For years, Paul Rudd has been coming on Conan's various late-night talk shows to promote his various films, and for years he's been showing the exact same clip: The "infamous wheelchair scene" from 1988's infamous E.T.-ripoff-slash-feature-length-McDonald's-commercial, Mac and Me.

Now, finally, someone has pieced together all of Paul Rudd's Conan appearances so that the full glory of the gag can be witnessed.

Actually, whoever compiled this supercut forgot to include the best appearance for some reason. Click here to see it.

[H/T: Reddit]

You were never going to win the lottery. The odds were farcically low. But just in case you were keeping hope alive, we must now inform you: your odds have gotten much, much worse.

We're talking about the Mega Millions here. The big one, the national one, the one that, along with Powerball, advertises the gaudy nine-figure jackpots. David Lazarus notes today that recently—perhaps while you were daydreaming about what to buy with your Mega Millions winnings—the Mega Millions people made it much less likely that will ever win. From the LA Times:

Your odds of winning the jackpot used to be 1 in 176 million. As of Oct. 22, those odds changed to 1 in 259 million.

That's because you used to have to pick six numbers from 1 to 56. Now you have to pick them from 1 through 75.

The most egregious aspect of this is the quote that Lazarus got from the Mega Millions spokesperson: "We can expect to see larger jackpots and greater excitement. Yet one very important thing won't change. The price of a Mega Millions ticket will remain $1."

The chance of your ticket being worth anything are much lower. Yet its price will not decrease. And you, the public, are so hapless that the lottery people are using this drawback as a selling point.

Do not buy lottery tickets. You are only encouraging financial predators if you do.

[Photo: AP]

To make sure everyone buys everyone the best gifts ever, this year Gawker has divided the universe of potential gift recipients into readers of our Gawker Media brother and sister sites. Previously: Kotaku Gift Guide; Jezebel Gift Guide; Deadspin Edition; Lifehacker Gift Guide.

You know what's fucking great about buying sci-fi geeks presents? They are specific, detail-oriented, and they like cheapish material things that will not break your bank. You're not going to get a bunch of vague, "Oh, I don't know" answers from geeks when you ask what they want. They know.

Because there's a slippery slope between watching Alien on DVD to watching Alien on Blu-ray to straining your eyes and hand while paining a galaxy's worth of small, metal extra-terrestrial creatures that will test yet another slippery slope (the one between collecting and hoarding), chances are you already know exactly what the sci-fi enthusiast in your life wants. And several backups. This is not because the person is selfish. This is because the person is a completist. It is a virtue to be so easily satisfied.

But say you don't know, or say you're going to get crazy and deviate from the nicely printed, easy-to-f0llow electric dreams gift wishes of your sci-fi/fantasy-loving loved ones. What are some good presents for the io9-reading space boys and girls in your life? To make it looks nice, follow the following template:

1. Begin with the name of the gift, in bold, followed by the price.

2. If there's a photograph, post that below the name and price.

3. Describe the gift and why the sort of person who reads io9 would like it.

4. Indicate where an interested reader can purchase the gift, linking out to an online retailer if appropriate. Which online retailer? That's up to you. But if you link out to Amazon.com, a nifty little box will appear allowing readers to click a little thingie and buy it right there, which is pretty neat. Even neater, Gawker will get a cut of the purchase price. Do what you will with that information. Get gifting, live long, and prosper.

Adapted from Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile (Harper).

After the last game of every season, we came into work for an exit physical. I sat down in front of the team doctors and our trainer, Greek, and went over my injuries for the year—anything that required treatment during the course of the season. It could be a minor training-camp injury or a season-ender. We discussed them all. They needed to document everything because some day some of us would file worker's-compensation claims, and the Broncos would pay out the settlements.

Well, not the Broncos, but their insurance company. And the insurer has lawyers who will use these documents to build a case against me. My lawyer will defend my claims. Neutral doctors will assess my body: physicals, neurological exams, MRIs, X-rays, psychotherapists, sleep-doctors, all of it. Then a judge will decide what I deserve. These documents, which at the time I thought were necessary for the team and its medical crew to better understand my body, were really for legal purposes.

"How's your left ankle?"

"Good."

"How about your right wrist?"

"Fine."

"Right shoulder?

"Fine."

"Do you consider yourself fit to play football?"

"Yes."

"Then sign here. And have a good off-season, Nate."

I was signing an affirmation of health. Next to that piece of paper was a file as large as a dictionary that contained my injury history. Every injury I ever had was described somewhere in that file. But I never saw it. It wasn't my property.

Had I owned that file, that information, I would have had a better idea of what was happening to me. Every treatment was in there. Every report written up by Greek or our team doctors. The results of every physical. And an unbiased report from the off-site imaging center that conducted our post-injury MRIs. These MRI reports contain information of great value to a player, because they are unfiltered. But I never saw the file. As far as I knew, I never even had access to it.

During my football career, I dislocated my shoulder multiple times, separated both shoulders, broke my tibia, broke a rib, broke my fingers, tore my medial collateral ligament in my right knee, tore my groin off the bone, tore my hamstring off the bone twice. I had bone chips in my elbow, bone chips in my ankle, concussions, sub-concussions, countless muscle strains, labral tears in either hip, cumulative trauma in the lower spine, sciatic nerve damage, achilles tendinitis, plantar fasciitis in both feet, blisters—oh the blisters! My neck is bad. My clavicles are misaligned. I probably have brain damage.

Looking at the injuries individually, it seems easy enough to diagnose and treat each one. Your groin is torn. Look up "torn groin" in the index, find the list of exercises to plug into your daily rehab regimen, and you're off and running. But seen from a distance, the litany above tells me something different. The injuries are all connected. One injury leads to the next, to the next, to the next. The aggressive rehabilitation of one muscle neglects its opposite. The body is thrown out of balance.

I now own a copy of my injury file, obtained by subpoena from the Broncos for my worker's-compensation case. Page by page I've gone through it, reminded of injuries and treatments I had forgotten. An oblique injury, a wrist injury, an ankle injury, chronic plantar fasciitis treatments, shoulder treatments, chronic hamstring issues, achilles tendon pain, groin treatments, pectoral strains, lower back pain. The list is long, the memories vivid. Four years after leaving the NFL, the story of my own body belongs to me.

In college I dislocated my shoulder twice. The second dislocation came at the end of my senior year. I was advised that I needed surgery, but I opted against the knife. It's a four-month rehab, and it would've prevented me from working out for NFL teams and playing in the East-West Shrine Game, a college all-star game in San Francisco for standout seniors. I was the only Division III player selected. This was my time to prove I could play with the best in the country. So I rehabbed the shoulder aggressively, and it felt fine in the lead-up to the game in early January.

The day before we checked into the hotel for the weeklong festivities, Dave Muir and I went out on the Menlo College grass to run routes. Dave was an ex-quarterback for Washington State. He was also my coach at Menlo and a good friend.

It was a bit chilly in the early January twilight. But it was my favorite time to be outside running routes: the crisp air, the fading light, the musky smell.

"Colorado!" I yelled. Colorado is a wide-receiver route in the West Coast offense's route tree—a three-step slant, then back out to the corner.

"Set-hut!" Dave yelled. I took my three steps straight up the field, broke along the slant for three steps, then stuck my foot in the ground and accelerated back out toward the corner. Hello, hamstring. Yank. I pulled up and tried to walk it off.

"You OK?" asked Dave.

"I don't know."

The next few days during check-ins and meetings I concealed a soft limp. I couldn't tell anyone about it because I was the one Division III kid trying to prove himself against Division I talent. And the NFL scouts would be at every practice. This was no time to be hurt.

First practice, first route during one-on-ones, I ran a slant, tried to break away from the cornerback, and the thing really ripped this time. I was done for the week. My hamstring turned purple down behind the knee and there was a palpable depression in the middle of the muscle.

A few days before the game, some of us on the "West" squad went out in North Beach. I was in a fragile state of mind. I got in a drunken brawl and sliced up my hand on a tooth, I think. I don't remember much of it. I do remember several bouncers sitting on me until a cop came and handcuffed me. He put me in his car, and I watched my roommate and fellow wide receiver, Donnie O'Neal, plead for my release. It worked. The cop opened the door and uncuffed me and told me to scram.

We took team pictures the next day, and I had a black eye. A pretty bad one, too. A girl I was dating came to the hotel and applied makeup. The next day at the game, a hundred Menlo faithful came to support me, even though they knew I wasn't playing. It was supposed to be a happy day. It was brutally sad.

The following week, I got to work rehabbing the hamstring, which healed quickly. I was able to work out for teams and showed no residual effects from the injury. I was signed to the 49ers after the draft and passed the physical, though my bum shoulder was so unstable that they made me sign a waiver. If I didn't sign, they weren't going to let me on the field. And once I got on an NFL roster, they started documenting everything.

The waiver meant that if I injured the same shoulder again, they could cut me without pay or treatment. Otherwise, whenever a player is hurt, the team has to nurse him back to health. I signed the waiver and of course dislocated the shoulder again during training camp.

I finished camp with one good arm and was promptly cut. The next month I opted to have my left shoulder stabilized. I had surgery through my own Lifeguard insurance by a surgeon recommended by the Niners, then spent what would have been my rookie season living at home with mom and dad, staring at the walls. But my shoulder was fixed.

The Niners signed me back after the season. About halfway through mini-camps I developed chronic Achilles tendon pain in my left foot. My left ankle had been bad for years, and all the wear and tear was starting to affect the surrounding regions. But again, I had no time to be hurt. No football player does, especially one who's just trying to make the team. I was struggling to get reps and stuck way back on the depth chart. And you can't make the club in the tub, they say.

By then, pain had become a part of my daily life. I started to understand it, have dominion over it, control it. And this control empowered me. No matter how bad anything hurt, I could get through practice without showing it.

Halfway through training camp I was traded to the Broncos. I was the new guy again. So how's your body, Nate? It's great. Never felt better.

A few weeks later, in the last preseason game against the Seahawks, a defender landed on my outstretched arm and I felt my good shoulder sublux. I didn't say anything to the trainers about that one. Upper-body injuries are easier to play through if you can deal with the pain. It's the lower-body stuff that does you in, especially as a receiver, because you have to be able to run.

The day after making the practice squad, at our first practice of the week, I ran a route across the middle and went up high for the ball. It was a laser throw and it stuck to the hand on my new shitty shoulder. I nearly fainted it hurt so bad. I swallowed the pain and ran back to the huddle, no one the wiser. I dealt with the shoulder and the Achilles all season.

After the season, I went to NFL Europe and played for the Rhein Fire in Germany. During this three-month span, I popped a bursa sack on my left patella, broke my left pinkie, and tore my MCL in my right knee. I worked through all of these injuries, arriving back in Denver on June 7, whereupon I was deemed healthy enough to be on the field practicing the next day.

My body was tired. By this point, I'd been doing football things for 14 months straight. But I had a team to make. This training camp would be crucial for my career trajectory. Lots of guys play one year on the practice squad and that's it. Cut loose and on with life. I didn't want to be that guy.

On the surface, training camp was great. I played well and made the team. But my body developed a new problem. The Achilles troubles had prompted me to re-evaluate my shoes and insoles. Perhaps I was wearing the wrong shoes. And maybe I needed lifts in the shoes to keep my heel up higher, and some soft insoles that would conform to my feet and offer better support. I tried the new foot set-up, and it alleviated some of the Achilles pain.

