances usually came after paydays. We never knew where he went, and Mommee always vowed not to let him come back. But eventually, Tommy would come back and "hold" Mommee's foot, and he'd be our cook again. Old Man Charlie was grumpy and irascible, and was always throwing people out of the kitchen. He made the best cinnamon rolls. I was the only person he didn't kick out of the kitchen. He let me help him make biscuits, dipping the top of the water glasses in flour and making the round biscuit-circles. After Old Man Charlie came Sammy Cooper, the yardboy. Also Kpelle. I liked hanging out with Sammy Cooper because he knew, and told, stories about Daddy from when Daddy was younger. Old Sammy Cooper, who I always thought was Sammy Cooper's father but who was apparently not technically, used to work for my grandparents. He helped Radio Cooper plant the Cooper family farm up in Kakata, and believed Radio Cooper should have given the farm to him when Radio Cooper died, instead of leaving it to Daddy 'them. It was the common belief in our household that Old Sammy Cooper, who was Kpelle, witched Radio Cooper, and that's why Radio Cooper got sick and died. When we first moved to Sugar Beach, Old Sammy Cooper brought a chicken to the house, and asked Mommee if he could sacrifice it and bury it in the yard so that we'd have good luck at the new house. Mommee didn't trust him but was too afraid to antagonize him so she let him do it, but then spent the next seven years trying to figure out where the chicken was buried so she could have it dug up. Galway, the washman, was Bassa, and had his own room in the Sugar Beach house, next to the laundry room, where he slept away from the boys' house. Galway couldn't see out of one eye. He was also a grump. And after Galway came Bolabo, the watchman. Bassa. Asleep by eight p.m. Unlike me. I had demons to wrestle with. The first night at Sugar Beach, I eagerly reported to my bed at seven forty-five, a full and shocking fifteen minutes before my scheduled bedtime. I couldn't wait. It was going to be so great, sleeping in my own room, all by myself. Mommee went in with me and closed the curtains. She knelt beside me and we said my nightly prayers: "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, I Pray the Lord My Soul to Keep." I was antsy to rush through and finish so I could get into bed. We recited, "If I Should Die Before I Wake, I Pray the Lord My Soul to Take." A small shiver of premonition shot through me. If I died, I would be all by myself in that room. I hadn't thought about that. I crawled into bed and Mommee leaned over and kissed me. "Good night, joy of my heart," she said, and left the room, flipping off the light behind her. I was immediately engulfed in an impenetrable, malevolent blackness. Vicky's spirits were in the room with me. There were three of them, one man and two women. I could feel them; each was standing in a separate corner of my pink room, looking at me silently. They were trying to decide what they were going to do to me. I started to shake, and curled tightly in my bed, putting the blanket over my head. But then I couldn't breathe. Was that how they were going to get me, by scaring me into suffocating myself? That's how I would die before I woke? Slowly, so the spirits wouldn't notice, I drew the blanket down and stuck out my nose, ever so carefully. Cold air-conditioned air filled my nostrils. I could breathe again. But the spirits were still in there, edging closer to me, especially the two women. I clutched myself tighter and squeezed my eyes even tighter. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. This was not a good prayer. I was accepting death as a fait accompli, without appealing up high for a different outcome. Please God don't let me die before I wake. Please please. I promise to be a good girl. Please please please. I'nt want die before I wake. I was still praying when I finally fell asleep. Every night for two weeks, I prayed myself to sleep in sickly fear. In those same two weeks, Sugar Beach had three nighttime visits from rogues. They took one of Mommee's favorite paintings, a pastoral scene of a Kpelle village by the river, with two women washing clothes, their babies on their back. Mommee had hung that painting up on the wall next to the music room; it was one of the first things you saw when you walked into the upstairs part of the house. The rogues took it, along with a giant elephant tusk in the living room. They didn't pick the place clean, only taking a couple of things each visit. In the morning, an empty shelf or bare wall taunted us: the rogues could come in and do whatever they wanted. The night after the rogues' third visit, I realized that the rogues were actually heartmen. That's why they were only taking a couple of things at a time; they weren't really coming for ivory and paintings. They wanted me! Heartmen are witch doctors who kidnap people and cut out their hearts while they're still alive and use it to make medicine. Now that I was sleeping in my own room at night, they had the perfect opportunity to come and get me and cut out my heart and I would die before I woke. They floated into the room that night as I slept, two of them, their cutlasses strapped to their waists. Long gleaming knives that curved at the tip, the better to carve out your heart -- a paralysis came over me and woke me up. I lay on my back with my eyes open but I couldn't move, as the heartmen floated closer. