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Coronado High: A Legendary Drug-Smuggling Ring in a Sleepy California Town
Before anyone had heard of the Mexican cartels and the Colombian kingpins, there was a group of Cali surfers, friends who discovered weed in the '60s and—in a fit of stoner inspiration—figured out how to smuggle in the best, most potent stuff on earth. Over a decade, they built an empire that made hundreds of millions, while laughing at the war on drugs. Joshuah Bearman, the writer who brought you 'Argo,' tells the whole true story
There, on the horizon: a ship.
Dave Strather* saw it through binoculars, the white sails ghostly against the water, the hull full of precious cargo. He was sitting on an exposed cliff, overlooking the Pacific. It was dark, and the beach was deserted for fifty miles in both directions; this was the Lost Coast, a vast stretch of uninhabited, magnificently forested Northern California, the kind of place that makes you understand why they called it the Golden State. Dave chose this spot for landfall precisely because it was empty. He and his team needed secrecy. The sailboat was laden with contraband: four thousand pounds of Thai-stick pot, the latest in marijuana commerce, a product as potent as it was valuable, which Dave and his crew—a team of smugglers called the Coronado Company—would unload and sell for millions of dollars.
*This name has been changed.
Once Dave made visual contact, his crew got on the radios: "Offshore vessel, please identify."
"This is Red Robin."
Smuggling means waiting, of course, but Red Robin—a code name for the ship—was months overdue, and Dave's nerves were frayed. Importing pot from Mexico had become routine for the Company, but this was a new type of gig, crossing the Pacific in a double-masted ketch. There were more variables, more opportunity for error. The Red Robin had run out of fuel before it even reached the international date line. Once under sail, she was becalmed in the Doldrums. Then she disappeared.
With the ship lost, Dave set up a radio watch on a palisade covered in redwoods. "Red Robin, come in," he had said into his radio a thousand times in a daily attempt to reach the boat. Back in September, it was pleasant on his perch, taking in the panoramic view, drinking a beer, tweaking the dial. But by December, everyone was cold and jumpy. Now, just before Christmas, their ship was finally coming in.
Dave and his team snapped into action. That was the Company's signature; they were a tight, coordinated unit—Dave and Lance, Otter and Don. Almost the entire group had grown up together in Coronado, a secluded little beach town on a peninsula off the coast of San Diego. In the 1960s, they had been classmates at Coronado High. They were surfers. Some would head to Mexico for the breaks—and bring back small bales of pot. Then they brought in their former Spanish teacher, Lou Villar, for his language abilities, and the operation exploded. Within a few years, the Coronado Company was the largest smuggling outfit on the West Coast. Over ten years, they would assemble a $100 million empire, importing more than ninety tons of product from Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, and Thailand in what the DEA would call the most sophisticated operation of its kind.
"Let's get the Duck rolling," Dave said over the comm.
The crux of the business was the off-load. The battle was fought and won—or lost—on the beach. And for this massive operation, the Company had brought in an audacious centerpiece: the Duck, or DUKW, a thirty-one-foot, six-wheeled World War II-era amphibious landing craft that allowed the Company to drive right into the water and dock alongside the Red Robin. Initially Lou, the company's leader, had thought this was crazy—Oh sure, why not use zeppelins?—but he was eventually persuaded to green-light the purchase of the seven-and-a-half-ton vehicle. The Company shipped the beast by train to Oregon, where Don Kidd, the crew's mechanic, reconditioned it.
Now Don was in the cockpit of that hybrid metallic monster, which did fifty miles per hour on the road and six knots in the water. He'd welded on a wave shield so the ship could make it through the brutal surf. Don and a pilot plowed through the murky night ("nine feet up a black cat's ass," as he put it) to meet the ketch. They tied up, quickly transferred the load to the Duck, and turned around, finding their way back using shore lights that marked a safe passage. Dave, the beach master, looked at his watch: So far, so good.
It was a funny thing to see the Duck rise from the darkness, seawater dripping off it like a real-life Nautilus. Until it stopped rising. Then it wasn't funny. By now the tide had gone out, and the Duck, heavily weighted with Thai gold, immediately sank to its axles in the soft beach. You're supposed to deflate your tires to drive on sand and then reinflate on asphalt. But even deflated, the Duck's wheels were too hard to gain purchase. The tide wouldn't lift the boat for another six hours, by which time the sun would be overhead and the Duck would be as conspicuous as a relic on Omaha Beach. "Fuck," Dave said over the radio. "We're stuck."
The pilot hit the throttle and spun the wheels, sinking the Duck deeper. "Kill the engine!" someone yelled. Don got out, looked at the tires, and stood back. "Don't panic," he said. "I know exactly what to do."
Don told the team to get the pickups "and a lot of rope" and quickly assembled an elaborate pulley system that attached their four-wheel drives to the Duck's winch.
"Are you sure this is gonna work?" Dave asked.
Don didn't flinch when the motors fired, and sure enough, his ad hoc Archimedean apparatus allowed the Duck to lift itself right out of the sand and drive back up the beach to the road. It was a goddamn glorious sight. Cheers went up along the coast.
The Duck's cargo was unloaded and safely hidden in a barn behind an old general store. It was a sweet reward to sample the supply. Don thought the faintly purple buds were thick and beautiful—the finest he'd ever smoked. It was the biggest haul to date: $8 million (about $33 million today). The Company had stepped up its game, bringing in better product with more sophisticated technique, and the distributors were going to be very happy with the fragrant cache.
By now those dealers had been waiting a long time, too. Lou had had a hell of a job keeping them calm. As the ringleader, Lou rarely set foot near the beach; instead he was installed in a cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel, quarterbacking from downfield. He was worried their reputation would be ruined if the supply didn't show. It was a relief to call the clients and announce that "the Eagle has landed."
The exchange always happens fast. Like in the movies, the money would come in Halliburton briefcases. Unlike in the movies, the Company usually waited to count it.
And count it. And count it. And count it. It took so long to count that much cash, they got bored. The partners each made half a million. For his rescue of the Duck, Don got an MVP award, a new Company institution, which came with a bonus payment of $25,000. Everyone else got their wad and prepared to scatter to the winds—the sweet, distinctive scent of their trade wafting from their clothes and hair.
It was exhilarating, the money and the camaraderie. The Company members saw themselves as hippie outlaws. There was no violence, no guns, just the threat of the law, which bound them together. They were criminals, but they were also a family. Afterward, Lou and Dave sat in his cabana, going through receipts, accounting for a very good year. They hoisted two flutes of champagne. "Here's to everyone's efforts," Lou said. "Let's do it again soon."
Lou got in his Corvette in New York and knew he wouldn't stop until he reached the Pacific. He was making that modern-day migration west, a twentieth-century Manifest Destiny, with the top down the whole way and the red metal-flake lacquer flashing off the hood in the sun. On the radio were Dick Dale and the Beach Boys, singing about girls, woodies, and surfing.
Lou—who was born in Cuba and moved to Brooklyn at 14—had heard about a job teaching Spanish at a high school in Coronado, a spit of land in the middle of San Diego Bay. For a fast-talking kid from Flatbush Avenue, it was all he could have hoped for: a low-slung beach town of 18,000 people known for its naval base and its isolation, a sort of military Mayberry, accessible by ferry. From the moment he arrived, Lou loved the nonchalance that came with the geography. Everyone called it the Rock. Or, playfully, Idiot Island: a place where people did their own thing. No matter what your rush, you waited for the ferry to get anywhere. And how romantic was it, Lou marveled, taking a boat to and from home?
Lou wasn't like the other teachers at Coronado High. He was handsome and charming—and at 25, he was not much older than his students. Soon he was everywhere at school: teaching Spanish, coaching basketball, then the swim team to the regional championship. He was the kind of coach the kids could confide in. They thought of him as the bohemian teacher; no one else pulled into the faculty lot in a red Corvette and shades. And when the school banned sunglasses, Lou wore his prescription sunglasses anyhow, teaching in Ray-Bans like some kind of beatnik professor. For the students of Coronado, it was a sign of solidarity. They saw Lou going through the same changes as they were.
Imagine starting high school in 1964, how fast it was all moving between freshman and senior years: from Tonkin to the Tet Offensive, from the Voting Rights Act to the Watts riots, from Help! to the White Album. Like the students', Lou's hair was growing. After basketball practice, his kids taught Lou to surf. He started inviting a group of them, along with some girls, over for dinner. A few of Lou's fellow teachers had already thought he was too chummy with his kids; now he was having them over to his house and talking waves while the hi-fi played the Doors, whose frontman had lived in Coronado.
Eventually, Lou quit teaching. Nobody wanted to be in the establishment anymore. By the summer of Woodstock, the generational shift was too powerful. Lou traded his Corvette for a VW bus. He and his old students sat around in his backyard and smoked their first joints. Everyone was scared, convinced they'd go crazy. But teacher and students sat in silence, smiled, and pondered.
That August, not long after Lou left school and several of his star students graduated, the bridge was built. The two-mile feat of box-girder engineering arced gracefully across the bay, connecting Coronado to the rest of the world. Everyone gathered to see the bridge open, waiting to watch those first cars roll across, knowing things would never be the same.
The Coronado Company started small. Lance Weber, the founder, was an unlikely entrepreneur, known around town as the likable oddball. After he graduated from Coronado High, he joined the navy so he wouldn't get shot at in Vietnam. His father, a navy captain, wanted Lance to be an officer. But the life didn't suit Lance, and when his tour was up, his parents had to accept that he was another washed-up swabbie hanging out back on Idiot Island.
Lance was a wiry but fearless nut whose time on a submarine had forced him to learn how to fix anything. He could fabricate parts and bring to life whatever fantastic idea came to mind. He tricked out a VW Type 2 microbus with the engine of a Porsche 911 and built, by hand, the first lowrider bicycle in Coronado. (Seven years later, he would think up the Duck.) "Here comes the Wizard," people would say, watching him cruise the beach on his tuned-up lowrider, barefoot, shirtless, his long blond hair flowing behind him, a goofy smile on his face.
If the Wizard was on that bike, he was high. Everyone was. That fall, demand for pot in the United States skyrocketed. Simultaneously, supply suffered as Nixon launched a huge interdiction program at the Mexican border. Prices spiked, which encouraged ever more creative efforts to bring the stuff in. There were mules caravanning the Sonoran Desert, planes flying low over the Arizona mountains, tires stuffed with green at the border. It was the dream of every pot smoker to get a block, or a kilo, and make some scratch while getting free weed. For someone in San Diego, there was an enormous arbitrage opportunity just a few miles south, in Mexico. The trick was getting the stuff home.
It was Lance who dreamed up the idea of dodging the border altogether. Down in Baja, he got his hands on twenty-five pounds of pot and swam it north. He washed up on the U.S. side, a bleak stretch of beach with no name, facilities, or parking lot. It was dangerous, being in the water at night with only some fins and blinking radio-tower lights for guidance. But it was worth it: Each delivery netted five grand (more than $32K today). Soon Lance had a little team of pot Marines working with him, swimming as many bundles as they could find. They were misfits, guys who couldn't get girlfriends in high school before Lance put pot and money in their hands, and now they looked to Lance as their eccentric leader.
Until he got busted. Lance spent six months in prison in 1971, and when he came back, he worked as a boat mechanic and tried to stay straight. But whether Lance liked it or not, he was Coronado's first hippie hero, the local drug legend. So when one of his misfits, Paul Acree, had a new lead on pot, he asked Lance to revisit his old border route. They swam a few bales in the hard way and then realized a little motorization would help. Lance pulled one hundred pounds of grass across in a Zodiac, an inflatable rubber craft like the ones used by Navy Seals. It was easy money. Paul introduced Lance to Ed Otero, a nice addition, since "Otter"—who looked like the archetypal California boy (blond, square jaw, cleft chin)—was on the swim team back at Coronado High and could break through any surf. With Paul arranging supply, Lance piloting, and Otter swimming bales, they quickly developed a solid operation. The only thing holding them back was the connection. They called their guy in Tijuana "Joe the Mexican," and since none of them had taken Lou's Spanish class, they couldn't understand a word Joe said.
"You speak Spanish, right?" Lou was in dungarees, standing on a ladder, paintbrush in hand, when Lance rolled up on his lowrider bike.
"Sí," Lou said. "Naturalmente."
"Then come down here," Lance said. "I got an idea."
Lance offered Lou fifty bucks to go with him to Tijuana for dinner.
"I just need you to do a little translation."
Lance wasn't one of Lou's students, but they'd hung out around the Rock together and roasted some pigs on the beach. (Luaus had become the thing.) By then, Lou was painting houses for money, living in a little cottage. A bona fide beachside Buddhist, he surfed, read Carlos Castaneda, pondered the evils of materialism, made candles, and meditated with a local guru named Bula. Lou loved the life. But he never got used to being so broke.
Mexico was the easiest fifty bucks Lou ever made—until Lance offered him a hundred the next week to do it again. With the ubiquity of pot, Lou didn't think twice about the illegality or the ethics, and he was a natural dealmaker. While translating the second time, Lou sensed an opportunity for his friends and negotiated a larger load for a better price. Thrilled, Lance offered Lou the chance to share directly in the next shipment. Lou helped Lance, Paul, and Otter inflate the Zodiac and load it at the little salt-eaten Rosarito beach shack where Joe the Mexican delivered the goods. On the other side, he received ten grand.
It was more money than Lou had earned in years. And it was all he needed to give away his nascent painting business. Like everyone else, Lou had been smoking pot for fun, but then came a moment of clarity, when he took that joint from behind his ear, sparked it up, and saw the future.
Gigs, they called them. Or scams. Or barbecues, since they would plan them while throwing steaks on the grill at sundown. Everyone would get a call—"Do you want to go to a barbecue?"—which meant it was time to mobilize. The missions were simple at first, with just that twelve-foot Zodiac that they inflated with an Electrolux vacuum. As the loads got bigger, so did the effort. It's not easy loading a boat with fifty-pound bags through head-high waves. Lou could help, but it was Otter who had the brute in him; he was the mule.
When the boat arrived at Silver Strand beach in California, Lance would just signal with a flashlight and then run the Zodiac right up onto the sand—Burn up the motor, we'll buy a new one—so they could get those bags on land, deflate the boat, and load the van in five minutes. Just like that, they each made twice their parents' annual salary.
That was every month. Then every week. The new partnership was an overnight success. Within a year, they worked up to power boats, fishing boats, a forty-foot cabin cruiser. As the money piled up, they reinvested in the business. Lance bought a spacious Chris-Craft called the Lee Max II and rebuilt the engine so he could carry serious weight at seventy knots. The scams grew, but they were faster and less frequent, minimizing exposure. They hired beach crews to expedite the off-load. Lou thought it was risky, letting in new people, but this was Coronado, and everyone knew one another. "If we take care of them," Lance said, "they'll take care of us."
The partners could afford generosity. Everyone except Lou was in their twenties, with $50K in their pocket. Then $100K. Then a quarter-million dollars. Lou felt it gripping them, the uncontrollable joy of becoming sudden millionaires. Or as Lance put it: "Don't you love it when life goes from black-and-white to Technicolor?"
Pot was too green to pass up. High Times even started publishing a reference table for rising street values of varietals. Smugglers everywhere figured grass would be legalized—polls showed the population increasingly approved of legalization; Jimmy Carter would favor decriminalization, as would several states, including Oregon. If that happened, the golden goose would be cooked.
In the meantime, the Company couldn't move enough of the stuff, going back and forth to Mexico, driving with their boards to get some time at K-38 and other Baja surf spots. It was about this time that Lance started calling Lou "Pops," a nickname that caught on. "What do you think, Pops?" Lance asked one night as they watched the break crash just offshore in Mexico.
"I think we got a good thing going here," Pops said. "Let's not fuck it up."
Pot was officially everywhere. Even rich people wanted to smoke. Lou met the manager of the Albatross Restaurant, a nice seafood place built in an old church in Del Mar. He thought the place was groovy: good food, drinks, music, and well attended by rich dopers. Lou knew that smuggling was about personality as much as it was about know-how. To climb the ladder, you had to play it cool. Which is what he and the restaurant manager did, warily revealing their mutual interest, pulling their cards away from their vests to talk about how they might fit into each other's business model.
