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Minnesota deer hunters urged to buy licenses early
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Minnesota deer hunters are urged to buy their licenses early to avoid long lines and potentially overloading the system.
The Department of Natural Resources says Minnesota has nearly 500,000 deer hunters, and the firearms season begins Saturday, Nov. 3.
Deer licenses can be purchased for $27 from agents across Minnesota. Hunters who buy by phone and Internet pay additional fees, and receive their deer licenses and tags by mail, which can take three to five business days.
The DNR also reminds hunters selected by lottery for the early wolf season they must buy their licenses by Wednesday, or they'll be made available to other hunters. As of Friday, the DNR had sold about 2,000 of the 3,600 wolf licenses available for the early season, which also opens Nov. 3.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.


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With north winds kicking up, low temperatures in the 50s with be slow to climb through the morning Thursday in South Florida.
Afternoon highs will run about ten degrees below average, reaching only into the lower 70s mid-day under sunny skies.
Clear skies will hang around tonight but temps won't be quite as cool, dropping into the lower 50s inland and into the upper 50s along the coast.
Progressively warmer and breezier conditions return as we polish off the work week and head into the weekend. Expect highs of 76 on Friday, 79 on Saturday and 81 on Sunday.
With the return of northeast winds this weekend, the rip current danger will be elevated.

subset: commoncrawl


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Posted by Olivia on Friday, September 9th, 2011
Making YOUR Perfect Vinaigrette
We get asked on a daily basis: how do I make the perfect vinaigrette? The benefit to making your own vinaigrette instead of buying one prepared is that you can make it your way and change it up depending on your taste, mood, or specific cuisine. Making the perfect vinaigrette for any and every occasion starts with a simple ratio of olive oil to balsamic, and you build up from that base.
The Vinaigrette
Let's begin by looking at what a vinaigrette is. At the most basic level, it's an emulsion—or a mixture—of oil, vinegar, and any various added flavors and ingredients. Most cooks use a ratio of 3 parts olive oil to 1 part vinegar; this will yield a mild flavor. If you like more "bite" to it, use a ratio of 3 parts olive oil to 2 parts vinegar; this will yield a sharper, tarter flavor.
The Combination
How do you know which olive oils and balsamic vinegars to use together? It's all to taste, so use your own palate to tell you which combinations you prefer. Popular combinations at The Olive Press include: White Balsamic Vinegar and Limonato Olive Oil; Sherry Balsamic Vinegar and Arbequina Olive Oil; or Peach Balsamic Vinegar with our Ascolano Olive Oil. Visit the pages of specific olive oil varietals on our site to see which balsamics they pair best with.
The Emulsifiers
Olive oil and balsamic vinegar are only the beginnings of a masterful vinaigrette. What happens when oil and vinegar mix? They separate almost immediately. If you are whisking your vinaigrette immediately before serving the salad, this won't pose a problem. But to get your vinaigrette to become more emulsified, or blended, you'll want to add an emulsifier to the mix to hold things together. Mustard, dry or wet, is the easiest and safest to use, and it adds a lovely brightness to the vinaigrette's flavor. A pinch of dried mustard or a teaspoon or two of wet mustard is usually a good start for a single batch of vinaigrette. Otherwise, an egg yolk may be used (think of traditional mayonnaise, which uses raw eggs)—but be aware of the safety precautions regarding consuming raw eggs.
The Other Flavors
Oil, vinegar, emulsifier—your perfect vinaigrette is almost complete. Now comes the really fun part, where you get to experiment with everything in the kitchen sink to make your dressing your own. Here's a list of ingredients we love to add to homemade vinaigrettes:
· Chopped garlic
· Minced shallots
· Minced fresh herbs
· Dried herbs and spices
· A few drops of high-flavor fruit balsamic vinegar (try Fig or Strawberry)
· A few drops of fresh citrus juice (lemon or lime are great) or alcohol (try sherry, rum, or infused vodka)
· Just a smidge of sweetener, such as honey, maple syrup, or agave
· And, of course, ample sea salt and freshly black pepper
The Blending
Now that you know what's going into your vinaigrette, you'll need to know how to blend it. In order to get the mixture to emulsify properly, there's an order to the process. In a small mixing bowl (preferably not plastic), combine your chosen vinegar, "other flavors," and emulsifier; whisk well. In a small drizzle, slowly stream in the olive oil to your mixture; whisking constantly. The point here is to slowly emulsify the oil directly as it hits the vinegar—a process which can take a few minutes to get just right, but when it's done properly, will get your vinaigrette smooth and well blended. Once whisked, it's time to test your vinaigrette. Take a lettuce leaf or other chopped vegetable that's going into your salad, and dip it into your vinaigrette, shaking off the excess liquid. Now taste. The flavor of the vinaigrette should pop a bit and be well seasoned (i.e. salted); otherwise, adjust flavors and redip. When the flavor of the vinaigrette balances with the flavor of the vegetable you're dipping, you're all done.
To get ideas for vinaigrette and salad dressing recipes, check out the Recipe section of our site.Print This Recipe


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SAN DIEGO -- The American Council on Exercise (ACE) recently announced new executive officers plus the addition of two general members to its board of directors.
Wojtek Chodzko-Zajko was named chairman of the board. He is the head of the department of kinesiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Janet Lee was named vice chair and has been Shape magazine's deputy editor since 2005.
Lorna Friedman was appointed ACE board's secretary. She is a senior medical executive at CIGNA International. Herb Flentye was named the board's new treasurer. He serves as president and CEO at SPRI, a subsidiary of Gaiam.
Newly appointed board members are Kimberly Wells and Scott Murdoch. Wells is a senior international economist/space policy analyst for the Office of Aerospace and Automotive Industries within the U.S. Department of Commerce. Murdoch is co-founder and chief nutrition officer of NutriStyle Inc., a Web-based nutrition and fitness program.
"We feel privileged to continually glean insights and benefit from the collective expertise of distinguished leaders in the health and fitness industry that serve on our board of directors," says Scott Goudeseune, ACE's president and CEO. "These individuals share our dedication to the country's health and well-being and commitment to enriching quality of life through safe and effective exercise."
The board changes are based on rotation schedules and term limits as determined by ACE's bylaws, the organization noted.


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There seems to be a lot of debate behind the cell phone usage ban on airplanes. A lot of cell phones now have airplane modes so we can enjoy out electronic devices in peace while aboard commercial aircraft. We keep hearing how cell phone communication could interfere with the aircraft instruments and devices. The ban was put into place in 1991 and was almost lifted in 2007, but was upheld by the FCC. I am curious what devices technically do they interfere with? What exact instruments do cell phones radio frequencies potentially interfere with? What on an aircraft uses similar radio frequencies? Or is it all just a general concern since there is a lot of electronic communication that needs to take place for an aircraft to operate safely?
EDIT: This could apply to smart phones, laptop data cards, and other devices (Kindle, etc.) that connects to the cell networks while on aircraft.


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The makers of Monday Night Combat were taking suggestions for official wallpapers; unsurprisingly, Pitgirl - the game's booty-shaking NPC - figured prominently. They're still taking requests and have turned it into a contest.
You don't have to create the wallpaper or even draw anything. Just give Uber Entertainment an awesome concept. For example, Support riding a buckin' Bouncer. Five winners get a signed print of their wallpaper idea and a free copy of the game. Uber is running this contest - we aren't - so see the link for more details. Repeat, posting ideas in the comments is fine, but we're not the ones judging or awarding this stuff.
MNC Wallpaper Contest! [Uber Entertainment Forums]


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Main Page
From Students
Revision as of 17:50, 25 February 2008 by John Chrastka (Talk | contribs)
This wiki gives students in ALA-accredited MLIS Programs, NCATE Programs (SLMS], LTA Programs a place to find information and a place to add information about career development, networking within the association, information about the American Library Association (ALA) and what it's like to be new in libraries.
If you have information on tools and resources feel free to add them to this wiki.
Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.


