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David Foster Wallace: One Year Later
As of today, it's been a year since David Foster Wallace died. Wallace was an important author and teacher; incidentally, the first movie adapted from his work is about to come out. n+1—yes, that n+1—has a nice remembrance.
It's a small, great story about the writer, Michael Casper, who discovers, by going through his record collection, that David Foster Wallace named some of the characters in Infinite Jest after the real-life characters associated with an uber-obscure record label at the University of Arizona, where Wallace earned his MFA. This was my favorite part; someone who knew Wallace, a US military vet turned fellow MFA candidate, talking about his interactions with the author:
Wallace, who was fresh out of his undergraduate years, was attracted to stories of experience because he thought his life was bare of detail. "Dave liked to hear me tell stories," he said. "He didn't know what to write about. He thought he had used up all he knew in Broom of the System.
"Dave used to say that his life story would be, 'David sat in the smoking room of the library'-they still had smoking rooms in those days-'trying to think of the next line to write.'"
Wallace is still gaining popularity: a website devoted to helping readers get through Infinite Jest, called Infinite Summer, popped up earlier this year. Regardless of the movie on its way, and maybe more of his writing to be unearthed—who knows? The guy was prolific.—David Foster Wallace put to paper the kind of work that'll ensure his legacy and influence over contemporary literature living on for a long, long time to come.


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New Peet's owner Benckiser to buy Caribou Coffee for $340 million
That's quite a caffeine high: Between Peet's Coffee & Tea and now Caribou Coffee Co., German conglomerate Joh. A. Benckiser will pay more than $1.3 billion this year for joe.
On Monday, Benckiser said it will shell out $340 million for Minneapolis-based Caribou. In July, Benckiser said it would spend $974 million to buy Emeryville, Calif.-based Peet's. The German giant also controls makeup maker Coty and luxury goods company Labelux, which owns shoe brand Jimmy Choo.
To acquire Caribou, an affiliate of Benckiser will pay $16 a share, a 30% premium to Caribou's closing price Friday of $12.32 a share. Caribou's stock is down slightly from Dec. 14 last year, when it was trading at $13.10 a share.
The stock has struggled to recover since May, when in the space of a few weeks it plunged 38% to roughly $10 a share from more than $16.
That slide came after Caribou lowered its forecast for 2012 sales, citing slower expansion in its single-cup business, which has been buffeted by competition from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. and Starbucks Corp.
Caribou's independent directors have unanimously approved the Benckiser deal, which would keep the company based in Minneapolis and operated as its own brand. The business, founded in 1992, has 610 coffeehouses in 22 states and 10 international markets and also sells its coffees in grocery stores, hotels and other retail channels.
Worried yet, Starbucks?
$50 for a cup of coffee? All you need is elephant poop
Starbucks goes glam with $450 stainless steel gift card
Peet's Coffee & Tea sold for nearly $1 billion, but not to Starbucks

subset: commoncrawl


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The Tale of John and Ann Bender and Their Quest for Paradise
A brilliant American financier and his wife build a lavish mansion in the jungles of Costa Rica, set up a wildlife preserve, and appear to slowly, steadily lose their minds. A spiral of handguns, angry locals, armed guards, uncut diamonds, abduction plots, and a bedroom blazing with 550 Tiffany lamps ends with a body and a compelling mystery.
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The city of San José, Costa Rica, is a sprawling gray mess that doubles as the sex-tourism capital of Latin America. Thanks to legalized prostitution, parts of downtown look like Disneyland for horny, middle-aged Australians. The urban center is a mix of shopping malls, semi-rises, and fast-food outlets that separate streets of grinding poverty from pockets of conspicuous wealth.
The Costa Rica FortressJohn and Ann Bender's haunting Costa Rica fortress.
Ann Bender to Be Tried AgainCosta Rica's justice system has overturned Ann Bender's acquittal.
Rich expats gravitate to a suburban area called Escazú, because that's where the embassies are and because misery loves company. It was there, in a high-security apartment complex for short-term diplomats, that I first met Ann Bender, Central America's most captivating accused murderess.
By this point—October 12, 2012—nearly three years had passed since the strange and bloody death of Ann's husband, John Felix Bender. John, 44 when he died, was known on Wall Street as the troubled genius who'd quit the billionaire track without explanation in 2000 and retreated to a fortified compound in the Costa Rican jungle. His end came just after midnight on January 8, 2010, in the top-floor bedroom of a circular mansion that looked like something Colonel Kurtz would have imagined in his dreams. John was naked in the bed he shared with Ann, who was then 39. The cause of death was a single pistol shot to the back of the head.
The only witness to the shooting was Ann, who'd spent a dozen years as the yin to John's yang. Together they'd built the tropical Xanadu that surrounded the mansion: a 5,000-acre wildlife preserve built on and around the highest mountain in the most forbidding rainforest in Costa Rica. They nursed each other through a shared battle with manic depression, and together, thanks to a dicey blend of extreme isolation, mental health challenges, and conflicts with enemies real and imagined, the Benders had apparently gone mad.
On the night in question, Ann was found stroking her dead husband's hand while saying, "I tried to stop it, but I couldn't." She claimed John finally made good on his long history of suicidal behavior. But investigators came to doubt her—partly because of forensic evidence that didn't appear to match Ann's story. The day I met her, she was awaiting trial on a murder charge that could put her away for 25 years.
At Ann's insistence I was driven to our designated meeting place by her security chief and all-around fixer, Jose Pizarro, whose quiet warmth and casual style—close-cropped hair, mustache, polo shirt—did nothing to diminish his standing as a man to be obeyed. Having previously served as chief of Costa Rica's civilian security force, Pizarro, 45, couldn't drive ten feet without a cop shouting, "Generale!" or "Don Pizarro!"
I complimented the tattoo on his arm. A cobra. "Sí," he said. "I did it myself."
Pizarro's English was rudimentary, but his message was clear.
"This case is—how you say?—bullshit. Bullshit from motherfuckers, sí?"
Inside the building, Pizarro escorted me up to a two-bedroom unit. "Ann feels safe here," he said. "And she don't feel safe anywhere in Costa Rica."
Several questions sprang to mind. First: Costa Rica? Weren't we in the peaceable kingdom of eco-lodges, zip-line tours, and romantic episodes of The Bachelor? No juntas, death squads, or drug cartels. No standing army. Nothing but democracy, beaches, and coffee, right?
Second: Was I heading to meet a human train wreck? Ann, during our brief e-mail correspondence—which had been initiated by her brother, who'd contacted me at the suggestion of a reporter I knew in Detroit—told me she was suffering from various physical ailments, among them Lyme disease and a potentially lethal blood clot situated just above her heart. Her afflictions and legal problems had caused her to be, by her own admission, a model of instability. There had been hospitalizations, talk of suicide, and anxious late-night e-mails hinting at dangers and conspiracies.
And then she walked in.
"First question," she said. "Can I hug you?"
Her life was no longer her own. The Costa Rica criminal court had seized her passport and ordered her to show her face on a weekly basis. The trustee cited John's death as grounds to seize her purse strings.
She was a tiny thing—five-three, 105 pounds, but in a sleek, elegant way. Black halter, black skirt, black suede boots; piercing brown eyes and unlined caramel skin; hair pulled back in a shiny ponytail. She displayed only one marker of ill health: an adhesive bandage, located just above her right clavicle, discreetly concealing a catheter that dripped small doses of morphine into her veins, to keep her pain and moods in check. "I'm not stoned," she said. "Trust me."
Despite her moods, which could be epic, Ann typically evinced a kind of cockeyed pluck, a hummingbird baseline that stood in contrast to mania. Sometimes she seemed almost too sane for her own good, displaying pointillist recall of details perhaps best forgotten. Blood splatters and bank balances, pillow talk and court testimony: she held it all at her fingertips, literally.
"Make way for the bag lady," she said.
Ann was pushing a shopping cart stuffed with legal case files, transcripts, and research materials. "When I say 'I know,' I will be careful," she said. "If it's conjecture, I will say so. Otherwise, operate under the presumption that I have proof."
Ann's stockpile pertained to a trifecta of separate but related legal proceedings. Along with the murder rap, she was a suspected jewel smuggler. Police, while investigating John's death, had found millions of dollars of "undocumented" gems inside the Bender mansion. Meantime, Ann was playing offense against a Costa Rican legal trustee she blamed for swindling her and John's fortune and sandbagging her to the point of indebted servitude.
The net effect: her life was no longer her own. The Costa Rica criminal court had seized her passport and ordered her to show her face on a weekly basis. The trustee cited John's death as grounds to seize her purse strings. Now Ann lived on a bare-bones allowance covering little beyond monthly expenses, part of her medical care, and rent on this apartment.
For more than two years, Ann said, she tried to keep her story out of the news, lest she come off as the Ugly Americana in a country she still loved. "But enough," she said. "I didn't kill my husband, and I don't deserve this. That's why I made the very careful decision to tell you everything. I'm angry. And when I'm angry, I do a lot better than when I'm sad. Sad means passive. And that's exactly how the powers that be want me."
She launched into a complicated explication of a financial matter. Then, just as swiftly, she pumped the brakes.
"Too fast?" she asked
A little.
"Where should I start?"
The beginning.
She nodded and smiled. "John," she said.
John Bender was brilliance descended from brilliance—the oldest of two sons born to Paul and Margie Bender. Paul, a noted legal scholar, held prominent posts in the Clinton administration's Justice Department and at two major law schools, Penn and Arizona State. Both parents say John's intelligence was evident very early.
"When I would take the kids grocery shopping, he'd be figuring out price per ounce," Margie says. "When he was in kindergarten, he'd say, 'Mom, you could get a better price if you bought a pound.' "
"His use of words was precocious," Paul says. "He didn't speak early. Then he started speaking in complete sentences. He never did anything until he was absolutely sure he could do it perfectly. He taught himself to read but didn't display the ability until kindergarten. He said if he'd done so earlier, he feared I would stop reading to him."