"How much can you handle?" Lou asked.
"How much can you bring?" the owner said.
By now, Lou had cut his hair, gotten rid of his beads, and traded his hippie duds for silk shirts. He realized that's how the game was played. These guys had money and acted like it. When Lou suggested bringing in a ton and the owner said he'd pay cash on the barrel, Lou saw the horizon expanding right before his eyes.
Lou told Lance about the new demand. "Let's feed the beast," he said.
"We're gonna need a bigger boat," Lance replied.
Lance, the Wizard, delighted in the prospect of expanding their little navy. He bought a Sea Ray and stripped the cabin for just cargo and extra gas. He changed the waterline so it didn't look low when laden. More weight meant more freight and even more people on the beach—five, ten guys, running bags up and down the sand. Lou, now the de facto leader, wanted to tighten the screws on the organization. He wanted dependable people, synchronized, there at the right time, gone at the right time.
The Company reorganized, cut weak links—early member Paul Acree had gotten hooked on heroin and was voted out of the organization—and became more structured. Just like when he was coaching, Lou knew how to motivate people, gain mutual trust, field a squad, and make them believe in their abilities.
Still, Lou needed a right-hand man. He recruited his good friend and former student Dave Strather. A solid body surfer, Dave started off as a loader, but he was more effective at planning, and it wasn't long before Lou gave him managerial duties. Dave was a natural. Even as a hippie, he was fastidious, shampooing his long hair every day. That hair was cut short once Dave started running around with a clipboard and checklists, buying and storing equipment, running smuggling gigs like a stevedore superintendent.
Lou moved out of Coronado, and much of the outfit followed. The town had become too small, their presence too obvious and well-known. The one thing they kept was the name: the Coronado Company. Lou thought it sounded official.
It was fun in those early days, he told his boys in the Company, but amateur hour is over.
Lou and Dave were south of the border, at a Tijuana flophouse near the racetrack, surrounded by men with machine guns. A dozen cartel foot soldiers stood around them, their combat arms accessorized with belted, chrome-plated pistols for good measure. No one moved. Dave and Lou waited. The seconds felt like hours.
They had gotten themselves into this situation on purpose, having decided to do some supply-chain outreach. Lou sweet-talked his way up the ladder to a guy they called Rick Pick, who said he knew Roberto Beltran. The Don. The head of the Sinaloa traffickers. One of the biggest drug dealers in the world. Lou and Rick met, sized each other up, and Lou said: "Introduce me to the Don."
When the call came, Lou arrived two hours late on purpose. That's the Mexican style of business, he thought. Mañana! Lou figured that keeping them waiting would show they're equals, but now, spirited deep inside the cartel-owned flophouse, they were clearly the small fish. The Don's bodyguard led them into a small room. There, on the bed, was Beltran. Dave and Lou were surprised to see that the Don looked like a maharishi, or maybe a bum: scraggly hair, jeans, T-shirt, unshaven. When they walked in, the Don didn't get up. It was a weird scene, the two of them standing at the foot of the bed, unsure of what to do. Dave thought they'd be killed. Especially when Lou decided to start the negotiations by taking a pillow and lying down on the bed right next to the Don. Dave said a prayer. Lou remained unfazed. To him, this was a game.
Dave couldn't understand what was being said as Lou and the Don, faces inches apart, started chatting softly. Within a few minutes, the Don was grinning, then laughing. Lou's instincts proved out; the Don respected the wildly daring initiative of showing up like this. No one from the States had ever approached him. "What do you have to lose?" Lou told the Don. He knew the Mexicans were sending half-tons north a million ways, losing a lot of product at the border. It was a model that made money: The supply that made it through paid for the losses. But still, that's a lot of smuggler's shrinkage. This is what Lou told the Don, in not so many words: The Coronado Company can reduce your shrinkage. "Let's do business," the Don said.
Fifteen tons, Dave thought, right on the goddamned beach? The Mexican job was an enormously challenging off-load; in prep, Dave had bought more sophisticated equipment and procured several houses as staging sites and covert entrepôts, including a rental right off the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu.
That's where the team assembled, including some new beach runners. One of the mules, Allan "Fuzzy" Logie, was a surfer who became a motorcycle racer. He was amazed at the scale of the Company's operation. Fifteen people on the beach, all in plain view of neighbors, whose lights were on. And they were out there for hours, buzzing around in the Zodiacs, carrying everything by hand. Luckily, it was overcast, and the reflective glow of the city gave them light.
It took forever to get the load off the beach. Runners like Fuzzy ran for eight hours straight, all through the night. By the end, they managed to fit all fifteen tons in three rented Ryder trucks. Fuzzy threw his last bale and wanted to collapse from exhaustion. Instead he got behind the wheel. Turning onto the PCH, he drove right past a highway-patrol cruiser writing some poor bastard a speeding ticket while 2,000 cubic feet of pot sailed by at sixty miles an hour.
At the warehouse, Dave had organized an assembly-line-style repackaging system—every brick was weighed to the gram, bagged, marked with a sticker, and recorded. Lou came up from his cliffside house to inspect the wares. It was a job well done. When everyone got their cut, Fuzzy asked if he could get paid in weed. He had to settle for $20,000 cash instead. "Well," he told the Company, "I hope I get invited to another barbecue."
Lou, intent on impressing the Don, decided to deliver the cartel's money immediately and in person, without an invitation. "This is going to blow his mind," he told Dave as they flew south together. When Lou and Dave, again surrounded by machine guns, handed over two duffel bags, each with $1 million in cash, the Don smiled. "We owe you a party," he said. That night he feted them at a restaurant in Sinaloa, where Lou arranged the next consignment: another twenty tons.
There was no precedent for the Company's operation. A bunch of young hippies sat atop an empire. Most were in their twenties; the oldest among them was Lou, at 34. When they got that twenty tons into the safety of a warehouse in Santa Cruz, the load was ten feet high. Otter pulled out some blocks and arranged them into a chair, and they all took turns sitting on a throne of hard-packed kilos.
The first time the DEA heard of the Coronado Company was an accident. The San Diego office got a call about a guy in a holding cell across the bay who had some very interesting information.
Paul Acree was probably jonesing already when he was arrested for petty theft. He had gotten an $8,000 severance from the Company, but it was gone. By the time Paul was interviewed on tape, he sounded like a man addicted, shaky, asking cops for dope. Instead he got a deal, in return for spilling, and he became the DEA's first informant in Operation CorCo.
The DEA was dumbstruck to discover such a sophisticated operation right under its nose. Smuggling was, until that time, fairly haphazard. As was enforcement. Only a few years old itself, the DEA was still an underfunded, overlooked agency. Special Agent James Conklin, a recent transplant from the New York office, spearheaded the CorCo investigation. When he started in San Diego, his unit had four cars: two American Motors Javelins, a seized purple Plymouth convertible, and a Buick Riviera with bullet holes in it. New agents received guns but no holsters. Most of the men were border veterans and looked like Mexican vaqueros. They spoke Spanish and wore beards and mustaches and colorful guayabera shirts. The agency could barely cover the county, much less sniff out an organization like the Company.
Sensing opportunity, the DEA allowed Paul to go free to gather more information. Back in Coronado, Lance was still hanging around, and he filled in his old friend Paul on the Company's latest exploits. That was how the DEA learned about the Don and about the latest trip to Morocco—the Africa connection had come from a Coronado guy who had gone surfing on the edge of the Sahara and came back talking about hashish. But it was when the DEA heard chatter about an even more profitable product, Thai stick, that they took serious interest. Lou's former student and a star swimmer made the Thai connection. He had gone overseas for some mystical time in the Pacific and learned about "one-hit shit." Otter saw the potential immediately. "We can make so much more money," he said.
He was right. According to Conklin, Thai stick was among the most profitable commodities in existence: $100,000 for a ton in Bangkok that sold for $3.5 million Stateside. Unlike drugs flowing north from Latin America, Thai stick had to come by boat. And boats were the Company's specialty.
As the boss of an ever growing empire, Lou had long since traded his VW bus for a black-over-blue 1966 Ferrari adorned with a vanity license: 20K. In the trunk, he'd carry a valise full of "fun tickets": C-notes to satisfy any whim. The idealism of the '60s had given way to the excesses of the '70s. Lou and Ed collected a fleet of Mercedeses and Ferraris between them and bought palatial homes. Lou spent fifteen grand on a fake passport using the name "Peter Grant," bought a Mercedes as "James Benson," shopped at Wilkes Bashford as "Richard Malone."
Sometimes Lou's story was that he was a trust funder. Sometimes he was the son of a Texas wildcatter. Once he was mistaken for a member of KISS, and he didn't deny it. Whoever he was, Lou owned it. "I'm in oil," he'd say. "And if you ask any more questions, I'll ask you to leave."
Eventually Lou bought a place in Tahoe, where he entertained friends and investors: bond brokers and lawyers and other pedigreed people who couldn't resist the two- or sometimes three-to-one return Lou was offering. Lou had an affinity for networking up, and he made the drug business look like any other business. Supersanitary, no rough edges. It was like the aspirational subtext of _The Godfather—_where capitalism eventually turns all criminals into respectable businessmen—only without the guns. The Company didn't want to be gangsters. They wanted to fit in and live the good life. They got their own accountant, buying properties on their behalf, creating shell companies with names like Mo Ching Trading Co., Tow Tow Ltd., and Ku Won Investment Co., LTD.
There, above Tahoe's electric blue lake, a thought dawned on Lou: Money is energy, a frictionless medium for amplifying your will. Their attorney liked to use what Lou called "innovative" legal tactics to help his clients. "Don't deal in anything white," he told Lou after getting a $300,000 retainer in cash, "and I'll always be able to get you off."
Word from buyers was that the East Coast was dying for smoke. Switching geography, the Company figured, would throw off any heat. The company didn't know the feds were on to them, but the border had become a smuggling frenzy, and the DEA was stepping up efforts around San Diego. So Dave—who had moved beyond beach master to something like a general manager—got out his maps, studied, and praised the gods of fractal geometry for giving distant Maine as many miles of coast as California. He purchased a beach house on Dennison Point in Cutler, Maine, overlooking Machias Bay, plus an equipment house in Freedom and a communication house near Skowhegan. Across the globe, Otter attended to maritime details: cargo-ship certifications, port clearances, tonnage certificates for the Canal. A shipment of prime Thai stick was on the move.
By now, the Company was practically corporatized. Those Mexico loads had been sloppy successes, with too many runners and too little cohesion. Since then, Dave had built a real close-knit crew of as many as fifty people at a time, men who knew one another's families and had a clear chain of command. The DEA didn't realize the extent to which the Company had perfected a cell structure, both loose and extremely well organized, bonded by friendship and mutual trust. Company guys lived around the country, under various assumed names, and communicated by 800 numbers with answering services, where they'd leave coded messages with callback numbers to pay phones. Everyone always had a bag of quarters. Dave was an early adopter of beepers. You'd get a message—"Burma Christmas"—and know whom to call back. The Company could disappear for months at a time and then re-emerge, at the ready. "These kids were the best in the business," Special Agent James Conklin says today. "They were ahead of their time. They operated almost like a military unit."
Another coast, another challenging off-load. Maine wasn't like back home in Coronado, with 300 yards of flat white sand; Machias was all cliffs down to the water with its huge, quickly changing tides. They'd have little time on the beach. So Don, the mechanic, suggested they install a yarder—a five-ton piece of industrial logging equipment—to winch pickups straight down the cliff face and, once they were loaded on the beach, hoist them back up right into the garage.
In a nineteenth-century barn, they stored the rest of the gear: motors, boats, gravity feeds, and the new Maravias—inflatable thirty-five-foot-long Kevlar barges—for towing the pot back from the mother ship. Dave had them custom-made, telling the Maravia sales agent that they would be used to transport cattle across the Rhine River. Nearby, at the communication house, a former Coronado High ham-radio enthusiast operated the radio tower's 5,000-watt transmitter. That sixty-foot tower ran a lot of juice; when you'd turn it on, the lights would dim, the room would hum, and you'd get warm standing next to it, waiting for word to come that the mother ship was nearing Machias Bay.
When the boat arrived, the crew motored out in a smuggler's blackout beneath a moonless sky. They dropped chem lights in milk bottles as buoys to mark the way back and held up aluminum so the mother ship could pick them up on radar. The Zodiac crews wore thick wet suits, and hockey helmets rigged with radio headsets that worked hands-free (a critical tactical upgrade the U.S. military would take years to discover). The crew looked ridiculous, black and wet like analog-robot seals, with six-inch antennae sticking up from their heads, but they made short work of the load while Dave watched on a night-vision Starlight scope.
After traveling 10,000 miles, the Thai stick breezed through the flawless final stretch. Don won the MVP award again, a record-setting third time, for solving the cliff problem. In a suite at the Waldorf, Lou and the other partners divided their cut. The celebration was epic. They always were. "Why settle for a glass of champagne," Lou would say, "when you can have a magnum?" It always felt great, watching the flutes get filled as soon as they were empty, unless you followed Pops's lead, draining your glass and throwing it into the fireplace. With a girl on your arm and gilded pockets, all juiced up, stumbling out to the limos at dawn, it felt like you were going to live forever.
Lou was on the slopes at Vail when he learned about the indictment. Eight counts, unsealed in the district court in San Diego, naming him, Otter, Lance, and twenty-three others. Lou and Dave were skiing with their attorney. "I have bad news," the lawyer said, after a call came in from his office. "The bloom is off the rose." Lou frowned, planted his poles, and kept skiing.
Lou figured that if the authorities knew where they were, they'd have been arrested already. And no one was putting up wanted posters, were they? Besides, the DEA was essentially looking at a dead-end case: They had no leads on the Company members' whereabouts, and they lacked the resources to go after fugitives.
Lou and Dave met with their attorney, Phil DeMassa, at the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco to discuss the indictment. "As your attorney, I advise you to turn yourself in," he said. "Now with that out of the way," he added, "let's get down to business." Using carefully worded hypotheticals, DeMassa advised the Company on how to be a fugitive. The group agreed that the principals should stay on the run and that some others might surrender and strategically cooperate so as to get light sentences but not provide any information. This was a new idea, doing time for the Company. But things were different now, more complicated, and Lou would turn on the coach charm and tell his team that sacrifice was necessary. That's what the Company is about, he'd say, the big picture. "We can get slaps on the wrist for the underlings," DeMassa promised.
The indictment did claim one casualty: Lance, the Wizard. "We know you're talking to Paul Acree," Otter told him during an uneasy meeting. "It's on tape." Lance didn't hear the recording, and he denied it, but Otter said their lawyers had gotten the tapes from the United States attorney's office.
Lou remembered the day Lance showed up on his bike, like some kind of stoned angel, asking him to get off the ladder and go to Mexico. There wouldn't be a Company if it weren't for Lance. Now Lou and Otter had determined to buy him out, settling on a $400,000 lump sum. Their lawyer, DeMassa, met Lance in the parking structure of the Orange County courthouse, where they chatted briefly, and DeMassa told him to "stay out of trouble." Then the lawyer pointed at a briefcase he'd set between them. "Oh," he said, as they parted ways, "I think this is yours."
Hiding in plain sight, the rest of the Company's principals went even further upscale, spending more time in ritzy Santa Barbara. They moved into huge Spanish-style haciendas, had fierce tennis matches, and discovered polo. (Otter stabled his twenty ponies at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club.)
It was a dangerous game, being that high-profile. Otter couldn't reinvent himself with a patrician facade like Lou. While Lou played it cool, Otter wanted to be cool, speeding down Shoreline Drive in his Ferrari. Indiscretions notwithstanding, Otter earned his keep in the business, running point on the Thai supply chain, where he had managed to connect directly with growers, cutting out the middlemen, increasing the Company's profit—the kind of profit that made it possible to throw money at DeMassa, hold the feds at bay, and keep the cogs of the Company machine moving along while the partners played aristocratic pastimes in the afternoon and drank the nights away.