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Person of Interest Review: Date NightSean McKenna at .
Hopefully, your head is not all tied up in knots after the amount of twists and turns in this week's Person of Interest.
One of my biggest compliments of this show (and there are many) is the drama's ability to actively combine the case of the week with the larger seasonal story in a way that feels natural. It works in allowing casual or first-time viewers to get a sense of what the show is all about, while the long-time watchers see the characters grow and the multiple story arcs progress bit by bit.
And there's always something for everyone, whether it's trying to solve the mystery along with Reese and Finch; great humorous moments; bullets-blazing action scenes; a touch of potential romance; or individuals with dimensionality and personality.
"Bury the Lede" did a good job on touching pretty much all those bases, and although it wasn't my favorite, the negatives of the hour seemed more minor compared to how the show performed overall.
Reese and Finch spent most of their time tracking the pretty and determined journalist Maxine, but the real focus was all about the mysterious boss of HR.
So, while the story bounced from politician scandals to mob boss' sons to anonymous callers, the identity of the boss could have been pretty much anybody. And it turns out Fusco, who used to be on the corrupt cop pay roll, didn't have a clue.
Of course, bringing back the dirty officer Simmons seemed only natural, but I found it very odd and interesting that rather than have Reese take him out, Fusco went along with his plans. Is that something that could cost Fusco down the road?
Who knows, but Fusco has been playing on the good side for a while and it really seemed as if he was just trying to clean the slate for good. Except, like Simmons said, once you're in, you're in.
Clearly the same case is for Maxine, whose passion for publishing the juicy news stories got her in hot water. And maybe I missed something, but how did she manage to get her article published in the first place?
I know she said she had sources, but none of them really confirmed that the mob boss' son was the actual HR boss. It just seemed like for a professional to jump to conclusions because it sounded good rather than rely on cold hard facts was a stretch for me.
I am glad the reveal of the HR boss didn't turn out to be just the politician, but was the moment dramatic enough for everyone? I appreciate that Finch saw beyond the simplicity and that we did actually see who it was, but I wasn't left in utter shock.
Hopefully, we'll get to see more of the HR boss and learn if he can be as much of a formidable foe as the ones that have already appeared on the series.
But some of the best moments of the night weren't about the corruption or the enigmatic players in the political game. Instead, the comedy really helped sell the hour.
Finch was on fire with an endearing awkwardness, from getting Bear the squeaky toy... nagging Reese for not reading up on his internet dating profile... and even the shock and awe of seeing the massive collection of guns in Reese's closet.
Even the moment when he told Reese that he'd been texting Maxine and Reese asked what he just said was hilarious.
The dinner date was full of its own laughs that really got me perked back up during the episode, and it couldn't have gone more differently than Reese probably thought.
I loved that Reese tried to play it cool and Finch kept telling him he was doing it all wrong. And it was fantastic that Maxine talked about superheroes and Reese finally decided it was a good idea to put on the glasses Finch got him.
Anyone think of Clark Kent with a Batman voice?
Of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Paige Turco's return as the sexy and smart Zoe Morgan. She had a small amount of screen time but she nailed that fun flirty attitude when she's with Reese. Those two together are perfect.
It's not often that the smaller moments shine more for me than the bigger story, but I just had more fun with the likes of Reese trying out dating or Finch on doggy duty. But that's the great thing about Person of Interest: it stays fresh, it tries out new things and it still finds a variety of ways to make the hour enjoyable.
What did you think of the episode? How would you fare on a date with Reese? Did you guess who the HR boss would be?
Sean McKenna was a TV Fanatic Staff Writer. He retired in May of 2017. Follow him on Twitter.


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Liberty News
Liberty professor Daniel Henderson gives message on prayer
Prayer is about more than asking what God can do for us.
"It's all about seeking His face and not just His hand," said Daniel Henderson, Assistant Professor of Renewal and Church Leadership at LU, in a convocation message in the Vines Center Friday morning.
Henderson, also Pastor of Renewal at Thomas Road Baptist Church, has penned six books dealing with prayer and other spiritual topics. He teaches in the areas of prayer, Christian living and church leadership. He is also the founder/president of the non-profit Strategic Renewal ministry that benefits pastors foremost in the area of prayer.
On Friday, Henderson equated the idea of seeking God's face with being in God's presence and knowing Him better. That's the secret to a transformed life, he said – and one of the ways to seek God's presence is through prayer.
For LU students who are moved to experience the power of prayer, an All Night of Prayer is being held at 10 p.m. Friday outside Pate Chapel. The event will kick off Spiritual Emphasis Week beginning Sept. 1.
Click here for more on Spiritual Life programs at Liberty University.


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Posted by Editoress on 06/8/12
Cycling Canada Cyclisme is proud to announce the line-up that will represent Canada at the 2012 Tour de Beauce. Canada will be stacked with star-power, with two riders from the professional World Tour.
The team will be directed by Steve Rover, the 1996 Canadian Road Champion and an organizer of the 2012 Cold-FX Canadian Road Championships, which will be held the following week in Lac Mégantic.
The team includes Svein Tuft, the seven-time Canadian TT Champion and former Beauce winner, fresh off the Giro d'Italia with World Tour team Orica-GreenEDGE, where he finished in the Top 10 of the final stage Time Trial.
"Beauce has always been a special race for us Canadian riders. It's a race that has helped all of us progress to the next level and given us a chance to race at a very high calibre on difficult courses on our home soil. So it seems like a good tradition to be able to come back and race here with the national team where I had my first opportunity to experience Beauce, in 2001. It was definitely an eye opener for me then and I look forward to racing in this year's edition," said Tuft.
At the 2011 IMMUNITY-FX Canadian Road Championships in Ontario, Tuft triumphed in both elite races, winning the titles in both the road race and time trial, competing with Team SpiderTech powered by C10. At Beauce last season, Tuft won the individual time trial as well as stage 6 to finish in third place on the General Classification.
Tuft will be joined by long-time friend and current teammate Christian Meier, who was also recently racing the Giro d'Italia. Since turning professional in 2008 with World Tour Team Garmin-Slipstream, Meier spent three seasons on the World Tour. Last year at the 2011 Immunity-FX Canadian Road Championships in Burlington, Ontario, Meier was second in the individual time trial, behind Tuft.
Tuft and Meier will be joined on the Canadian team by Stuart Wight (CR4C Roanne), Nic Hamilton (Jelly Belly Cycling), Michael Woods (Stevens Racing p/b The Cyclery) and Casey Roth (Ride with Rendall Cycling Team).
It should be noted that David Veilleux (Team Europcar) and Dominique Rollin (FDJ-Big Mat) were originally going to join Tuft and Meier, however, their trade teams have since scheduled them to race Route de Sud.
The Tour de Beauce starts Tuesday, June 12th, and runs through Sunday, June 17th. (Note: Canadian Cyclist will be there to provide daily coverage, as always)
CCC press release
|Return to Canadian Cyclist homepage | Back to Top


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Watkins Glen victory for The King and the Aussie...but 2013 for both is still up in the air
By Mike Mulhern
RICHMOND, Va.
It's the Last Chance 400 for Carl Edwards, Marcos Ambrose, Jeff Gordon, Kyle Busch, Kasey Kahne, Ryan Newman, Paul Menard and Joey Logano.
Those last two wild card spots in the championship playoffs are up for grabs in Saturday night's Richmond 400. And odds favor Kasey Kahne and either Kyle Busch or Jeff Gordon making the cut, though the others still have a very outside shot.
A title battle without Carl Edwards?
Well, that's what it's looking like.
Edwards, who had the best season of all drivers on the stock car tour in 2011, has been dogged by slow cars and bad luck this season. That blown engine at Atlanta was probably the coup de grace.
Still, Edwards -- one of this sport's best pitchmen -- has a slim shot at recovering.
For Ambrose there is much more on the line here, and in the next few weeks, than just the championship playoffs, because the situation at Richard Petty Motorsports is up in the air.
Ambrose says he does not have a deal for 2013. "Yeah, it worries me a little bit.
"I've got unfinished business here in NASCAR. I want to be in NASCAR, and I'm working with RPM. Hopefully we can be with them for a long time to come... but there is no guarantee.
"Obviously RPM has been through a lot this year, as they have the last few seasons. And I'm here to help them get to where they want to go. Hopefully it works out for me."
Petty himself is apparently a minority owner in the two-car team, with business partners Doug Bergeron and Andy Murstein. And if Ford, as it looks like, cuts its sponsorship of the Petty team, then Bergeron and Murstein would probably have to come up with more investment money to keep the teams on track.
"They're telling me they're good for two cars, so I believe them," Ambrose says.
"They'd love me to drive... but it's just a matter of making it all work. We're going to get serious here, and see how it all stacks up.
"We've all got good intentions to keep it all together..."
Petty, Bergeron and Murstein have to figure out finances and Detroit backing "before they can lock in their drivers," Ambrose says. "I'm looking forward to having that discussion with them, and hopefully we can all agree to move forward very quickly.
"I've come a long way as a driver. I feel much more complete a driver than I did this time last year,
"I want to be in NASCAR. I feel I'm right on the edge of breaking through to being a consistent front-runner, and I would love to give myself another shot."
When the playoffs kick off next week in Chicago, NASCAR officials have thrown a wild card of their own into the game: with a rules change seen as an attempt to take away that handling advantage the Rick Hendrick teams have used so successfully since early May.
Hendrick teams have been using a trick, but legal, rear-end device that makes the car turn better in the corners.
Rivals asked NASCAR about the legality of the device, and NASCAR assured them it was okay. So rivals began working on their own versions, with varying degrees of success.
Now NASCAR has decided to outlaw it.
What that means for the 10 playoff races is uncertain.
That's next week. This week Edwards and playoff hopefuls have a different agenda.
"I've got to hope for Kyle and Jeff to have bad nights, and we've got to win the race," Edwards says.
"But the only thing I can control is going out to win the race. So I'm going to try to win the race.
"There is so much that's going to happen out here that it's going to be hard to keep track of all the scenarios as the night progresses.
"If Tony Stewart (locked into the playoffs with three wins as a potential wild card, but also 10th in the standings, which could shake up the wild card plays) were to have a bad night, it changes a lot.
"If Jeff and Kyle have bad nights, it puts a lot more pressure on us.
"I've seen a lot of crazy things happen in this sport. That's why I'm doing my best to not think about 'What if.'
"I'm trying to just focus on what I can do to win this race."
If Edwards does make the chase, then he should have a good shot at the title, since teammates Greg Biffle and Matt Kenseth have had two of the strongest cars on the tour all season.
However, Edwards concedes he hasn't been winning much lately.
"If we don't win the race, we have no shot," Edwards says.
"I'm haven't won a race in 70 races (March 2011) or something like that, I don't know how long it's been. But I'm going to sit here and tell you I can win this race and it's going to happen.
"With everything that's going to happen in this race, I think it truly could happen."
The rear-end trick?
Hendrick men insist it's no big deal, that it's something everyone has been doing, to some degree, even teams far back in the pack.
"I was just talking with Phil Parsons, and he says they've been working in that area too," Jimmie Johnson says.
"It's not really a rules change, just a clarification. It won't affect anything we're doing."
Whether or not that's really the case isn't clear, and probably won't be until the Chicago 400 next weekend.
"It's an advantage, but it's a legal advantage," Kyle Busch says. "Nothing illegal."
The possibility of four-time champion Jeff Gordon missing the championship run is surprising. He's run strong most of the season, just with tons of bad luck.
"It makes me feel real good that Jeff Gordon is in as bad a position as I'm in," Edwards says wryly.
"A year ago we were cruising right now -- dominating the points...not a care in the world.
"Fast-forward one year and it's a whole different story.
"I think the true tragedy for us would be to not make the chase and then have all of these things we've been working on come to fruition and go out and win six races and not even be in contention."
Gordon last missed the playoffs back in 2005. Edwards, Tony Stewart and Greg Biffle -- after taking the top-three spots in 2005 -- all failed to make the playoffs in 2006.
"What's going to make this race crazy is if there's a caution like last week," Edwards says.
"If the race gets strung out and it goes green, it will probably be a fairly calm race.
"But if we get a caution with five to go, or six to go, it's going to be insane. There are going to be guys staying out on 100-lap tires and blocking....
"It's going to be crazy.
"It's a little different when you know your whole season is riding on a finish...
"The craziness happens when a guy has a shot and he knows that's his only shot. You saw Jeff Gordon last week: 'Man, I'm getting soft; I should have taken that chance.'
"People will be taking the chance no matter how nice they are as people. It's your job.
"Nobody is going to blame a guy for going for it, being a little aggressive."
© 2010-2011 www.mikemulhern.net All rights reserved.
Web site by www.webdesigncarolinas.com