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. They closed in on me, and I tried to scream. Nothing, no sound. I tried and tried, but no sound came from my locked throat. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Just as they were about to pounce, a scream burst out of my throat and I almost fell out of my bed as I ran out the bedroom door as fast as I could, straight in to Mommee and Daddy's bed, refusing to leave until morning. The next day, the Mandingo men came to sell Mommee more ivory, to replenish her reserves, which were being rapidly depleted by the nightly visits from the rogues. Any private detective worth his two cents could have immediately figured out that the Mandingo men who sold Mommee the ivory had the most to gain from the constant burglaries, but Mommee welcomed them in anyway. They came, in their customary long white flowing robes and their white pointy slippers. Two tall statuesque haughty men, with skin the color of a Hershey's chocolate bar. They walked up the dirt road to Sugar Beach, carrying barley bags, the sharp end of one of the elephant tusks poking out, gleaming in the sun. Marlene's dogs, Happy, Blackie, and Christopher, started barking as soon as the men entered the yard, rousing themselves from their usual slumber under the kitchen steps and running around the men furiously. They were all mutts, distinguishable by color: Happy was light brown, Blackie was black, and Christopher was white. Happy, in particular, was yipping around the Mandingo men's ankles. But the Mandingo men didn't even flinch. They walked right up to the steps and asked for "Ma." I didn't understand how they could wear those long robes in the heat. It was the height of Liberian summer -- January -- and there wasn't the slightest breeze, not even from the ocean right at our backs. I was in shorts and my favorite Wonder Woman T-shirt, which the men eyed disapprovingly. "How they looking at people so?" I muttered to Old Man Charlie, standing next to me on the kitchen porch. "That Muslim people, wha' you expect?" Old Man Charlie replied, not bothering to whisper. Old Man Charlie eyed the Mandingo men. He was Kpelle and Kpelle people didn't really like Mandingos. The Mandingos had been in Liberia for about as long as anybody else, but somehow Liberians still thought of them as outsiders. Mandingoes worked hard and saved their money -- a definite cause for envy and suspicion. Just after he became president in 1971, William R. Tolbert, in an attempt to be inclusive, permitted the Mandingos to celebrate Ramadan at Liberia's Centennial Pavillion, which set God-fearing Christian Liberians muttering. It was bad enough the Lebanese people were all flocking to Liberia to take over the shops and stores, because of the fighting in Beirut, but at least they weren't pretending to be Liberian. The Mandingo people, on the other hand, loved reminding everybody that they had been around since way before us Congo People first began to return from America on ships. Mommee liked the Mandingo people because her grandmother, Ma Galley, used to hide them in her basement whenever the police came looking for them to hit them up for bribes. She liked that they knew where to find good ivory, because she had a house to decorate. Mommee took the Mandingo men into the living room to inspect their wares. I trailed behind them, observing as they visibly blanched upon walking into the cool, air-conditioned house. I sat on the brown velvet love seat in the corner to watch the proceedings. One of the men had a glass eye. He put one elephant tusk on the glass coffee table and started to describe it to my mother. "This came from a great African elephant from the Serengeti," he said. "You see how it da' form like this? If you put two of them together, one on each side o' de' table, it will be fine, so." The whole time he talked, his glass eye kept looking at me. I bolted from the living room and locked myself in my room. That night there was a thunderstorm, and the electricity went out. The air conditioner rattled and wheezed and stopped. The porch lights went out. Lightning crackled through the air, and I quickly took off my gold bracelet so I wouldn't get struck. I burrowed as deep as I could under the covers, but I was still scared. I knew this was all the doing of the Mandingo man with the glass eye, who was clearly in cahoots with the rogues, who themselves were actually heartmen. And they were angry that I had gotten away from them the night before, but they would be back, I knew. I just knew the elephant tusk was witched. I was whimpering