Fugitive Status was taking its toll on some of the Company faithful. Dave, like the rest of the indictees, had gone deep underground. He'd been living a double life for several years, and he was paranoid, always looking in rearview mirrors and store-window reflections. He and Lou would meet in public places to plan the next gig. "I don't know if I can do this anymore," Dave said one day, hardly able to concentrate on their conversation. He had a kid now, and his wife was tired of living a secret.
"I know how you feel," Lou said, coaching him through. "I feel it, too. But the Company needs you."
Dave and the others had good reason to be paranoid. A second round of indictments had appeared as the DEA stepped up its investigation. Operation CorCo had become a mobile task force with more men assigned, including an agent from the IRS. Since the days of Al Capone, that was how you built the central case around organized crime: Follow the money.
That's how Special Agent Conklin found himself digging through the trash of an accountant in San Diego. After he received information connecting the Company to the accountant's office, Conklin got a warrant. Each week, he accompanied the local waste-management company to the guy's building, sorting through his bins. Turns out the accountant should have owned a shredder. "We got gold," Conklin told a fellow DEA agent. "Look at these letters."
Conklin had found an epistolary trail from the accountant to Lou, mostly under aliases. The meandering paper trail eventually led to an ongoing investigation of a suspected drug dealer who owned a palatial estate in Hilton Head, South Carolina. The suspect's contractors claimed their boss was a drug smuggler. They called him Mr. Thai Pot. They knew only aliases, so Conklin flew them to the San Diego office and showed them his smuggler's folio. They immediately picked out Lou Villar.
It was the break that Conklin had been searching for. But when he brought it to his superiors, along with evidence that Lou, based on the value of his houses alone, was worth $6 million, it wasn't enough. The Justice Department wanted a surefire conviction. Conklin was miffed but patient. He and his team had been on Operation CorCo for years now. It was the biggest case of their careers. For some, it was the biggest they'd ever work. And in truth, Conklin liked matching wits with the Company. They were worthy opponents, guys who'd be good at anything, Conklin thought. It just so happened they were really good crooks.
Dave was at 5,000 feet, riding shotgun in a Cessna four-seater, looking down at the site of the Company's most ambitious gig yet: off-loading ten tons of Thai stick via military helicopter. Dave was all the way at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, near the Makah Indian reservation, a nearly unpeopled landscape of forest, salmon streams, and jagged sea stacks on the beach. He had planned the gig for late August, when the gray usually breaks above the peninsula, and he had already contracted a pilot to "borrow" the helo from his Air National Guard squadron. For the off-load, he had ordered the construction of special wire cages that would enable the massive double-rotor Chinook to lift the entire haul—just under the aircraft's 24,000-pound capacity—off the deck of the mother ship.
But when their ship, the John L. Winter, arrived on August 23, the coast was shrouded in dense fog. Helicopters couldn't fly in that kind of visibility at night. Waiting for the fog to lift was a problem. The ship's captain came onshore; he and his crew didn't want to float out there and get plucked by the Coast Guard. The army pilot bailed, pointing out that joyriding with a military-owned Chinook was tough to reschedule. Dave was pissed—at them, at himself, at the weather; his supremely elegant plan was spoiled by an unseasonal dew point.
The Company regrouped, renting a U-Haul to transport the load and fetching their old beach equipment from storage. They also hired some local Makah Indians from the reservation to assist with their fishing boats. But by then, tempers were short.
As each day passed at Neah Bay, there was plenty of time for anxious speculation. Fuzzy, admittedly nosy, listened on the radios as the crew kvetched to Dave, and everyone else complained about something. Like the Indians, whom no one in the Company trusted. Fuzzy thought: You don't want to be meeting new people in medias res on a smuggling site. The Indians were charging $150,000—the kind of deal you strike in an emergency—but they were wild at the wheel and unpredictable, unable (or unwilling) to get their ships into proper position. On the night they commenced the off-load, Fuzzy could hear everyone arguing on the radio, blabbering back and forth for hours. It was the opposite of the Company's streamlined command structure. "Get off the channel," someone finally said. "And get in here!"
It was a bad start, hours late, already past midnight. Earlier, on the beach, Fuzzy watched tiny waves lap at his feet, but his surfer's instinct told him that these waters would rise. Sure enough, by the time they started, enormous eight-footers were crashing on the rocks. Fuzzy fought his way out with a Zodiac and the Maravia barge, then docked at sea with the John L. Winter. The Indians met him there. It was raining, but they managed to transfer six tons of Thai stick while the sea heaved a full story every twenty seconds. Luckily, the high tide allowed a small vessel to shoot the mouth of a tiny river that emptied into the ocean near Neah Bay, so the Indians started ferrying the stash, 500 pounds at a time, into the shelter of the river.
Dave was positioned on a hill, using his night scope to watch a constellation of green figures running on the beach and battling the sea in what the cops would later call a scene of "naval warfare." It was a battle the Company was losing. The tide was shifting. The boats were scraping the shallows. The Indians were erratic, not following orders. When one of the Indian pilots knocked his hull on a rock, he refused to continue. "I'm worried about my boat," he said.
"How much does your boat cost?" Dave asked over the radio.
"A hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars," the pilot said.
"We'll buy you two goddamn boats," Dave said. "Just bring the shit in!"
That was good for one more trip, but the night had been a slow-motion debacle, and now the tide had gone all the way out. No boat with a keel could get through, and there was $10 million worth of pot still sitting out there on the barge. The Indians motored off en masse. On the horizon, the black of night turned slightly pale with the first hint of tomorrow.
"I'm getting that barge!" Fuzzy yelled into the com. Through the scope, Dave watched Fuzzy break a Zodiac through the pounding surf and race out to sea. He strapped up the barge. The Maravia was enormous but flat-bottomed, so Fuzzy figured he could tow the entire barge, stacked several feet high with pot, onto the beach, where it could be unloaded.
"Go for it, man!" Dave yelled through the radio. "Gun it!"
Fuzzy couldn't hear Dave through the whine of the Zodiac's outboard and could barely see through the ocean spray, but he got the barge close. And then, just as he reached the shore, he felt himself elevating.
"Holy fuck," Dave said to himself. A monster wave had suddenly curled up and lifted Fuzzy, his Zodiac, the barge, and the Thai stick ten feet above the beach. It would have been a tough run on sculpted fiberglass, but it was even trickier with tethered inflatables; and as the crest toppled, the thirty-five-foot barge was dropped directly on top of Fuzzy's Zodiac. Fuzzy felt the weight of it pinning him to the rubber floor. A fatalist, he thought, How ironic to be killed by my own stash. The wave started to swamp the Zodiac. But before the boat capsized, Fuzzy realized his hand was still on the Zodiac's throttle. He instinctively cranked that little motor, and when the wave shifted, his boat broke free and shot down the face of the wave.
After tumbling in the foam, the barge dumped some of its load in the water and floated gently onto the beach. The crew unloaded what remained on deck. The rest of the bales were collected from the river. Dave had come down from the hill and welcomed Fuzzy back onto the beach. "You barely got out of there with your life!" Dave said.
"It's like I always say," Fuzzy responded. "When in doubt—punch it!"
Dave and the beach crew scrambled to get the load into a U-Haul truck. First light was upon them. There was only one way in and out of this heavily forested area, and if the police got wind of what was going on here, the Company would be sealed in. They started for the stash house, ten miles away, but the road out of the forest was slick and canted, and the truck didn't get very far before sliding right off the asphalt and landing on its side. "Leave the truck," Dave said. "Transfer the stash to the pickups." But the U-Haul's rear door was jammed. The truck's whole frame box was warped and wouldn't open. "Get an ax!" Dave yelled. But there were no as.
Dave looked around. The crew was losing faith. Birds were singing, announcing the morning. The scale of the disaster was dawning on them. "All right, everybody," Dave said wearily over the radio. "This is a code red."
It was the first time Dave had given the order to abort.
They had sixty bales in the pickups—a small fraction of the load. The rest they left on the beach and in the U-Haul, along with the boats and motors, the conveyor belts and generators. Dave instructed everyone to get their emergency kits, which contained oiled rags, for clearing fingerprints. "Wipe it all down, boys," he said. They scrubbed every vessel, then mounted the pickups and tore out. As he was bumping along in the bed of one of those trucks, leaving the disaster scene behind, Dave wondered what he would say to Lou.
The recovered bales went to pay back the investors. The rest was a loss. Smuggling is speculative and expensive: It had cost a lot to stage this fiasco. A million bucks spent to lose $20 million in potential profit. The Indians got some hush money. Later, Lou convened the Company for a postmortem at his place in La Costa. Dave, ever faithful and feeling guilty, bought Lou a gold Patek Philippe watch as an apology—even though, as Fuzzy noted, "everyone knew it wasn't his fault."
Hours after the code red, Walter Cronkite reported on the national evening news about the mysterious drug-trafficking incident on the Olympic Peninsula. The police discovered the entire smuggling operation in situ—the bales in the water, the truck, and all the gear—but they didn't find a single print.
After Neah Bay, Lou started talking seriously about retirement. Despite the loss, he still had money buried (literally) and had already investigated real estate options for his Bahamian exit. He and the other partners decided to "do one last gig." His palm reader said to be wary, but from his hundred-acre orchid farm, he had managed to coordinate another successful import of four tons of Thai stick. To celebrate, all the Company partners gathered in Santa Barbara, returning to form with a classic victory party full of girls, food, drink, and drugs.
The timing couldn't have been better for the DEA and Special Agent Conklin, who were already in Santa Barbara, waiting.
Conklin looked at his watch. It was 11 a.m. Another agent called in an approaching silver four-door Mercedes. They made the license plate: 1ATM158. The car turned west on Alston, then south on Cima Linda Lane, where other surveillance units made the driver: Ed Morgan, a.k.a. Kenneth Eugene Cook Jr., a.k.a. Edward Otero, a.k.a. Otter.
The DEA had been sitting on the houses of the partners for months now. Lou had no idea his contractors had led the heat to his doorstep. Now Conklin had teams in place. "Let's do it," he said.
Otter saw the tail and tried to run. He didn't get far. Shortly thereafter, DEA agents saw Lou driving his signature 6.9 Mercedes and got him, too. Dave was riding with Otter. For all his investigative efforts, Conklin didn't realize who Dave was, or the important role he played in the organization. The agents found twenty grand in Otter's trunk and seized Dave's valise, in which there were two fake IDs, an airline ticket, and several notebooks—all detailed accounting ledgers.
The house where the Company members had celebrated the last shipment was soon surrounded by yellow tape and filled with tagged evidence: three safe-deposit keys, $144,800 in cash, photos of landing sites, and records showing payments to ship captains. In total, the DEA confiscated $12 million in cash, contraband, vehicles, and property from the Company. After nearly a decade and gigs all over the country, the Company had thrown its last barbecue.
When the news broke, the DEA told reporters the Company had netted $96 million over the past decade (nearly $300 million today). At a minimum, Lou thought in his cell. The real number was hard to know but may have been twice that.
From their individual cells, the members of the Company tried to stay together. Lou was running damage control, even managing collections from distributors from jail. The Company had a strong sense of trust, but the DEA was looking for cracks. It knew there were a lot of loose ends out there.
In fact, no sooner had the news about the busts gotten out than the DEA received a call from Lance, the Wizard. Lance offered to talk, and then started working on Fuzzy. "I'm sure you know why I'm calling," Lance told his friend. He had already arranged for Fuzzy to sit down with the DEA. Fuzzy was conflicted, but Lance told him: "It's every man for himself."
Conklin's approach mid flattery with directness. "We want to know how you guys did it," Conklin told Fuzzy. "You guys were the A-team."
Lance and Fuzzy's incredible recall of detail helped the DEA fill in the blanks, and they quickly expanded the indictments. Dave faced an 848, also called the Kingpin Law, which carried the prospect of decades in prison. Dave wasn't a kingpin, but that's how the government puts on the squeeze. The Company's lawyer arranged a plea bargain for Lou before he could get charged with the 848. The kingpin never faced the kingpin statute. Instead, he got ten years.
In his cell block, three miles from the warm sands of Coronado, Lou met a prisoner named Howard, the resident autodidact, who traded homespun legal advice to prisoners for cookies. "Want my advice?" he told Lou. "Get yourself out of here. That's what all these other motherfuckers are trying to do." Lou was transferred to Terminal Island to "do his dime," as it was called in the yard. He looked around and thought: "I can't spend ten years here." The DEA was shocked when it got a call one day: "Lou Villar wants to talk."
It was controversial within the DEA whether or not to let Lou turn. He was too high up, some people said. But he could provide detail on the financing, suppliers, and dealers. He could also influence Dave, who was still facing decades behind bars. So far, Dave had rebuffed all DEA efforts. But now Conklin came to him, told him about Lou, and said he had one last chance before the charges turned into thirty years. "You're a smart guy," Conklin said. "Don't throw your life away."
In a way, Conklin thought these guys were lucky to have gotten caught when they did: The days of the hippie smugglers were giving way to violence, as cocaine culture and gangsters moved into the grass business. "You have a chance to be a regular guy again," Conklin said. Dave finally agreed and spent weeks being debriefed by the DEA. In the end, Lou and Dave were the only Company players to turn in prison. Père et fils, the two switched sides and disappeared from their cells.
Many Company members and their associates did time. Eventually, more than one hundred people were indicted. Some spent just a few months in prison, others years. Otter refused to cooperate and served part of a ten-year sentence. Fuzzy and Lance spent years on probation. Somehow, through it all, Lance managed to form a friendship with Conklin, who later came to Lance's wedding and presented him with handcuffs in a shadow box engraved with Congratulations on your life sentence!
Some people never recovered and drifted back into crime. Others were able to reassemble their lives. Dave moved away to the Pacific Northwest, where he got into real estate. After a second stint of smuggling and prison, Otter started a legitimate and successful air-conditioning business. At 40, Lou Villar changed his name, started over, and found another career. He was successful, he says, but it wasn't the same as the Coronado Company. "Then again," he says, "what could be?"
When I finally managed to meet Lou, I found a different man than the tanned playboy I'd seen in pictures and newspaper articles. He was a retiree now, his hair white and his smile warm. Arranging the first meeting was complicated, requiring the kind of cloak-and-dagger planning that he knew from the days of the Coronado Company. I appeared at a pizza place, waited, and was later approached by Lou after I "checked out." Lou was spry, fit, and still sharp as he jumped into a story that hadn't been told in thirty years.
As I spent time with Lou, I could see the charming and charismatic man that found himself at the center of the Company. But I also saw the tragedy of the story. By the time we met, I had spoken with many who still felt the sting of his betrayal.
Did Lou have regrets? He did. He'd testified against people he cared about. It was an agonizing decision, one he couldn't rationalize away: "I told my story in exchange for freedom, and I'll always have to live with that." Of course, it wasn't just Lou's story to tell. Some people see the Coronado Company as a cautionary tale, others a story about greed, and some a parable of power. Everyone said that the beginning was glorious, the time of their lives, but no one agrees about the end. The one certainty is the heartbreak: For all members of the Coronado Company, it was a coming-of-age story, where the exuberance of youth eventually runs aground on the hard reality of adulthood's disappointments and consequences.
In his previous media appearance, just after prison, Lou said he regretted his Company days, because they affected his family and destroyed most of his friendships. Things seem different to a 76-year-old man looking back on his life. "Those were lessons that had to be learned," he says. After the sentencing, Lou and Dave found each other and became friends again. When they spend time together, their wives have forbidden them from talking about the halcyon days of the Company, because it goes on for hours. No matter how nostalgic he gets, Dave says he wouldn't do it again. Now Lou says that he would. The highs, the lows, the hard lessons. "Because," he says, "those are the things that made my life."
Joshuah Bearman wrote the story that became Argo. An expanded version of this story is available at atavist.com.