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A flexible and cost effective dress code has been established at our school to encourage academic success while reducing distractions and competition. Implementing a simple, flexible, cost effective dress code promotes student learning and increased academic instruction time.
Please refer to the Student Handbook for the complete dress code policy.


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Feeling like having a maximally productive Saturday?
While everyone else is binge-watching Netflix next Saturday, you could instead be doing the most meaningful and important work to you, in a maximally supportive and structured environment.
This event is 100% free. In the past, we've charged $140 for this type of training and people have happily paid it, given rave reviews, and come back repeatedly. We're doing this for free to get the methodology out in the world, connect with more great people, and hit some peak productivity in the process.
You can sign up now to get some free training and peak performance on Saturday 16 December from 12PM to 4PM Eastern Time (9AM-1PM Pacific). Click below to sign up, or read more below if you want more details --
Work Cycles: A Reliable Way To Get An Immense Amount Done
This session was REALLY helpful. The accountability practices plus the group work setting was tremendously focusing. Will have to spend some more time thinking about the second and third order elements that contributed to that outcome. This is the first time I've done long- period work tasks in an "accountability group". This setting has been eye-opening and extraordinarily valuable.
— Gregg Jones, Georgetown Professor, CEO of Strategic Applications, retired U.S. Army Special Forces Officer; Washington, DC, USA
I was pleasantly surprised with my performance — at least 3x more productive than normal. I've read about productivity best practice and implemented some of it before but you have to try something like this to really experience the benefits.
— Neil Taylor, Commercial Director at mobedia; London, UK
My productivity was higher and I was more motivated to get stuff done. This program's format is awesome for productivity.
— Mark Bao, Programmer; New York, NY, USA
Work Cycles is a simple concept, but don't be fooled by the simplicity — you show up and we walk you through how to plan and complete difficult work in real-time.
People report anywhere from a 25% to 400% boost in effectiveness from attending these cycles. Yes, on the higher end, people report getting 4x more stuff done than they do working alone.
The Methodology
First thing's first — this isn't a seminar. You don't sit there and listen to a "blah blah blah" — you actually bring your Most Important Work you want to get done. You then do very some brief planning and laying things out with guidance from one of our trainers — Marshall himself will be hosting this one — and then you break your work down in a simple spreadsheet we set up with four starting questions:
"What am I trying to accomplish this Cycle?"
"How will I get started?"
"Are there hazards present?"
"Energy/Morale (High/Medium/Low)"
At the end of each 30-minute Work Cycle, you assess:
"Goal completed?"
"Were there any distractions?"
"Things to improve for next cycle?"
"Energy/Morale (High/Medium/Low)"
Do not be fooled by the simplicity of this methodology.
This is an incredibly reliable way to troubleshoot and complete work in real-time, see what's effective and what isn't, manage your energy and morale when work gets hard, reset and adjust if you run into a roadblock, and otherwise get over any procrastination or anxiety and get work done.
It works really, really, really well.
Live real-time guidance, training, feedback
Every 30 minutes, you take a break from your work, assess how the last cycle went, and plan the next one.
By itself, this methodology works well and is very popular. Many attendees of past Work Cycles adopt the format verbatim for their own lives and use it consistently going forwards to great effect.
But over and above that, you've got Marshall and Zau there to give you feedback, help troubleshoot, help make small adjustments. For instance, the difference between "write my book" and "finish outlining chapters 3, write the opening hook, and transition to the next scene" is actually night-and-day for productivity.
After having run Cycles for elite professionals performing at the highest level, students at top universities, entrepreneurs, and people who are looking to break through on creative work — Marshall and Zau have some good insights and tweaks to help you navigate your own work.
If you happen to get stuck at any given point on what to do next, you get real-time feedback to get unstuck. It's very valuable.
The Community
There's a lot of known science about how people perform better in groups than by themselves, and in supportive groups best of all. You'll be working with your video camera on, in real time, with other participants working away. You know you're going to be reporting back your results in 30 minutes.
This gives surprisingly huge boosts to productivity. In athletics, sports scientists have seen that people training in groups get as much as 13% higher power output while feeling less fatigued than when working out alone — which, you know, is kind of incredible when you think about it.
Work Cycles is the same sort of thing. The people are terrific. It's also neat to learn lessons by seeing how, for instance, a programmer goes about writing and debugging difficult algorithms, a top attorney goes about writing a white paper on changes in the tax code, or how a bilingual creative translates an opera from French into English (all real examples).
It's very cool to be working alongside terrific people doing interesting things. You learn a lot, you get a boost of motivation, you get more done, you feel less tired, you might learn and build some new mental models about how other people organize their work, and — very cool to see — we've seen new friendships and relationships come out of this sort of thing when attendees follow up with each other.
Free Work Cycles on Saturday December 16th
In the past, we've charged $140 for Work Cycles alone, people came, and we've had literally a 100% satisfaction rate. Seriously, no joke, we survey people afterwards in an objective survey, and everyone has always said it was worthwhile. We've also ran these with open attendance at some top universities — not a partisan crowd, y'know? — and got across the board 100% positive rave results there too.
So how much is this going to cost you?
Well, how about free?
We're looking to get the methodology out into the world and connect with more great people. We'd love to have you here, for free, to max out your productivity on a Saturday, to learn a lot in the process, and with some amazing people working alongside you.
Neat, huh?
Why are you guys doing this?
(1) Because we think it's cool,
(2) Because we think it's a really powerful thing that the world needs more of,
(3) And because the type of people likely to come — ie, you — are probably our type of people, and we always want to get to know more of our type of people.
Okay, sounds great. What do I do?
Simply register below and mark your calendar for 16 December, 12PM to 4PM Eastern time (9AM-1PM Pacific).
The only thing we ask is that if you sign up, you actually come. If you're not sure you can make it, pass on this one and keep an eye out for the future. We've got strong tech underpinning this but don't have infinite capacity, so please be courteous and only sign up if you can make it.
You'll actually be working live, in real-time, so pick the work you're going to do in advance. Two types of work are good to do during Cycles: the first is very boring rote work that you don't want to do, like getting your taxes done or answering a ton of email. The second type is deep, hard, creative work that often gets procrastinated. Either one is a good candidate, but we've found "in-between" work to not be so great… for instance, if you need to answer a few emails, then call someone back on the phone, and then wait for a while, etc, obviously that doesn't work as well for a heads-down focused burst of Cycles. If you're debating between two different things, that's fine, we can help you choose and get set up for Saturday if you simply reply to the confirmation email we send after you register.... but again, you'll definitely benefit if you've thought this through a little beforehand.
See you Saturday, and here's to leveling up alongside some great people.
Here's the registration --
We're jazzed to have you and very excited for December 16th -- until then, yours,
Sebastian Marshall and Kai Zau


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Information is subject to change. Please check the event website for the most current information.
- This event has passed.
Pandas: The Journey Home
March 11 @ 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
An event every week that begins at 10:00 am on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, repeating until May 4, 2019
An event every week that begins at 10:00 am on Thursday, repeating until May 2, 2019
The giant panda is one of the rarest species on our planet. A shy, elusive and gentle creature, they once ranged in great numbers between Beijing and the Himalayas. But now, after centuries of human expansion and destruction of their habitat, the giant pandas are on the brink of extinction, with fewer than 1,600 remaining. Pandas: The Journey Home, a groundbreaking natural-history film, captures for the first time in 3D on the world's largest screens the highly endangered giant pandas living in Wolong National Nature Reserve in the People's Republic of China. This film experience gives audiences a unique glimpse into one of the most incredible conservation efforts in human history. The scientists' goal: to increase the numbers in captivity and, far more ambitiously, to return pandas to the wild —to their natural home. Running time: 40 minutes.
Show times are:
Saturdays – 11 am, 1 pm, and 3 pm
Sundays – 2 pm and 4 pm
Monday Through Friday 11:30 am
Special thanks to those listed above and others who contribute to this resource for our visitors.
Event Submissions are accepted for events in the Waco area only (McLennan County).