under the covers when the door opened and Mommee came in with a candle. She already had a crying Marlene in tow. She looked at me and shook her head, and before she could motion toward her bedroom, I was out the door and climbing into bed with Daddy. The next morning we had a family meeting. We always had family meetings in the living room, because it was more formal. I tried to sit in "my" corner by the sliding doors -- the same spot I used the day before to watch the Mandingo men -- but Daddy just eyed me and pointed to the love seat. "She's too scared to sleep by herself," Mommee began. This was technically true but not something I, at the age of seven, wanted discussed so brazenly by the whole family. "No I'm not!" I said, hotly. "You're too old to be sleeping with us," Daddy said, Marlene on his lap sucking her pacifier. That was it. I felt my ears get hot with embarrassment and I stomped out of the room -- though I stopped in the kitchen to eavesdrop on Mommee and Daddy. I couldn't hear all they said because Old Man Charlie was singing "Old Yellow Woman" in the kitchen. "Old, yellow woman...you want make trouble for me...every day you come to my house...I don't want trouble, no...you are somebody's wife...go away, yellow woman..." It was Old Man Charlie's fault I didn't hear Mommee and Daddy making their decision. I didn't know it at the time, but the house at Sugar Beach was about to get one more resident. Copyright (c) 2008 by Helene Cooper Excerpted from The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.


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I am working in Python 2.6 and ArcGIS 10.0 through comtypes, so I have full ArcObjects access. (See the answer I tacked onto the related question "How do I access arcobjects from python?") That makes this strictly an object model traversal question.
I have an IFeatureClass on an annotation feature class. I need to get to IAnnoClass to get the ReferenceScale property. How do I do that?
I'm guessing that it starts with the Extension property inherited from IClass, but I may be way off base. Thank you, all.
Cheers, Ti


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via press release:
Their Performance, Available on CBS.com and VEVO,
Will Follow the Band's Taping of the "Late Show with David Letterman"
CBS Interactive Music Group's award-winning concert webcast series, LIVE ON LETTERMAN, presented by AT&T, will showcase GRAMMY® Award-winning San Francisco rock band Train in a live webcast concert from the world-famous Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City, available on CBS.com and VEVO, Monday, August 20 (8:00 PM, ET/5:00 PM, PT).
Train will play songs from their catalog of albums including their latest effort, California 37, which was released earlier this year. The LIVE ON LETTERMAN franchise, which has surpassed 120 million views to date on CBS.com and VEVO, has hosted some of the most established bands and musicians across the globe in an intimate and dynamic setting for worldwide followers to enjoy.
Fans can watch Train's webcast live or on-demand at http://www.cbs.com/late_night/liveonletterman/. Additionally, the show is available live and on-demand through CBS properties, broadcast on select CBS RADIO stations, viewable live on CBS's JumboTron in Times Square, as well as via a live audio stream on Radio.com's mobile applications. The webcasts are also offered on VEVO, the world's leading all-premium music video and entertainment platform, with on-demand performances available across the entire VEVO platform, including VEVO.com, mobile and connected devices and syndication partners.
Train is Pat Monahan (vocals), Jimmy Stafford (guitar) and Scott Underwood (drums). The multi-platinum band made its mark on music history with the GRAMMY Award-winning song "Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)," from their second album of the same name, as well as chart-topping singles like "Meet Virginia" and "Calling All Angels." Train earned their third GRAMMY in 2011 for the worldwide smash "Hey, Soul Sister" from Save Me, San Francisco. The top-selling single of 2010, "Hey, Soul Sister," hit #1 on radio in the U.S. and in 15 countries abroad, while Save Me, San Francisco has sold more than one million albums worldwide and more than 10 million tracks. The band released California 37 in April 2012, featuring the lead single "Drive By," and is on tour in the U.S. through September to support the album.
Train's LIVE ON LETTERMAN webcast will follow the taping of their performance on the LATE SHOW with DAVID LETTERMAN, which will be broadcast the same night, Monday, August 20 (11:35 PM-12:37 AM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.


text:
Hiltron Communications announces the conclusion of a major systems integration project for a leading European satellite network operator. The new systems have been delivered to 50 sites around the world where they are being used for continuous quality of service monitoring of high-throughput satellites.