John won math competitions but lost his temper, typically with teachers or students who failed to question everything. The world's youngest individualist could play well with others, as long as they played his game; failing that he'd bolt, melt down, or both. He was a gifted percussionist who refused to audition and an A student who rejected Harvard because he hated the interview. "People were not John's favorite thing," Margie says. When he was in his early teens, John asked, "Mommy, is it alright if I don't have a birthday party?"
As a teenager, John spent his free time hanging around Penn's physics department, later enrolling as a student there. He was on track to a physics career until the summer of 1987, which he spent working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a government-sponsored facility in Northern California that works with high-tech weapons. This was during the Reagan-era arms buildup; John concluded that most of his job opportunities in physics would involve "helping out with new ways to kill people."
His future was decided the day he visited a friend at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, where he discovered options trading—a numbers game he could win or lose based solely on his talents. Almost immediately, he began buying options with his own money. He did well enough that friends staked him with funds to make a go of it.
John was Ann's ideal specimen. He had massive shoulders and thighs the size of armadillos; his face, with its strong cheekbones and wide-set features, projected a quiet intensity that could play as aloofness or arrogance.
John, then 22, was built like a football player—six-foot-three, 250 pounds—and on the floor, with its shouters and showmen, fellow traders didn't know what to make of the shy young behemoth wearing medical scrubs instead of pants. "It was the same pair for a while," says Bernie Hirsh, one of John's former floormates. Another ex-trader, Jonathan Kaplan, pegged John as a wallflower with dark shadings. "I definitely recall the social anxiety," Kaplan says. "He mostly was quiet, listening."
They both thought he was brilliant, and in time John came clean about the scrubs. "I wore them so everybody would think I was an idiot," he told Hirsh. "I wanted guys to trade with me."
At the heart of John's success was his embrace of game theory, a data-driven mode of strategic decision making based on the anticipated actions of others. Ever the contrarian, he found anomalies in the probability theories most traders viewed as gospel. He used his predictive advantage to successfully bet against the conventional wisdom.
From 1992 to 1996, John's returns were through the roof. So it was only a matter of time before his hedge fund, Amber Arbitrage, attracted some big whales, among them the famed mogul George Soros. By the time John turned 32, in 1996, he was on pace to become a billionaire by age 40.
They met in March 1998, at a place called Golden Mountain Farm. The 100-acre spread was located in the lush countryside west of Charlottesville, Virginia. John had purchased the lot two years earlier, telling friends he needed to live "somewhere green."
Ann, then 28, was a new addition to rural Virginia. Her looks and style seemed more in keeping with her birthplace, Rio de Janeiro, where she was the second of two children born to Kenneth Patton III, an executive at Chase Manhattan who worked in Rio, and his wife, Gigi. "I wouldn't say I had a platinum spoon or a gold spoon in my mouth," Ann says. "Silver-plated, perhaps."
Her youth was marked by private schools, parties, and white-sand beaches. Then, in classic expat-brat fashion, Ann moved from Rio to Lisbon to London to New York. She earned a degree from Ithaca College, did a stint working at a fine-arts college in Baltimore, and experienced a kind of epiphany. "My mood swings and bipolarity had started ruling my existence," she says. "By the time I was 22, I'd been pretty much always up and down, up and down. I don't think my move to Virginia was an incorrect one, but it was definitely something I did in a manic moment."
Ann arrived in Virginia scared, isolated, and frail. She made friends—including one who invited Ann over to meet her live-in ex-boyfriend, John Bender.
John was Ann's ideal specimen. He had massive shoulders and thighs the size of armadillos; his face, with its strong cheekbones and wide-set features, projected a quiet intensity that could play as aloofness or arrogance. Or both. Ann had always been "drawn to strong men, physically and mentally," says her mother.
"I like to feel safe," Ann says.
John, when he first met Ann, noticed her trembling hands right away. "Can I get you some water?" he asked.
"Oh, I'm just on an enormous dose of lithium," she said, in her unfiltered way. "I'm severely bipolar. So if I act strange, that's why."
John, equally unfiltered, volunteered that manic depression had colored his life, too, though to somewhat different effect. His depressions could be every bit as apocalyptic as Ann's. But where Ann never enjoyed the sparkly side of the condition, John's mania often fueled long periods of inspiration and productivity. He also suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, so it was no wonder he happily put in 20-hour workdays.
Virtually overnight, the preserve turned into a summer camp for monkeys, sloths, and parrots; every morning, in the foggy darkness before dawn, the Benders woke to the impatient squawks and stares of macaws dangling upside down from the ledge of their roof.
Ann and John, during that first day, found too many commonalities between them to count. They shared family histories best described as "complicated." Mood disorders had brought havoc to both the Pattons and the Benders. Ann's parental conflicts were mostly related to that; John's were mostly tied to his father, who sometimes questioned John's impulsive choices.
Still, both sets of parents had warmly encouraged their children's passions for things like far-flung travel and wildlife. John, as a child, had always preferred the company of nonhumans. As an adult, he kept dozens of stray cats on his farm. When people asked why, he'd reply, "Because they don't talk."
John, who was treated for a mild aneurysm in 2000, told Ann that once he racked up enough money, he would get out of trading, sinking much of his fortune into a bigger, better version of the green idyll he enjoyed in Virginia. He told Ann he'd been scouting potential locations in Costa Rica and Brazil.
"I've already been to Brazil," she pointed out.
The town of La Florida de Barú looms 2,200 feet above the Pacific, on the southwestern edge of Costa Rica—arguably the country's most undeveloped region. Prior to 1998, many of the 100 or so people who lived there lacked electricity; most residents lived in weather-beaten farmhouses or tiny cabinas accessible only by narrow dirt roads that turned to slop during the rainy season.
To live there was to submit to the primacy of the rainforest: an area so vast (hundreds of square miles), so wild (deadly pit vipers, warring monkey tribes), and so damned out there that it remained impervious to the gringo land grabbers buying up the northern parts of the country. Nobody bought into this corner of Costa Rica. Not even Costa Ricans.
Then, in 1998, along came these two rich yanquis who dropped $10 million for 5,000 acres in the middle of the highland jungle. The land was composed of separate farms that produced a meager coffee crop and a few grazing areas for cattle. The main issue was accessibility, or lack thereof, thanks to the combination of rugged mountains and a massive escarpment that cut the place off from the world.
"Perfect," John said. "This is home."
Construction took four years, with an army of 500-odd workers completing a vast compound that included four separate houses, a moat, and a helipad. The Benders gave it a name that they mistakenly thought was a species of local plant: Boracayan.
Admittedly, plopping a giant house into the rainforest doesn't sound like environmentalism, but the Benders mitigated that by making the structure eco-friendly, reforesting to undo the soil damage from coffee farming, and operating the place, first and foremost, as a refuge—the region's only large-scale private haven for endangered, abandoned, or injured animals.
Teams of armed rangers were hired to chase off poachers, who previously had used the land as a hunting ground for birds and animals whose meat fetched top dollar at local markets. Ann hired six full-time caretakers and brought in vets when needed. Virtually overnight, the preserve turned into a summer camp for monkeys, sloths, and parrots; every morning, in the foggy darkness before dawn, the Benders woke to the impatient squawks and stares of macaws dangling upside down from the ledge of their roof.
But the sight of sights was the main house, which sat atop the area's highest mountain, at roughly 2,500 feet. The interior structure took up 8,000 square feet. The total living area—the porches, sculpture garden, waterfall, reflecting pool stocked with tilapia, and more—approached 120,000 square feet.
Refuge employees hadn't seen him in weeks, except for one or two long-distance glimpses of "Don John" carrying Ann from room to room. "Gently," one of the guards recalls. "Like carrying a sick child."
The house benefited from Ann's light decorating touch and John's design master-stroke: no external walls. The only thing standing between the Benders and the elements was a series of roll-up storm doors. Whenever they were inside—cooking, taking a bath—they were outside. And whatever was outside came in, unabated: birds and lizards and insects, wind and fog. To lie in bed was to sleep in the clouds.
The master bedroom took up the entire top floor. Below, on the third floor, was an office space furnished with a large desk, a few chairs, and a computer. Despite John's "retirement," he was constitutionally unable to quit the game altogether. A satellite dish linked him to the outside world.
But every evening, just before sunset, John and Ann had a thing. They'd go to the second floor, which housed a chef's kitchen and a large dining area. They'd migrate out to a balcony that faced west. From there they could sometimes see all the way to Panama (on the left) and Nicaragua (to the right). And on the best nights, as they peered out over the Pacific, they would see an endless blue sea dotted by whales.
It was ideal. Then it all started going to hell.
The troubles began in late April 2001, on a sleepy country road just outside La Florida. John and Ann were in their Ford F-350, on their way to buy seeds, when a car boxed them in. "John Bender!" the driver shouted. "You're coming with us!"
Two men aimed guns at John's head, ordered him out of the truck, and started forcing him toward their vehicle. During the confusion, the gunmen fired two warning shots, and one of the rounds sprayed up dirt near John's legs. Ann screamed. Suddenly, the assailants identified themselves as plainclothes police and arrested John. Hours later, in the local police station, a man John had never met handed him a summons and said, "John Bender, you've been served."
The summons was related to an ugly legal battle John was engaged in at the time. It involved a New York financial manager named Joel Silverman, who had invested seed money in Amber Arbitrage in the mid-nineties. In 2001, Silverman alleged that John had verbally promised him a 25 percent cut of the company's value, which by then ran in excess of $500 million.
Silverman tried to paint John as a tax mercenary who used foreign tax shelters to hide his money from both Silverman and the U.S. government—an assertion that wasn't entirely inaccurate. John hated the IRS so much that he renounced his U.S. citizenship when he and Ann moved to Costa Rica. He claimed that Silverman was behind the abduction, stating in a deposition that he had suffered "at the hands of Silverman's agents."