But soon the bottom of my foot began to hurt. More and more every day, the connective tissue between the heel and the ball of the foot, the fascia, became tender and painful. I had plantar fasciitis. Plantar fasciitis was similar to the Achilles pain in that it was chronic and unremitting. It hurt with every step. But after 30 minutes of practice it warmed up well enough to get through the day. Yet no treatment was helping; massage, ice, ultrasound, electrical stimulation, stretching, meds, acupuncture—nothing. The Broncos medical staff decided I needed an MRI.

I accepted the offer to inject. Thus began my long relationship with the needle-as-savior approach to injury treatment. Toradol, Bextra, Kenalog, Dexamethasone, Medrol, Cortisone, Kertax, PRP, Human Growth Hormone. The needle was the last resort when pain was too much or progress too slow.

Accompanying the injection was a new type of shoe insole: a hard, plastered orthotic. Greek imprinted my feet and sent away for it. A week later, orthotics specifically made for my feet arrived in the mail and I was told to use them in my shoes.

They put my feet at an angle that science apparently had deemed pleasing but that I found compromising. It felt as if I were standing on a pile of rocks.

"Man, Greek, these things don't feel good."

"It takes a while to get used to them, Nate. Just give it a little time."

A few weeks later we played the Chargers in San Diego. I was doing my best to work with the orthotics. The shape and size of the orthotic filled my shoes so much that it was difficult to get them on my feet comfortably. And it took a good amount of ankle tape on the outside of the shoe to secure the shoe to the foot. Once the tape was complete, I was dragging around two bricks. There was no give, no cushion, nowhere for my feet to go. I guess that was the point.

On a ball intended for me in the end zone, I got tangled up with a cornerback. He fell sideways on my left leg. Not a very hard fall. But I felt a click in my ankle. I jogged off the field and tried to walk it off. No dice. My tibia was broken—a vertical fracture through the bottom bulbous part of the bone.

My shoes and orthotics went back in the bin underneath my locker while I finished the last four games on injured reserve, and on crutches. A few months into the off-season, my rehab complete, Denver's coach, Mike Shanahan, called me with a proposition: How about tight end? He thought it would be a great way for me to get more involved with the offense and catch more passes. I agreed to the science experiment and started gaining weight that day: protein shakes, extra meals, heavier lifting. The weight came quickly. I went from 215 to 240 in a few months, and by mini-camps I had taken on my new tight-end body. But my mind was still a wide receiver's. I ran like one and cut like one. I still knew how to move that way, and it gave me an advantage in the passing game. But my body didn't like it. The movements that I knew how to summon were being carried out by a body that was 25 pounds overweight. My pelvic girdle, the source of my torque and snap for every fast-twitch movement, was under a new kind of strain.

During a particularly tiresome training camp practice in early August, I ran a deep crossing route in the end zone. As I tried to accelerate past linebacker Ian Gold, he gave my jersey a small tug, and my hamstring yanked. But this time it was up high, against my butt bone. And deep, intrinsic. The rehab was ice and stim and strengthening and stretching and cardio—right away. Normal protocol. But it didn't help. After three or four days, the benchmark for noticing improvement, it was still the same. Greek was stifled.

"Feeling better today?"

"Uh, maybe a little but not really." I always said "maybe a little" even when it wasn't.

"It should be improving by now."

Twice a day I went through an extensive exercise program that targeted the injured muscle. Lots of guys get hurt in training camp. Some guys get comfortable not practicing so they're pushed back on the field, usually before they're ready. That's achieved by applying verbal pressure in the training room, creating a timeline for return, and kicking his ass in the weight room twice a day—insanely heavy lifting then 30 minutes of intense cardio—so that he'd actually prefer practice to this isolated attention.

I succumbed to the pressure like everyone does and rushed myself back on the field in time to play the Houston Texans in a preseason game. During the game, I re-aggravated the injury. I don't remember how, exactly. I just overextended myself with an unhealed injury. The action on an NFL field is so fast that your subconscious takes over. If the mind is up to the task and the body is not, thwap goes the body. When we got back to Denver, I got an MRI.

That was the report they read. The translation to me: mild hamstring strain; exercises, ice, meds, and modalities. We good, Nate?

Yeah, I guess we're good. And I was back on my daily rehab sheet. Another week and not much progress. Greek let me know in his special way that it shouldn't be taking this long to get better. In other words, my progress didn't jibe with the timeline that was laid out from the start, that fit the protocol for "mild hamstring strain." That got me thinking: What's wrong with me? Am I being a pussy or what? Greek says I should be ready to go. So I know that's what he's telling Coach Shanahan every day when he goes upstairs and gives him the injury report. Nate's milking it.

So I got myself back on the field again, in time to play another preseason game, the last of the year. I thought I needed to get on the field and prove myself a warrior if I had any chance of making the team. I got myself as ready as I could: heat, pain pills, meditation, stretching, back plaster (a patch that goes on the skin and heats up as your body warms it), and adrenaline. I played like shit anyway. And I re-injured my hamstring. Another innocuous football play; another thwap. I knew I wasn't ready, and I was right. But I made the team anyway. So the training staff decided to ramp up the treatment plan and get me back onto the field, where I could contribute to my team.

The shot got me back on the field, but my hamstring bothered me all season long. I was two steps slow. It was obvious. Watching myself on film became a painful ordeal because I looked like shit. I couldn't reach top speed, which took away my main advantage as a former receiver. The injury kept me from effectively covering kicks on special teams. All of this meant I wouldn't be getting on the field. (Bless Coach Shanahan for even keeping me on the team.) I was inactive for all but three games that season and spent the entire time trying to figure out my hamstring. Ice here, heat there, stretch here, rub there, injections, chiropractor visits, cold lasers, hot lasers, active release therapy, strength training, core work— nothing. The only thing that would help wasn't an option: rest.

But I learned to deal with the pain, the instability, the imbalance, just like every other NFL player does. My story is not unique. Every other football-playing man deals with the same cycle of injury and rehab, separated by periods of relative health. Some bodies are better suited to the demands of the game than others. They stay healthy longer, play more, smash more skulls, die younger. I should see my inability to stay healthy as a blessing in the long run, because it spared my brain the extra punishment. The fact is, no one remembers any NFL game I ever played in but me.

Exacerbating the brutal demands of the game of football is the industrial approach to training for it. In the off-season, when we might have been resting, we lifted like Olympic weightlifters. We ran like track runners. We threw enormously heavy weights around at angles that compromised our already misaligned bodies. And we did it to the steady soundtrack of "C'mon, Nate! Harder!" That's the football way. And in many ways, it's necessary. You need to be explosive and powerful to play the game at that level. But training that way has its downside. It kept me sore all year long. It also neglected the tiny, important muscles of the body to focus on the big, showy, powerlifting muscles. When those fatigued, as they always did as the practices and seasons wore on, it left the work to the smaller muscles, which were underdeveloped. The result was injury.

Now that I don't play football, I can choose what methods I use to strengthen my body. If I am hurting, I can stop. If something doesn't feel right, I don't do it. I can focus my attention on core strength instead of bench press and squats. The core is the decider and the connector. It is the source of our strength. And for the athlete, it is crucial for the transfer of power from the lower to the upper body. When the big muscles break down, the core comes to the rescue. But when I played, my core was weak, especially compared to the overdeveloped muscles on either end of my body.

But the athlete doesn't have a say in his training either. Every morning in the weight room, we picked up our personal folders. Those folders dictated the workout. We follow orders. Football players are great at that. Show up at this time. Do this. Eat this. Watch this. Take this. Wear this. Say this. Yes, sir! is the only phrase I needed to learn. And I learned it well.

Going in to the 2007 season, I was playing well and having fun. I was as healthy as I'd been in years, and I'd finally become comfortable as a tight end. Then my left groin went thwap.

I've been electrocuted once. When I was a kid there was a Coke machine in the locker room at swim practice that was busted open and the wires were hanging out. One of the kids said that if you touch that red one to that blue one, something happens. No one would do it. I was soaking wet—armor, I thought. I touched them together: THWAP! Frozen to a tuning fork of lightning bolts. Same feeling.

Chargers, Week 5. My first NFL start, two weeks after my first career touchdown. "Get yourselves warmed back up when you get back on the field," our special teams coach Scotty O. was saying. "It's getting chilly out there. You don't want to get tight!" He was offering a bit of halftime advice I wasn't listening to. I was already warmed up. I wasn't worried. Sure, there was that tiny click I felt in my left groin near the end of the first half. But I felt fine.

I had the needle to thank for that. After meetings the night before, I'd lined up for my shot: 60 milligrams of Toradol, a powerful anti-inflammatory and painkiller. A handful of us relied on it every game. We lived in pain during the week. We wanted relief on game day, and we didn't trust adrenaline alone to give it to us. Toradol did the trick, on the eve of the battle, so we could sleep soundly and wake up pain-free.

After jogging out of the tunnel again and drinking some sideline Gatorade, we lined up for the second-half kick-off. The ball popped off the tee and all 10 of us tore off down the field. Twenty yards into my straight-line sprint, a sniper somewhere in the cheap cheats popped one off and hit me square in the left groin, tearing the muscle off the bone with a yank that rattled the iron off of heaven's gate. THWAP!

The pop splayed my left leg off to the side. I reached for my groin and hopped on one foot. Total malfunction, but I was still on the field in the middle of the play. And I still had a job to do. The returner broke a tackle and ran through the wedge, coming right at me. I'd have to make this tackle regardless. There are things on the line, after all: pride, glory, other stuff. Hopping along like that on the 50-yard-line, some things get put in perspective. One, Scotty O. was right; I should have warmed back up. Two, I'm fucked. Three, somebody please tackle this man.

Just then a teammate tripped up the returner, and he came to rest five yards in front of me. I turned and limped to our sideline. As I reached the chalk, I got dizzy and almost fainted. My vision blurred, tunneled, then steadied again.

"What happened?" asked Greek.

"Something popped."

"Where?"

"Here." I pointed to my groin.

"OK, give it a minute and see how it feels."

"Alright." I turned my back to Greek and walked away gingerly. I knew I was done for.

I spent the rest of the game on the sideline with an ice bag stuck down my crotch. After the game I went home with instructions to return first thing in the morning to evaluate the injury. A pulled groin, they thought. No biggie. My sister Carol and brother-in-law Jeff were in town for the game. We went out to dinner, a Brazilian meat-on-a-stick restaurant downtown. I limped and hopped between the tables and chairs. People looked at me strangely. I was also meat on a stick.

The next morning I limped and hopped into the facility. My upper-inner thigh and pubic region had swelled up. I was walking timidly, slowly, straight-leggedly. Week 5 and I was crippled.

Injury treatment in the NFL, and in all levels of football, follows a certain protocol. Page one of the trainer's manual is ice and electrical stimulation, or "stim." Ice and stim; ice and stim; ice and stim. The stim uses electrical charges that pulse through two positive and two negative wire lines, like jumper cables, and are fixed to conductive pads and stuck on the skin, forming a picture frame around the injured area. The machine is turned on and electricity surges diagonally through the meat, stimulating the healing process. The muscle jumps as the electricity flows.