Hiltron Communications has chosen IBC2017 as the venue for the introduction of the Super-HMAM large-capacity motorised antenna mount. Based on the highly successful HMAM three-axis motorised antenna mount, Super-HMAM is designed and built to accept much larger reflectors.
Hiltron Communications, a leading specialist in satellite and wireless communication, reports another successful year in terms of new product development, product sales and systems integration for worldwide broadcast and telecommunications markets.
Hiltron GmbH announces the completion of a satellite downlink system for Ireland' s national public service broadcaster, Raidi Teilifs ireann (RTE). The new resource consists of a 3.7 metre antenna, an HMAM motorised antenna mount and HACU controller. It will be used as a Ku band link receiving video and audio data from multiple sources.
Hiltron's SORBAS family of products makes its European exhibition debut at IBC2016.
Hiltron announces the completion of a satellite communication project at a major teleport in Latvia. A combined endeavour with Danmon Group Sweden, the project includes a five-channel satellite link which will carry television content to Europe from the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Central to the contract is the provision and integration of 3.6 metre satellite dish on an HMAM motorised mount plus a Hiltron HACU antenna control unit and an HDCU-E ice-sensing and dish heating system.
Hiltron has completed a project on behalf a major broadcaster in southern Germany for the provision of two satellite uplink stations. These have been integrated in main and redundant roles as part of a nationwide expansion of the digital audio broadcasting network.
Hiltron Communications, Germany's leading satellite and wireless communications systems integrator, manufacturer and distributor, has chosen CABSAT 2014 for the Middle East & Africa market introduction of its new MAF 1.4 metre motorised flyaway antenna.
Hiltron will demonstrate the latest additions to its range of satellite communication products on stand B89 in Hall 4 at the IBC exhibition in the Amsterdam RAI Centre, 13-17 September 2013Tags: Hiltron GmbH
| Hiltron Communications
| turnkey satellite systems integrator
| DVB MPEG DSNG systems
| L Band and IF Band fibre-optic systems
| DVB-T encoding and multiplexing headends
| ATM/SDH/PDH/IP transport networks
| DVB-S/S2 satellite uplinks
| VSAT systems
| TVRO systems
| IPTV headend antenna systems
| satcom redundancy-system controllers
| fibre-optic and waveguide switches
| remote monitoring and control systems
| motorised antennas; satellite antenna de-ice controllers
| L Band splitters and L Band matrices.
Hiltron will promote its full range of satellite communication products and services at Broadcast Asia 2013. Exhibiting on stand 5A1-01 at Broadcast Asia, Hiltron will be represented by Michael Schiestl, Managing Director. Centre of attention will be the HMAM-IOT advanced satellite antenna mount, HCS4 satellite communications control system and HMCS D-SNG satellite-link monitor and controller.
Hiltron has chosen CABSAT 2013 for the introduction of two major additions to its product range: the HMAM-IOT advanced satellite antenna mount and the HCS4 satellite communication controller. The HMCS D-SNG satellite-link monitor and control system will make its Middle East market debut. Exhibiting on stand F6-22, Hiltron will be represented by Sales Director Reinhold Wagner.
Hiltron GmbH announces the completion of a digital satellite newsgathering truck refurbishment for German public-service television and radio broadcaster Saarlndischer Rundfunk. It centred on the replacement of the microwave system used to feed the DSNG antenna mounted on the truck roof.


text:
The board of directors (the "Board") is responsible for providing governance and oversight over the strategy, operations and management of Accenture. The primary mission of the Board is to represent and protect the interests of our shareholders. The Board oversees our senior management, to whom it has delegated the authority to manage the day-to-day operations of the company. The Board has adopted Corporate Governance Guidelines, which, together with our Memorandum and Articles of Association, form the governance framework for the Board and its Committees. The Board regularly reviews its Corporate Governance Guidelines and other corporate governance documents and from time to time revises them when it believes it serves the interests of the company and its shareholders to do so and in response to changing regulatory requirements.
Governance Documents:
Corporate Governance Guidelines [PDF]
Memorandum and Articles of Association [PDF]
Governance Policies:
Political Contributions and Lobbying Policy
Committee Charters:
Audit Committee [PDF]
Compensation Committee [PDF]
Finance Committee [PDF]


text:
The choice of colors is essential in coming up with a great looking tattoo.