Meanwhile, the Benders became unpopular among the Costa Rican locals. Some were hunters tired of getting chased by men with guns; others were just pissed that they hadn't been hired to work at Boracayan.
A security expert was blunt, telling the Benders: "My advice to you is to get the hell out of here." After spending three months in Canada, the couple returned and hired security guards with paramilitary training.
Still, Ann couldn't quite shake her fear and agitation. This triggered a cycle of manic depression, a physical breakdown, and an emergency hysterectomy a few months after the incident with the gunmen.
A second crisis materialized one night in 2002, when guards exchanged gunshots with an armed intruder who was seen heading toward the house. After the intruder fled into the night, Ann spiraled downward. And when she crashed, John did, too. "He was very upset about Ann," says Brad Glassman, a Washing-ton, D.C., attorney who handled some of John's legal business. "And when things weren't working for John, he could go off the deep end. He got very manic, very out there."
Paranoia took hold. When John wasn't searching for cures to what ailed Ann, he was fortifying the home and buying weapons. At one point, they again fled the country, this time to New Zealand for three and a half months. Again they were advised to cut their losses and move somewhere else. But no. "We chose Costa Rica," Ann says. "We were in love."
Their commitment was rewarded in 2003, when they sponsored and hosted a research team made up of botanists from the U.S., Costa Rica, and Germany. In one week, the team discovered three new species of orchid on the preserve. One belonged to a particular genus (Gongora) known to be uniquely difficult to classify or understand. The team named this species Gongora boracayanensis.
By 2008, John and Ann's legal battles had been settled, and they had invested the bulk of their liquid assets—roughly $90 million—in a Costa Rica–based trust that promised several benefits. For starters, Costa Rica now rivaled the Caymans as a shelter for foreign wealth. More important, the trust insulated the Benders from future claims against their personal assets, including Boracayan. Legally, they were now mere servants of the trust, which would be administered by a local attorney John had come to respect. The trustee's name was Juan de Dios Alvarez.
By the time John died, his closest neighbor was Paul Meyer, an American expat who owns a small tree farm in La Florida. Some nights, while driving through the area, Meyer would catch a good view of Boracayan. Mostly it was dark, he said, but the top floor of the main house—the master bedroom—would be glowing "like a clerestory window."
The glow came from one of Ann's design touches. She craved bright, colorful lights—the Benders collected Tiffany lamps—a desire that was especially strong during her dark periods, which were increasing in frequency and duration. John would do anything to improve her mood, which explained why, by 2010, the number of Tiffany lamps in their bedroom had reached 550.
Ann's health had taken a sharp turn for the worse. Now, on top of the Lyme disease and bipolar disorder, she was having trouble walking. John sent her to various specialists in San José, but nothing helped.
John started breaking down, too. Such was the extremity of his devotion to Ann, to fixing her, that he saw his failure as a failure of character. "He was always fanatical about trying to help Ann," says Pete Delisi, a stockbroker who was one of the few people John kept in touch with. "The abduction, her illness—he felt like he'd failed her."
That month, when Ann was off seeing a doctor, John sent her an e-mail in which he despaired about everything, from small health maladies to his larger mental condition:
I'm losing my fucking mind right now. First sick again and now this shit. Today is a total fucking nightmare and tomorrow will get worse. Just when I was feeling I could finally learn to be happy, now I get this and I want to be dead. I feel so fucking horrible. I want to kill everyone and then me.… I deserve to die.
Ann describes that period this way: "Every day, during the last six weeks, we would sit down and he would take all the medications we had and put them into piles and say, 'OK, when am I gonna start taking the pills?' There would be these suicide dress rehearsals. And if I went along with them, we got through the day."
John no longer answered to anyone but Ann; anxious e-mails from his parents were ignored. Refuge employees hadn't seen him in weeks, except for one or two long-distance glimpses of "Don John" carrying Ann from room to room. "Gently," one of the guards recalls. "Like carrying a sick child."
John's life was playing out in an erstwhile dream home now patrolled by no fewer than nine armed guards who were forbidden even to enter it. His personal arsenal included two licensed Ruger pistols and two illegally acquired AK-47's.
Ann says John was convinced that the water in the area could cure her. He also set up his own treatment regimen: an unknown concoction administered daily by injection.
"He was psychotic," Ann says. "He started experimenting with me. He was injecting me with certain things. And I allowed this to happen." She shrugs. "Yeah, I know," she says. "But there was nothing non-intense about John's and my relationship."
The day Ann described the fatal shooting was our fifth together. We'd spent the previous four talking around the subject. She seemed like somebody trying to crawl out of the rabbit hole with a flashlight.
When zero hour arrived, on a muggy Thursday afternoon, her manner was one of resigned acquiescence. "Will it drive you berserk if I smoke?" she asked, pointing to a pack of Dunhills. It was the first time I'd seen her with a cigarette. She perched on the windowsill for 90 minutes, like a little bird, and took us back to sundown of January 7, 2010.
"After we did our sunset thing, we played Fallout 3," she said. The video game, which John played obsessively, is part of an action series whose central character roams a post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of his missing father. "We would play for two or three hours.… When John said, 'I'm ready for bed,' I'd think, 'OK, got through another day.' So we go upstairs to our bedroom on the fourth floor.
"John was talking. He was saying some things. I don't remember exactly what he was saying.… He had a routine ritual. He had to have his pillows arranged a particular way. I was already in bed. I was falling asleep, kind of in and out, and I heard him say something like, 'You don't know how it feels to wake up with your spouse half dead next to you.' I opened my eyes and I saw—and once one has seen it, you know what it is—those two little dots that are the sight of the gun. The glow. And I realized that he had one of the handguns in his hands. And he was lying back on the pillows. And he had the gun pointed at his face as he was talking.
"She knew why she was in the hospital but was not aware of it. She knew, Yes, my husband died. But that was it—with no emotion whatsoever."
"When I saw the gun I was stunned, and my immediate reaction was to get up on my knees and try to reach for it," she went on. "The gun was loaded and cocked. I reached for the gun with both hands, and I was up on my knees. And I did put my hands on the gun. And the gun slipped through my hands. And it went off."
Ann said she ran around to John's side of the bed, saw blood dripping to the floor, picked up a two-way radio to call for help, and turned on a light. "I think I was in shock, because I was running around—which, given the state I was in, I shouldn't have been able to do. But I remember I did, like, four laps around the bed as I was waiting for somebody to come up and help me. At this point, I already knew he was dead, because I'd heard that death rattle—that last breath."
At 12:15 A.M., a guard with an estate security team known as Imperial Park heard a gunshot echo from the upper part of the house. Then he heard a woman's voice crackle over his radio: "Post Five. Help! Help! Help!"
The guard, Moises Calderon, radioed his supervisor, Osvaldo Aguilar. Five frantic minutes elapsed before Ann and Aguilar were able to give Aguilar access to the secure private elevator. Once he reached the bedroom, Aguilar found Ann kneeling, splattered in blood, and stroking her dead husband's hand. Near her on the floor lay one of John's semi-automatic pistols: a 9x19mm Ruger P95.
Aguilar took Ann down to the second floor, where she popped a tranquilizer, sat at her laptop, and e-mailed her parents. Then she called her older brother, Ken Patton IV, at his home in Michigan. Ann's first words to him: "He finally did it."
From this point on witness accounts diverge. Ann's team of lawyers and supporters describe a chaotic scene in which rubber-necking cops were texting snapshots to friends, swiping sunglasses and iPods, and grinning at her. Photos of the crime scene do show quite a crowd, but the prosecution insists everything was done by the book.
By 11 A.M., Ann was an hour inland, in a police station in the nearby city of San Isidro de General. There, she willingly gave investigators a witness statement and phoned Dr. Arturo Lizano, her psychiatrist in San José. "I need you to admit me," Ann said in a whisper. "My husband just shot himself."
That night at the hospital, both Lizano and Ann's attending physician, Dr. Hugo Villegas, were stunned by what they saw. "It was amazing how thin, pale, and weak she was," Lizano recalls. "She didn't have the strength to hold a cup of coffee."
She weighed about 80 pounds. The blood clot near her heart would require the installation of a permanent stent. Her skin was covered with open boils, welts, and infections. Most of the sores turned out to be needle marks from the injections John gave her.
"She was literally blank," Villegas says. "She had no recollection of what was going on, and she basically was unable to fathom what was going to happen tomorrow. She knew why she was in the hospital but was not aware of it. She knew, Yes, my husband died. But that was it—with no emotion whatsoever."
The status quo held for more than three months. Finally, Villegas says, "it started hitting her: My husband died. She became a lot clearer about what happened and what the consequences were. Of course, that generated its own levels of anxiety and despair."
Gradually, Ann came out of it. She called Celine Bouchacourt, an old friend from Switzerland she hadn't seen since the 1990s. "John was her whole world," Bouchacourt says. "Ann told me, 'I didn't forget about you. I didn't forget about other people. It was John. He wanted just me. And I felt that was what I had to give him.'"
Folie à deux. That was Dr. Lizano's assessment. John and Ann had dissolved into a state of shared psychosis. At a certain point, one person's delusions fed the other's, and vice versa. Madness by osmosis.
When Ann finally walked out of the hospital after six months, she couldn't go back to Boracayan, which was now a ghost house: the police had confiscated nearly all the Benders' belongings. Beyond that, Ann's two attorneys assured her that she could not be charged because of her inimputabilidad, which basically means mental incapacity. At no point, it seemed, did her lawyers claim she was innocent.
Alarmed by this, Ann turned to the man who had hired the lawyers on her behalf: Juan Alvarez, John's handpicked trustee, who assured Ann that everything would be taken care of. He said the same thing right up until August 2011, when Ann was arrested and then charged with first-degree murder.