On top of the electrical pads, a bag of ice is fixed—form fitting and expertly tied. But it ain't just a bag of ice. There is an art to tying a bag of ice. All of the air must be sucked out of the bag before it can be twisted and tied: air tight. And it can't be ice cubes. They don't conform to the contours of the skin. It needs to be ice pebbles, ice chips, ice dust, stuff that will wrap around the injured area and freeze the muscle into a submissive post-injury state. That stops the swelling by slowing the blood flow, thus—stay with me here—speeding up the healing process.

The combination of an electric surge pulsing through the body, intended to stimulate blood flow, and an all-encompassing ice bag, intended to slow down the blood flow, might seem contradictory to someone in a position to consider it. But I was not in a position to consider it.

What's that, Nate? You want to rest it? Wait until it feels better before you start working it? No thingamajigs? Ha! You don't know anything about the human body, do you? We have to speed up the healing process! Your body's natural reaction to the injury is incorrect. We can't trust it, Nate. We need to manipulate the body's natural healing process, send shocks to it, changes of temperature, strain it to the point of exhaustion, stretch it to the point of snapping, blast it with powerful anti-inflammatories and painkillers, then shock/temperature change again, strain/stretch again, pills again, and repeat. That's how you heal the human body, Nate. Make sense?

Ice and stim, an MRI, back to the facility for more ice and stim. The training room has a sterilized smell to it: salves and creams and freshly laundered towels and cleaning supplies. I hated it, if only because I knew what the smell meant: I was injured again.

I lay on the table in the back corner sulking with an ice pack wedged in my taint, electrodes pumping diagonally through my testicles, an electric chair for my spermatazoa. I was waiting for our team doctor to arrive and assess the situation. Once the MRI results are received, the doctor meets with the athletic trainer. They discuss the findings, come up with a course of treatment, and then they brief the head coach. Once everyone is on the same page, the player is notified. Make sense?

Dr. Schlegel, one of our two team doctors, walked out of Greek's office and came to my table with an excellent poker face. "What's the word, Doc?"

"Well," he said, "there are three muscles in the groin that come up and attach to the pelvis. The MRI showed that you tore two of them off the bone. The longus and the brevis. There's a five-centimeter retraction on those muscles, meaning they tore away and retracted from the bone by five-centimeters. That's a significant retraction, but there is still one muscle intact and there are some fibers from the torn muscles that are connected to the pelvis, along with the intact muscle. Despite all of that, we feel that we'll be able to avoid surgery."

"OK."

"But this is a significant injury, Nate. We're going to give it a few days to let the swelling go down, and reassess this. But we think we're going to send you to Vail for a procedure that we've had a lot of success with lately. Greek will tell you more about it, but its an injection that uses your own blood to help speed up the healing process. Its called a platelet-rich-plasma injection. It has proven to be a very effective treatment, especially with athletes. But this is at least an 8- to 10-week recovery."

"Alright. Thanks, doc."

"No problem. And get some rest."

Doc left and I stayed. Greek came out and asked me if I had any questions about what Dr. Schlegel had told me.

"No, not really. He said I might be going to Vail. And he said I'm done for two or three months. And he said to get some rest."

"Yep, exactly. Now let's get another round of ice and stim going."

The next morning I came into the training room on crutches with a watermelon next to my cock. The swelling had overtaken my genitalia, mushing them into the opposite corner of my crotch. Black and blue ribbons curled up and down my inner thigh. A mile's worth of chains were wrapped around my pelvis, intertwined, cinched tight and locked. I was worthless. The medical staff reached the same conclusion: No point rushing it. Greek told me I was going on injured reserve. My season was over.

What do you call a football player who's not playing football? You don't.

That morning we watched special-teams film and I saw my injury on the big screen. There I was running down the field. It was me—yes, it was me. But it didn't feel as if I was watching me. I was watching someone else, some thing else. I was watching a video game. And when the video-game player hitched and started hopping, I thought, what the fuck is wrong with that guy? Fucking run! Run, you idiot!

After crutching in and out of a few meetings that day, I realized that there was no reason to be there. I was on injured reserve. I wasn't going to play. No need preparing like it. Besides, a cripple hobbling in and out of meetings every day is not a welcome sight for those trying to focus on the task at hand. A cripple makes them confront the obvious: You're one play away from looking like this.

As I lay incapacitated on the back table the next morning, my coaches came in to pay their final respects. They told me to hang in there; work hard on my rehab and I'd be as good as new. They used hushed voices and somber tones. Grave looks on their faces. l knew the score: This was my eulogy. They were moving on in order to save themselves. They had no choice. I was dead until April.

The limp and the hop: perfected in silent corridors, echoing off the tiles of an empty shower room. The watermelon ripened in the corner of my manhood. After four of five days, the swelling went down enough for me to go to Vail for the PRP injection. In the middle of the week, my girlfriend drove us up into the mountains while I squirmed in the seat like a thing unhinged.

The procedure was set for the first thing in the morning. We went up the night before and checked in to the Sonnenalp resort, dimed by the Broncos. It was just down the street from the highly esteemed Steadman-Hawkins medical clinic in the heart of beautiful Vail. A great place to convalesce. I hadn't seen my girlfriend for a while. And it was nice to get out of my house in Denver. The room at the Sonnenalp was nice too. It had a mountain lodge feel, very spacious and very cozy. We had a fireplace and a big bath tub and despite my disability, I was determined to take advantage of the accommodations.

As I lay on the bed, and as she scuttled around me rearranging things, I grabbed her and pulled her on top of me. I kissed her and reached between her legs. She protested the advance, perhaps simply to spare me the embarrassment. But I persisted, watermelon or no. She was the most beautiful creature I knew.

Delicately we removed our clothing. She maneuvered herself on top of me, flinching only slightly when she saw the rotten fruit. But her touch sparked a miraculous blood flow. In defiance of the forces that opposed it, my soldier rose to salute its muse. And in appreciation of the gesture, she gently accepted.

Slowly we squirmed, but I was wilting. I reminded myself of the objective—coming—and tried to clear my head. The miseries of life's worst moments, its deepest pains and its saddest days of bed-ridden depression, are no match for an orgasm. But the real action of the fuck—the body-on-body, the thrust-and-the-cushion, the bumping-and-pressing—was impossible to achieve.

Or was it? My will led the way, and we found the elusive rhythm. Her skin flushed; her hair follicles domed; her lips reddened. The metaphors jumbled. A spark ignited in the depths of her ocean. Faint, then less faint, creeping toward us cautiously, the tide unlocked the gates of her hibernating libido. I paddled out to meet her. In slow motion and clothed in wind-blown linens, we splashed into each other's arms as the symphony reached its crescendo. Just when the final note was to be carried into eternity, the conductor dropped his baton, and the instruments crashed to the ground, and a solitary oboe pushed out one flitting note. Poof: a puff of smoke.

"Did you?"

"I think so."

Watermelon seeds.

The next morning I crutched into the Steadman-Hawkins clinic in Vail for my PRP injection. They gave me a hospital gown and I crawled onto my gurney. Of course my nurse was pretty. This pattern developed around every genital-area injury I had during my career. The more intrusive and emasculating the treatment, the more attractive the woman who treated it.

She tied up my arm and pushed in the needle. They needed a good deal of blood for the procedure. One vial, two vial, three vials, four. I lost count. Many vials later, she pulled the needle out from under a cotton swab, pressing down and covering it quickly with a Scooby-Doo bandage.

She left the room with the vials and came came back with the blood in a bag. She opened a large circular machine and fixed the bag inside, closed the top, and turned it on. It was a centrifuge, and as it started to hum and spin, the properties of the blood began to separate into little bags on the sides of the machine

"See that one there?" she said, "the one that looks like urine? We don't need that. But see the dark, thick red stuff? That's the good stuff. Look at that. That's beautiful." She fingered the bag. "That's the platelet-rich plasma. That's what's going back inside you." She pointed to my balls.

After 30 minutes, the machine clicked off and the separation was complete. She took all of the bags and left me on my gurney to count the holes in the particle-board ceiling squares, wondering how easy it would be to pop one of them off and climb through the ventilation ducts like Bruce Willis in Die Hard. SHOOT ZE GLASS!

After a few hours of waiting, it was time for the shot. They would sedate me, my nurse said, because of the location of the injury. It would be too discomfiting otherwise. For both of us, I assumed. They wheeled me into an operating room and I looked around frightened. All of these people in masks. Why so many people? And why the masks? I'm not wearing a mask! Where's my mask? And it's so cold in here. Why so cold?

The anesthesiologist introduced himself and pushed a needle into my hand in one motion. My nurse pulled up my gown and swabbed my groin with alcohol. Can she see my penis? Nurses have kind eyes. I felt the drugs hit my blood, tubing through my veins and arteries. At the same time, I felt a trickle of alcohol catch momentum, run down a ridge, and hit the tree line in the crease between my leg and my crotch. The race was on. My eyesight fogged over. My lips felt big. It wasn't cold anymore, except for the river below, raging toward a protected marsh. My nurse watched over me maternally. I closed my eyes and surrendered to the drugs.

In the hallway on the way to the recovery room, I met Dr. Marc Philippon, PRP injector, world-renowned hip surgeon, excellent human. He was still masked and wore a full blue hospital suit. He struck a vibrant image in my loopy mind, what with his bright blue eyes and his blond hair flowing from underneath his light-blue skull cap.

"Everything went great, Nate. Really great. You'll be fine in three weeks. Now rest up, he said. All you can do is rest."

"Will you tell that to Greek?" I mumbled.

"Sure, of course," he chuckled. And he was off down the hall, wingtips echoing off the linoleum floor, blond hair bouncing to the beat.

I was back at work the next morning—strapped again to my electric chair. My only job now was rehab: At 8 a.m. I jumped on my table; at noon, I jumped off and went home. The four hours in between varied slightly from day to day, but they closely followed the protocol for a torn groin muscle, ramping up the work slightly every day, depending on my body's response.

The injected plasma encased the damaged tendons and hugged them with nutrients, forming a bridge of goop that the retracted muscles could cross before reuniting with the bone that had held it since the womb. I sat on the table and meditated through the hours of ice and stim, picturing the PRP as a fleet of noble warriors sent to save a town from a blood-thirsty regime, sort of like the Three Amigos. My torn groin was El Guapo.

Every day I went home at noon and lay on the couch. I smoked weed and thought about shit. That was it. Sit and think, and find your way to God. I found that when I ingested the team-prescribed opioid painkillers, the line to God was always busy. So I avoided them and tried to keep a clear head.

Some days I had bright ideas for home improvement. I lived alone in a big house. It was my house! I bought it! I went to Home Depot and bought every color of spray paint they had and got to work on a mural in my master bathroom. Stencils and acrylics and oils and brushes followed. The walls were my canvas. And my targets.

The next day I threw butcher knives at the walls. The one after that I strung pine cones from the rafters to usher in the snowy season. I read the first 30 pages of lots of books. But I couldn't concentrate. I took guitar lessons once a week in Boulder for a few months. That got me out of the house and gave me something productive to do. I wrote a few songs. A few poems.