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A tug-of-war game at a San Gabriel Valley high school left two students horribly injured, after the rope they were using wrapped around their hands and ripped off several fingers, authorities said.
The girl, whose name was not released by authorities, lost five fingers, Sgt. Jorge Marchena told NBC4. The boy lost four fingers.
The students, who are seniors, were identified in a get-well banner in front of the campus on Tuesday as Edith Rodriguez and Pablo Ocegueda.
The students were on the yard at El Monte High School at lunchtime on Monday when the incident occurred, Los Angeles County supervising fire dispatcher Eddie Pickett told NBC News.
Student Eric Garcia said Ocegueda was at the front of the tug-of-war line, near the center of the rope.
"He was trying to pull the knot and then when everyone pulled it tightened on him and it was too much force and it ripped through his hand," Garcia said.
Friends said Ocegueda remained calm, despite a scene of students screaming and lots of blood. He tried to calm a teacher and asked about Rodriguez, Garcia said.
The two 18-year-old students were taken to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center for treatment, and were in surgery overnight.
"They are both stable and the parents were by their bedside," Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center spokeswoman Rosa Sacca told The San Gabriel Valley Tribune on Monday. "They were getting ready to be taken to the operating room to try to re-attach the fingers."
Sacca said the surgery was completed, but would not disclose to NBC4 whether the students' fingers were successfully reattached. She later said the two were stable and moving about Tuesday.
A friend of Ocegueda's said doctors were not able to reattach the teen's fingers, but that the surgery on Rodriguez went successfully and her fingers were reattached.
El Monte Union High School District Superintendent Nick J. Salerno said officials will review activities associated with "Spirit Week," which the students were celebrating. The school has held such games for years, he said.
The district could eliminate tug-of-war games, he said.
"I've never heard of anything like this happening," he said. "It's unbelievable to me, it's shocking."
Similar injuries have occurred elsewhere.
In 2008, an 8-year-old girl nearly lost four fingers when her hand got tangled in a rope during a tug-of-war in Fergus Falls, Minn. The fingers remained attached by tendons and were reattached.
In 2007, two students at a high school in Parker, Colo., had their right hands partially severed during a tug-of-war at a pep rally.
In 1997, two men had their left arms torn off when a rope snapped during a tug-of-war in Taiwan that involved some 1,600 participants. Doctors managed to reattach the limbs.


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Popular Guides
View more guides at Linux Wiki Guides
Welcome to the Linux Laptop Wiki. The aim of this website is to provide a central wiki for people to post their experiences with Linux on the model of laptop or notebook they are using. Hopefully we will generate a large database of laptops where people can come and quickly see if the laptop they are interested in works with Linux.
We also have our guides which expand on our laptop listing by giving you a step by step guide on configuring several different laptop components on a range of Linux distributions.
Remember, these are wiki pages and most of them can be directly edited by everybody. If you have any details to add to a laptop or you would like to submit a laptop to this website please feel free to edit.


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Photo Valentines
In the February 2009 issue of Creating Keepsakes, I shared ideas for photo-based valentines. One of the ideas was to photograph your child holding a valentine—it's an idea I want to expand here. In this photo valentine, I used two techniques to draw the eye to the heart-shaped valentine.
The first is a camera technique. I used an open aperture to blur the background so the city streets wouldn't be distracting in the background. You can re-create this look by simply choosing the portrait setting or "aperture priority" mode and using the lowest-number aperture you can (1.8 or 2.8 would be great for this). Then make sure that you focus directly on the valentine. The valentine will be sharp and everything else will blur.
The second step is an Adobe Photoshop Elements computer technique. I made the background black and white and left the valentine in color. This is actually pretty simple to do in Elements:
1. Open the image you want to use.
2. In the Layers palette, click on the "Create adjustment layer" icon (look for the gray/white circle), then choose Hue/Saturation from the drop-down menu.
3. Slide the saturation down to "-100" to create a black-and-white image.
4. To add color back on the valentine, click on the white rectangle on the Hue/Saturation layer (it's called a "mask").
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Just a quick post of Sew Green links to make the busiest shopping day of the year a little less busy and wasteful.
Gift for Good- Alternative gift giving suggestions
Gift for Good- Alternative gift giving suggestions
Green Gift Giving for Kids - Great list of ideas
What's in your wallet - Think before you buy
Crafty Bastards- Great handmade shopping links
These aren't your mama's clogs- Eco Fashion links
Conscientious Consumption - Mindful consumerism
Toys without the tox- DIY toys
Rock PAPER Scissors- Make your own notebooks
The Art of Finding- sourcing materials for handmade collages- which make great gifts
Also, Healthy Child, Healthy World has a list of 192 eco-friendly kids toys on Amazon.
Also here are a few suggestions for non-shopping alternatives for the whole family on this shopping heavy weekend:
- Museum [we are open!]
- Zoo/ aquarium/ garden [all are nonprofits and need your support]
- Volunteer [soup kitchen, animal shelter or visit a senior center]
- Tour your city [what would tourists do?]
- Beach, mountains, river, or any spot with a great view [pack some leftovers]
- If weather permits- get outside and organize a sporting activity [Croquet!]
- If weather doesn't permit, board games [or organize a scavenger hunt].
Please leave any other suggestions in the comments!


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NetBSD Documentation: Running VMWare on NetBSD
The information below was inspired by installing vmware 2.04 on NetBSD-1.6 and NetBSD-1.6I.
Pitfalls in the installation
- Raw disks don't work!
- Hardware profiles
- Vmware segfaults and other mysterious errors
- Bridged networking
- Linux realtime clock (rtc) support
Pitfalls in the installation
Raw disks don't work!
This means that if you are in a situation that you want/need a dual boot system you'll need a 'plainDisk'. Since vmware sometimes chokes on a disk that contains a NetBSD disklabel, the best way to setup a Plaindisk configuration is to configure a virtual disk in the configuration wizard. The size does not matter since you can remove the virtual disk afterwards. When the wizard is finished, change the 'deviceType' of the disk in the .cfg file to 'plainDisk'. Now you have to correctly fill in the geometry of the 'plainDisk'. The filename is the 'fileName' field in the disk description (usually: ide0:0.fileName). The contents of that file should look something like this:
DRIVETYPE ide CYLINDERS 16384 HEADS 16 SECTORS 63 ACCESS "/root/vmware/win2000/disk.mbr" 0 63 ACCESS "/dev/rwd0e" 63 8193087 ACCESS "/dev/rwd0f" 8193213 4176837
The disk.mbr is a copy of the master boot record. You can create it by:
dd if=/dev/rwd0d of=disk.mbr count=63
Now that the mbr is a fake anyway, it is best to rip out all partitions that vmware should not know about. They sometimes give you mysterious crashes. The easiest way to accomplish this is:
vnconfig vnd0 disk.mbr 512/63/1/1 fdisk -u vnd0 vnconfig -u vnd0
You might also like the '-a' and '-i' options of fdisk, boot selectors are annoying when there is only one actual choice left...
To determine the other components of the plain disk, you'll need fdisk too. The first numeric field is the offset, the second one the size. You can directly take them from the fdisk table.
Hardware profiles
Check out the vmware documentation on Setting Up Hardware Profiles in Virtual Machines This might save you some work in re-installing drivers for the real hardware afterwards. It's not fatal, just very annoying.
Vmware segfaults and other mysterious errors
For w2000 and XP, check out the part on ACPI You will get lots of weird crashes (including vmware/sig11) when this is wrong.
Bridged networking
If your w2000 needs all kinds of networks drives and such, you really need bridged networking. NAT will just no be good enough for the job. Nice thing is that this that this works with NetBSD, although not in the most obvious way.
Start with configuring your virtual machine with 'HostOnly' networking. Now, setup a bridge like:
ifconfig bridge0 create brconfig bridge0 add <your main interface> add vmnet1 up
I think you'll also need to enable packet forwarding by adding:
Linux realtime clock (rtc) support
The Linux RTC can be emulated using the linuxrtc
option. Please be aware that this option makes your CPU 0%
idle. It is only needed for Windows 9x for smooth rendering
of for example menus. The Linux RTC can be emulated
by adding "linuxrtc=YES" to the
/etc/rc.conf file.
Back to Documentation Top Level