And there it was. The prosecution's not-so-secret theory about motive was a noir classic: the lady wanted the jewels.
When this happened, Ann found herself at Alvarez's mercy. He severely restricted the flow of money to both Ann and the refuge, and security cutbacks allowed poachers to return. Alvarez justified his actions by pointing to a postnuptial agreement between John and Ann. The gist of it was that Ann had waived her right to John's property, and so Alvarez controlled everything on behalf of the refuge. Ann, however, believed that the postnuptial agreement was invalidated when they created the trust.
But then, in the months that followed, Ann caught a couple of breaks. One came in the person of Milton Jimenez, a former accountant at Alvarez's law firm. Jimenez was so distraught about Ann's plight that he quit his job and opened the firm's books to her. He alleged—both to me and in sworn court depositions—that Alvarez had bilked the trust for millions, which he used to finance a lavish lifestyle and grand real estate ventures, including a high-end equestrian center in northern Costa Rica. Alvarez had done so, Jimenez alleged, by exploiting the Benders' trust. "He believed that he was the sole heir and owner of the trust," Jimenez said in a deposition.
The second break came during a chance encounter with an attorney named Fabio Oconitrillo, who had just quit the biggest criminal-defense firm in San José and was looking to start his own practice. "I just have to ask you one question," Oconitrillo said when he spoke with Ann. "Did you at any point confess to shooting John?"
"No," she said. Oconitrillo told her to plead not guilty and started preparing a defense.
Leading the case against Ann was an enigmatic, middle-aged county prosecutor named Luis Oses. Laconic and cagey, with a prominent forehead and close-set eyes, Oses relished his street-fighter vibe. "There is very little I can talk about," he told me when we met in his office last October.
One thing he readily acknowledged: Ann had been under suspicion since the beginning. Within 72 hours of the shooting, Oses was reviewing forensic and police evaluations that cast doubt on her story. "One week after the death," Oses said, "we had sufficient evidence to consider it not a suicide but a murder."
According to the indictment, blood-pattern tests showed that the crime scene had been staged postmortem, forensic evidence indicated that the victim had been asleep when shot, and both the murder weapon and a spent shell casing had been found in incriminating locations. Firing a pistol nearly always leaves gun residue on the shooter's hand, and John's hands had tested negative for any trace.
Costa Rica eschews the jury system in favor of judicial tribunals composed of a chief justice and two associate judges. Verdicts need not be unanimous. The majority rules.
But at the heart of the case was the question of why a suicidal man would somehow shoot himself in the back of his head. The entry wound was located to the right of John's cortex, in the right inferior occipital region of his brain—which means the bullet came from the back and right. John was left-handed. Ann slept to his right. Ergo.
The indictment offered no theory about motive, but in Costa Rica as in the U.S., prosecutors are not required to establish one. Still, a failure to offer a motive tends to reduce the chance of a conviction, so it seemed likely they would come up with something.
Oses wouldn't discuss this with me, but his smile said plenty. "What I can tell you is that this case is basically divided," he said. "The murder litigation is taking place here. All the litigation concerning the precious stones that were found on the defendant's property—that case is being litigated in a separate court in San José."
And there it was. The prosecution's not-so-secret theory about motive was a noir classic: the lady wanted the jewels.
On the morning after John's death, investigators found more than 3,000 gems inside the home: diamonds, rubies, opals. Some lay neatly arranged in custom-made display cases; others sat randomly on counters or were stuffed inside backpacks. According to prosecutors, most had been brought into the country illegally: no receipts, no duties paid.
Ann told me that everything had been legally acquired and that she was working on providing all the paperwork. But for the prosecution, an implied narrative began to form. The Wall Street bubble bursts in 2008. The Benders, facing liquidity problems, hit upon a cash business big on profits and short on tax oversight. But then the femme fatale kills her poor dupe to make off with the loot.
"That's me," Ann said sarcastically the day after I met Oses, "a criminal mastermind."
She showed me a series of photos that police took while cataloging the jewelry collection. The gems included a red diamond (which the Benders bought in a $2.2 million lot with other jewels) and boxes of opals and diamonds worth $8.5 million. "The reason I bring this up," Ann said, "is how do you make this work with this theory that I killed my husband to be able to run away?" She tapped the images. "This is $15 million," she said. "I left them. Right on the counter."
The trial, conducted in Spanish, began on January 14, 2013, in the eggshell blue court-house that sits in the center of San Isidro. Team Ann had driven down from San José the previous afternoon, in a guarded caravan that included two of Ann's visiting relatives (her brother, Ken, and their grandmother, Ann Esworthy), her two closest friends (Celine Bouchacourt and Greg Fischer, a burly American she'd met in San José), and two friends of John's from the U.S., Pete Delisi and Brad Glassman. John's parents, unable to attend, sent the court statements that were supportive of Ann.
"Until now I hadn't seen John or Ann in a decade," Delisi said.
"Same for all their friends," Glassman said.
Looking weak, Ann leaned on a cane as the group descended the steps of a sunken courtroom the size of a high school chemistry lab. Criminal trials in Costa Rica proceed much as they do in the U.S. One big difference: Costa Rica eschews the jury system in favor of judicial tribunals composed of a chief justice and two associate judges. Verdicts need not be unanimous. The majority rules.
The chief judge in Ann's trial was José Luis Delgado, a square-jawed alpha male who presided with breezy authority. The two other judges scarcely said a word during the trial, which lasted six days and opened with a whiff of class warfare.
On one side was Fabio Oconitrillo, the immaculate private defender wearing an Italian-cut suit and flanked by an attractive young paralegalista carrying a zebra-skin bag and a white iPhone. Before them was a stack of case materials, neatly codified and color-coded.
"You don't kill your husband because 'Today I'm feeling bad,' " Oconitrillo said. "There is no motivation, and with no motivation there is no homicide.
Opposite them was Luis Oses, the lunchbucket civil servant wearing Dockers and a cheap dress shirt. Oses worked alone; on his table sat the single dog-eared case file he carried in an old backpack. While Oconitrillo addressed the court, he slumped in his chair, gazing blankly at points unknown.
Criminal defendants in Costa Rica are permitted to address the court during trial, and Ann spent more than an hour describing the life and death of her marriage. Her story was consistent with what she'd told me—except for the addition of one anecdote that served to illustrate the depths of John's self-destructiveness. Two months before John died, Ann said, she'd thwarted his attempt to kill himself by jumping off their open-air elevator. This was news to me.
Ann, having waived her right to remain silent, submitted to questioning. But Oses seemed indifferent to the defendant; Ann, in turn, tended to supply one-word answers. Finally, they were interrupted by Judge Delgado, who asked Ann: "Did [John] give you reasons why he wanted to commit suicide?"
"He told me that he was not a good person, that he had failed to cure me," Ann replied. "He told me he was tired of living a very hard life with everything he was facing. And he also told me that he was scared that he could harm somebody and that he was sure I would be safer without him."
That night, with everybody eager to relax after a long day in court, Ann threw on a sparkly green dress and hosted a dinner at an outdoor restaurant specializing in chimichurri and sushi. The mood was reserved euphoria, thanks to a sense that the prosecution was weak. Someone reminded Oconitrillo of a moment earlier in the day when Oses had questioned the veracity of one of his own witnesses. "Just terrible," Oconitrillo said. "But don't tell him I said that."
The twice-divorced Oconitrillo was wearing a pink Izod polo shirt and tight jeans. His paralegalista, now dressed in evening wear, nodded obligingly while he reassured Ann about Judge Delgado. "I know how he works," Oconitrillo said. "If he'd been skeptical of your testimony, he would have thrown fifty questions at you."
The relief seemed to make Ann woozy. So in stepped her friend Greg, a former bodybuilder who handled her like a China doll. I was struck with the realization that the friend was actually the boyfriend. During all the time I'd spent with Ann, hashing over the deepest intimacies of her life, she'd never mentioned anything about a relationship. Instead, she described her life as being "almost always alone and isolated."
Late that night, I expressed bafflement to my translator, Ernesto, a San José hipster wearing oversize Prada glasses. "Accept that you can only know so much," he said.
For the next three days, everything about the trial—the lawyering, the forensic work—seemed haphazard and baffling.
The best example was one of the prosecution's key witnesses, Dr. Gretchen Flores, a government pathologist who examined Ann after the shooting. Flores was there to prove that John couldn't have fired the fatal gunshot with his left hand. She made a compelling case, but only up to a point. Ann had repeatedly explained that, during the struggle for the gun, she'd jerked John's hands toward the right side of his head, at which point the gun discharged. Oconitrillo offered witnesses who testified that John handled guns ambidextrously. He asked the doctor if she'd factored this into her findings. "It would require research," Flores replied, "since that is a very different condition."
Meanwhile, evidence of John's self-destructiveness was everywhere. On the witness stand, Pete Delisi referenced three different times when John had confessed his suicidal urges, usually spurred by his inability to handle disappointment or failure. "Both my and his family knew his condition," Delisi said. "And we knew it was a matter of time until this moment would come."
At lunchtime I found Ernesto in the lobby having coffee with Oses. "The lady is going away for a very long time," Oses told Ernesto. When Ernesto challenged him, Oses smiled and said, "Just wait till Friday."
He placed a hand on Ernesto's shoulder. "I don't necessarily think the defendant is an evil woman," he said. "I think maybe it's possible to love someone too much."
On Friday, the last day of testimony, Oses began by recalling two experts he'd questioned earlier. The first was Luis Aguilar, an investigator for Costa Rica's top federal forensic unit. A placid giant, Aguilar served as ice to Oses's fire while they analyzed a series of grisly death-scene photographs. These were projected onto a large video screen. Ann couldn't look. One of John's friends nearly passed out.