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I love that the Hyacinths, opening in the warmth of the house, fills each room all the way to the basement with the smell of spring.
I love the little wicker baskets stuffed with wisps of green cellophane grass and foiled-covered treats.
I love sharing my table with my loved ones at this first feast of the barely budding new season.
I love the bright plastic eggs lovingly stashed in the crevices of rock walls by the Easter Bunny.
I love the ham, Au Gratin potatoes and asparagus with Hollandaise that we eat every year without fail.
I love the set of springtime dishes that grace the table with their gold rims and flights of butterflies, dragonflies and other winged things.
I love that there are 2 little people that look forward to coming to my house for Easter and start to pester their parents months in advance.
I love that this is the day that we celebrate our faith. Without the crucifixion and resurrection we would not be Christians.
I leave you on this Easter Sunday with my Aunt Evelyn's recipe for Herb Rolls. She made them for every holiday when I was growing up.
1 pkg dry yeast
3 ½ C. flour
2 tsps. celery seed
¼ tsp. sage
1 tsp. parsley
1 ¼ C. milk
¼ C. shortening
¼ C. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 egg
In a bowl mix together the yeast, 1 ½ C. flour, and the herbs. Heat together the milk, shortening, sugar and salt until just warm (not too hot), stir to melt the shortening. Stir wet into dry. Add the egg and beat at low speed for 1 minute, then move to high speed for 3 minutes, scraping the bowl constantly. By hand, stir in enough flour to make a stiff dough. Grease a large bowl. Put in the dough, turning it over to grease all sides. Chill 2 hours covered with a damp cloth. (Don't do it overnight, the dough grows too much in the fridge and oozes out of the bowl, then does not rise well when cooked. Been there, did that.) Pinch off a piece of the dough and roll it in the palm of your hand to make a 1 ½" ball. Put 3 dough balls in each opening of a greased muffin pan. Let rise about an hour until doubled in size. Bake at 400F for 12-15 minutes. Makes about 18 rolls. These can be made the day before and put hot into aluminum foil, sealed tight and refrigerated. Pop the unopened foil package into the oven, after the potatoes come out, for about 15 minutes. Set out the butter lamb to soften at the same time. One of my favorite things. I love these. Enjoy.