The entertainment center in my living room was set into the wall about three feet deep and had a six-inch-thick dry-walled shelf built in to it that divided the top from the bottom. Sometimes I had the TV on the bottom, sometimes I moved it to the top. But I really wanted it in the middle. That fucking shelf was no good. But it was built into the damn house!

One day after rehab, I went to Home Depot and bought everything I needed to demolish it: multiple power saws, hacksaw, crowbar, sledge hammer, disc sander. I went home and tore my living room to shreds. When I finished, there was a layer of dust caked to the furniture. But the television now sat proudly in the right spot, surrounded by a torn-up wall with cables hanging out of it and exposed two-by-fours and particle board.

The injury also gave me more time to spend at home tracking the movement of the family of mice that had moved in. One night, after ingesting some unprescribed herbal medication, I was cleaning up the kitchen. I lifted a pot, and a mouse darted across the countertop. I jumped out of my slippers, hit my head on the ceiling, and moonwalked into the pantry. While I was there, I inspected the area and found a collection of turds in the corner. I wasn't surprised, as I often pooped there. But in the opposite corner of the pantry was a collection of much smaller turds: mice! The next day at rehab, I could barely contain myself. I told the story to everyone in the training room. After my workout, I went to Home Depot. By then they knew me.

"How did the demolition go?"

"Eh, ya know. Least of my worries now. I have mice."

"Mice?"

His face lit up.

"Follow me."

He took me to an aisle lined floor to ceiling with widdle fuzzy murder tools. I declined the fancier weapons and opted for the old-school hinged snap-trap. I paid for my tools and raced home. I was so excited I barely noticed my depression.

I set one trap next to the turdpile in the pantry and the rest in and around the kitchen. Then I left the house to summon the angel of death. When I walked in the front door a few hours later, a cold wind blew through me. A rodent lay dead on the kitchen floor. He'd died of a broken heart/neck. I lay another trap in the same spot, knowing his bride would come back to pay her last respects. When I woke up the next morning, the trap was gone. I found it underneath the dishwasher. Bitch got snapped and dragged herself under the dishwasher, where she wiggled free and was off in the night. Well played, Minnie. Well played.

From that day on, I sat on my kitchen counter every night with night-vision goggles on and an airsoft rifle loaded with poison-soaked pellets. I wasn't going to be made a fool of by no mouse. Eventually the snap-trap snuffed her out—THWAP!—then it got the three kids. I sealed up their entry points, which I found on either corner of the garage door. I felt triumphant in my kingdom of solitude.

But I was a living shadow outside of my house, ducking in and out so as not to be seen, not to have to speak to anyone. When I was at the facility, I was the model of hard work and enthusiasm. I pushed the limits on every exercise. "Is that all you got for me Greek? I'm feeling great!" my groin healed much quicker than expected. It healed so fast that it was still November and I felt as if I could be playing. Should be playing. I'm a football player, dammit! But that was my pride talking.

What I know now, after reading the fine print in my injury file, is that my groin absolutely was not healed. It was still torn then just like it is now. Just like it always will be.

The following season, I felt good. Things were going well again. Then I woke up one morning during training camp and I could barely walk. My ankle swelled up for no reason. No trauma. No twisting. Just a backlog of gunk. The ankle itself had a thick memory of pain that the slightest tweak would call forth. The loose bone fragments and spurs and ligament scarring and calcification of the tibia fracture made for a temperamental area on a very active region of my football body. A few days of rehab and "Feeling better yet?"s and I was back on the field, limping.

A few days later we began our preseason practices against our first opponent: the Cowboys. I was playing fullback on one particular play, as tight ends are often asked to do, and I was the lead blocker. I knew coming out of the huddle that the play was going to fall to shit. That's probably why it did. I hated getting put in at fullback. Whenever I did, I looked at my coach like, "Really?" He looked at me like, "Yeah, really, motherfucker!" I came into the league as a receiver. Now here I was in a three-point stance, lead-blocking through the two-hole, about to get my dick ripped off by a snarling linebacker.

I came through the hole off-balance and met their backup middle linebacker, Bobby Carpenter, with a hearty pop, taking it all on the point of my right shoulder. I felt it buckle and separate. A power hose of fire ants shot through the right side of my body. But a shoulder separation is only pain. So deal with it. There are several treatment options. One is preferred.

Hello again, Mr. Needle, how well you mask my pain. But will I pay for this quick fix some other lonely day?

The needle worked, and I forgot about my shoulder. There were new pains to address. It seemed as if my mind never took on more pain than it could handle. An instability or a new injury might be waiting in the wings, might already be symptomatic, but it was always polite enough to wait until the previous injury had significantly improved before roaring to life. A few weeks into the season, my shoulder was an afterthought. Now I was bothered by a pectoral strain. It wasn't a big deal, and actually it gave me a "legitimate" excuse for getting an injection the night before the game. This pacified the subconscious reluctance of both doctor and patient to engage in such an overtly risky and unsound medical practice just to juice up a bit player for an early-season football game.

One week later during Friday practice, I ran a hook route and felt something yank in my right oblique area. It was toward the end of a light practice. It was diagnosed as a "right costochondral irritation at roughly the 10th rib".

The next morning we left for Kansas City. I was in a lot of pain, possibly the most painful injury I'd ever played with. Another 60 milligrams of Toradol into my ass the night before the game. Didn't help. The muscles in the torso are constantly at work while playing football. Twisting, cutting, exploding, sprinting—all of it activates the obliques. Warm-ups were so painful that I was considering the unthinkable: telling coach I couldn't play. But my pride wouldn't let me. And when one guy goes down right before the game, it throws the machine out of whack. The coaches have to scramble to fill his spots with guys who aren't prepared to play. I was on all the special teams. I practiced all week. I knew all the plays. I had to be out there. So I was. But I was whimpering to myself the whole time. As I ran on the field before each play, I asked myself: How are you going to get through this play? And after each play, I asked myself: How are you going to get through the next one? Eventually the game was over. I think we lost. Or maybe we won. I didn't care.

More Toradol for the next week's game, and all subsequent games. And all previous games. Every game a needle.

On a Thursday night game in Cleveland a month later, I was hit in the head and neck while airborne and perpendicular to the ground. It was Willie McGinest who got me. His hit knocked me out. I was dizzy and depressed and my neck was locked for the next week. But I didn't receive any treatment for it. By then I knew the drill. Come in to work and get strapped to machines all day just so we can log it in the book. I weighed the options in my head: peace of mind or peace of nothing. I chose peace of mind and stayed at home, where I could rest and medicate myself with drugs of my choosing, drugs that didn't come out of a needle and wouldn't eat away stomach lining.

The NFL is a constant study of pain: physical and mental. How to manage the pain? It's an important question that all players must answer for themselves, and everyone has a different approach? I found marijuana worked best for me. I developed no physical dependence on it, as many of my friends did with pain pills, and it never interfered with my work. I was competing against the best athletes on the planet at the very top of my field. I wasn't a burnout stoner eating TV dinners on grandma's couch. I was alleviating a vicious physical symptom of my job, which was putting my body under constant attack. So I weeded as needed.

Another routine 60 milligrams of Toradol for the following game in Atlanta.

Usually by the time the season started, my weight would begin to drop. It was hard for me to keep on the tight-end pounds, because practices were so strenuous, my metabolism was so fast, and I was never hungry. My appetite showed itself only at night, when I was relaxed. The rest of the day I was tense and my stomach was knotted. The weight loss compromised my ability to block defensive linemen. I was getting thrown around, so every once in a while I took a scoop of creatine to help build a little muscle and put on a little weight. But the creatine dried me out. I needed to drink lots of water to avoid cramps and muscle pulls. But I preferred that to getting my ass kicked every day.

A few days after the Falcons game, we were practicing for the Raiders. It was a day just like all the rest. Practice was dragging along. There were two tight ends in the huddle: me and Tony Scheffler. The play called for us to do mirrored corner routes on either side of the ball. Tony and I were always being scolded for not reaching our required depth on our routes. If the route called for 10 yards, we broke it off at nine. If it called for 12, we made it 11. We were very similar route runners—eager to get there and eager to get the ball. As the huddle broke, we agreed. "Let's see who can get their full 10 yards on this one!"

I ran my route to the full 10 and broke to the corner. The ball was thrown to me. I accelerated to track it down. THWAP! Right hamstring, again. Season over, again. Career soon to follow. The Lighthouse Diagnostic Imaging Center reported its findings:

Not an acute injury. Both groins already torn. Both hamstrings already torn. Both hips already torn. The hamstring that had bothered me for years was torn from its attachment the whole time. It never healed from the rehab or the injection or the off-season. It was ready to blow at any moment.

The PRP injection didn't have the same effect this time around. My hamstring never healed from that tear. How could it heal, anyway? Looking back at all the MRI results and the treatments and the injections and the meds, coupled with the constant demands of high-paced, physically explosive performance, there was no way it could heal. I was constantly hanging on by a thread. That's how it felt because that's how it was. Only now do I understand that my pains weren't phantom pains. It wasn't me being a pussy. My body was a mess.

But what was the main culprit? The Toradol shots? All the anti-inflammatories and painkillers? My diet? Was it the creatine? Poor treatments of my chronic hamstring injury? Poor health care in general? The steroid injection in the ischial tuberosity two years earlier? Was it the hamstring overcompensating for a weak groin? My weight gain? A weak core? Fatigue? Was it my mind? Was it fate? God? No. None of it. It was football. I played football for a living. THWAP!

What followed was an exercise in desperation—a case study in the slow-burn realization of the bitter end. Soon the season ended and Coach Shanahan was fired. Josh McDaniels was hired, and he cut me along with seemingly a third of the roster. I was without a team for the time in years, but I had plenty of football left in me. At least, that's what I told myself. But my hamstring was shit. The PRP shot didn't work this time. I figured I'd have to do something about that. That something was another needle, this one filled with a banned substance.

I acquired some Human Growth Hormone from Mexico and started injecting myself immediately. I knew all about HGH thanks to the media. A moral panic is the best marketing for an illicit drug. The media told me HGH would fix all my problems. They said that the NFL should test for it lest it give anyone an unfair advantage, though they also said everyone was on the stuff anyway. But the NFL didn't test for it. And I was a broken machine. This was my only chance, I thought.

I spent the next five months in San Diego, shooting up and working out. I expected a transformation. I expected a miracle. All I got was an achy body and some well-developed muscles that more effectively concealed a hamstring that was torn off the bone. I had workouts in Philadelphia, New Orleans, Cleveland. I was signed to the Browns then cut one week later. The NFL season started the next week, and I was jobless, so I packed my car up and drove to Arizona as a member of the Las Vegas Locomotives. They'd drafted me at the beginning of the summer and still held my rights. I signed a $35,000 and went back to training camp.

Two weeks into camp, I was running a corner route during one-on-ones. I had my man beat clean and caught a perfectly thrown deep ball. Touchdown. Fate shook his head, took one more drag from his cigarette, leveled his rifle, steadied his hand, and fired. No doubts this time. The sniper had hit his mark. THWAP!

My hamstring exploded as I decelerated. I hopped twice on my opposite foot, dropped the ball to the grass, sat down next to it, and popped off my helmet. A mosquito hovered at eye level. It's over now, I thought. It's all over.