There, on the left side of his bed, lay the nude, blood-stained body of John Bender. His head was tilted to the left. In the back of his head, on the right, was the fatal wound. His left wrist dangled off the left side of the bed. Beneath his left arm was a river of blood snaking down the side of the mattress. Beside the pool of blood on the floor lay John's pistol—a sight that made no sense given the location of the wound. We also saw images of the spent bullet casing, which lay behind the bed: closer to Ann's side than John's.
Next came Dr. Flores, the pathologist caught in the middle of the left-versus-right controversy. She, like Aguilar, contended that blood patterns on and around John's body were inconsistent with a self-inflicted gunshot. The same went for the positioning of John's body. "It shows no sign of struggling," Flores said, "and is consistent with what we characterize as a body in rest."
Finally, Flores discussed the significance of John's right hand, which was shown to be lying flat on a pillow tucked down by John's right waist. It was a given, she said, that John's vital functions had ceased the instant the bullet entered his brain. "It is very difficult, anatomically, to shoot in that position," Flores said. Even if John had done so, she said, his arm would have immediately fallen "en estadio inert."
"Is it possible to shoot with the right hand and end with the position in which it was found?" Oses asked.
"In my experience," Flores said, "it is not possible."
Oses, during his two-hour closing argument, prowled and paced, staring straight at Ann. "She had the mental ability to turn the lights on," he said. "After that she called on her radio. Then she was able to unlock the elevator mechanism. She was also able to come downstairs and was even capable of turning on the computer and sending e-mails."
During the 60-plus minutes before the authorities arrived at the scene, Oses said, Ann and her security team had plenty of time to wash her hands and move the gun. He held up the murder weapon and crouched, as if he were on the right side of the Benders' bed. "Our theory," Oses said, "is that Ms. Ann got close and, holding the gun sideways, fired at her husband."
He pulled the trigger: the click was loud enough to make Ann flinch. Then he gestured toward the back of the imaginary bed, where the shell casing was found.
He displayed the gun and said, "I have no approved gun permit and can, with no experience whatsoever, feed it and shoot it."
He cocked and pulled the trigger. Easily. Repeatedly.
Oses closed by reminding the court that the only Bender who tested positive for gunpowder residue was Ann. "The version of events given by Ms. Ann is false," he said. "It was Ms. Ann who shot the gun. That's why her clothes had gunpowder on them. And the elements of the crime scene prove that John Felix Bender did not shoot himself. Considering that she ended the life of her husband in what the penal code defines as a cruel manner, we ask for 25 years in prison."
Oconitrillo rose to Ann's defense. "There is not a single piece of criminalistics evidence from which we can conclude, 100 percent, that my client committed homicide," he began.
He tried to rebut many of the prosecutor's assertions. For one thing, there was ample evidence that both the crime scene and the body had been disturbed during the chaos that followed Bender's death. The crime-scene photos, it turned out, had been taken hours after investigators first found John's body. And of course Ann's clothes revealed traces of gunpowder—she'd been lying beside John when the gun went off.
"You don't kill your husband because 'Today I'm feeling bad,' " Oconitrillo said. "There is no motivation, and with no motivation there is no homicide.… Were they eccentric? Yes. It's not a crime. Were they millionaires? Not a crime, either. They lived in a four-story castle? Again, not a crime."
The final words came from Ann, who struggled to hold herself together as she blinked up at the tribunal. "I'm innocent," she said. "I did not kill John. Since this trial began, on Monday, is the first time in three years that I feel I have rights. It's been three years of hell. And I feel listened to and protected by the justice system. And I would like to thank you."
After she finished, Judge Delgado announced that the tribunal would wait until Monday to render its verdict.
On Monday, Team Ann reconvened outside the courtroom—only to be informed that the judges needed a few more hours. Everybody slouched back to the hotel to kill time in the lobby, too spooked and exhausted to manufacture small talk. While I feigned interest in e-mails, I felt a presence materialize beside me. It was Ann.
"Last night I was lying in bed," she said. "And I was thinking, What would I have done if I'd been in the prosecutor's position? I would have said, 'She's crazy, something set her off, and boom! She killed him in a fit of craziness.' But no. He goes for the whole enchilada. Which is really crazy."
Then, just as quickly, she was gone.
An hour later, at the courthouse, a line of spectators snaked through the lobby and out to the street. In court, Ann was a trembling mess as TV cameras trained on her face. Oses didn't show up, and Judge Delgado deferred to one of his colleagues, Francisco Sanchez. "Based on the evidence presented," Sanchez said, "we have unanimously decided the defendant is acquitted."
With good reason, I thought, the tribunal found the prosecution's case short on evidence, long on conjecture, and devoid of motive. The forensic analysis, Sanchez said, was based on a series of flawed or outright false assumptions.
But then, unbidden, Judge Delgado interrupted. "The tribunal does not count with certainty the criminal responsibility of the defendant," he said. "We found it possible that the defendant could have killed her husband, but also possible that it could have been a suicide. By not being certain, the tribunal found that the evidence is not conclusive as used by the D.A."
If the caveat bothered Ann, she didn't show it. She was too busy hugging her team, ducking cameramen, fumbling for a cigarette, and getting the hell out of San Isidro.
Two hours later, at a roadside diner halfway to San José, I saw her for the last time. She was exhausted; her hands trembled.
"You OK?" I asked. She started to reply, but no words came out.
I left the next morning, relieved to see the drama end. Ann's counteroffensive against her trustee, Juan Alvarez, proceeded apace. Authorities had raided his office, and a judge had replaced him with an interim trustee who was tasked with determining how much money (if any) remained in the trust. Ann seemed to be headed for a better life, probably in Florida.
And yet.
Soon came news that the jewelry-smuggling case had gone from dormant to active. Also, on February 12, a Costa Rican TV news outlet reported that prosecutors were investigating whether Ann's trial was influenced by a past business deal between her attorney and one of the judges who acquitted her. In 2003, Oconitrillo had notarized the sale of a parcel of land to none other than Judge Delgado. In response, Oconitrillo said that a ten-year-old transaction in no way suggested the sort of "close friendship" forbidden by law. Delgado had no comment.
But the biggest twist came when prosecutors announced they would appeal the acquittal. In Costa Rica, prosecutors can complain to a higher court, which may either dismiss the appeal or order a new trial. Although the latter happens only rarely, Ann can't leave the country until the appeal plays out—a process that could take six months to a year.
On March 14, Ann sent me an e-mail that read, in part:
"I've reached the point where I can't accept on a fundamental level what has happened. Everything I suspected has borne out to be true in the evidence. I can't sit here, a prisoner for an indefinite period of time, and not fight on all fronts. I'm willing to do anything to expedite ending this.
"The story is far from over," she concluded. "Nothing is over. Nothing."
Ned Zeman is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.


text:
Green-technology projects flourished at organizations of all sizes in 2008, a trend that, at first blush, might seem counterintuitive. Given the economic hardships companies are facing, you might expect that projects seemingly tied to feel-good corporate social responsibility endeavors would take a backseat to initiatives aimed at bolstering the bottom line.
However, as this year's crop of Green 15 award winners demonstrates, the rewards of green-technology projects are far from limited to noble goals such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions, reducing landfill buildup, preserving trees, and the like. Rather, organizations leveraging green tech are realizing gains in efficiency, productivity, and cost savings. These business benefits are key drivers behind many green IT projects -- sometimes overriding good environmental intentions.
[ See last year's list of Green 15 winners. | Keep abreast of green IT news and tips by subscribing to InfoWorld's free weekly Green Tech newsletter. ]
That's no reason to discount the environmental merits of any of the projects that appear in the 2009 Green 15 winners' list or any of the other countless green-tech initiatives being pursued by companies across the globe. Whatever the rationale for a green IT project, one fact is clear. The outcome of a green-tech project is generally win-win: a healthier planet and a healthier bottom line.
This year's winners are, in alphabetical order:
- Aramark cuts print waste with better devices, software
- Burt's Bees undergoes green IT makeover
- California Academy of Sciences reaps efficiencies through network convergence
- California State University East Bay turns to green tech to fend off power crisis
- Con-way Freight slashes annual fuel consumption by 4.9 million gallons
- Digital Realty Trust sets new standard for green datacenter design
- GlaxoSmithKline sheds nearly 6 tons of e-waste
- HD Supply achieves ecodreams through array of green-tech initiatives
- Intel finds significant savings by pushing the limits of free cooling
- Niagara Catholic School District turns to e-docs to cut paper and transport costs
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory proves just how smart a smart grid can be
- Procter & Gamble finds a green alternative to travel in telepresence
- Raytheon reaps green success from sowing sustainability seeds
- U.S. Navy enlists virtualization to supercharge sprawling intranet
- U.S. Postal Service taps optimization software to slash transportation costs


text:
Mediterranean Tuna Wreath
2 packages (8 ounces each) reduced-fat refrigerated crescent rolls
1 can (6 ounces) water-packed tuna, drained and flaked
3/4 cup finely chopped red bell pepper
1 can (14 ounces) artichoke hearts in water, drained, divided
1 can (3 1/4 ounces) pitted ripe olives, drained and sliced
1 lemon
1 package (4 ounces) crumbled feta cheese
1 garlic clove, pressed
1 1/2 teaspoons Italian Seasoning Mix, divided
1 egg, separated
1. Preheat oven to 375�F. Unroll crescent dough; separate into 16 triangles.
With wide ends of triangles toward the center, arrange 8 triangles in a circle
on a large round pizza stone. Corners of wide ends will touch and points will
extend 1 inch beyond edge of baking stone. Arrange remaining 8 triangles in
center, matching wide ends. Seal seams. (Points will overlap in center; do not
2. Drain tuna. Finely chop bell pepper. Chop artichoke hearts. Slice olives.
Using a lemon zester, zest lemon to measure 1 tablespoon zest. In a bowl,
combine tuna, bell pepper, artichoke hearts, olives, lemon zest, feta cheese,
garlic and 1 teaspoon of the seasoning mix; mix well. Using a scoop, scoop
filling over seams of dough, forming a circle.