subset: commoncrawl


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Check the box next to any choice you believe is correct. If you believe that none of the choices are correct, simply press the Submit Answer button.One player wrote: About yesterday's quiz, the indications in the text asked to indicate the wrong exceptions, but the column header on the answer table asked for "Correct". This puzzled me, and in doubt, I assumed that the table header was the right thing to do, and I did not check any answer, because none of them was actually "Correct". Today I see that my choice was the wrong one, but I think that the indications in your quiz pages are ambiguous: you cannot set the header "Correct" to indicate a "non-Correct" syntactical construct! And another: Hello, First of all thanks a lot for the idea of PL/SQL quiz. It really inspires me take part in it. Let me comment the quiz published on 7th July (yesterday). I think the question was very confusing and I understood its meaning in absolutely opposite way. I am not English native speaker (I reckon most of people here are not) and that's why I didn't catch the gist of that quiz. Could you please avoid such tricky combinations in future. We are just Oracle specialists and not English language experts. :-) Another person reported that we scored his answer entirely wrong, but I am pretty sure he experienced similar confusion. So, first of all, our apologies for causing this confusion. There can, in essence, be several layers of "correct" that you have to deal with when answering a question:
- Is the code correct or does it have errors?
- Is the choice a correct answer to the question?
Check the box next to any choice you believe is a correct answer to the question above. If you believe that none of the choices satisfies the question, simply press the Submit Answer button.Now we explicitly ask you to determine correction in relation to the question. Please let us know if you think this helps. We plan on implementing this change in the 1.4 release this weekend.