JAPANESE LOTUS FLOWER TATTOOS GALLERY 1 japanese lotus flower tattoos
Cherry Blossom Tattoos Cherry Blossom Tattoos. Related posts:
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males are the cherry blossom tattoo styles, lotus flower tattoos,
Here is my new tattoo: New tattoo. It is a lotus flower on my left forearm.


text:
North Korea Declares War Truce 'Invalid'
Pyongyang Claims End to 1953 Armistice, as U.S. and Seoul Conduct Joint Military Exercises; Washington Adds Sanctions
North Korea cut off a telephone hot line to the South and "declared invalid" the Korean War armistice, as South Korea and the U.S. began Monday a second phase of their annual joint winter military exercises.
Later Monday, Washington slapped a series of new sanctions on North Korea, reflecting its deepening concern over Pyongyang's weapons activities.
Sponsored Offers


text:
Georgia Library PINES (Public Information Network for Electronic Services)
PINES (Georgia Library Public Information Network for Electronic Services) is Georgia's public library automation and lending network for 249 libraries in 127 counties. PINES is an initiative of the Georgia Public Library Service, a unit of the University System of Georgia. Fifty percent of Georgia's population and 44 of Georgia's 58 public library systems rely on the PINES network for their library service. PINES creates a statewide "borderless library" that eliminates geographic and socio-economic barriers and provides equal access to information for all Georgians. Georgians with a PINES library card have access to materials beyond what is available on their local shelves and enjoy the benefits of a shared collection of 7.7 million books and materials that can be delivered to their home library with no charge to the library user that contributes to a more educated Georgia through lifelong learning.
Express Link (bookmark): http://www.galileo.usg.edu/express?link=zpin


text:
Media Releases
WAG Receives BIZ Achievement Award
The Winnipeg Art Gallery has received the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ Achievement Award for Outstanding Long-term Contributions to Downtown.
"Downtown Winnipeg is proving to be quite the multicultural and artistic hub in our city and in Canada, with destinations like the Winnipeg Art Gallery,' says...
Nov 30, 2012
Generous Winnipeg Couple Donate Christmas Tree to WAG
Thanks to the generosity of Frank and Sophie Czayka, the Winnipeg Art Gallery will be displaying a stunning silver spruce in their front foyer.
The tree, cut down to 20 feet to fit in the WAG's Eckhardt Hall, will be the focus of the activity at the Gallery's annual tree-trimming party from 2...
Read more about Generous Winnipeg Couple Donate Christmas Tree to WAG
Nov 29, 2012
Help Trim the WAG's Holiday Tree
Get your holiday season off to a wonderful start at the Winnipeg Art Gallery's third annual holiday tree-trimming party from 2 to 5pm on Sunday, December 2. The event is free (regular pricing applies to visit exhibitions).It's a fun-filled afternoon for the whole family. Warm up with a hot cup...
Nov 27, 2012
2012 Cannes Lions – WAG Premieres the World's Best Commercials
From all over the world they come. Thousands enter but few are chosen. We're talking about the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the best commercials from across the globe, being screened at the Winnipeg Art Gallery on select dates in December in the Muriel Richardson...
Read more about 2012 Cannes Lions – WAG Premieres the World's Best Commercials
Nov 27, 2012
Michael Maltzan selected to design Inuit Art and Learning Centre for WAG
Winnipeg, MB, November 22, 2012: The award-winning American architect Michael Maltzan has been selected to design the Inuit Art and Learning Centre at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. The Centre will house both the WAG's celebrated collection of contemporary Inuit art, the largest of its kind in the...
Read more about Michael Maltzan selected to design Inuit Art and Learning Centre for WAG
Nov 22, 2012
Limited Edition WAG100 Clothing Line the Perfect Holiday Gift!
One of the many ways the Winnipeg Art Gallery is celebrating its Centennial year is with the production of an ultra chic clothing line for adults and children. Available at the Gallery Shop, the WAG100 line includes t-shirts, tanks, sweats, and hoodies. Screen-printed with past WAG exhibition...