3. Beginning in center, lift one dough triangle across filling towards the
outside. Next, lift one triangle from the outside across the length of the
filling. Continue alternating triangles, slightly overlapping to form wreath.
Tuck last end under first. Separate egg. (Discard yolk or set aside for another
use.) Add remaining seasoning mix to egg white; beat lightly. Brush over dough.
Bake 35-40 minutes or until golden brown. Cut and serve.
Yield: 10 servings or 20 sample servings
Nutrients per serving: Calories 250, Total Fat 12 g, Saturated Fat 2 g,
Cholesterol 15 mg, Carbohydrate 24 g, Protein 11 g, Sodium 650 mg, Fiber 2 g
Cook's Tip: 1 can (6 ounces) chunk white chicken, drained and flaked, can be
substituted for the tuna, if desired.
Italian seasoning can be substituted for the Italian Seasoning Mix, if desired.
Source: Pampered Chef
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text:
Recently Nate Hooper had the pleasure of visiting the Amsterdam studio of Dutch graphic designer, illustrator, artist, art director, clothing company owner Parra.
I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...
I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.
It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.
Hit me up if you have any ECommerce related questions. - trippe.io


text:
Cindy Sheehan, who gained international fame when she camped outside President Bush's ranch in an anti-war protest, plans to pitch her tent again, Venezuela's president said Sunday as he urged activists worldwide to help bring down "the U.S. empire."
Hugo Chavez, an arm around Sheehan's shoulders, told a group of activists that she had told him "she is going to put up her tent again in front of Mr. Danger's ranch" in April.
In some of his strongest recent comments aimed at Washington, Chavez condemned the Bush administration and said his audience should work toward ending U.S. dominance.
"Enough already with the imperialist aggression!" Chavez said, listing countries from Panama to Iraq where the U.S. military has intervened. "Down with the U.S. empire! It must be said, in the entire world: Down with the empire!"
Chavez said Sheehan had invited him to join her April protest at Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch. Sheehan, whose 24-year-old soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, held a vigil outside Bush's ranch during the president's vacation in August, attracting some 12,000 peace activists and reinvigorating the national anti-war movement.
"Maybe I'll put up my tent also," Chavez said, to applause from an audience invited to his weekly broadcast on the final day of the World Social Forum, an annual gathering of anti-war and anti-globalization activists.
Chavez said his government would help protest the war in Iraq by supporting a drive to gather petitions and delivering them to the U.S. Embassy in Caracas. Chavez, who before the war in Iraq had friendly relations with Saddam Hussein, has been a frequent and strident critic of the war.
Sheehan thanked Chavez for "supporting life and peace." She said earlier that she was impressed by his sincerity when they met privately on Saturday.
"He said, 'Why don't I run for president?"' she said. "I just laughed."
Sheehan also noted that singer and activist Harry Belafonte recently called Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world," and said, "I agree with him. George Bush is responsible for killing tens of thousands of innocent people."
Sheehan, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., said Saturday that she is strongly considering challenging Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California because the lawmaker will not support calls to immediately bring the troops home.
Sheehan, 48, who was visiting Venezuela for the six-day forum, said running in the Democratic primary in June would help "bring attention to all the peace candidates in the country." She said she will decide whether to run after talking with her three adult children in California.
Feinstein's campaign manager, Kam Kuwata, said the senator did not support Bush and felt she had been misled by his administration. But with troops committed, Feinstein believes immediate withdrawal is unworkable, he said.
"Senator Feinstein's position is, 'Let's work toward quickly turning over the defense of Iraq to Iraqis so that we can bring the troops home as soon as possible,"' Kuwata said in an interview Saturday.
Also joining Chavez on Sunday was Elma Beatriz Rosado, the widow of slain Puerto Rican nationalist Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Holding back tears as she stood at Chavez's side, Rosado accused the United States of killing her husband, a 72-year-old militant independence activist.
Rios was slain in a September FBI raid on a Puerto Rican farmhouse where he was living in hiding while being wanted for the 1983 robbery of $7.2 million from a Wells Fargo armored truck depot in Connecticut — funds intended for the independence cause.
"They murdered him," Chavez said. "Viva Filiberto!... Let's follow his example."


text:
[nggallery id=863]
Even though it is possible Evelyn and Chad have already gotten back together in some shape, form or fashion, Evelyn has decided that instead of being an advocate for domestic violence, she will just get back to doing what she does best.
Throwing bottles, drinking, cursing and taking photos.
Technically this is how she worded it.
"I was so happy to FINALLY get back to work after taking a hiatus that seemed like FOREVER!"
You can see some of the behind the scenes photos from the shoot above courtesy of The YBF.


text:
"Atlanta Academy has great teachers, smaller class sizes, and more individualized attention – making it a wonderful place for our family."
- Home
- Testimonials
The Jarboe Family
"We come from a family of educators and the small class size was a key factor is choosing Atlanta Academy. We have been here four years and our expectations have been exceeded! The education is top notch, the teachers and administration are wonderful, and the school community feels like family."
The Lieberman Family – Student
"I love Atlanta Academy for so many reasons. First of all, I love the small classes. I become extremely stressed because of large amounts of people, and the small classes not only keep me relaxed, but they give everyone a chance to be acknowledged by the teacher and given the chance to clear up any questions. There are also so many fun things we do. We have a school coop with chickens, a greenhouse, and some amazing festivals and a lot of other entertainment. I'm glad I chose Atlanta Academy for my school and I hope to have an amazing next few years at the school. "
The Saldana Family
"Atlanta Academy offers just the right size classes for our children. They are known and paid close attention to each and every day. It has a family atmosphere where all teachers are watching out for the children and it is a very safe, comforting feeling for our family. After 3 years at the school, we have not run into a situation that negatively impacted our experience here. The children have a very healthy respect for all authority at the school and their daily routine runs like a well oiled machine. Any issues are dealt with timely and with appropriate action. All feedback is welcome and we always feel comfortable asking questions or making suggestions. Parent involvement is welcome and encouraged, and we all participate in activities offered. And most importantly for us, God is guiding the faculty and direction of this school without a doubt. We felt that from the moment we walked in with such polite 8th graders opening the door for us."
The Guzman Family
"Atlanta Academy is filled with fantastic teachers and administration, and the small school environment allows them to know your student and your family very well. The curriculum is challenging and rigorous, yet with the caring teachers, it is tailored to meet your students learning needs. They can provide the individualized learning that your child needs because they are capable, equipped and supported by the administration to make appropriate accommodations. It's an amazing school for families looking for an encouraging community for both students and parents."
The Parker Family
"Atlanta Academy is an amazing school and community. We have been so happy and thankful to be a part of it for the last five years. Our girls have grown, matured, learned and had opportunities they would never had at any other school. This community provides them a safe place to call home while asking them to try, to put themselves out there, and to be brave while knowing they have the entire school behind them pushing them to succeed."
The Kindred Family
"This is a school that will genuinely welcome your entire family with open arms, provide your child with all the necessary tools to succeed, and make your child feel like the most important student in the room. Most of all, each teacher will go the extra mile when your child needs them most, not just from a high level of education and creative academic structure, but also a uniqueness of feeling like 'family' – each member of the Atlanta Academy genuinely cares about the success of your child. We've been blessed to be a part of the Atlanta Academy for many years for our boys – the Atlanta Academy will always be family to us!"


text:
|*June 17 -23
in the Last Days
Read for This Week's Study:
|Joel 2:28, 29; John 1:9; Acts 2:14-24; Acts 3:19, 20; James 5:7; Rev. 14:6-16; 18:1-5.
Memory Text:
| "Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the
way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the
It was by the confession and forsaking of sin, by earnest prayer and consecration of themselves to God, that the early disciples prepared for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. The same work, only in greater degree, must be done now. Then the human agent had only to ask for the blessing, and wait for the Lord to perfect the work concerning him. It is God who began the work, and he will finish His work, making man complete in Jesus Christ. But there must be no neglect of the grace represented by the former rain. Only those who are living up to the light they have will receive greater light."Ellen G. White, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Mar. 2, 1897.
What a message is in those words as we end this quarter's study, focusing now on the Holy Spirit in the last days. We'll look at what the Holy Spirit will do in order to prepare a people to spread this gospel and to stand in the final crisis.
*Study this week's lesson to prepare for Sabbath, June 24.
|June 18
The Spirit in the Last Days
"And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit" (Joel 2:28, 29).
Study the above verses, along with Acts 2:14-24. What message do you see here that's applicable to us? In what ways, if any, have we, today, seen this prophecy fulfilled?
The words of Joel here are some of the most exciting in all Scripture. They point to a time when the Holy Spirit in a mighty way will be poured out just as it was at Pentecost. This outpouring, however, doesn't happen in a vacuum; it's all part of a single purpose: to bring people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. This point becomes especially clear in Peter's Pentecost speech, in which, after quoting those verses from Joel, he begins preaching about Jesus Christ (Acts 2:22-24).
Joel 2:28 says, too, that He will pour out His Spirit upon "all flesh." This doesn't mean all flesh will respond with the surrender and humility needed to receive the blessing of the Spirit. Through the action of the Holy Spirit the Lord is able to touch every soul with conviction. The Bible says: "The true light [Jesus] that enlightens every man was coming into the world" (John 1:9, RSV); unfortunately, though, not "every man" responds as God would like.