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In the town of Greenwich, Connecticut, it is illegal for a real-estate agent to post a "For Sale" sign in front of a house or a tract of land. For many years, such an ordinance was unnecessary; those who needed to know knew, and those who did not did not. But in the nineteen-eighties, with the arrival in town of national real-estate firms, "For Sale" signs started sprouting up, cluttering the roadways with middleman names and numbers. Many residents found the signs unsightly and crass; some home-town agents, keen to preserve the relationship between their local knowledge and their market share, agreed. The signs' most persistent opponent was a satellite-television mogul named Rene Anselmo, who lived in a mansion modelled on the Petit Trianon, at Versailles. Patrolling his street in a Bentley convertible, Anselmo uprooted any "For Sale" signs he could find and piled them in the Bentley's back seat. One day, the police arrested him for spray-painting over a Realtor's sign near his house. After admitting that he had done this to eight or nine other signs, and remarking that he wished he'd used a chain saw, he became a kind of folk hero, the John Brown of real-estate signage. In time, the town came around and passed a law. It has never been tested in court.
The absence of such signage has been a blessing in recent months, as the town's brokers and homeowners have sought to maintain, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that they are immune, more or less, to the ravages of the credit crisis. On its own, the subprime-mortgage fiasco would not much affect home prices in Greenwich, a place more prime than sub, but it has reverberated through the financial system, costing many residents, actual or aspiring, their jobs or credit lines. If brokers' signs were allowed, the town might look, from the right distance, like a giant and very expensive tag sale, and the sudden conspicuousness of so much supply, in a time of slackening demand, might shatter a range of illusions best epitomized by the risible listing prices. Generally, people are almost as protective of their property values as they are of their children, and will be as doting in their appraisals of both.
We're in a season of white elephants, of projects commenced in good times now languishing in bad. The sight of a stalled construction project or half-empty development touches off, even in the most disinterested passerby, a kind of queasy delectation. Deep-seated thrift craves vindication, just as envy wishes for comeuppance, but even the most pious strain admits a twinge of fear in the face of vacancy and failure. When others are going under, you could go under, too. An unwanted house, no matter how hideous, is a little sad, like an empty restaurant or a child left out of a game.
North of the Merritt Parkway, Round Hill Road, one of four arteries that run up from central Greenwich to the New York State line, enters what is called backcountry Greenwich, the precinct of the old country estates, now mostly gone or diminished. Still, it is a neighborhood of stately houses, vast fields, big oaks, and stone walls. Not far along, you come to Mooreland Road, which passes through what used to be a hundred-and-sixty-eight-acre farm belonging to the industrialist Charles A. Moore (starting in the nineteen-twenties, Scottish hands in his employ staged annual Highland Games there) and near the childhood home of the actress Glenn Close (a Moore descendant and twelfth-generation Greenwicher). It ends in a cul-de-sac, at the head of which is a large new faux-classical house belonging to a hedge-fund manager named Julius Gaudio, who once spent seven hundred and eighty thousand dollars at a charity auction on two packages, for himself and his wife, featuring a round of golf with Bill Clinton and a pair of Manolo Blahniks, and whose clutch-burning attempts to gun his Ferrari up his steep driveway greatly amused the longtime Moorelanders next door.
Before you get there, you come upon Langhorne Lane. Make a left. It's woodsy around here, but beyond a bend the land opens up, revealing an enormous, mostly finished mansion, in a moonscape of cleared timber and blasted rock on one side, and new sod and blacktop on the other. Viewed from the road, through a chain-link fence, it looks like several houses mashed together—a mutant rising from the rubble. The house, in a style that has been called "stockbroker Georgian," is constructed primarily of stone, excavated on the site and hand-cut, and has thirty-five thousand square feet of floor space, if you include the basement—an underground complex housing a basketball court, a movie theatre, an indoor swimming pool, a gym, a spa, a twenty-thousand-bottle wine cellar, and a wine-tasting room. There are two elevators, seven chimneys, garages with room for ten cars. Although the house stands on a nine-acre lot, it seems lopsidedly close to the road.
The house is a spec house—that is, one built with no particular owner in mind. It is the biggest and most expensive of eight such houses that a local real-estate firm called Antares Investment Partners had planned to build in the Greenwich backcountry—"one of the great mansions of Greenwich's 300-year-old history," as Antares put it in an offering memo to potential investors. It is called the Lake Carrington Estate. James Cabrera and Joseph Beninati, the founders and principals of Antares, live next door to Lake Carrington. In 2002, they bought an eighteen-acre property that consisted of four lots. On one Cabrera built a traditional American shingle-style mansion; on another Beninati built an Italianate mansion called Villa Leoncelli. The other two lots became the Lake Carrington site, named for a grain magnate who used to have an estate nearby (and in whose pond a banker's teen-age son drowned a hundred years ago). The lake itself—small and man-made—was previously called Carrington Pond.
In recent years in Greenwich, as elsewhere, many developers have made a great deal of money buying up empty lots or teardowns and building enormous speculative ready-to-occupy mansions. You see them everywhere, a proliferating clan of insta-mini-giganto luxury houses, modest at ten to fifteen million dollars apiece. Their banal extravagance both mitigates and exacerbates what people either too rich or too poor to live in such houses would consider their tackiness.
Lake Carrington is enormous and speculative but not quite occupant-ready. It was framed out and drywalled but otherwise unfinished: no bathroom or kitchen fixtures, no moldings. The floors are plywood. It is a husk. To move in, a buyer would need to put in an additional five to fifteen million dollars' worth of work. The developers' name for this situation was "couture-ready," the stated theory being that the buyers, whoever they might be, would want to customize the guts, but not the shell, to their taste.
Another way of looking at Lake Carrington was that it was a Potemkin manor, a movie set, not as much a dream house as a house in a dream. The developers, in a booklet promoting the property, which was known around their office as "the Bible," had described it as "Gatsby-esque," inadvertently summoning up the pretense and the tragedy, rather than the grandeur, of West Egg. The Bible featured stock photographs of polo players, vintage-car grilles, little girls blowing cattails: a Greenwich of the mind. The house was, in one sense, an entirely superficial confection of Greenwichness, and, in another, a canny apotheosis of it. Lake Carrington went on the market in April, 2007, listed at twenty-eight million dollars.
People like to drive around and look at nice houses. They want to know who lives in them, what the owners did to afford them, as well as who used to live in them, and why they no longer do. Houses are projections of taste and means, or the lack of them, and signify fortunes made and lost—the ebb and flow of capital from generation to generation, place to place, line to line. Each cycle of ownership is a cautionary tale—dinner-table mythology.
And each season seems to bring a new saga of excess. Over the past fifteen years or so, Greenwich has effectively become the capital of the hedge-fund world. Firms large and small have settled there, as have their employees, many of them, thanks to their lucrative fee structure, earners of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year. That kind of money can change a place, even one as accustomed to big wealth as Greenwich. The town experienced a frenzy of buying, selling, subdividing, demolishing, constructing, renovating, and recriminating that altered its landscape and reputation, if not quite its self-image. There were the notorious cases: the waterfront Monticello-style mansion built for the fund manager Paul Tudor Jones II, which upstaged the old yacht club next door; the fund manager Joseph Jacobs's attempt to build a more-than-thirty-thousand-square-foot backcountry house, which, in the face of community opposition and media derision, he ultimately abandoned; and then, last spring, the failed effort by a Russian named Valery Kogan, an air-cargo oligarch, to demolish a twenty-thousand-square-foot mansion and erect in its place a fifty-four-thousand-square-foot (and twenty-six-toileted) "palace on a postage stamp," as an outraged neighbor called it.
The outrage is perennial. The town's vestigial claim to dignity and discretion—rooted as much in furtive fortune preservation as in any kind of righteous Yankee providence—is at odds with its feverish wealth, past and present. The gigantic new mansions, with their twenty-five-car garages and their private skating rinks, aren't so different from the heavily staffed estates of a hundred years ago, with their stables and arboretums. Vast new wealth will usually find a way to express itself, and what it lacks in imagination it makes up for in moxie. Old money was new once, and usually not that long ago, and, whether you earned it by selling mattresses or by securitizing loans to the mattress sellers or by shorting those debt securities, the more you have, the more you have.
How did Greenwich become Greenwich? It is no more pleasant or beautiful, on its own, than any number of places within a similar distance to Manhattan. The breezes are no sweeter. It contains less rust than some neighboring towns; industry, in the twentieth century anyway, clustered around the river mouths up and down the coast, in Stamford and Norwalk, and in Port Chester, New York. It has lovely coves and handsome upland pastures, big old beeches and appealing little ponds, but so do a lot of places. A hundred years ago, town boosters bragged of an absence of mosquitoes and malaria. Now they say that there are good schools, both public and private, a low crime rate (aside from the occasional home invasion or society murder), and great country clubs, public beaches, and parks. It's also a bit of a tax haven. Until 1991, Connecticut had no state tax on income (not including capital gains); property taxes, too, are generally lower there than in Westchester County. And Greenwich is the closest bit of Connecticut to New York City.
Greenwich is a big town, with a population of sixty-two thousand. It's more diverse than you might think, although it is true that for many years real-estate agents, admissions directors, club committee members, and other town leaders quietly enforced a policy of no Jews (more or less), and the 2000 census found that less than two per cent of its residents were black. For decades, there have been various ethnic neighborhoods situated according to their nineteenth-century industrial designations. These days, there are housing projects, working-class apartments, greasy depots, office parks, an industrial bakery, a brownfield site. But Greenwich has as high and showy a concentration of wealth as any like-sized town. In median family income—a hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars a year—it ranks below its neighbors New Canaan, Westport, and Darien (which is known to nitpicking Greenwichers as "Aryan Darien"), but those are smaller and more purely domestic. And there aren't any twenty-eight-million-dollar spec mansions in Darien.