Read more about Limited Edition WAG100 Clothing Line the Perfect Holiday Gift!
Nov 14, 2012
WAG Hosts Winnipeg Now Artist Panel
Join artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, KC Adams, and Dominique Rey for a lively panel discussion at the Winnipeg Art Gallery at 7pm, Friday, November 16. All artists featured in the WAG exhibition Winnipeg Now, they will be in conversation with exhibition co-curator and art critic...
Nov 1, 2012
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This site is the archived OWASP Foundation Wiki and is no longer accepting Account Requests.
To view the new OWASP Foundation website, please visit https://owasp.org
Difference between revisions of "OWASP AppSec DC 2010"
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*Security Managers and Staff
*Security Managers and Staff
*Executives, Managers, and Staff Responsible for IT Security Governance
*Executives, Managers, and Staff Responsible for IT Security Governance
*IT Professionals
*IT Professionals in Improving IT Security<br>
'''Press Release June 3rd 2010 -- [http://www.owasp.org/images/1/19/AppSecDC_2010_Announcement.pdf AppSec DC 2010 Conference Announcement and opening CFP & CFT!]'''
'''Press Release June 3rd 2010 -- [http://www.owasp.org/images/1/19/AppSecDC_2010_Announcement.pdf AppSec DC 2010 Conference Announcement and opening CFP & CFT!]'''
Revision as of 16:49, 28 September 2010
Registration Now OPEN! | Hotel | Walter E. Washington Convention Center
Register Here
Registration is now OPEN.
You can register via OWASP's CVENT tool here.
Registration Fees
|Ticket Type
|Before 8/15
|Regular Price
|After 10/15
|Active OWASP Member
|1 Day Training
|2 Day Training
ATTENTION FEDERAL EMPLOYEES: Enter code ASDC10FED for $100 off, limited time only! (must register with your .gov or .mil email address)
For student discount, attendees must present proof of enrollment when picking up your badge.
Who Should Attend AppSec DC 2010
- Application Developers
- Application Testers and Quality Assurance
- Application Project Management and Staff
- Chief Information Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Deputies, Associates and Staff
- Chief Financial Officers, Auditors, and Staff Responsible for IT Security Oversight and Compliance
- Security Managers and Staff
- Executives, Managers, and Staff Responsible for IT Security Governance
- IT Professionals Interesting in Improving IT Security
- Anyone interested in learning about or promoting Web Application Security
AppSec DC 2010 CVENT Info Page
Volunteers Needed!
Get involved!
We will take all the help we can get to pull off the best Web Application Security Conference of the year!
More opportunities and areas will be added as time goes on. Our Volunteer Guide can be downloaded which outlines some of the responsibilities and available positions.
To volunteer please email firstname.lastname@example.com or you can e-mail the Volunteer Coordinators Josh Feinblum and Jon Rose
Schedule posted here
OWASP strives to provide world class training for a variety of skill levels and interests at its conferences. From the novice to the expert, developers to managers, there is a training course at AppSec DC for you! Classes will begin at 9 AM each day and run until 5 PM (Daily schedule set by the trainer). Morning refreshments and lunch will be provided. Check each course for the required materials.
Price per attendee (conference Registration is a seperate item):
- 2-Day Class $1495
- 1-Day Class $745
2 Day Training
Assessing and Exploiting Web Applications with Samurai-WTF | Course Detail
Come take the official Samurai-WTF training course given by one of the founders and lead developers of the project! You will learn how to use the latest Samurai-WTF open source tools and the be shown the latest techniques to perform web application assessments. After a quick overview of pen testing methodology, the instructor will lead you through the penetration and exploitation of two different web applications, including client side attacks on the browsers connecting to those sites. Different sets of open source tools will be used on each web application, allow you to learn first hand the pros and cons of each tool. After you have gained experience with the Samurai-WTF tools, you will be challenged with a third web application. This final challenge will give you time to practice your new skills at your own pace and experiment with your favorite new tools. This experience will help you gain the confidence necessary to perform web application assessments and expose you to the wealth of freely available, open source tools.