The good news is that all who do respond, all who will make that surrender, have the promise of eternal life in Christ.
|What evidence do you see of the influence of the Holy Spirit upon those who aren't Christians? What can we do, as Christians, to cooperate with the Spirit in order to help these people see Jesus in a fuller light?
|June 19
Pentecost and the Last Days
As we saw yesterday, Joel speaks of an abundant outpouring of God's Spirit upon His people, of young men seeing visions, old men dreaming dreams, and sons and daughters prophesying (Joel 2:28, 29). He even sets the time frame for this experience. There will be cosmic phenomena with the sun being darkened and the moon turned into blood. Disasters on earth are described cryptically as "blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke" (vs. 30). All this is to precede immediately "the great and the terrible day of the Lord" (vs. 31).
Peter, along with other early Christian believers, viewed Christ's first coming as the last days (1 Cor. 10:11, Heb. 1:2, 9:26, 1 Pet. 1:20) and applied Joel's prophecy to the Pentecost experience (Acts 2:16-21), linking the gift of prophecy to the gift of tongues.
Read Joel 2:23, which precedes his words about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. What imagery does he use?
Joel's prophecy of the coming prophetic gift is set in the context of the early and latter rains (Joel 2:23-32). The refreshing, life-giving fall rains, which enabled the seed to sprout and take root, are called the early rain. The spring rain, which brought the grain to maturity and readiness for harvest, is called the latter rain. This phenomenon in the Palestinian agricultural cycle is a symbol of the spiritual refreshing God gives to His people through His Spirit (Hos. 6:3). Peter, fully believing he was living in the last days, experienced the early rain. The latter rain is yet to come upon God's people at the end of time.
What are we to understand by the meaning of the "latter rain"?
"Near the close of earth's harvest, a special bestowal of spiritual grace is promised to prepare the church for the coming of the Son of man. This outpouring of the Spirit is likened to the falling of the latter rain."Ellen G. White, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 55.
|What is your own experience with the "early rain"? Why is it so important to receive the early rain in order to be prepared to receive the "latter rain"? What does it mean "to receive" either rain? What changes do we need to make in our own lives now in order to be ready for the latter rain?
|June 20
The Latter Rain
"Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain" (James 5: 7).
In the context of what we've read so far, how do you understand the words of James above? How does this text show us our utter dependence upon a source outside of ourselves for spiritual power?
As we saw yesterday, Joel uttered his prophecy in the context of "rain." The terms rain, early rain, and latter rain were borrowed by the Hebrew writers in the context of their agricultural seasons. The former, or early, rain fell in the seventh month, usually just after the Feast of Tabernacles. This corresponds to our autumn, or to September-October. For the Israelites, it was the season for the plowing of the fields and the sowing of barley and wheat. The latter rain fell shortly before the grain harvest in March and early April. This rain enabled the grain to fill out and ripen for harvest.
These terms are used by the Bible writers to symbolize great periods of spiritual refreshing in connection with the preaching of the gospel. The important point is that for the harvest to be reaped, there was the need of both rains.
Look up these few verses: How do they help us understand the significance of the rain imagery, especially in the context of our mission as a church? Matt. 9:37, 13:30, Rev. 14:15.
As mentioned earlier, the purpose of the spiritual "latter rain" is much like the natural one: It's to prepare the harvest for reaping. What a powerful image regarding the work the Holy Spirit is to do among His people, for they are the ones God has used to preach the gospel message to the world. "While we cherish the blessing of the early rain, we must not, on the other hand, lose sight of the fact that without the latter rain, to fill out the ears and ripen the grain, the harvest will not be ready for the sickle, and the labor of the sower will have been in vain. Divine grace is needed at the beginning, divine grace at every step of advance, and divine grace alone can complete the work."Ellen G. White, The Faith 1 Live By, p. 334.
|June 21
The Refreshing
"Repent therefore, and turn again [be converted, KJV], that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus" (Acts 3:19, 20, RSV).
Look at this incredible statement by Peter. Notice how closely he links repentance and conversion with the "times of refreshing." In other words, what happens here in our hearts is linked with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We must never forget the reality of this close tie between heaven and earth.
What three great last-day events is Peter referring to in the text above? What does he say that shows these are, indeed, last-day events?
Peter's statement contains a most definite temporal element. Under inspiration, Peter is referring to great events of earth's last daysthe mighty outpouring of God's Spirit and the final blotting out of the sins of the righteouswhich are tied to a third climactic event, the second advent of Christ.
Read Revelation 14:6-16. Why do we know that these are events that immediately precede the Second Coming? How do we see in these verses evidences of a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit?
All through these texts we see evidence of the Holy Spirit working through His people, not only to prepare them to preach the "everlasting gospel" (vs. 6) to the world, not only to warn others against worshiping "the beast" (vs. 9), but also to prepare them to stand as those who "keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus" (vs. 12). If this isn't the work of the Holy Spirit among us, nothing is.
|As you look at the church today, why is it so evident that we will need a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit in order for it to do its work? Why is it so evident that you need it, as well?
|June 22
The Loud Cry
Though we saw at Pentecost a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we believe that in the last days we will see something even more powerful. The whole world needs to know the truth about the Lord Jesus in the context of the three angels of Revelation 14, as opposed to the false doctrines of Babylon that lead to the mark of the beast. And, quite simply, who else, at this point, but Seventh-day Adventists are preaching this distinctive message? And yet, what Adventist, looking at the task ahead, believes we can do it without a supernatural outpouring of the Holy Spirit?
Thus, we believe that in the very end the Holy Spirit will bring His gifts to the church in a remarkable way. He will have to; otherwise, final events, as portrayed in prophecy, will never happen.
Read Revelation 18:1-5. What evidence do we find in these verses that shows what the results of this outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church will be?
Thus, in the very last days, the consummation of the Cross and the work of the Cross will reach fruition. All the dead in Christ will rise (1 Thess. 4:16), and together with those who are alive, we all will be taken off this sinful planet, once and for all (vs. 17). Thus, at the end, we'll see the climactic manifestation of the Holy Spirit as He works on the hearts, not only of those who are called to proclaim this message but on those who receive it and who stand with usnot only in the last days against the forces of Babylonbut on the sea of glass in heaven, as well (Rev. 15:1-5).
What a gift we've been given in the Holy Spirit!
Write out a prayer thanking the Lord for the Holy Spirit and asking for the preparation in your own heart that will be needed in order for you to stay faithful, not only during the final crisis but even now.
|June 23
Further Study:
|Ellen G. White, Education, pp.
35-38; Prophets and Kings, pp.
238-243; The Acts of the Apostles,
pp. 578,
593-595; Testimonies for the Church,
vol. 8, pp. 21-23; Testimonies
to Ministers and Gospel Workers, pp.
"We must not wait for the latter rain. It is coming upon all who will recognize and appropriate the dew and showers of grace that fall upon us. When we gather up the fragments of light, when we appreciate the sure mercies of God, who loves to have us trust Him, then every promise will be fulfilled."Ellen G. White Comments, The SDA Bible Commentary, vol. 7, p. 984.
"The convocations of the church, as in camp meetings, the assemblies of the home church, and all occasions where there is personal labor for souls, are God's appointed opportunities for giving the early and the latter rain."Ellen G. White, Testimonies to Ministers and Gospel Workers, p. 508.
Discussion Questions:
| As a class, talk about world affairs and trends as they
relate to our understanding of last-day events. Though we mustn't be sensational,
what evidence do we see that points to the final crisis? As a class, what
things can you do to help your local church understand the times we are living
in and the need to prepare to receive the latter rain?
As a class, think about the work of the Holy Spirit and ask this question: Of all the gifts of the Holy Spirit and of all the work He does for the church, what's the one thing you believe your local church needs the most? Discuss.
What did you learn from this quarter's study that has impacted your life the most? What have you learned that impresses upon you the need for personal change? If the study didn't touch on some things you wished were touched on, why not pursue studies in that area on your own?
|I N S I D E Story
|From Pit to Pastorate
Charlotte Ishkanian
Jacob Gore was a Protestant pastor in southern Sudan when he was arrested for teaching children Christian songs in an area where Christianity is forbidden. He was tossed into a deep pit with 71 other condemned men. Food and water were dropped to them, and the only ones allowed out of the pit were never seen or heard from again.
Gore shared his faith in Jesus with his fellow prisoners, who eagerly clung to it as their only hope.
After four months Gore was released from the pit and warned never to preach in that area again. He escaped to an area where he could preach freely, and was assigned to pastor seven churches in a new area. When he arrived he found Adventist lay workers holding Bible seminars. He wanted to attend, but he did not dare. However, he encouraged some of his church members to go and report what they were hearing.
Gore noticed some strong differences between what he believed and what the Adventists taught. He went to visit one of the lay pastors to discuss the Bible. Gore asked many questions, and accepted the lay worker's offer of Bible studies. Eagerly he dug deeper into the Bible.
Gore took his time to sort out what he believed, praying that God would help him know what was the truth. He realized that he had to follow his conscience. He called his congregations together for a meeting.
"My children," he said, "I have discovered that our church does not teach everything the Bible teaches. We have always worshiped on Sunday, but the Bible clearly states that God's true Sabbath has never changed. I have baptized people by sprinkling them with water, but the Bible says we should baptize by immersion."
The church members sat stunned as he explained other differences in beliefs. Then he asked the members to pray and decide what they would do. He returned to his home. Gore hoped that some of the members would follow him, but the next day the leaders came to his house and took everything. "You bought this with money we paid you," they said as they carried away his furniture and clothes, even his food. In the end only four of his former members asked to study the Bible with him. All four eventually were baptized.
Gore's wife, in spite of threats by church members, decided to follow her husband into the Adventist Church.
Gore found himself without a job. After his baptism, the Adventist Church assigned him to work with a senior pastor and continue studying the Bible with him. Then he spent a year holding evangelistic meetings in which 177 were baptized. Today he is a Gospel Outreach volunteer raising up a church in Morobo, southern Sudan. Already he has gathered a small congregation of believers, including another Protestant pastor.