Size and speculation are not new to Greenwich. Some of the most exclusive sections, such as Belle Haven and Khakum Wood, started out as planned developments—spec houses, of a kind. In 1925, two sons of John Henry Twachtman, the Impressionist, purchased seventy-seven acres from William Rockefeller, near Round Hill Road, cut the land into parcels, and built more than two dozen houses, at least one of them on spec, in a variety of architectural styles. The development wasn't exactly Levittown, but it attracted a new class of people. "They did sell to a Jewish couple," Anne Young, the curator of archives at Greenwich's Historical Society, told me. In time, the Twachtman houses, owing in part to the affluence of their residents, became an exclusive and coveted neighborhood.
With wealth came prestige, which in turn attracted more wealth, creating a constant recirculation of capital and status. If New York City is the heart of the marketplace, Greenwich is the liver, where toxins are processed and rich bits collect. Or it is like the tidal marshes that ring its bays, filtering out nutrients and waste, and the mossbunker that come in on the tide, languidly schooling on the surface—those are the citizens of Greenwich. Every now and then, the bluefish—newcomers? bankruptcy?—strike from below, and the bunker boil up, and the water gets bloody. Anne Young described to me how the town's mores had changed, with the arrival of "people who have achieved financial success." She said, recalling a line from somewhere, "Remember, 'stranger' rhymes with 'danger.' " That may be so, but permanence is not an attribute of American capitalism, or of Greenwich.
It can pay to leave. George W. Bush has effectively renounced his Greenwich provenance, although not its perquisites, in order to distance himself from its élitist implications. He was born into a family of Yale and Greenwich men connected, by business, marriage, and sensibility, to some of the lions of the Eastern establishment—Harrimans, Rockefellers. His grandfather Prescott Bush married well and came to Greenwich before joining the firm that would become Brown Brothers Harriman. To sustain the dynasty, however, the next generations had to repudiate their Greenwichness, or pretend to. They had to convert the currency into something else, or at least refinance it.
Greenwich is a much more ephemeral place than it would appear. In addition to the three "D"s of real estate—death, divorce, diapers—you get a few others, such as distress and dislocation. The proximity of corporate headquarters in New York and its suburbs made Greenwich a way station for transient businessmen pulling short stints on the corporate-transfer wheel. (In the sixties, people liked to say that I.B.M., headquartered just over the state line, stood for "I'm Being Moved.") That era of the so-called upper middle class—lawfirm salaries, beat-up station wagons, unironic golf—gave way to the guiltless acquiring and flaunting of the Wall Street boom, and to a restlessness that stimulated turnover of a different kind.
This has been good for the realestate business, and for companies like Antares, the Lake Carrington developer. Greenwich's cachet is the brokers' ace, and they like to conjure it by telling stories about the properties they are selling. One of the reasons that the Helmsley estate, encompassing a ninety-year-old house on forty acres on Round Hill Road, is listed at a hundred and twenty-five million dollars is that it has such a rich past, albeit one full of misery and ruin—suicide, adultery, fraud, debt, Leona.
Anne Young, at the Historical Society, says that she often gets calls from brokers who are listing spec houses. "They ask me, 'What can you tell me about this part of town?' They want to know so they can use the history to sell the property. So in a sense even these new houses need a story."
A year ago, the Post ran a story ("SPENDING HIS A-WAD") about Alex Rodriguez, or A-Rod, the Yankees star, who was to be a free agent at the end of the season, and whose intentions—stay or go—had become the object of great speculation in the local media. The news in the story was that A-Rod had been house-hunting in Greenwich, which would suggest an inclination to resign with the Yankees. The house he was supposedly interested in was Lake Carrington. A photographer for the Post got an aerial shot.
It didn't matter that Rodriguez had not actually looked at Lake Carrington—that, according to the Post, he and his wife had simply eaten at Polpo, a Greenwich restaurant partly owned by Antares, with a real-estate agent named Lynn Cone, the wife of the retired Mets and Yankees pitcher David Cone, and that she had apparently gone to a Lake Carrington open house. Somehow, a possible celebrity sighting at Polpo morphed into an A-Rod scoop, and into free advertising for an unsold spec house. Antares also got, in passing, some advertising for itself.
By the time Jim Cabrera and Joe Beninati started building Lake Carrington, Antares had become well known around Greenwich as an aggressive purchaser, developer, and marketer of commercial property. Beninati and Cabrera, best friends from Choate, a prep school in central Connecticut, founded the firm in 1996, when they were thirty-one. By the summer of 2007, they were managing a portfolio of real estate in and around Greenwich that they valued at six billion dollars, although figuring out what's worth what, to say nothing of who owns what, can get very complicated, and has got only more so in the past year. Antares isn't a hedge fund, but it has such funds as clients and tenants, and in many ways it is structured as an asset manager; it is a real-estate development and private-equity firm that, in the main, deploys other people's money.
Beninati, the more adept of the two at raising capital, was born in the Bronx. His father worked in the photo-processing lab at the Saturday Evening Post before opening his own lab. When Beninati was fourteen, his family moved to the then middle-class town of Armonk, New York, just over the state line from Greenwich. After high school, where he excelled at football, he spent a year at Choate as a postgraduate—an athletic recruit preparing for college. Cabrera, who was also spending a postgraduate year at Choate, grew up in Old Greenwich; his father was the president of an outplacement counselling firm. Though they went to different colleges—Beninati to Middlebury, Cabrera to Duke—they stayed close, and when Beninati became the chief financial officer of Telos, a defense contractor, Cabrera, a regional president of a national brokerage, handled all of Telos's real-estate work.
Antares began as a real-estate brokerage when Beninati and Cabrera found new headquarters for Paul Tudor Jones's Tudor Investment on Steamboat Road. Jones is often spoken of as a Greenwich pioneer, the first big hedge-fund manager to set up both house and shop there. (Cabrera was the one with the real-estate background and the local contacts.) Cabrera and Beninati also helped him buy Soundview Farms, across the town line, in Stamford, the headquarters of the commodities trader Thomas O'Malley, for whom Cabrera had caddied as a kid. Before Jones moved in, however, he changed his mind. So Cabrera and Beninati advised him on buying the headquarters of Tenneco, formerly the Henry Luce estate, and were involved in the sale of Soundview first to PanAmSat, Rene Anselmo's company, and then of a portion of it, soon thereafter, to S.A.C. Capital Advisors, Steven A. Cohen's sixteen-billion-dollar hedge fund. Cohen turned Soundview into one of the world's most sophisticated trading floors. Cabrera and Beninati coördinated the development and managed the property.
On several occasions, I heard people in town refer to Beninati and Cabrera as "the boys," a moniker that conveyed varying degrees of collaboration, astonishment, and condescension. In the press and in pitches to investors, the boys positioned themselves as hedge-fund Pied Pipers. Capitalizing on this influx of what they and others in town generally called "the hedge-fund guys," Beninati and Cabrera, with various lenders and equity partners, bought a number of commercial buildings in Greenwich and Stamford and converted them into space fit for the kind of tenants who would be willing to pay rents more suited to midtown Manhattan than to coastal Connecticut. Antares bought into the group that had transformed the old Steamboat, a run-down motel on the harbor, into the Delamar, a swanky hotel for the bankers and salesmen who were now compelled to come to Greenwich to court the hedge-fund guys. Beninati and Cabrera were also part owners of hedge-fund-guy restaurants: L'Escale, at the Delamar, and Polpo.
For Antares, the hedge-fund guys were a strategy and a shtick. Two years ago, Beninati and Cabrera hired a firm called Shift Control Media to create "advergames"—Internet video games that would serve as advertisements for their properties and services. One, a twist on the old arcade game Frogger, was called Hedger. The premise was that you—the game player, the future Antares tenant, the hedge-fund titan—have just made a killing and are wending your way triumphantly from your offices near the Greenwich waterfront to the Delamar, in order to board the Louis XVI, your sixty-five-foot yacht. If you don't maneuver nimbly through Greenwich traffic, you get squashed—preparation, perhaps, for the real-life hostilities of the Whole Foods parking lot, a notorious battleground of eight-cylinder automobiles piloted with near-comical rage by over-caffeinated women and overcompensated men. If money buys anything here, it's impatience.
It was this constituency—the one that would be seduced rather than repelled by this vision of Greenwich—that Beninati and Cabrera had in mind when they bought twenty-six backcountry acres in 2004 and began building houses on them, under the aegis of a limited-liability corporation, Antares Mansions. The company raised $12.9 million from investors and borrowed twenty-seven million dollars from two banks. Antares put in the land, which it valued at $2.9 million. In the offering, Antares, citing "substantial velocity in the Greenwich ultra luxury market," asserted that, even if it sold the houses at thirty per cent less per square foot than the average selling price for luxury homes in the area at the time, investors would break even. The velocity made this supposedly worst-case scenario seem unlikely. (Antares was not alone in making such assumptions; a nation of homebuyers and loan officers did the same.) The plan was to give investors a return of twenty per cent.
In addition to the Lake Carrington site, there were seventeen acres off North Street, which Antares would develop into Taconic Estates. Beninati, in interviews, likened them to the giant cottages of Newport, Rhode Island, but with modern technology and luxury amenities. "We want each home to be a hard place to leave," he said.
One rationale for the spec mansion is that the developer, rather than the eventual homeowner, endures the trial of pushing inevitably controversial plans through the arduous approval process. The developer, theoretically, has the expertise, and the capacity for heedlessness. Antares pressed this advantage. Neighbors complained of illegal dynamiting, excessive tree felling, the impact on wetlands. Later, Antares asked for permission to cut down a copse of trees that belonged to the town; the town said no. One day, the neighbors discovered that the trees were gone. They accused Antares of surreptitiously getting rid of them. Antares responded that the neighbors must have cut them, to make Antares look bad. (Beninati said that new bushes and trees have now been planted on the site; he also denied that there had been any illegal dynamiting.)