Leading the AppSec Initative | Course Detail
In this two-day management session you'll get an industry perspective of application security, understand the key vulnerabilities to applications, be able to analyze root cause, and provide practical and proven techniques in building out an application security initiative. This course gives executives and managers the education and practical guidance they need to ensure that software projects properly address security. The course is designed to provide a firm understanding of the importance of software security, the critical security activities required within the software development lifecycle, and how to efficiently manage security issues during development and maintenance. This understanding is reinforced through industry awareness, live demonstrations of commonly found application vulnerabilities and workgroup exercises allowing attendees to conduct capability assessments and recommend improvement plans.
Remote Testing for Common Web Application Security Threats | Course Detail
The proliferation of web-based applications has increased the enterprise's exposure to a variety of threats. There are overarching steps that can and should be taken at various steps in the application's lifecycle to prevent or mitigate these threats, such as implementing secure design and coding practices, performing source code audits, and maintaining proper audit trails to detect unauthorized use.
This workshop will enable students to test the security of web-based applications from the perspective of the end user. Security testing is especially useful since it can be done at various phases within the application's lifecycle (e.g. during development), or when source code is not available for review. The most common threats and their potential impact will be covered (based on the industry standard OWASP "Top Ten"). Hands-on labs and demonstrations will be used to teach the tools and techniques needed to remotely detect and validate the presence of these threats.
Software Security Best Practices | Course Detail
This tutorial starts with a description of the security problems faced by today's software developer, as well as a detailed description of how defective software can be exploited. It goes on to provide a thorough description of the best practices available to prevent, detect, and remediate security problems in software. Next, the tutorial includes hands-on design review exercises to reinforce each of the concepts presented, together with dozens of examples of common coding errors (primarily in C/C++ and Java).
1 Day Training
WebAppSec.php: Developing Secure Web Applications | Course Detail
Web applications are the new frontier of wide‐spread security breaches. This tutorial will guide through development practices to ensure the security and integrity of web applications, in turn protecting user data and the infrastructure the application runs on. Several attack types and risks will be reviewed (including OWASP's Top 10), along with how the proper development practices can mitigate their damage. Although examples covered are PHP‐based, much of the content is also applicable to other languages.
The Art of Exploiting SQL Injections | Course Detail
This is a full day hands on training course which will typically target penetration testers, security auditors/administrators and even web developers to learn advanced exploitation techniques. SQL Injection, although now nearly 15 years old, still exists in over 30% of the web applications. This vulnerability could result in (Authentication Bypass, Extraction of arbitrary sensitive data from the database, Access and compromise of the internal network)
To identify the true impact of this vulnerability it is essential that the vulnerability gets exploited to the full extent. While there is a reasonably good awareness when it comes to identify this problem, there are still a lot of grey areas when it comes to exploitation or even identifying complex vulnerabilities like a 2nd order injections. This training will target 3 databases (MS-SQL, Mysql, Oracle) and discuss a variety of exploitation techniques to exploit each scenario.
Practical Web Security Overview | Course Detail
The course gives an overview of the applicable security solutions in web applications, focusing on the most important technologies like Web Services, and tackling both transport-layer security and end-to-end security solutions. The most severe security threats of web-based technologies are introduced through a number of hands-on exercises, prepared in a plug-and-play manner by using a preset VMware virtual machine, including injection-related flaws, Cross Site Scripting, Cross Site Request Forgery, some other input validation-related bugs, improper use of cryptographic features, and many more.
Java Security Overview | Course Detail
The course on one hand introduces the basic security solutions provided by the Java language and the Java Runtime Environment, tackling issues like the Java Security Architecture and the security services of the Java Standard Edition. On the other hand it provides a comprehensive introduction to Java specific security vulnerabilities. Besides the presentations being continuously updated by the latest advances in the software development industry and the most recent achievements of our security research laboratory, attendees can learn how to use Java security features and can examine and correct typical implementation bugs in example source code snippets through a number of hands-on exercises, prepared in a plug-and-play manner by using a preset VMware virtual machine.