Nate Jackson played six seasons in the National Football League as a wide receiver and a tight end. His writing has appeared in Deadspin, Slate, the Daily Beast, BuzzFeed, TheWall Street Journal, and The New York Times. A native of San Jose, California, he now lives in Los Angeles. Slow Getting Up, from which this story was adapted, is his first book. Follow him on Twitter, @NathanSerious.

Khloé Kardashian is reportedly filing for divorce from Lamar Odom today (four years, not bad!), but who cares about that: Her stepdad is getting his Adam's Apple surgically shaved off.

TMZ, which first reported on the gold medalist upcoming Laryngeal Shave, says the procedure is "typically done on patients who are in the first stage of gender reassignment."

Jenner, however, told the gossip site his decision has less to do with how he feels in his own skin than with how he feels in a turtleneck.

Having recently undergone surgery to remove a cancerous mass from his nose, Jenner, no stranger to cosmic electives, said he was paying his plastic surgeon a consultation visit to discuss fixing a post-op scar when the Laryngeal Shave came up.

"I just never liked my trachea," he told TMZ.

Bruce and Kris Jenner revealed back in October that they've decided to separate and have been living separate lives for some time.

"I'm finally free to do what I want and live life the way I want," Jenner was quoted as saying.

[screengrab via TMZ]

This was on CNN about 20 minutes ago.

On Wednesday, December 12 of last year, at lunchtime, Sammie Eaglebear Chavez talked about shooting up his school. The 18-year-old was in the cafeteria of Bartlesville Senior High, 45 miles north of Tulsa, Oklahoma, conversing with classmates he considered friends.

He floated an idea: What if he got on the intercom, made an announcement directing kids to the auditorium, then chained the lobby doors shut behind them and started firing down from the balcony? And what if the auditorium's exits were also rigged with bombs, so when the police arrived and tried to get inside, the explosives would detonate? Sammie couldn't pull this off alone, he told his buddies. That's where they came into the picture.

One of the teenagers told someone else, and the next day, Thursday, December 13, a Bartlesville mother phoned an assistant principal to report a second-hand version of the conversation. Sammie was absent that day—not an unusual circumstance—so no one questioned him. But by that evening, the Bartlesville Police Department had an affidavit regarding his lunch-table fantasia and an extraditable felony warrant for the young man's arrest.

On Friday, between four and five in the morning, Sammie and his mother Jessie Chavez, now 43, heard a noise outside the sallow one-story Adeline Avenue house they were renting. "Sammie comes in the hallway and goes, 'Mom, somebody's knocking on the door,'" Jessie recalled recently. "I said, 'I don't give a shit, it's 4:30 in the morning! Only two kinds of people come at this hour—and that's po-po and crackheads.' I was mad!'"

Jessie's instincts weren't wrong. Sammie answered the door to the cops, who put him under arrest for threatening to kill Bartlesville Senior students. Sammie was baffled. The conversation they mentioned was a joke, he insisted.

It was December 14, 2012. Less than four hours later, a 20-year-old named Adam Lanza fired his way into Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 first-graders and six adults in the second-worst school shooting in American history. All the child victims were shot between three and 11 times, then the gunman took his own life. The rampage took less than five minutes.

Sammie learned about the Newtown massacre from a television in Washington County Detention Center, the Bartlesville jail where police brought him after his arrest. Seeing the news reports, he broke down crying so badly that guards changed the channel.

The warrant drawn up for Sammie's arrest had cited a $200,000 bond, charging the defendant with planning, attempting, or conspiring to perform an act of violence, a crime punishable by imprisonment up to 10 years. By 1 p.m., when a district judge formally arraigned Chavez, the teenager's bail had skyrocketed to $1 million.

In his mug shot, Sammie looks like a detained refugee, despondent and resigned. For an accused felon facing 10 years, he seems boyish. His eyelids are droopy and mauve, his brown eyes doleful and despairing. The white T-shirt on his back is slightly dingy, the collar tinged. His mustache looks like dirt. His shoulder-length hair has a faint blondish streak that hangs heavy over his left eyebrow, as if he's ducking behind it for protection.

That hapless headshot flashed on screens around the country, for one news cycle, a momentary deliverance from the ghastly reconstructions of teachers shielding tiny bodies, children crouched in closets, and other inexplicably hideous transmissions from New England. Here was a blessing among the horrors, here was the face of a Sandy Hook interrupted.

"Hours after the bloodshed at a Connecticut school, police stopped what would have been a second mass school-shooting on Friday," the New York Daily News declared, in an error-riddled Saturday article that this very website passed along. Fox News Latino found a rich angle in Sammie's last name: "Latino Student Was Arrested Friday With Alleged Plot to Attack his Oklahoma School." Sammie is not Latino; his father is native American, and the Chavez name came down from his Pueblo Indian grandfather.

In Oklahoma, the terror caused by Sammie's hypothetical rampage was more than a temporary distraction. On Monday, December 17, a high-school minor was arrested for a terroristic threat in Guthrie, a 10,000-person town 30 miles north of Oklahoma City, and the local police chief told the Associated Press that "in light of what happened in Connecticut and the Bartlesville deal, we cannot take anything too lightly." The same week, Caney Valley Schools, a 700-student district also in Washington County, cancelled a full day of classes due to alleged terroristic threats made by two juveniles.

Back in Bartlesville, where police were suddenly stationed at the city's 10 schools, administrators staged the district's first-ever press conference on Tuesday, December 18: The senior-high principal had spotted two suspicious individuals carrying rifles behind the campus. They had fled, and their identities were still unknown at 10 o'clock that night, so city officials called off the last day of school before Christmas vacation. (The culprits, it would turn out, were skittish students out hunting ducks.)

The Oklahoma state legislature, not to be left out, began writing bills inspired by Chavez's arrest. Republican Representative Mark McCullough introduced a measure that would allow school districts the option of having teachers armed in the classroom, given the proper training. Republican State Senator Brian Crain proposed raising the maximum penalty for "planning, plotting or conspiring to commit a crime of mass violence"—specifically, here, talking in the lunchroom about shooting up the school—to a life sentence. Under the bill, the old maximum of 10 years would be a new mandatory minimum.

Crain's bill also stipulated that anyone between the ages of 13 and 17 would be charged as an adult when accused of the crime. You could feasibly be 13, talk about killing your classmates, and spend the rest of your life in prison. In addition, the bill sought to punish anyone "having reason to believe that another person is endeavoring, planning, plotting or conspiring to commit a crime of mass violence" with up to a year's imprisonment and $1,000 fine for not reporting it; if a plan were attempted or carried out, individuals who had "reason to believe" it might have happened would face a minimum of five years. (In February, the bill passed the state senate by a vote of 44 to one, only to stall in the house of representatives.)

Meanwhile, as far as the dangers of Sammie's plan itself went, the police had found one gun in his house, an ancient Marlin Model 99, a .22 caliber semiautomatic utility rifle with its stock sawed down to a pistol grip. It was lying by the door like a discarded umbrella. Jessie told the cops Sammie had bought it for $15 from some guy named Devon, who'd said it was so cheap because the firing mechanism was broken. The search found no ammunition for Sammie's intended rampage, and no sign of any explosives.

Besides the lone gun, the police ended up confiscating an assortment of items from the residence, including "a leafy green substance" that tested positive for marijuana, and accompanying paraphernalia—rolling papers, a pipe, aluminum foil, an herb grinder, a digital pocket scale. They seized two decorative swords, a pair of brass knuckles, a wallet with what they called an "R.I.P. Graveyard" drawing inside, a recipe for homemade alcohol, a love letter from Sammie's girlfriend at the time, a poster of a scorpion, a poster of the Joker from The Dark Knight, and something listed on the search warrant return as a "Suicidal Timmy" drawing.

On a bedroom dresser, the two officers who performed the search, Lt. Kevin Ickleberry and High School Resource Officer Korie Plummer, also found a black trench coat. "This coat was photographed but not seized as evidence," the police reported.

Jessie Chavez—a garrulous woman who tells reporters she has been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder—acted as their guide. As Lt. Ickleberry photographed the area near a small table, she volunteered that it was called "the 'Murder' table," explaining that Sammie and a friend had written "MURDER" all over it and a chair in the kitchen. Later, before a jury, Ickleberry would extract all sorts of meaning from the detail.

"Sammie's attorney was like, 'You have kids over your house and let them write 'MURDER' on your furniture?'" Jessie told me in November. We were in her current home, a two-bedroom rental in West Bartlesville, where she'd moved in May. "I'm like, 'Yeah. Anything they want to write, the furniture is just furniture. It can be replaced. That is a way of us expressing ourselves.'"

Her hair was cropped short and bleached blonde, tucked under a pink breast-cancer-awareness handkerchief. She wore a black T-shirt that boasted #1 MOM. She is a woman who will tell someone she's just met, apropos of nothing and everything, that she laughed so hard yesterday her dentures fell out straight onto the table. She won't even tell you what was so funny; she'll just tell you that—poof—there they were! She will also tell you she was a really, really bad drinker until she quit on February 2, 2010. And that long before, she did a year in jail—"and OOOH, I hated it"—though she won't say what offense brought her the time.

"Several times during her conversation with Officer Plummer," the investigators wrote, "Ms. Chavez advised that she was an alcoholic and a terrible mother."

During the search, according to the report, she also told the officers that her son had sent her a text the evening of his lunch-table conversation that read, "Just leave me alone, I'm having bad thoughts."

"Several times during her conversation with Officer Plummer," the investigators wrote, "Ms. Chavez advised she was an alcoholic and a terrible mother."

Jessie offered me a guided tour of the home. "Everything in this house, with the exception of the TV and the armoire, came out of a dumpster," she said. The living room had a wall of Christian iconography: an illustrated portrait of Jesus Christ; sun-rays beaming down on His Praying Hands, a minimal wooden cross on top. "As you can tell, we are a very Christian-based home," she said.

Jessie narrated a gallery of family photos: a shot of Sammie happily holding a small dog next to a canned-food pyramid; Sammie as an adolescent skateboarder, landing a kickflip; pictures of Sammie's older half-sisters, Rachel and Alex. Is she still in touch with her daughters? "Not anymore," she said. "They gotta get over their little temper tantrums."

One of the bedrooms is Sammie's room, though he hasn't had a chance to see it. Affixed to the door is a hand-scrawled NO TRESPASSING sign, on which Jessie has taken the trouble of adding a clarification—VIOLATORS WILL BE SHOT/SURVIVORS WILL BE SHOT AGAIN, with four miniature guns as visual aids. The walls are mostly bare, and his remaining possessions are gathered low around the perimeter. The crown jewel is a bed with a burgundy spread. "Check this out, nobody believed me," Jessie said, handing over a brochure for Full Sail University, a Florida for-profit entertainment-trade school, as evidence her son had plans. "Sammie was trying to apply."

Jessie dug through a shoebox filled with newspaper clippings about Sammie to find a letter he'd written her from jail. "Hey mom, I'm doing okay," she read out loud, sitting on the bed. "Every day I'm learning that 'innocent until proven guilty' is a lie. To the cops, the public, and everyone else, if you are arrested, then you are guilty. I find it funny that all these people have such strong opinions about something they know absolutely nothing about.... If the news and newspaper say it, then it must be true." He sent his love to Jessie, his ex-girlfriend, his friend Jake, then signed off with a reference from The Outsiders. "Stay gold."