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Embroidered Cotton Blend Jersey Sweatshirt
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- A fleece-back cotton blend jersey sweatshirt with a lightly cropped silhouette and long ribbed cuffs. Contrast topstitching complements the embroidered Burberry lettering.
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FORT MYERS, Fla. (Feb. 4, 2010) - Overcoming a 10-minute offensive drought to start the game, the ETSU men's basketball team employed its pressure defense to wake up from the lull and snap a two-game losing streak with a 56-47 win over Florida Gulf Coast in Atlantic Sun Conference play Thursday night at Alico Arena.
The Bucs (12-12 overall, 8-5 A-Sun) fell behind 10-1 and did not score its first field goal until the 10:16 mark of the first half. However, the team turned it around in time, getting strong offensive nights from a pair of Florida natives, as sophomore forward Isiah Brown (Miami) posted a game high 17 points and seven rebounds, and sophomore guard Adam Sollazzo (Tampa) added seven points, three assists and four steals in 26 minutes of play.
"Bottom line was our defense held us in there," said ETSU head coach Murry Bartow. "We could have easily been down 20-1 to start the game, but fortunately our defense kept us in there and we got a good lift out of our bench. Isiah just keeps getting better and putting up numbers right now, and Adam did some nice things for us."
The first half began with the ETSU offense in a deep freeze despite the 80 degree temperatures of South Florida. In fact, the Buccaneers fell behind 10-1 and did not score a field goal until Sollazzo picked off a pass and dunked it home with 10:16 left in the first half.
ETSU finally got its offense going thanks to its defense, as the Bucs utilized their aggressive, trapping halfcourt defense to force FGCU (7-16, 4-10) into 15 turnovers in the first half. Slowly, ETSU chipped away at the deficit and ultimately took the halftime lead at 26-24 on a pair from free throws from junior guard De'Shaud Johnson (Riverdale, Ga.) with 4.8 seconds left in the half.
The Bucs were outrebounded 17-11 in the first half, but outscored FGCU 15-8 off turnovers. ETSU also held the Eagles to 20 percent shooting from beyond the 3-point arc, and the Bucs ultimately shot 40.9 percent from the field in the first half despite the slow start offensively.
In the second half the Bucs built their largest lead of the game so far at 31-28, but the Eagles came right back to retake the advantage 32-31 on a pair from free throws from Eddie Murray with 15:01 left in the game. From there, however, the Bucs once again went to the pressure defense and took a four-point lead at 36-32 on a dunk by Justin Tubbs (Trussville, Ala.) with 13:53 left.
FGCU responded to tie it at 36-36 on a pair of baskets by Hunter Miller, but from there Brown scored nine of the Bucs next 20 points as ETSU outscored the Eagles 20-11 the rest of the way for the win.
The Bucs only had two players in double figures, with Brown being joined by junior forward Tommy Hubbard (Boston) with 10 points. ETSU finished the game shooting 47 percent from the floor, while holding the Eagles to just 39 percent for the game. FGCU did have the rebounding edge 32-27, but the Bucs forced 24 turnovers on 10 steals.
ETSU will continue on the road this weekend, returning to action Saturday at Stetson. The Bucs and Hatters are scheduled to tip at 7 p.m. in Deland, Fla.
For more on ETSU men's basketball throughout the 2009-10 season, visit ETSUBucs.com and click on the men's basketball link.


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NWSB insider Dave B brings us another Northwest Athlete Profile, following Zach Hamill. Hamill quickly caught on with the Everett Silvertips of the WHL where he caught fire. After representing his country in many competitions for Team Canada, he was selected 8th overall in the 2007 NHL Entry Draft by the Boston Bruins. He played for the minor league team affiliate, the Providence Bruins.
Northwest Athlete Profile: Zach Hamill
January 22, 2012 By Dave B
Filed Under: Coffee Shop Tagged With: 2007 NHL Entry Draft, ADT Canada-Russia Challenge, AHL, Bob Clarke Trophy, British Columbia, Bruins, CHL, CHL Top Prospects, Everett Silvertips, Junior World Cup, Northwest Athlete Profile, Northwest athlete profiles, PIJHL, Port Coquitlam Buckaroos, Providence Bruins, Team Canada, U-17 Hockey Challenge, Vancouver Minor Hockey, WHL, WHL Bantam Draft, Zach Hamill, Zachary Hamill


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This activity uses an episode of poor air quality over the Midwest and Eastern seaboard to engage students in an exploration of the collection, comparison, analysis and utilization of air quality data. With the aid of a camera, the EPA website and... (View More) Google Earth, students will determine local visibility. Students will also interpret images taken with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard both the Terra and Aqua satellites to distinguish between three aerosols-smoke, dust and haze. Then students will then find online satellite images of the local area to determine aerosol types and possible sources. Four lesson extensions are included. This lesson uses the 5E instructional model. (View Less)
Materials Cost: Free
This activity uses rain and flood events in the Midwest to engage students in an exploration of the collection, comparison, analysis and utilization of rainfall data. Students will access online precipitation data from both a ground-based station... (View More) (the Community Collaborative Rain Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) network) and a satellite (the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)). Explicit instructions are provided to allow students to graph, map and analyze that data. Instructions are also provided for setting up a school-based rain gauge to gather local rainfall data for analysis. (View Less)
Materials Cost: Over $20 per group of students


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Be the first to read the most interesting articles in your favorite law journal; set up an alert through HeinOnline!
HeinOnline previously delayed, for years sometimes, releasing digital issues of law journals. Now, 84% of the HeinOnline journals published in hardcopy are available digitally without delay.
As you scan the alphabetical law review lists in HeinOnline the word "UPDATED" tells that a new issue has been released.
You can receive a notification via email when a new journal is available on HeinOnline, via "eTOC Alert ." Each email alert will include a table of contents for the issue, with clickable links to individual articles.
To set up an "eTOC alert" you must…
Set up a MyHein Account
Go to Law Journal Library, select the journal you want to receive an alert for
Click on "Create eTOC Alert." (See Below).


text: Why You Need Starter in Continuous Corn October 25, 2013 08:21 PM Tweet TAGS: Marketing, Overseas December 18, 2014 By Darrell Smith Farm Journal Conservation and Machinery Editor Email Here's another way to view the role of crop residue on phosphorus (P) availability in continuous corn: After corn harvest, only 22% of the crop residue—leaves, tassels, second ears and silks—has a carbon to P (C/P) ratio below 200:1, resulting in a net gain of available P through mineralization. Another 10%, the ear sheaths, has a C/P ratio between 200:1 and 300:1, so P is neither gained nor lost. But 68% of the residue—stalks, cobs, husks and shanks—has a C/P ratio greater than 300:1, meaning there will be a net loss of P through immobilization early in the growing season. "The phosphorus that is immobilized by the microbes is not lost from the soil," says Farm Journal Field Agronomist Ken Ferrie. "But because there is a temporary net loss of phosphorus, we must apply fertilizer in the spring to decompose the residue and make phosphorus available to plants." Learn and Profit from Nutrient Navigator The Nutrient Navigator series focuses on efficient, environmentally sound management of nutrients. The goal is to provide practical knowledge that helps drive yields and profits higher. www.FarmJournal.com/nutrient_navigator Back to news


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By Nancy Hastings
Twitter: @nhastingsHDN
HILLSDALE � Twinkling lights, hot cocoa and cookies, along with the chance to make a natural ornament attracted a large crowd to the Barber House Children�s Garden Thursday night.
Slayton Arboretum hosted its annual Winter Lights Festival and Open House with a larger than expected crowd. This was the fourth year for the event.
"We had four times as many come this year than last year," Hillsdale College groundskeeper Richard Alvarez said. "We ran out of cookies after the first hour."
Alvarez put up more than 6,000 lights around the Barber House and in the adjacent children�s garden, spending three hours a day for three weeks to prepare for the event.
Hillsdale College volunteers helped Arboretum Director Laurie Rosenberg decorate the inside of the stone structure with Christmas tree lights and mantle decorations.
Some parents waited outside for their children, who filled a back room making pine cone squirrels, angels, owls, reindeers and Christmas trees. Or, they could just choose to attach a ribbon to a pine cone for an easier project.
Hanna Ritchey, 11, said she was making a pine cone angel, as she asked her grandmother, Betty Ritchey, to help her with some extra glue that hung from the Styrofoam head.
"This is fun, but I�m getting glue all over it," Hanna said.
Her grandmother was happy to bring Hanna to the event since it was close to where they live.
"It�s a fun activity for Christmas and it�s close to home, so we didn�t have to drive far," Ritchey said.
Holding an outside door open for people entering the small kitchen area was Hillsdale College freshman Luke Daigneault. He and sophomore Mary Agnes Geiger were also helping youngsters make hot chocolate to go with their sugar cookies.
"The cookies are gone and the hot chocolate is going fast," Daigneault said.
Though volunteering was a scholarship requirement, Geiger said she didn�t mind and was having a good time meeting people from town.
"I�ve never volunteered for the arboretum before; I�m usually at the preschool," Geiger said. "This is a good opportunity to meet people and it�s a good idea for the college to get involved with the town."
Allison Hutchinson of Hillsdale brought her three children to the event and they were all mesmerized with the lights around the Barber House.
"My 5-year-old kept saying he really liked all the twinkling lights," Hutchinson said.
Children's garden event attracts large crowd
By Nancy Hastings


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Chocolaterie Bernard Callebaut Regina wins the prestigious Paragon award in the category of customer service and satisfaction.
We are proud to announce that our Regina dealer store, Chocolates by Bernard Callebaut, was recently named winner by the Regina and District Chamber of Commerce in the Paragon Business Excellence Awards in the category of Customer Service for 2012! This award recognizes a business or organization that consistently demonstrates a high level of commitment to customer service and satisfaction over a prolonged period of time.
Congratulations for our partners, David and Jane Loblaw, and their staff for their their dedication to maintaining and exceeding the high standards associated with the Chocolaterie Bernard Callebaut brand and product. We wish them all the best for continued success!