Software Security Remediation: How to Fix Application Vulnerabilities | Course Detail
This class teaches attendees how to fix security vulnerabilities in existing software. It provides a mix of discussion of project concerns for planning and managing remediation efforts with hands-on coding examples fixing specific vulnerabilities. Attendees will learn how to risk-rank vulnerabilities, estimate remediation tasks, perform coding fixes for vulnerabilities and demonstrate the effectiveness of fixes applied. The focus is on the practical: how to use limited resources to make significant improvements to the security of target applications. Code examples use the OWASP ESAPI Java and Microsoft Web Protection Library. Many classes teach developers how to build secure code from the ground up or teach security analysts how to test applications for security vulnerabilities. This class teaches developers and security analysts how to deal with their existing portfolio of insecure applications.
Threat Modeling Express | Course Detail
The benefits of threat modeling at the design stage are well-documented, yet few organizations are able to perform this analysis technique due to time constraints. Based on our experience in real world situations, Security Compass has developed a one day approach to threat modeling based loosely on a Facilitated Risk Assessment Process (FRAP). In this class, students learn how to create a "quick and dirty" application threat model using an organization's most valuable resource: its people. Students learn about the basics of web application security, as well as learn about and perform a real hands-on Express Threat Model. A deliverable template and list of steps will be provided as takeaways for students.
OWASP Member Door Prizes!
Are you an OWASP Member? At AppSecDC we will be giving away some amazing door prizes to some randomly selected OWASP members in attendance. You HAVE to be an OWASP member to be elligable, but if your not, you can easily add the $50 annual membership to your conference ticket and recieve $50 off admission. That's right, FREE OWASP MEMBERSHIP when combined with AppSec DC Registration! So remember to Register today with your OWASP membership!
This years contests vary in length, challenges, objectives and the skill-set of the participants. The goal of this year's ASDC challenges are to include application security folks of all backgrounds from developers to ninjas and to do so in a fun environment that keeps contestants scratching their heads. Contestants have the option of either participating in a more relaxed environment with shorter contest length or going for the more intense route. Contests consist of:
Beer & Pretzels...FTW
Contestants will participate in an hour long challenge to which the victor receives the spoils. Meaning FREE BEERZ!!!
All our base belong to you
Contestants attempt to defeat multiple application(s) security protections for the glory. These challenges are intended to stretch the breadth and depth of contestants knowledge of AppSec and will call upon a range of skills. Play alone or choose your team wisely :-)
Walter E. Washington Convention Center
AppSec DC 2010 will be taking place at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in downtown Washington DC.
The convention center is located over the Mount Vernon Square/Convention Center Metro stop on the Green and Yellow lines of the DC Metro, and only a few blocks from our convention hotel, the Grand Hyatt Washington (reserve rooms here).
The Grand Hyatt is our hotel sponsor again for this year. Hotel rooms can be booked at a discounted rate prior to October 15th using this link: https://resweb.passkey.com/Resweb.do?mode=welcome_gi_new&groupID=2766908
We are currently soliciting sponsors for the AppSec DC Conference. Please refer to our sponsorship opportunities for details.
Slots are going fast so contact us to sponsor today!
Diamond Sponsors
Gold Sponsors
Silver Sponsors
Organizational Sponsors
Reception Sponsors
Coffee Sponsors
Traveling to the DC Metro Area
The Washington DC Area is serviced by three airports -- Reagan National (DCA), Dulles (IAD), and Thurgood Marshall Baltimore/Washington International (BWI). All currently have available transportation to downtown DC via public transportation, shuttles, or cab.
Washington DC is also serviced by Amtrak, VRE, and MARC train lines, which arrive in Union Station, a few metro stops or a short cab ride away from the convention center and the Grand Hyatt.
If you live in the DC Metropolitan area, we suggest taking Metro to the event. The convention center is located over the Mount Vernon Square/Convention Center Metro stop on the Green and Yellow lines of the DC Metro.
Conference Committee
Mail List: firstname.lastname@example.com
Mail List: firstname.lastname@example.com
- Facilities (firstname.lastname@example.com)
- Content (firstname.lastname@example.com)
- Security (firstname.lastname@example.com)
- Press (firstname.lastname@example.com)
- Registration/Info Desk (firstname.lastname@example.com)
- Volunteer Coordinators (email@example.com)
- Competitions/Contests/Events (firstname.lastname@example.com)
- Jon Rose (Chair)
- Ken Johnson
- Ben Null
- Wade Woolwine
- Marketing/Community Outreach (email@example.com)
- Sponsorships (firstname.lastname@example.com)