Back in the living room, Jessie plunked down on the blue plaid sofa, sipping sweet tea and smoking a cigarette, and proceeded to tell me about her son. "Yeah, he's had a shitty life and that's all my fault," she announced. "Let's get real. It is, all my fault."

More damning than any of Jessie's revelations, in the eyes of the prosecution, were Sammie's own words. One handwritten note found in his pocket at the time of his arrest read, "maybe I should just do what I've been planning for so long." Another prophesied, "One day I will show them all they do is wrong. They will never forget what I did. I will be remembered forever, changing the way the youth interact with each other."

"I will be remembered forever, changing the way the youth interact with each other."

Among the many journals Sammie kept over the years—for therapeutic purposes, at the direction of his counselors, according to his family and friends—were two entries made not long before his arrest:

12-05-12
These thoughts are becoming increasingly real. IDK I'm starting to like it. It's like they used to be scary and frightening, but now it's like these thoughts of hurting and killing others has become comforting. It's almost like they're actually started to calm me down, like when I feel shitty I can think about hurting someone and it will make me smile and feel better.

12-06-12
Sitting in a room full of people screaming for help...but no one can here me [sic]. Asking them, begging them to do something before I have to. Wanting to show them all what their actions can cause. If they would've just left me alone, they would be ok. How many lives must be lost before they realize that the things they say and do can really fuck with someone's head. How many times must the "freaks," "weirdos," "punks," and "geeks" shoot up a school, or bomb a building before they start leaving all of us alone and letting us express ourselves how we want without ridiculing or ostrecizing [sic] us. I've been brought to this point, this point of not feeling sympathy for those who die because most if not all of them deserve it.... Those who deserve to die, will be killed. Those who don't yet know our cause will be forced to witness it....

The language and imagery are familiar now. For the past 14 years, angry and frustrated teenagers have had a vivid real-life precedent for what it could be like to strike out at everything and everyone around them. Targeted attempts at school violence occur now at an alarming pace. In the 21st century, mowing down peers is not something limited to lunatic hallucinations, but an action with historical reference.

Tyler White, one of the Bartlesville Senior students who'd been talking with Sammie that day at lunch, told administrators he'd also witnessed Sammie researching "pipe bombs" on the school computer, and "Columbine." During the police search, according to court documents, Jessie mentioned "spontaneously" that her son had recently watched Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and then announced, "And they wonder why kids shoot up schools."

"Pre-Columbine, when we had a frustrated kid wanting to lash out, he was really unclear how to do that," said journalist Dave Cullen, who spent 10 years researching the definitive account of Columbine. "He might do something, but who knows what. Now, for the last 15 years, there's this template set up, this recurring thing that if he's one of those guys who is actually going to do something, it's sort of the go-to option for a kid at that level of desperation.... It sort of provided the model."

There's no evidence to suggest that Columbine's frightening legacy has turned regular kids into killers. But for a small fraction of deeply depressed, suicidal, or mentally ill young people, the massacre has made an unthinkable course of action become thinkable.

"Is it going to push somebody over the edge, so that they choose that as an option?" said Jeffrey Daniels, a professor of counseling psychology at West Virginia University who's spent more than a decade studying school violence. "I don't think so. I think it's one of those things where probably somebody who is pretty disturbed to begin with, and is thinking about it, and then sees all attention that it gets. And that may be the final thing to say, 'Yeah, maybe, I'll do it this way—I'm going to sound really callous here—instead of just committing suicide.'"

Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho considered the Columbine perpetrators, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, martyrs. Steven Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old who killed five at his alma mater Northern Illinois University in 2008, talked about how he admired Cho's door-chaining strategy and the Columbine killers' use of bombs as a diversionary tactic. Adam Lanza not only had a detailed spreadsheet of mass murders, but a digital and physical archive that included a New York Times piece about Kazmierczak's spree, a book about a 2006 Amish-school shooting, and photocopies of newspaper articles from 1891 about school shootings.

School shootings, and the revenge narratives the shooters use to justify them, have become mythology, a part of young mens' mindscape. "YEAH SURE PICK ON THE KIDS WITH PROBLEMS," Sammie posted to Facebook on August 27, 2012, less than four months before his arrest. "AND YOU ASK WHATS WRONG WITH US?????? YOU ARE THE TYPE OF PEOPLE THAT CAUSE COLUMBINE....PEOPLE WHO CANT LEAVE OTHER PEOPLE ALONE!!!!!! WHY DONT YOU JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP AND MIND YOUR OWN SHIT!!!!!!!!!"

Sammie Eaglebear Chavez was born on July 2, 1994, at Sparks Regional Medical Center in Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Ronald Chavez and Jessie Ellyn. That December, when Sammie was five and a half months old, the couple married. Within a year, they broke up. Jessie maintains her ex-husband walked out on his family. In any case, Ronnie was entirely absent from his son's life for more than a decade.

When Sammie was nine months old, Jessie said she couldn't take care of her baby, and left her son with Ronnie's mother, Reba Rodgers, in Marble City, Oklahoma. As a boy, Sammie liked to sing and play and goof around. He made a game of hiding the television remote. Reba was a schoolteacher, so when Sammie turned four or five, she enrolled him in Head Start.

But when Sammie was still a preschooler, Jessie returned. "It broke my mom's heart when she took him back," Sammie's uncle Will Chavez told me. Mostly, he said, because she never knew when or if she'd see him again. "She never stopped talking about him and wondering about him," he said.

When Jessie decided she wanted Sammie back, she was living with a man named Jimmie. "I was with Jimmie 12 years, on and off," Jessie said. "I was like, 'Dude, I want my son,' and he was like, 'Here, go get him.' Gave me the truck, gas money, everything."

Sammie's childhood was nomadic. He was dragged among Oklahoma cities like Arkoma, Sperry, and Tulsa in tandem with Jessie's romantic whims. He usually had long, sleek hair: In a class photo from an Arkoma elementary school, the third grader has hair past his shoulders; cross-legged in the front row, he's biting his lip.

At eight, according to his family and court documents, Sammie was sexually molested by his older stepbrother. "They had their clothes on, but his stepbrother did dry-hump him and say some hateful things," Jessie said. "So that was hard on Sammie."

When Sammie was 10, his mother pled guilty to food-stamp fraud. In the sixth grade, Sammie told a school nurse he wanted to kill himself, which resulted in his spending two weeks in a Tulsa psychiatric hospital. It's unclear whether this was before or after the suicidal act he described to a Washington County court-appointed psychologist, when at the age of "probably 11," he swallowed a bunch of Seroquel—used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia—hoping to overdose.

"Sammie wanted so bad to have a dad that every time we broke up with Jimmie, he'd be like, 'I want Jimmie,' and cry."

Jessie severed things permanently with Jimmie when her son was 12 or 13. This breakup was emotionally devastating for Sammie. Although volatility had been the only real constant in his mother's third marriage, Jimmie was also the only father figure the child had known.

"Sammie wanted so bad to have a dad that every time we broke up with Jimmie, he'd be like, 'I want Jimmie,' and cry," Jessie said. "That was his dad. Twelve years." She sighed. "Then, guess what, we went to another domestic-violence shelter. And then it didn't help that I—I ain't gonna lie—I was a boozehound bimbo. For real."

Court documents state something everyone who knows Sammie also seems to know: Jessie worked as a prostitute when her son was a kid. Later as a teenager, Sammie would confide in friends that he'd been present for the transactions. "So a lot of bad things happened," Jessie said. "A lot. I ain't gonna lie. A whole bunch of bullcrap happened."

Bartlesville, population 36,000, is the seat of Northeastern Oklahoma's Washington County. I drove in from Tulsa on Route 75, exiting the highway into a flat landscape of major corporate chain stores and restaurants. "This is very much a Super Walmart community," Chris Oldroyd, publisher of the free glossy magazine Bartlesville Monthly, told me. On Halloween eve, the 24-hour Walmart was promoting Duck Dynasty, a rotisserie-chicken sale, Joel Osteen books, and gun magazines.

The demographics are very white (79 percent in the 2010 census), very red (73.9 percent of Washington County went Romney in 2012), and institutionally conservative. "It's very polarized," one politically left local told me. Democrats, he joked, "meet in private and cover the windows."

Teenagers call Bartlesville "the Shady B" because, they say, everyone is always up in each other's business. Sammie's arrest exacerbated that tendency. On Facebook, the commentary became dramatic and heated. A handful of kids defended Chavez in their posts, insisting the situation was blown out of proportion. Mr. Brutal N' Beastly yelled back, "IF YOU WERE FELT WHAT SNADY [sic] HOOK IS FEELING RIGHT NOW YOUR WORDS WOULD BE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT." To which someone identified as Dustin G. added, "It dosent fukin matter what his reasons are . . . shootin up a school that is the most pussey thing ever." Eventually, Brutal N' Beastly concluded, "THIS IS JUST GONNA LEAD TO A FUCKIN FIGHT IN DA STREETS."

This tension manifested itself in jail, where Sammie was scared for his life. "I honestly did not think he was gonna make it a year," his good friend Missouri Dodd, 17, tearfully recalled one night at her house. She visited him in January. "It was a so horrible. I'd never seen Sammie cry like that. I'd seen him cry, but not like that." Remembering this, her voice cracked. "He said, 'I'm scared. People are threatening me, threatening my life.' I was so worried about him."

Ken Dossett, a local youth minister, saw Sammie two days after his arraignment. "The first day I saw him, I said, 'How do you feel?' And he said, 'I don't feel safe in here because some of the people in here may've had children in school, or knew people there, and they think I wanted to kill everybody.' He felt threatened."

Making matters worse, in the wake of Sammie's nationally publicized arrest, the young Bartlesville men Sammie considered his very best friends—friends he'd lived with in 2011 and 2012, friends listed as a "brother" on his Facebook page—hadn't stood by him. When they were questioned, they separately told investigators that they barely knew Sammie, or that they hadn't talked with him in months, lies motivated by self-preservation that trickled back to their incarcerated friend. According to mutual friends, they feared police harassment, or search warrants, or whatever other social and legal repercussions would come from associating with someone portrayed as a young monster.

I contacted four of these young men on Facebook, trying to see if it had been pure self-interest, or whether Sammie's arrest had changed their perception of their friend to something more frightening. I only heard back from Caden Shepherd, someone Sammie lived with for six months in the eleventh grade, someone friends say knew Sammie better than anyone. "He is really not what they are trying to say he is," Caden texted me late one weeknight. That was the only thing I'd hear from him.

Meanwhile, Sammie was almost entirely alone. He hadn't heard from his biological father since the arrest. His paternal grandmother's landline was unreliable, thanks to the callous indifference of storms and telephonic bureaucrats, and he couldn't reach her.

Jessie was around, but not handling the situation emotionally well. In addition to her remarks to the cops, she'd said unexpected things to a Tulsa World reporter, claiming that Sammie had texted her about wanting to "shoot up the school" the same day of his lunch-room conversation. ("That would be the last thing I'd say if my son was in trouble," a source familiar with the case told me. "It almost felt like she wanted to send him off for good.") The purported wording of this particular text message never appeared again, in court documents or testimony, but there it was, printed in the newspaper, for all of the city to read.