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Stop Cracking Knuckles and Joints
It feels like fun at first. There's something satisfying about pulling that finger or thumb out… out… out… until Crack! There goes the joint. It can hurt a bit. Or a lot. But who cares? What a great noise! Do it again, louder! It all seems pretty harmless, but once you're hooked on knuckle cracking, it can be surprisingly hard to stop.
Can cracking your knuckles do you any harm?
Why would you want to stop cracking your knuckles, anyway? It doesn't hurt anyone (unlike some other habits). It doesn't leave any mess. It doesn't damage your health… or does it? If you only cracked your knuckles once in a while, you wouldn't suffer any particular ill effects. But if you keep it up for years, you risk damaging joints, tendons and ligaments in your hand. So your hands could be glad when you stop.
Other good reasons to lay off the knuckle cracking
But there are other reasons why you might like to stop cracking your knuckles. Firstly, it's a pain to be the prisoner of any compulsive habit. Sure, if you really want to crack those joints, go ahead. But don't be forced into it because you can't stop yourself. Secondly, mannerisms like knuckle cracking can be seriously irritating and off-putting to others. And they can make you appear nervous and lacking in confidence.
So it can be good for your health, your personal autonomy, your self-esteem and your social standing to put the habit of cracking your knuckles behind you.
Tacking unconscious patterns using the tools of the unconscious
But where do you start? Compulsive habits, by definition, tend to resist our best efforts to use will-power to break them. They are tough unconscious patterns!
Fortunately, when it comes to dealing with the unconscious, you have access to the ultimate tool - hypnosis. In hypnosis, your brain enters the same 'brain state' that it uses to create automatic behaviors. And this is just what you want in this instance - to create a new automatic behavior which automatically gets you doing something other than cracking your knuckles.
Hypnosis can help you stop cracking your knuckles very easily
Stop cracking your knuckles is an audio hypnosis session designed to help you help you escape the compulsion to crack your joints. As you listen to Stop Cracking Your Knuckles, you will be transported into a state of deliciously deep relaxation, where you can make changes effortlessly and almost without noticing.
The powerful hypnotic suggestions in Stop Cracking Your Knuckles, based on the latest understanding of the psychological basis of pattern formation and modification, will give you all the tools you need to make significant changes in your habits. For yourself.
Download Stop Cracking Your Knuckles today and give your hands a rest
Stop Cracking Your Knuckles has been purchased by 92 customers.
Why you can relax about buying from Hypnosis Downloads...
Stop Cracking Your Knuckles
Narrator: Mark Tyrrell
Length: 24:13
Download Size: 11.09 MB
Buy these together Stop Cracking Your KnucklesRelieve_Stress.mp3 and save $6.95
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With more than 300,000 customers and 30,000 fans of our Facebook page, we are proud to serve people from countries as far afield as New Zealand, India, South Africa, as well as Europe, the US and Canada. (And our shipping is free worldwide, did you know?)


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Dramatic Shift for Kids With Asthma
For kids with asthma, more doctors are prescribing the once unthinkable: exercise. WSJ "In the Lab" columnist Shirley Wang unpacks the latest research on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
... I ... that ... is to much Peckham Wendy downs for the ... ads and more doctors are prescribing the once unthinkable that is exercise can explain the dramatic shift in treatment ... has lost regionals in the lab calmness surely long surely ... the guy was for Kids with asthma and ... so long said salinity Jin class ... limit exercise what's changing about that ... you're right there is this belief before or that ... because ... kids to get past attacks on the exercise them and they shouldn't do it ... um but now the set up a lot of work both in humans and also in animals ... this suggests that not only is a good thing to exercise that actually might even help the kids asthma symptoms and kids have to be taking the BBB very cautious about their condition before doctors will recommend exercise money just quickly I know and help us out with this ... exercise ... what can exercise trigger asthma attacks in in the first place what's happening in the body ... Exxon's enthusiasm and basically ... and when you exercise you start to get them to try to see longs customer centric years this ... whole cafe of events that happened sink to clean out the attack ... including inflammatory molecules be released an yearlong muscles tightening in constricting which together makes you feel like you can't breathe you can get enough air and ... the fine apparently I listen to this and I am thinking about encouraging my child ... to two and a few more exercises I've been to some really scary episodes with my kids having the bus to the hospital and then a middle of ... exercise I'm going to be a little bit skittish and the person in the no wonder is ... deal for them to be able exercise they just cannot take more drugs or is it may be just about the tightening of the medication ... we'll that's a good question ... I think the overarching issue is that if your kids are having frequent ... at after tax and exercising ... that means that they are asthma is not under the control ... so doctors are saying now that they're cutting its attack that means you need to go in ... and get better treatment in that Mimi more medications in some cases for kids but very severe episodes ... they may need to take a puff than healer ... up before they actually ... go to gym class terrorists or to run around ... on the doctor say they really as mentioned me preventing me from doing anything you want to do including ... exercise and health benefits of exercise ... are so critically important ... that its import to get those kids took place for they can and ... hopefully physically ... be able to breathe and do all things in India when they're running around and and actually ... an interest in the car trade and in all the good things exercise does for the body absolutely insists line and be with their friends and that's a big compound that they are actually won more the Pursell Journal section tomorrow thanks be with us ...


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Mayor's Office
Lincoln Parks and Recreation officials today announced that the Billy Wolff Trail from 27th Street and Capitol Parkway to Randolph Street will close Tuesday, June 7 and remain closed through Sunday, June 12.
City Parks and Recreation and the Lower Platte South Natural Resources District are in the process of relocating the trail to the east side of Antelope Creek, allowing it to connect with the Antelope Valley Trail near "J" Street. The trail will be closed while the contractor constructs an abutment for a new bridge that will cross Antelope Creek east of Randolph.
During the trail closure, trail users are urged to use the sidewalk on the west side of Capitol Parkway. For more information on the City trail system, visit lincoln.ne.gov (keyword: trails).


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Michal "Rosey" Rozsival
What's your hockey nickname and how'd you get it?
"People just call me 'Rosey.' It just comes from my last name, obviously. It's probably the only nickname that I've had in my career. I guess it's the easiest thing to call me. I've always been 'Rosey,' even in [the Czech Republic]. When I first got to Pittsburgh [in the NHL] I'd say, 'My name is Michal Rozsival,' but my nickname is 'Rosey,' so if you feel like calling me 'Rosey,' that's fine too."
Does it take you awhile to learn everybody's "hockey name" when you get to a new team?
"Yeah, it takes a couple of weeks, but it's not too hard."
What's your favorite hockey nickname on the Blackhawks?
"I think 'Seabsie' [Brent Seabrook] has a good name. They call him 'Biscuit.' To tell you the truth, I don't know why. I've just heard them call him 'Biscuit,' but I haven't heard the story yet. I've got to find that out. That's one of the better ones here."


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Wide Horizon Media needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 196 designs submitted by 53 freelance designers.
Wide Horizon Media
A brand new multimedia company is looking for a logo.
Wide Horizon Media has experience in writing, photography, and videography. We offer a breadth of skills and the website design (currently in construction) will convey experience and expertise.
The target audience includes both conservative and artsy professionals so looking for something modern and sleek, something that is not too busy and will appeal to both crowds. One client may be a government agency while another may be a hollywood producer.
The company name is Wide Horizon Media and this should be captured in the logo. No acronyms please. You can emphasize the first letter of each word but it's not necessary - having the full name is necessary. It's nice if Media is made a little smaller than Wide Horizon.
For colors, I prefer warm, natural tones or bright and fresh, not bold, pastel, nor loud.
The company name and logo will be trademarked and copyrighted. So please no clip art or stock images. Will need various file types for different printing uses. The logo will be used on the website, business cards, and stationary.
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


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The Solution
The Course
Through six units, I'll have opportunity to learn about critical photographic topics, such as background and lighting, editing, use of props and styling, as well as camera technology and food photography industry standards. With required discussions, blog posts, projects and quizzes, my efforts and understanding will be evaluated against a stringent scale of expectations. At the end of the course, I'll have a portfolio to showcase my new skills through consistent, quality photographs. It is my fervent hope to have a few stunning shots within the collection, as well!
Although my adventures in Food Photography have only begun, thus far I'm quite pleased with the experience. My first online course, I'm finding Pearsons Open Class site easy to follow and navigate, with course information well organized and student discussion participation simple. Further, after a cursory exploration of Pixlr.com, I can't wait to begin editing my photographs in this new (to me) online editor. Well beyond the scope of the simple editors I've been using, I am looking forward to learning how to edit the finer points of photos, using level adjustments, filters and more.
Are you shutter bug?
What types of subjects do you love to capture on film?
Which photographers inspire you?
Are you happy with your photo taking skills or do you need more education?
Tell me in a comment below!
I was giving an opportunity to participate in this free photography course through my association with Social Fabric, a community of Collective Bias. The opinions above are both honest and of my own experience. Some images and information sourced from course and various sites related to Social Fabric. Although my enthusiasm for this course is sincere, posts and badges related to SoFabU on my site are placed as part of the requirements of participating in the course. #CBias #SocialFabric


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Flat Weave Large Moroccan Design Rug Black
or 4 payments of $59.75 interest-free and fortnightly with Info
Available on orders up to $1250
Available on orders up to $1400
Product estimated to leave Partners warehouse in 5 Business Days, unless otherwise advised by Interiors Online.
FREE SHIPPING on this item!
- Rug is hand-knotted in India
- Flat weave 100% wool construction
- Dense 7mm pile
- Double sided
- Easy to vacuum and spot clean - do not dry clean
- Recommend an anti-slip pad such as Supa Rug Grip to prevent slippage between the rug and the surface underneath
- Contemporary Style
- Various sizes


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Breadcrumb navigation:
Annual Giving
Support what matters most at BC: our students
Annual gifts to Boston College make up some of the most reliable funding for financial aid, academics, athletics, and the life-changing student-experience that helps connect all Eagles to each other and the world.
Gifts to the Boston College Fund are made without any restrictions or designations. This kind of unrestricted giving offers the University the most flexibility and makes it possible to seize unexpected opportunities and tackle unforeseen challenges.
70 percent of all BC students receive some form of financial aid. Donors who designate their gifts to the University's financial aid program provide essential funding for life-changing scholarships.
One out of every 12 BC students is a student-athlete, and all of BC benefits from the spirit and camaraderie our teams bring to the Heights and our extended community.
The nine schools that make up Boston College are at the center of the BC student-experience and make a lasting impression on the meaningful work of BC Alumni.