Before Lake Carrington came on the market, in April, 2007, Beninati told the New York Sun, "There's always a market for van Goghs, and there's always a market for backcountry mansions in Greenwich. Markets are pretty much irrelevant here. It just depends which group of guys in the world are on top. So it might be the Russian oil barons, the hedge fund guys, or the private equity guys today. In the next few years it might be the venture capitalists, the tech guys, and the Japanese guys. It is just a rotation of who has the millions and millions."
One day late in the spring, I had lunch at L'Escale with Charles Mallory, one of the owners of the Delamar. He came up with the name, as a tribute to Joseph DeLamar, a mining magnate who built one of the largest mansions of the Gatsby era, on Long Island's North Shore, across the Sound. L'Escale seeks to summon the Côte d'Azur, by way of Miami and Glen Cove.
It was a humid, glary tristate-area afternoon, and we ate outside, on a terrace, within view of the ferry to Great Captain Island, which, until recently, had been open to town residents only. Mallory, who runs a ship-brokerage business, grew up in Manhattan and moved to Greenwich in 1991, but his roots there reach back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when his forebears had an estate on Byram Shore Road. I had come across a Times clip from 1905 that described an incident during a "card party" there, in which a gas tank exploded, killing a gardener. The host, Charles H. Mallory, a shipping magnate, ordered the undertaker to refrain from removing the gardener's corpse until the party was over. As the Times reported, "While his body lay on the lawn a hundred feet from the house the guests continued their merriment, not having been informed of the fatality."
Mallory hadn't heard this particular family tale. He told me that two-thirds of the estate had been sold off after the Second World War and subdivided. The remaining third, maintained by a cousin, had been sold several years ago. "It's easy to say new wealth has changed Greenwich for the worse," he said. "But I would argue, and this is even coming from a Waspy perspective, that it's a more diverse and fascinating community than it was. It's gotten better, even if it's more competitive and more expensive."
Mallory had on a pink and white checked shirt, pleated white linen pants, and webbed loafers. He was drinking rosé. "This is the new Greenwich," he said, indicating a table nearby of about a dozen women in their forties and fifties. "This is a very indicative get-together: an enormously attractive group of females, who are from, what, probably Venezuela, Mexico, Argentina. That's the way it is here now. A very international community. There are a lot of Russians." Later, Mallory mentioned that the trompe-l'oeils inside the hotel had been painted by a local artist named Debra Ryan, who was the girlfriend of Samuel Israel III, the convicted hedge-fund swindler. The week before, while he was supposed to be driving himself to prison, Israel had faked his own suicide, abandoning his car on the Bear Mountain Bridge with a message reading "Suicide is painless." Ryan, who allegedly helped him get away, was arrested soon thereafter.
Another woman walked in. "Here's a friend!" Mallory said. "She's the wife of a shipping magnate. Very attractive." The woman, voluble and bare-shouldered, came over to say hello and explained that she was here with her twelve-year-old daughter and the daughter's boyfriend. There he was, a sullen-looking kid with long hair and big sneakers.
Mallory didn't want to talk much about Beninati and Cabrera. "I have to be careful," he said. "They're still partners of mine in this place." He added, "It's been useful for them to have a Trump-like persona in this market, but then it's about execution and market timing."
I first went to see Beninati last winter at Antares's office, on an old industrial peninsula in the city of Stamford. The South End, as the neighborhood was called, had once been home to Pitney Bowes and Yale & Towne, and was now a Rust Beltish conglomeration of abandoned industrial space and hard-luck housing, with some new office developments scattered about, many of them now owned by Antares. Beninati's office looked out in the opposite direction, over parts of Long Island Sound.
Beninati, who is forty-four, has long, slicked-back, gray-streaked dark hair and favors a showily preppy style of dress that would seem self-mocking on an editor or an adman. That afternoon, he had on orange chinos and a white sweater vest over a candy-striped Oxford shirt with the top two buttons undone. The intonation of his voice rose frequently at the end of his sentences. On a dry board, he drew a pyramid. At the top were the hedge funds and private-equity funds—S.A.C. Capital Advisors, Tudor Investment. Below were the investment banks and commercial banks, such as U.B.S. and the Royal Bank of Scotland, that had moved their trading operations to Fairfield County in part to be near them. The base of the pyramid comprised the lawyers, accountants, insurers, and others who minister to the upper layers. "It has really created a full business ecosystem up here," he said. I gathered that Beninati saw Antares as belonging to both the peak and the base—and that this pyramid did not take into account the gardeners, cops, teachers, storekeepers, lifeguards, caddies, mechanics, and massage therapists who made the town a town. They weren't Antares tenants.
In 2006, Antares had paid two hundred and twenty-three million dollars for a pair of apartment complexes in the Byram section of Greenwich, a formerly working-class neighborhood whose name, the lore has it, derives from "Buy rum." Antares planned to convert them into luxury condominiums and to change their names, from Putnam Green and Weaver's Hill to Greenwich Oaks and Greenwich Place. It was one of the biggest real-estate deals in Connecticut history, and it was a dud.
Antares, in effect, would be pricing out existing tenants, most of them elderly. This led to lawsuits, which slowed renovations and attracted opprobrium in the press. Antares had to charge prohibitively high prices to recoup its investment. Buyers were scarce. There was velocity in the market, but in the wrong direction. In the summer of 2007, Antares stopped construction work, amid a bout of lawsuits from contractors seeking back pay.
Lehman Brothers had loaned the Antares project about three hundred million dollars, and by the end of the year foreclosure proceedings seemed possible—a complicated business, because by this point Antares had replaced approximately forty million dollars of its original financing with funds from a Kuwaiti investor. The deal had to be compliant with Sharia, or Islamic law. Sharia forbids interest, so it was structured as a lease arrangement, with Antares's name still on the deed. With Lehman as a partner, a group led by an Atlanta-based firm, Radco, assumed control of the complexes.
The Putnam Green venture was, in many ways, a microcosm of the entire American banking meltdown: easy credit, blind optimism, heavy leverage, murky chain of custody, poor execution, infusion of foreign capital, market reversal, bust, more murkiness. Still, people in town wondered how it was possible for the boys, who had made so much of their local roots, to have made such a bad bet. "They're supposedly from here," Henry Pascarella, a prominent realestate lawyer in town, who was part of a group of investors who looked at Putnam Green, told me. "They should've known better."
Beninati wouldn't talk about the Putnam Green proceedings, citing confidentiality agreements with Lehman (which also declined to comment). Now he was thinking ahead, or at least trying to get me to. He mentioned that a subsidiary of a fund that managed a portion of the Rockefeller family fortune had just signed a lease to move into an Antares building, and said, "It's amazing. Something like that won't garner any notice, but you build a spec house in Greenwich and suddenly everyone wants to write about you." Despite a flurry of newspaper stories, Antares had built only two houses at Taconic Estates, and had sold just one of them, for $10.75 million. Lake Carrington still hadn't sold. Backcountry mansions, apparently, were not van Goghs.
Greenwich's spec-house crackerjack may be Mark Mariani, who, in the last fifteen years, has built dozens of ownerless homes in and around town. He claims to hold the top three spots in the spec-home sales-price rankings; Tommy Hilfiger bought one from him, for eighteen million dollars, in 2005. More than anything, Mariani is fast. It takes him six months or less to build one. Earlier this year, he demolished an old Tudor house on Round Hill Road and replaced it with an eighteen-thousand-square-foot château-style mansion in just eighty days. This was a custom job for Judy Sheindlin—Judge Judy. One day, I stood on Round Hill Road with a real-estate agent and tried, without success, to count the number of workers swarming the grounds, like time-lapse termites in rewind. Mariani told me that he often has more than three or four hundred men on a site. "I'm an animal," he said. "We compress time when we build."
Mariani, who is a longtime friend of Beninati's, did some clearing for Antares at Lake Carrington. He said that the project had presented a series of no-win decisions for Antares: "It's not the right kind of home for that area." Speaking generally, he went on, "Everybody jumped into the real-estate business in Greenwich, thinking there were fortunes to be made. That doesn't mean they know how to build."
Mariani also has a nursery and landscaping business, Mariani Gardens, in Armonk. On the company's Web site he is described as "a sort of latter day Thoreau crossed with an English gardener" who can "create the garden or landscape of your dreams." Mariani says that a client will tell him, "I'm going to give you half a million dollars. I'll be away for three weeks. This is my property. Make it beautiful." When I visited Mariani Gardens, the dream-creation apparatus was in full bloom. Rustling fountains, bird feeders, topiaries, statuary, hydrangeas, boxwoods, fruit trees, fire pits: the rudiments of back-yard make-believe. There were attendants in uniform and New Age music and a café.
Mariani, who is forty-three and is built like a guy who actually uses his basement gym, was dressed in a pastel striped shirt and tan slacks. Like Beninati, he was born in the Bronx and reared in Armonk; in fact, he dated Beninati's sister when they were teenagers. In high school, Mariani borrowed money from Beninati's father to buy a bulldozer and started doing landscaping and construction jobs. "I was making more money than the principal," he told me. College seemed pointless; he worked construction instead. When he was twenty-one, he built his first spec house.
Mariani doesn't feel much remorse for the houses he knocks down. "I don't even walk inside them," he said. "I could care less." His crews do the demolition, the site prep, and the building, including the millwork, masonry, cabinetry, painting, and landscaping. He reuses the materials on site. A rock crusher turns excavated stone into gravel. He doesn't give his houses names.
His model is different from Antares's. "I finance myself," he said. "Banks couldn't get used to my schedule. They told me, 'You build a luxury home faster than most people close on a mortgage.' " Mariani owns two private jets, and houses in Anguilla and Telluride. One afternoon, after visiting a couple of his projects, we wound up at his house, a renovated French manor on Round Hill Road, not far from Lake Carrington. He was about to take his son to a Yankees game, but he had time for a quick tour of the grounds. Out back, a battalion of gardeners was trimming boxwoods that had been sculpted in the shape of musical notes. "It's something Liberace should've done," Mariani said. The pool had rose petals floating in it. Allées led through hedgerows to little cherub statues, corresponding to his wife and two children, and then farther on to an orchard full of plums, figs, strawberries, olives, and pears. Inside, he showed me his basketball court and his movie theatre, where he urged me to sit in one of the plush velvet seats. He turned out the lights and put on a DVD of a Carlos Santana concert. "You like Santana?" Mariani said. "I'm so glad he finally got noticed."