Sammie had no chance in hell of making bail; he couldn't even afford a lawyer, listing his monthly household earnings as $750 from Supplemental Security Income in his sworn application for a public defender. One former classmate set up a Facebook page called "Saving Sammie:": "Everybody message me if you are willing to save money to get Sammie out!" The effort only accumulated 25 friends.

For weeks after Sammie's arrest, the local sheriff's office couldn't say who his lawyer was. Eventually, he was assigned a public defender, in the form of James E. Conatser, a prickly 86-year-old whose son is a municipal judge. Conatser has a reputation for forgetting questions he's asked in court.

Bartians describe him privately as "the town's worst lawyer," "a jerk to everybody," "in the early stages of dementia," "off his corncob," "a stickler for accuracy," or "a man with an admirable past." No one seems to understand why he hasn't retired. "I felt like they put that old man with him because they knew he'd bomb it," the mother of one of Sammie's closest friends told me.

Conatser did not return any of the detailed messages I left him, over the course of months, regarding his client's case. At 10 a.m. on Halloween morning, my first full day in Bartlesville, I visited his downtown office. Talk radio crackled behind his locked door. I knocked. Twice. Eventually, with the creak of a coffin lid, the door opened. I have never seen any man look more angrily interrupted.

"I don't give anything out on Sammie Chavez, I don't care," he said. "I didn't talk to the radio, I didn't talk to to the TV, I don't talk to anybody." A back-and-forth ensued (Q: "Would you possibly have time this weekend?" A: "I don't work on weekends!"), and then the door really did slam in my face.

The figure of the school shooter in the national consciousness is built, to a great extent, out of misconceptions. Columbine, in Cullen's painstaking reconstruction, wasn't a ruthlessly well-executed shooting plot; it was a completely botched mass-bombing attempt that left the perpetrators aimlessly wandering the halls, peeking out the windows for explosions that never came. Nor were the Columbine killers outcasts or victims of bullying. Despite the police's interest in Sammie's outerwear, the much-discussed Trenchcoat Mafia had nothing to do with it.

Who really perpetrates school killings? In 2002, the Secret Service, in conjunction with the Department of Education, released the most definitive report regarding targeted school violence to date. In Columbine's aftermath, both agencies identified and analyzed 37 cases in the United States, from December of 1974 to June of 2000. The incidents involved 41 attackers who ranged in age from 11 to 21. All were males; all were former or current students of the schools they besieged.

The predominant finding was this: There is no consistent profile of a school shooter. Three-quarters were white. Many of the attackers felt bullied (71 percent), but they were frequently part of their peer group's social mainstream (41 percent). One third were loners, most were not. Two-thirds came from two-parent homes. Many had exhibited suicidal inclinations (78 percent), but only a few had been diagnosed with mental health disorders (17 percent). Only 27 percent had been previously been arrested, and only 11 of the 41 had ever been suspended from school.

Gary Noesner, a retired FBI hostage negotiator who worked several school crises during his 30-year career, attended one of very first national conferences on school violence. "One of the objectives was to try to identify one of the common attributes of these shooters in the schools," Noesner said. "What we found out is that there were, indeed, some by and large, fairly common behaviors. But what was disarming for us was the fact that these same behaviors were present in quite a large number of kids who never did these things. So they might be common in the perpetrators, but they're not precursors. It's like, for example, if a kid's raised in the ghetto, you can't say he's probably going to become a criminal, because he also might become a neurosurgeon."

"Society is now so frightened of these things that he's not gonna get the benefit of the doubt," retired FBI negotiator Gary Noesner said.

However, one consistent factor was that at least one other person knew the assailant was considering or planning the attack (81 percent). In two-thirds of the cases, more than one outside person knew. Nearly all (93 percent) had done something before the attack that alarmed other people in their lives.

So when a high-school senior talks about shooting up a high school in the lunchroom, school-violence experts believe the threat has to be evaluated seriously, even if it's purported to be a joke. "Society now is so frightened of these things that he's not gonna get the benefit of the doubt," said Noesner. "It's like yelling 'Fire!' in the movie theater; you can't yell 'Hijack' on a plane. You can say, 'Hey, I was just joking.' Well, you were just joking a little bit too far. We don't know the difference, and the consequences are now going to fall on your shoulders."

On Halloween afternoon in the Education Service Center, a stone-facade single-level office space of wood-paneled hallways and tiled ceilings, Bartlesville Senior High principal LaDonna Chancellor sat down with Chris Tanea, Community Relations Coordinator of Bartlesville Public Schools, and tried to explain how her staff determines when a student threat is credible enough to involve the local police.

"There's some history with the kid that comes into play," she said. "If a kid just pops off in a class, you know the situation around it: Is this something?" She added, "You pay attention to other things too. You pay attention to things kids write, you pay attention to things kids draw."

The Bartlesville school system, a 10-school nexus of approximately 6,000 students and 800 employees, is considered a top school district in the state. In December 2012, the Oklahoma State Department of Education ranked Bartlesville second among the 32 largest districts. In spring 2013, Bartlesville High claimed eight National Merit Finalists, the most of any Oklahoma large school per-capita. Last month, the state Department of Ed's bi-annual report-card evaluation awarded Bartlesville Senior, a 900-pupil secondary school of 11th and 12th graders, a letter grade of A.

Chancellor has known Sammie since the seventh grade, when she was his middle-school principal. Federal privacy laws prevented her from discussing his records specifically, but court documents filled in some blanks. In eighth grade, he accrued a series of suspensions: five days for fighting in February 2009; three days for swearing at a teacher that same month; a suspension for the rest of the year after a blanket offense of disruption and defiance in March. In September 2010, he received in-school suspension for using profanity and punching a locker. Before his arrest, his GPA was a 1.64.

At the time of his lunch-table conversation, Sammie was enrolled in a special-education program called Bruin Brilliance, a fully supervised half-day schedule for 10 students, grades nine through 12, who also attend supplementary counseling. "Usually there's something going on that's not allowing them to be successful at school and their education needs the counseling piece," Chancellor said. "It's just another level of intervention."

Tyler White, who talked with Sammie that day at lunch, was also in Bruin Brilliance. He told his best friend Tony; the next day, Tony's mom called an assistant principal to register her concern. When Tyler White was questioned about the incident, he not only synopsized Sammie's fantasy, but also said his classmate was trying to obtain a campus map.

Separately, Bruin Brilliance instructor Bill Wright told the investigators that Sammie had told him he'd recently bought a Colt .45 and gone shooting. Those sworn testimonies were enough for the Bartlesville Police to build an affidavit and to convince a judge to sign a warrant for Sammie's arrest.

Chancellor called a faculty meeting on Friday morning, to inform the staff of the situation. Before noon, a mass email went out to all Bartlesville Public School parents, alerting them that an unspecified threat had been dealt with in an appropriate manner. Bartlesville High administrators were so consumed with handling the fallout of Sammie's arrest that day, they didn't even know about the Newtown rampage until later.

"Over the weekend, I started to realize [Sammie's arrest] was bigger than it even was—for peoples' peace of minds," Chancellor said. "After Sandy Hook, you just can't help but connect them."

Bartlesville High School officials categorically believe they prevented something terrible from happening last December. "With the conditions that were set out, we certainly think that we made a really good decision," said Tanea. "We think it's quite possible that we prevented something serious from happening—not only for our students, but for the kid who was thinking about doing it."

"I don't think he could have played out the whole movie the way that he shared in the cafeteria that day," Chancellor said. Her voice was a whisper. "I mean, I don't know."

"We just know that what we had in front of us, that we prevented something," interjected Tanea. "We don't know if it ultimately would have happened or taken place, but everyone did about as good a job as we could have."

"Our whole goal, every day, is to educate every kid we have at our site," Chancellor continued. "Sammie was one of our kids. That's just as disappointing as anything else: Everything we know we tried couldn't make a difference for him."

Since Jesse moved into her latest house half a year ago, she's already had a parade of roommates: Sammie's older sister Rachel and her girlfriend Ashley; Jessie's friend Craig; Sammie's old friend Dakota Bush and his uncle Billy; John and Roscoe, two guys Sammie had met in jail, who didn't have places to go after their releases, plus Roscoe's "psychotic" girlfriend Jessica, who Jessie eventually filed a protective order against. Now Dakota was back, sharing a bedroom with his pregnant 17-year-old girlfriend, Natasha. "My door is always open," Jesse said.

Dakota and Natasha traipsed off to the store to buy ramen noodles and Cheetos. Jessie drank her sweet tea and talked about life with Sammie. Her fourth marriage, she said, took place on June 24, 2008. Sammy was 14, living with her at the Lighthouse Outreach Center, a Christian homeless shelter in Bartlesville. He walked his mother down the aisle of the mission's chapel to marry 54-year-old Jack Garnett, Jr.; Jessie wore a wedding dress, with a tablecloth as a veil.

The union lasted a little more than 24 hours. Shortly after the wedding, Jessie learned that Jack had told people he'd emptied out his bank account and sold his van to buy her the engagement ring, which Jessie says she'd paid for bought herself. "If you have a bank account, why you at a homeless shelter?" she said. She could not live with such a preposterous liar. "When he come off work at two o'clock in the morning, his shit was out on the lawn."

"From then on, I had numerous boyfriend, girlfriends, people moved in and out because they needed help," Jessie said. "Sammie has seen me beaten by all of the boyfriends once Jack left."

It's difficult to disentangle the strands of culpability that led to Jessie requesting a Bartlesville Police officer to help "discuss problems with her 16-year-old son" on January 11, 2011. But at approximately noon that winter Wednesday, a cop was called to an apartment complex called the Georgian Arms. Jessie and Sammie had shared a place there until 201o, until Jessie moved somewhere else and Sammie ingratiated himself with the new renters, a young married couple named Tori and Wes, who let the teenager stay with them.

Now Jessie wanted him out of their apartment, and she became belligerent. "Due to the level of the Defendant's aggressiveness, her son had been secured in my patrol vehicle, separated from her," wrote the arresting officer, who also summoned a caseworker from Child Welfare to the scene.

When the tenants came home, Jessie went ballistic, pushed past their door, and grabbed Tori by the neck, according to an affidavit. Jessie was charged with unlawful entry, plus assault and battery. Court documents later alleged that the husband had discovered his wife had become romantically involved with their teenage roommate—who at 16, met Oklahoma's age of consent—and that was why Jessie was livid. "He was old enough," Jessie said. "He knew right from wrong. Nobody made him do this. So he had to face it on his own."

"The defendant reported being shocked when he found out his mother terminated her rights. As a result of his mother's decision, the defendant began drinking heavily and cutting himself."

The Department of Human Services took Sammie. Jessie was ordered to take parenting classes, but she refused and signed away her parental rights. "The defendant reported being shocked when he found out his mother terminated her rights," the pre-sentencing report gathered this past October said. "As a result of his mother's decision, the defendant began drinking heavily and cutting himself."

On the night of May 21, 2011, the date that apocalyptic radio preacher Harold Camping had predicted the Rapture would occur, Sammie posted a Facebook message lamenting that the world hadn't ended.

"What are you talking about," Delia Avilez, a loyal friend from junior high, wondered in the comments.

"The rapture. . . We were supposed to die today," Sammie wrote back.

"Why do you want the world to end," Delia asked.

Sammie clarified: "Not everyones just mine."