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Message Board
Sherry Lewis Message Board
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Lewis has written!
Author Lewis's Book Reviews
An Echo In Time
Jove, Sep 2001, 5.99, 293 pp. ISBN: 0515131563 In 1889 Black Mesa, Colorado, Sam Evans knows it is time to leave the ranch to his brother and move on because the woman he loves married someone else. Though it hurts, he knows that Kurt and Olivia belong together even if the former swears he comes from another century. Still, before fleeing the area, Sam feels obligated to help Kurt in this showdown with the Durant crowd. However, some...
Only Time Will Tell
Sherry Lewis specializes in time-travel novels. This one is very good. Her heroine, Courtney Moss, lived a miserable childhood. Her mother went through a long chain of live-in boyfriends. Her grandmother resented every time Courtney's mother took Courtney to grandma's to keep Courtney out of the way. In spite of her wounds, Courtney succeeds in life, but bears hard feelings for her mother and grandmother. When her grandmother dies, Courtney returns...


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Comedian Paul Scheer (Human Giant, The League) is such big fan of the "chemistry teacher turns meth chef" drama Breaking Bad that he's immortalized the show as a bunch of nonsensical GIF files.
He'll be updating his psychedelic art project Breaking GIFs periodically as the final season approaches. Until then, here's Gus Fring with an army of hot dogs marching out of his pants and Jesse and Walt arguing, always arguing.


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Difference between revisions of "Hakka phrasebook"
Revision as of 17:57, 19 September 2012
Hakka (客家话; Kèjiāhuà in Mandarin) is one of the main seven or so Chinese languages. It is spoken across several provinces in Southeast China including Taiwan and Hainan and Hong Kong. In this article, the Hong Kong dialect of the Hakka language will be used.
Brief Overview
The Hakka (客家 Kèjiā, IPA: [hak₃ ka₃₃] ) people are said to have migrated south from Northern China over the centuries to settle in southern Jiangsu and Hunan, western Fujian, eastern Guangdong, and various other areas, due to wars, famine, natural disasters, and political persecution. Hakka comes from the words '客' "guest" and '家' "families" which derives from an official term during the Qing Dynasty for the program of resettlement of the coastal areas of Guangdong after evacuation orders imposed during the reign of Emperor Kangxi. These settlers whose language seemed different to the original inhabitants were given this appellation to show they were not indigenous to the areas they became settled in. Most indigenous inhabitants occupied the more fertile basins, whilst the incoming Hakka became settled in the more inaccessible valleys and mountainous or hilly terrain. The Hakka language (客家话; Kèjiāhuà) is shares a common vocabulary with Southern languages such as Min and Yue, and there are regular sound correspondences to the historical sound system of Middle Chinese.
Pronunciation guide
The most accessible Hakka speakers are found in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Most of them will be dual language speakers, in Hong Kong, they are able to understand and speak Cantonese, whilst on the mainland of China and on Taiwan, they will also speak Mandarin. There is no standard form of Hakka and regional variations in local dialects can be surmounted by understanding the gist of the spoken sentence and knowing some sound correspondences that the user will encounter.
There are some sounds in Hakka which do not occur in English. The following pronunciation guide aims to rhyme English words with the sounds found in the Hakka syllable. Please note they are approximations, you may require a Hakka speaker to guide your pronunciation.
The vowels can be long or short. Long vowels occur in open syllables, where there are no endings. Short vowels occur in syllables which end in nasals (-m, -n or -ng) or stops (-p, -t or -k).
In some dialects there is a vowel which we represent as ii, which does not occur in standard English. It is a retroflex i, the closest sound is almost like ir in "shir" when saying English 'sure'. In the Hong Kong dialect, these sounds become -i or -u.
Initial or Consonant
The tone changes known as sandhi does occur, but the change in the pitch is not as great as found in other Chinese languages.
Some Sound Correspondences between dialect of the Hakka Language
Apart from tonal differences, there are small variations in pronunciations from place to place. The following details some of the more commonly found differences, which may be helpful to the user when hearing other speakers from different areas.
h is sometimes pronounced as s, especially when there is a vowel -i- in the syllable. E.g. 兄 hiung1 may be pronounced siung1.
au is sometimes pronounced as o. E.g. 好 hau3 / ho3
ai is sometimes pronounced as e E.g. 雞 gai1 / ge1
Some Hakka dialects has the -u- medial, so you may hear words like 光 gong1 pronounced as guong1 (gwong1).
Phrase list
Clock time
The twelve divisions of the hour by five minute increments makes it fairly convenient to tell the time.
Combine the two and you can express time as hour and minute combinations
When you want to express a time between the five minute divisions, you can do so by nearly or just after in the following manner.
Writing time and date
Bus and train
Learning more


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New Holiday Update for Balloon Touch!
- Two new Balloon Designs
- One new Background
- The countdown for Endless and Hard mode has been increased to 10 seconds, up from 5 seconds.
- The amount of Balloons needed to increase the speed has been increased to 15 pops, up from 10 pops.
So what's next for Sam and Dan?
We are both working on a new game, which we think its going to be great. Can't say much about it yet but it will include ninjas, and multi-touch controls, stay tuned for more info.
Also I'm working on a side project on my own. The project is basically a Pokemon Tower Defense game, I'm a huge pokemon fan so I hope that you guys will enjoy it when its done.
I would like to thank all the supporters who have bought and played the game. If you haven't bought the game and feel like you want to support our future growth you can support us by buying the .99 center version of Balloon Touch. Also I would love to hear from you guys, so leave a comment. Thanks again and Happy Holidays!


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It's May 1st. Really. I promise. I'm telling you the truth. Can you believe it? What happened to April? We're one-fifth of the way through twenty-twelve already. What sort of insanity is that?
There's a lot of information and goodies to share with you today! I'm excited about everything. SO much is going to be happening! The Gingerbread Ladies outdid themselves, I'm telling you!
The first bit of news? Do you know what next weekend? It's NSD!! National Scrapbooking Day is something we digital scrapbookers look forward to for so long. Or is that just me? Well, Gingerscraps has some amazing things planned for it!
The designers are hosting everything, and they're pulling out all the stops!
70% off sale on Thursday and 50% Friday through Sunday. Some restrictions apply.
Every other hour, a speed scrap or chat will be going on. That means everyone will have a chance to join in on something!
Persnickety Prints has the best printing services around, and they're getting into the swing of things for NSD, too, with amazing sales. I don't know about you, but I think I'll take advantage of this deal!!
The bake sale is going on now! Go! You have until the 5th of May to take advantage of some amazing $1 deals!! You never know what you'll find on sale.
Also, just a quick note: the Bake Sale and May Buffet items are not going to be included in the 70% and 50% off sales for NSD.
Time for a new buffet. April Showers bring May Flowers, usually, but instead, at Gingerscraps, May isn't about the flowers. No, we're all about the babies. This buffet is perfect for all those baby-related layouts. There are also items related to adoption, so it's perfect for all of those layouts, as well. May is also synonymous with Mother's Day. Flowers, cards, and love. These kit pieces speak of all of that. Even the pet mommas need some extra loving this time of year. Why not share that with someone you love?
The Gingerscraps designers really out-did themselves this month with some great mini kits, and they all coordinate so perfectly. There's something perfect there for everyone!
The Gingerscraps CT had a blast playing with the kits. The layouts are just spectacular.
Remember, when you spend $10 at the store, you get an amazing grab bag. May's was created by the talented Pretty in Green.
Some big news concerning our April Guest, Find Your Bliss Designs. She's staying! It's been wonderful seeing her designs in the store, and I'm happy that she has decided to make Gingerscraps a more permanent home!
Now, it's time to introduce May's Guest Designer. You might have seen some of her collab designs in the store with other designers. We're so excited to announce that our guest designer is
We asked Jen for a little bio, and this is what she told us:
Hi all! My name is Jen. I live in Belfast in the UK. I've been married for almost 6 years and we have two beautiful children – Luke and Charlotte. When not digi designing, I work as a web marketer and graphic designer for two local companies. Oh – and of course, playing with my kids! I stumbled into digi scrapping 2 years ago when I was on maternity leave and designing blogs for friends. I started on my first creative team shortly after and designing soon after that! I absolutely love it! I'm inspired by everything from interior decorating magazines to song lyrics, a photo of my kids to suggestions from my fans and creative team. If you ever have a suggestion for a kit or template idea, just let me know!
I can't wait to get to know her better! And to see her designs, of course!
Here are a few that are in her store right now:
Collection: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Spring-Blooms-Collection.html
Kit: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Spring-Blooms.html
Embossed Papers: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Spring-Blooms-Embossed-Solids.html
Paper Add-on: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Spring-Blooms-Add-on-Papers.html
Alpha: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Spring-Blooms-Add-on-Alphas.html
Collection: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Divalicious-Collection.html
Kit: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Divalicious.html
Alpha: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Divalicious-Alpha-Add-On.html
Add-on: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Divalicious-Overlays.html
Styles: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Divalicious-Styles-CU-okay.html
Collection: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Celebrate-Collection.html
Alpha: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Celebrate-Alpha-Add-On.html
Boy: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Celebrate-Boy.html
Girl: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Celebrate-Girl.html
Cardstock: https://store.gingerscraps.net/Celebrate-Cardstock.html
Well, I guess that's it. Oh, I'm just kidding, there's some more. The Daily Download! April's was created by Sugar Kissed Designs, and it's now available in the store!
May's Daily Download was created by Blue Heart Scraps. It's just adorable, and perfect for the upcoming summer. Day 01 is available for download now on the blog! Remember to pick up each piece every day!
I told you there was quite a bit, but I think the read was worth it. Thanks for reading and helping to make Gingerscraps what it is.