After a few numbers—wind chimes, showgirls, Dave Matthews—I found myself wondering what a guest is supposed to do or say, in the din of a darkened Greenwich home-screening room, to convey that he is suitably impressed.
To a certain extent, Greenwich, as a state of mind and as a vendible commodity, is a self-perpetuating contrivance, consisting of some amalgam of exclusivity and display. It may be that the version of it that Cabrera and Beninati tried to bottle at Lake Carrington was off. Still, Lake Carrington's difficulties may have been not so much aesthetic or conceptual as they were financial. Antares had solicited a study from Cushman & Wakefield, a realestate services firm, which recommended that the mansion sites be developed to the "highest density possible." In other words, to do well, go huge. The plans expanded, which required more money. Antares Mansions raised an additional twenty-five million dollars of so-called "mezzanine" debt (debt that, in order of eventual repayment, ranks below senior debt but above equity). The mezzanine lender was, in fact, Antares (the parent company). Meanwhile, NorthStar S.I.C. Holding, a joint venture involving a New Mexico state fund, had acquired an interest in Antares.
Antares Mansions' original debts matured. Having failed to complete or sell its mansions in time, it entered default on those initial bank loans, incurring fees and fines, and punitive interest payments of up to twenty-five per cent. This increased the already odious costs of carrying the inventory of unsold houses and land, which forced the company to sell properties off at lower prices. The second Taconic mansion went for just $6.6 million, a few million less than Cabrera and Beninati hoped, and the remaining parcels—five empty lots—for nine million dollars. This paid down some of the debt but not all of it. In May, Cabrera invited the mansion investors to a meeting at the Delamar and, according to people who were there, told them that essentially their money was gone. Still, he proposed a plan to get back a small portion of it.
In July, some of the original equity investors in the mansions sued Antares. The suit, filed in Connecticut, asked the court to force Antares to pay them back before paying off other debt interests. (Antares, having provided the mezzanine loan, was basically paying itself back before the investors.) Antares countersued in New York, claiming that the investors' insistence on being paid back before any new lender had scotched Antares's ability to get another loan, which had caused it to default on the original loans, which in turn had undermined its ability to build and sell the houses.
Last week, the parties agreed, in principle, to settle both lawsuits. Under the settlement terms, the investors would recover some of the capital they had put into the mansions. One consequence was that Antares could now move ahead with the sale of its last remaining piece of mansion inventory, the Lake Carrington house. A buyer had come forward, Beninati said—"a local hedge-fund guy with a construction partner. The buyer's going to finish it and may live in it." There was a signed contract. The sale price was $13.75 million, about half its original list price.
"For Sale" signs may be illegal in Greenwich, but bank-foreclosure signs aren't, perhaps because they are so rare. In late May, a crude notice, poster-size and dense with type, appeared in the driveway of a house on Round Hill Road, just across the street from the turnoff onto Mooreland, announcing a foreclosure auction. The property, a thirty-year-old six-bedroom contemporary farmhouse on a steeply sloping 7.3-acre lot, had been appraised at $3.9 million. (A second appraisal came in slightly higher.) The owner was a longtime homebuilder who had suffered losses on a recent development project, and had defaulted on a mortgage on the house, which he'd built himself. His wife, a real-estate agent, had been trying to sell it for more than a year. It had been on the cover of the Times' "Homes" real-estate advertising supplement in October, listed at $5.295 million.
The foreclosure auction was scheduled to take place at noon on a Saturday at the end of June, after a two-hour inspection period. Allan Cramer, the lawyer who had been assigned by the court to run the auction, told me that he expected it to sell for more than $3.9 million, likely to a builder looking for a teardown. Each bidder would have to present a bank check for three hundred and ninety thousand dollars—ten per cent of the initial appraisal price. Cramer noted, a few days before the auction, that about twenty people (Beninati among them) were interested in bidding, and that several of them were Russians. Certainly, the millions had rotated the Russians' way, and in the last year they'd come to town looking to rotate a fraction of it back.
Oddly, the owner, an older, courtly gentleman, was present. He greeted visitors at the front door and showed them around, as though he'd invited them over for tea. The house was strewn with the leavings of a tag sale earlier in the week: twentieth-century obsolescence on the block—a silver tea service in the corner of an empty living room; cameras and sunglasses on the dining-room table; old skis, golf clubs, and wooden tennis racquets in the basement. The house smelled of mildew, and summoned up the Connecticut suburbs of the "Ice Storm" period, that fond and dreary time of rec rooms, Deep Purple posters, and latchkey afternoons.
As noon approached, there were no Russians. The only prospective bidders were a young couple. A few neighbors had drifted over, out of some kind of parasitically supportive curiosity. At noon, Cramer, the lawyer, announced the bank's offer—$3,905,311.89, or just a smidgen over the original appraisal—and that was that. No one topped it. The bank, Washington Mutual, the nation's largest thrift, which had so many defaults and bad debts on its books that it was in danger of going under, now owned a nice piece of property on Round Hill Road in Greenwich, Connecticut, that no one else seemed to want. The foreclosure sign was gone, but the house, as those in the know would know, was extremely for sale.
I met Beninati again in June, at Polpo. He showed up in a Bentley convertible. Since January, he had been hard to track down. He had spent a total of thirty days in the Middle East that winter and spring, raising money for a new Antares private-equity fund. (There was also a partnership with Goldman Sachs Real Estate, which was invested in Stamford and Greenwich office buildings.) "It's a classic time for overseas investment," he said, which was one way of putting it. The market had turned, and Beninati was already treating his and Cabrera's forays into residential, as opposed to commercial, real estate as an unfortunate but trifling misadventure—a deviation from their strong suit, and, no matter the outcome, a venture of insufficient scale. Tiger Woods had just won the U.S. Open on one leg, and Beninati said, "It's a good lesson in life: stay focussed." This observation gave him a chance to state, for the record, "We will not be building spec houses. It's a niche business, and it's not our niche."
In early August, Beninati took me on what he called a "windshield tour" of Antares's various projects. The conveyance, this time, was a Range Rover, and the outfit an orange checked sport coat, coral-pink pants, and light-brown suède loafers. The first stop was a four-story building on West Putnam Avenue, in the heart of Greenwich, which had previously been the headquarters of U.S.T., the tobacco company. Antares bought it last year and was converting it into offices for three hedge funds, which were paying around a hundred and fifty dollars a square foot, a Greenwich record. It was fully leased, he said. "This is the year of the distressed guys," Beninati told me, by which he meant the guys who trade in distressed securities, as opposed to, say, guys who are in distress. "Somehow, the top of the pyramid always shows up in Greenwich."
We surveyed a future trading floor—"Rent is as insignificant to these guys as the lunch bill," Beninati said—and then headed up to the roof, from which you could see Manhattan, New Rochelle, Long Island, and sections of Greenwich sloping down to the shore. Beninati pointed out a Trump high-rise going up in Stamford, a brief drive east, and next to it a crane, which he said was Antares's.
The company's Stamford project was by far its most ambitious undertaking to date, and, because of its size, at least as near to the fringes of the Antares niche as the mansions had been. Starting in 2005, in partnership with a real-estate private-equity firm in Philadelphia called Lubert-Adler, Antares had assembled more than a hundred acres in Stamford's South End. It changed the name of the neighborhood to Harbor Point and set out to develop it, over the next five to ten years, at an estimated cost of $4.5 billion, into a complex of apartment and office buildings, with a marina, a school, two hotels, grocery stores—the works. "We're building a city on the water here," Beninati said. Or, as he told the Wall Street Journal, "How do you take Greenwich and expand it? Right next door is the Stamford waterfront."
By June, a developer from Norwalk named Carl Kuehner and his firm Building and Land Technology had joined the project. People around town wondered whether Antares had lost control of Harbor Point, but Beninati dismissed this: "Carl's going to lead the vertical development. He's a superstar. It's like trading for a Derek Jeter. We're not about ego." (A spokesman for Lubert-Adler said that the firm would have no comment.)
In real estate, the only thing more important than location is optimism. Rosy projections create a kind of fog that can make it all but impossible to measure the prospects of a project, or of a privately held real-estate firm. There was a sense, among Greenwich real-estate veterans, that Antares's residential stumbles augured poorly for its grander schemes, but Beninati, in the time I spent with him, was more inclined to express relief that the company had made it through a very tough year—tough for everyone and not just for Antares. "This is the second inning of a nine-inning game," he said. He noted, on several occasions, that Antares's total internal rate of return on its various investments over the years was thirty per cent, a self-reported track record that formed the core of his pitch to potential overseas investors in Antares's next fund. The goal was three hundred million dollars. When I asked him how much he'd raised so far, he said, "We'll get to well over five hundred million."
The windshield tour wound its way into backcountry Greenwich. Beninati's radio was tuned to CNBC. The Dow was up strongly, and, the commentator noted, "There's a lot of cash on the sidelines waiting for a theme to develop." Beninati, who the previous week had predicted to me that the bottom was near, sensed vindication. Certainly, if the roadsides, with their impeccably maintained houses and grounds, were sidelines, there was a lot of cash there.
Before long, we reached the Lake Carrington Estate. We went in through one of the garages, and he led me from one giant proto-room to another, conjuring up appliances, materials, and the striations of what Antares had called, in the Lake Carrington Bible, "a life rich with stories and memories." What would this house look like in a hundred years? Through a window in the library, you could see a tiny decrepit log cabin, an old skate hut from the lake's pond days, persisting on the grounds, like a rebuke from a dead relative. ♦


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