"The people of southern Sudan have been forced to move from place to place over the past 30 or more years. They have heard of Adventists, and they want to know what Adventists believe. These people need a strong faith to hold on to. I am happy that I have found the truth, so I can give them the truth."
Jacob Gore is a gospel evangelist serving in Morobo, southern Sudan. Charlotte Ishkanian is editor of Mission.
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text:
1- Click Ready Secured HFSExplorer on Windows 2016
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text:
Philip Zimmermann
PGP Marks 10th Anniversary
5 June 2001 - For a signed version of this announcement click here
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of PGP 1.0.
It was on this day in 1991 that I sent the first release of PGP to a couple of my friends for uploading to the Internet. First, I sent it to Allan Hoeltje, who posted it to Peacenet, an ISP that specialized in grassroots political organizations, mainly in the peace movement. Peacenet was accessible to political activists all over the world. Then, I uploaded it to Kelly Goen, who proceeded to upload it to a Usenet newsgroup that specialized in distributing source code. At my request, he marked the Usenet posting as "US only". Kelly also uploaded it to many BBS systems around the country. I don't recall if the postings to the Internet began on June 5th or 6th.
It may be surprising to some that back in 1991, I did not yet know enough about Usenet newsgroups to realize that a "US only" tag was merely an advisory tag that had little real effect on how Usenet propagated newsgroup postings. I thought it actually controlled how Usenet routed the posting. But back then, I had no clue how to post anything on a newsgroup, and didn't even have a clear idea what a newsgroup was.
It was a hard road to get to the release of PGP. I missed five mortgage payments developing the software in the first half of 1991. To add to the stress, a week before PGP's first release, I discovered the existence of another email encryption standard called Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM), which was backed by several big companies, as well as RSA Data Security. I didn't like PEM's design, for several reasons. PEM used 56-bit DES to encrypt messages, which I did not regard as strong cryptography. Also, PEM absolutely required every message to be signed, and revealed the signature outside the encryption envelope, so that the message did not have to be decrypted to reveal who signed it. Nonetheless, I was distressed to learn of the existence of PEM only one week before PGP's release. How could I be so out of touch to fail to notice something as important as PEM? I guess I just had my head down too long, writing code. I fully expected PEM to crush PGP, and even briefly considered not releasing PGP, since it might be futile in the face of PEM and its powerful backers. But I decided to press ahead, since I had come this far already, and besides, I knew that my design was better aligned with protecting the privacy of users.
After releasing PGP, I immediately diverted my attention back to consulting work, to try to get caught up on my mortgage payments. I thought I could just release PGP 1.0 for MSDOS, and leave it alone for awhile, and let people play with it. I thought I could get back to it later, at my leisure. Little did I realize what a feeding frenzy PGP would set off. Apparently, there was a lot of pent-up demand for a tool like this. Volunteers from around the world were clamoring to help me port it to other platforms, add enhancements, and generally promote it. I did have to go back to work on paying gigs, but PGP continued to demand my time, pulled along by public enthusiasm.
I assembled a team of volunteer engineers from around the world. They ported PGP to almost every platform (except for the Mac, which turned out to be harder). They translated PGP into foreign languages. And I started designing the PGP trust model, which I did not have time to finish in the first release. Fifteen months later, in September 1992, we released PGP 2.0, for MSDOS, several flavors of Unix, Commodore Amiga, Atari, and maybe a few other platforms, and in about ten foreign languages. PGP 2.0 had the now-famous PGP trust model, essentially in its present form.
It was shortly after PGP 2.0's release that US Customs took an interest in the case. Little did they realize that they would help propel PGP's popularity, helping to ignite a controversy that would eventually lead to the demise of the US export restrictions on strong cryptography.
Today, PGP remains just about the only way anyone encrypts their email. And now there are a dozen companies developing products that use the OpenPGP standard, all members of the OpenPGP Alliance, at http://www.openpgp.org.
What a decade it has been.
-Philip Zimmermann


text:
Moffat Inc.—specializing in the design, manufacture, distribution, and after-sales support of commercial convection ovens, proofers, and holding cabinets—is pleased to announce the appointment of Peter Carroll as executive chef for Moffat US, effective immediately.
Carroll will be responsible for executive chef services with respect to new product development, new customer development, and ongoing product and customer support, with a focus on national accounts.
"Peter has the technical experience to guide Moffat's newest concepts that go beyond standard requirements and create high-performance, cost-effective, energy-efficient oven products," says PJ Loy, vice president of sales, Moffat.
Carroll has more than 30 years of experience in the foodservice industry, most recently as an executive chef for International Traders, a dedicated master distributor in the chain restaurant industry.
In this position, he assisted with R&D and was responsible for menu development and ideation showings for all food products from vendors within the ITI system. Prior to that, he was with Ali Group North America for nine years in various roles


text:
Then the most beautiful sound in the world came along—the final bell. I grabbed my bag and rushed out the door to my locker, where I ran into Reagan O'Hara, Nick's gorgeous ex-girlfriend. "Watch where you're going, spaz," she said, glaring at me. "Exactly where are you in such a hurry to get to anyway? I can't imagine that you'd have plans."
I could have said, "Off to meet my boyfriend, you know, the guy you used to badmouth me to," but no, I took the high road and said, "Excuse me," and kept going.
"Whatever, loser," she said. My shoulders tensed. As I tried to ignore her and tell myself it was just jealousy, I couldn't pretend that her words didn't hurt. I had been considered kind of a loser at my old school in Goodacre. I had had one super close best friend who I did everything with, Lexi Irvin, and when she moved to Dallas, it was as if I had been abandoned. So yeah, I had felt like a complete loser in Goodacre, but now I was here in Grand Haven, with new friends and a new positive outlook on life. I had a new best friend, Charlotte Lidstrom, and had become friends with former teen TV star Simone Hendrickson and her best friend, Asia Milanowski.
It could be intimidating hanging out with Simone since she was popular, pretty, and famous. Sometimes I felt invisible next to her, and unfortunately, hanging with Simone sometimes meant spending time with people like Reagan or Simone's other friends, Pilar Ito and Morgan Kemp. Morgan was the ultimate mean girl. I swear, even if she told me she loved my outfit and was hooked up to a lie detector test saying she was telling the truth, I still wouldn't want to risk it and I'd go home and change. But today I was not going to worry about Morgan, Reagan, or any of that. I was just going to focus on my first date with Nick.
Until I rounded the corner and ran into Simone, who was waiting for me at my locker with Morgan and Pilar.
"Hey, Hadley," Simone said. "Wanted to return your lucky bracelet. Let's hope it helped me pass my math test."
She handed me my heart and natural stone charm bracelet and I slid it on my wrist. Morgan looked down at my hands and made a face.
"Why are you wearing such dark nail polish?" she asked me.
My face got warm. "I thought the color was pretty when I saw it in the store. I've never seen this shade of purple with so much blue in it."
"Guys aren't into weird nail polish colors," Morgan said as she fluffed her long curly blonde hair with her red polished fingers.
Great, so even my nail polish was wrong. Could I do anything right?
"Here comes Nick," Pilar said, and the girls all got quiet.
"Hey, guys," he said, coming up and nodding at them. I started to curl my fingers under so he wouldn't notice my dark polish—the color that up until a few minutes ago I thought was unique and beautiful was now making me feel like a little oddball.
"Cool color," Nick said.
"I like the blue. It's very you," he said, and then he reached over and intertwined his fingers with mine. Take that, you dark nail polish haters.
"So are we all heading over to Scoops together?" he asked.
Simone played with a strand of her long blonde hair, but didn't say a thing.
"Yup, we thought we'd go over with you guys," Morgan said, smiling up at him with her gleaming white teeth.
Wait, what? No, not cool. This was our first date and I knew I'd feel awkward talking to him around a group—a group judging me on what I said, did, and apparently even the colors I wore.
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text:
Orion Parachutes Successfully Complete NASA Testing
By Space Coast Daily // December 21, 2012
Spacecraft On Track For 2014 Flight
BREVARD COUNTY • KENNEDY SPAXCE CENTER, FLORIDA – NASA has completed the latest in a series of parachute tests for its Orion spacecraft Thursday at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in southwestern Arizona, marking another step toward a first flight test in 2014.
The test verified Orion can land safely even if one of its two drogue parachutes does not open during descent.
Orion will take humans farther into space than ever before, but one of the most challenging things the multipurpose vehicle will do is bring its crew home safely. Because it will return from greater distances, Orion will reenter the Earth's atmosphere at speeds of more than 20,000 mph.
After re-entry, the parachutes are all that will lower the capsule carrying astronauts back to Earth.
"The mockup vehicle landed safely in the desert and everything went as planned," said Chris Johnson, a NASA project manager for Orion's parachute assembly system. "We designed the parachute system so nothing will go wrong, but plan and test as though something will so we can make sure Orion is the safest vehicle ever to take humans to space."
Orion uses five parachutes. Three are main parachutes measuring 116 feet wide and two are drogue parachutes measuring 23 feet wide. The 21,000-pound capsule needs only two main parachutes and one drogue. The extra two provide a backup in case one of the primary parachutes fails.
To verify Orion could land safely with only one drogue parachute, engineers dropped a spacecraft mockup from a plane 25,000 feet above the Arizona desert and simulated a failure of one of the drogues.
About 30 seconds into the mockup's fall, the second drogue parachute opened and slowed the mockup down enough for the three main parachutes to take over the descent.
The next Orion parachute test is scheduled for February and will simulate a failure of one of the three main parachutes.
In 2014, an uncrewed Orion spacecraft will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Exploration Flight Test-1. The spacecraft will travel 3,600 miles above Earth's surface.
This is 15 times farther than the International Space Station's orbit and farther than any spacecraft designed to carry humans has gone in more than 40 years.
The main flight objective is to test Orion's heat shield performance at speeds generated during a return from deep space.