Privately, Sammie told Delia why he was so despondent: His girlfriend had thought she was pregnant. But Sammie wasn't scared of becoming a father; he was so upset that because she wasn't. "He couldn't get over the fact that she might've been pregnant," Delia told me over the phone. "He was excited because he had a feeling that if he was a dad, it would change him into a better person." Sammie was 16. "He wanted to be a really good dad to the baby, if he was gonna have one."

Jessie said that her relationship with Sammie is great now, ever since she admitted her failings. "I said, 'I know the truth, I'm a horrible mom'—ever since then we've been like that," she said, crossing her fingers. "I told him, 'Hell yeah, I screwed your life up. And I'm sorry. I can't do nothing about it.' And now we're like buddy-buddy." She paused. "I can't WAIT for him to come home!"

Will Chavez learned about his nephew's arrest from a smart-phone news update. A senior reporter for the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the United States, Chavez received a mobile alert on December 14 about a thwarted school-shooting plot. Click. There was Sammie's mugshot. "It was pretty heartbreaking," he said. "I was shocked."

Chavez and Reba Rodgers, Sammie's grandmother, were seated in a quiet lobby inside the headquarters of the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, a gorgeously sprawling 15,000-person town along the Western foot of the Ozarks. To their right was a tribal gift shop; to their left was a buffet-style Restaurant of the Cherokees. The carpet was patterned with the Cherokee alphabet, Reba's first language.

Earlier in December, Sammie had phoned his grandmother to tell her he would visit during Christmas vacation. "He said, 'When school turns out for vacation, I'll let you know where to come get me, or to meet me somewhere,'" she said. Sammie had a driver's license, but no access to a car, and Reba lived three hours away from Bartlesville. "I said, 'OK. I'll be waiting.' Then just a couple days later, Will calls, and says, 'Mom, bad news: Sammie's been arrested.'"

Reba, a soft-spoken matriarch with a profoundly soothing presence, hadn't talked with Sammie since his arrest. The silence has been difficult. She has followed his case through the newspaper and the television, but that's a pinhole perspective. In the last 11 months, she's dropped 30 pounds. "My doctor said, 'Is there anything bothering you, something going on in your life?'" she said. "I said, 'Ahhh, just worried about the kids, I guess.'"

Will had been the one person relatively close to Sammie who I could track down before arriving in Oklahoma. Over the phone, he'd been candid about his frustration with his brother Ron's lack of involvement in Sammie's life. "It's a source of bad blood between my brother and I," Will said. "He never stepped up and did anything for him." (Ronnie could not be reached for this piece; even the number Will had for him, for a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, didn't work.)

But in 2011, with Jessie renouncing her parental rights, DHS custody called: Could Sammie's father take him? The department had nowhere for him to live. His dad only had a one-bedroom, so Reba offered up her home again—after all, it was where he'd been as a baby.

At a court date in Bartlesville, Reba said, she encountered Jessie: "She said, 'Well, I just want to say: If you all are trying to get that boy, I'm gonna tell you, he's no good. He's a drunk, he's a drug addict, he's just no good. Me, I'm gonna go in there, and sign those papers, and give away all my parental rights. I've got nothing to do with him.'"

Reba hadn't seen Sammie since he was a little boy. She didn't know what to believe. "Later, I asked the DHS lady, 'Is he really something like that?' She said, 'Noooo, Sammie's a good boy. He has no problem with us.'" Reba, who is careful with her words, inhaled deeply. "So I don't know."

At the time, Sammie had been living in a group home. "He didn't like it," Will said. "Everybody was in your business constantly, he said, so he was glad to be going to my mom's home."

"He said, 'This is my own bedroom? My own bed?'" Reba said. Despite his constant moving, Sammie had managed to keep a few prized possessions: a workout bench, a punching bag, a big screen TV, a gaming console.

Every morning, Reba enticed him out of bed by cooking him breakfast. He'd say she made too much, but then clean his plate every time. "He was smart," she said. "He knew world events. And he knew how to say things." In the evening, they'd sit on the porch and chat. "He probably talked to me more than my boys did," said Reba. "He was a talker."

Sammie still went to counseling regularly, and every night, Sammie would write in his journal, which intrigued his grandma. "I said, 'What you write, Sam?'" she said. "He said, 'Oh, just what I did during the day. If something made me mad, I write about it.'" She's pretty sure she gave him the black notebook police confiscated.

Reba's parents had bought land in Marble City way back, so her siblings all built houses there, turning the area into an informal familial settlement. Sammie had grown up being the only Chavez he knew, but all the sudden he was surrounded by others. In July, he turned 17. Relatives came to celebrate. "He said, 'I never had a birthday dinner before,'" Reba recalled. "He thought that was something." Four days later, Sammie updated Facebook with: "So kinda of not feeling so alone anymore . . ."

"He used to say, 'I think I would've been a different boy, Grandma, if I'd grown up with you.'"

At the same time, Sammie was still a high-school kid, plagued by fear that things were going on without him. On July 5, he wrote on Facebook, "Ready to go back to the ville...missing so much...I just hope my dad can understand…" Again, on August 12, "I can not wait to get to the ville." He moved back soon after, to start his junior year.

"He used to say, 'I think I would've been a different boy, Grandma, if I'd grown up with you,'" Reba remembered. "He said, 'Your brother, he goes to church all the time. And I noticed all your family around here: Nobody drinks, nobody smokes, I don't even hear nobody cussing.' And I said, 'Well, I guess that's how you would've been if you'd stayed with me.'"

Bartlesville Senior High was not a welcoming place for a half-Native American teenager with an unstable home life. Sammie skateboarded frequently, painted his fingernails, and wore eyeliner. He listened to metal, hardcore, rap, sometimes the much-maligned Insane Clown Posse—people teased him about that.

"He would have a sideways mohawk that he would dye all sorts of crazy colors," said 17-year-old Missouri Dodd, the only one of the defendant's close friends who kept in contact since his arrest. "People, I guess, didn't like the way Sammie had fun with it and bullied him over that."

Missouri, who goes by the nickname Mo, was curled up on her Bartlesville couch, knees pressed against her chest. Dark-haired with a lip ring, she looked and sounded like a millennial Angela Chase, if the My So-Called Life's protagonist liked zombies and played Grand Theft Auto. Her mother Kelli sat to her left.

Sammie lived with them for a month in high school, after he returned from his grandmother's house. "He is welcome in my home any time," said Kelli. "He always will be."

Sammie sometimes trusted the wrong people. "When he would get someone close, and he thought they were his good friends, he would confide," Kelli said. He told some people that he'd been molested; later when they turned on him, they gossiped about the assault. Kids started called Sammie a "faggot."

The aggression occasionally got physical. He got jumped a few times. "He'd come over here bleeding and everything," Kelli said.

"It wasn't every day," Mo said. "But it happened. He came over with his battle wounds."

"Through all that he had this great heart, he was still a every sensitive guy, he still just wanted to be accepted and loved and be accepted for who he was," Kelli said. "He's different, he's strange, he's kind of geeky, but he's a very cool kid."

Mo, whose close friends tend to be male, met Sammie at Central Middle School. "He was the odd one and we clicked as soon as we met," she said. "We just had this crazy, emotional, rollercoaster relationship."

From the other end of the sofa, her mother translated: "They dated off-and-on for six years."

"He was like my first real boyfriend in school," Mo admitted sheepishly. "I freaking love that kid, no matter what."

The two agreed that Sammie was a "tortured soul." They said that even when he tried to be tough, sometimes he just came over to the house and cried. Occasionally, he got too drunk and acted like an idiot, but he was never violent or mean. He'd been cutting himself in the time before his arrest, Mo knew. He'd been prescribed the antidepressant Celexa and the anti-anxiety medicine propranolol. But Mo saw him in the hall at school a couple days before his arrest. Everything was the same.

Kelli doesn't understand why if Sammie really was searching "Columbine" on a school computer, the administration didn't know. "Is that not a cry for help?" said Kelli. "Instead they want to prosecute this boy, put him on a million dollar bond, and give him 10 years in prison? Is that gonna help him? There needs to be some other option."

Sammie's trial went absurdly fast, so fast that the local NBC affiliate, KJRH Channel 2, declared the proceedings "abrupt." At nine a.m. on Monday, September 23, 79 potential jurors were seated in the third-floor courtroom of Washington County Courthouse. By 3:37 p.m. the next day, both sides had rested their cases and a jury of 12 had reached a verdict. There'd even been time to break for lunch.

Gathered in support of Sammie were his mother; his older sister and her partner; Sammie's ex-girlfriend Shelby; and Mo. Dakota showed up the for first day, on a bicycle. There were also a handful of local print and television reporters in attendance, including the Tulsa World's Bartlesville correspondent, who had been dutifully covering Sammie's case.

Tyler White, who'd turned 18 since the incident, testified. Visibly nervous, he stumbled over his words while recounting the cafeteria conversation he'd already repeated to administrators and law enforcement: Sammie's proposed intercom takeover, the auditorium trap, picking off kids from the balcony, the cop-deterring explosives by the doors, Sammie's casual bid for accomplices.

When it was the defense's turn, all Sammie's public defender wanted to know was how White would describe Chavez. A "jokester," Tyler said. Conatser was satisfied.

Lieut. Ickleberry, the officer who'd executed the search warrant on the Chavez's home, was a far more compelling witness for the prosecution. Ickleberry testified that Chavez's school computer had logged searches on various weapons, Columbine, and Virginia Tech. "We found that there were 13,000 hits on the word 'bomb' on that computer," Tulsa World quoted him as saying. The defense had planned to argue that the rifle seized from Sammie's residence didn't work; Ickleberry demonstrated that the weapon was functional.

Ickleberry also talked at length about the ominous "Murder Table" and assigned macabre significance to the dates carved in the wood. For example, he proposed that "9-25-12" represented the National Day of Remembrance for Murder Victims, and that "9-19-12 Murder Barbie" corresponded to the death of Barbara Olson, a Wisconsin grandmother who was hacked to death by her 13-year-old great-grandson and his friend.(Mo and Kelli told me that "Barbie" was one of Jessie's multiple personalities and that "MURDER"was the graffiti tag of Sammie's friend Jake, but no one offered those interpretations to the jury.)

In a Tulsa World photo from the trial, Sammie looks small, outmatched, and a little lost. But on the witness stand, Sammie was self-assured and spoke confidently. Dressed in a striped button-up shirt and black slacks, he didn't dispute White's factual recollection of his lunch-room scenario, just the intent of his words.

"It was a joke in the sense that it wasn't meant seriously," Sammie said. As for the journals, he clarified, "It was just me being really angry and writing anything down that came into my head." He described the evidence collected against him "an unfortunate coincidence."

For rhetorical effect, the prosecution kept flashing the pages from Sammie's journal on a screen and referring to the notes found in Sammie's pockets. Those who deserve to die will be killed. Those who don't yet know our cause will be forced to witness it. District Attorney Kevin Buchanan hammered away at the jury, imploring them to sentence Chavez to the 10-year maximum. When I feel shitty I can think about hurting someone and it will make me smile and feel better.

The defense countered, "I would hope that when you weigh everything that you would decide what you have heard is not worth 10 years of his life."

The jury, seven women and five men, deliberated for two hours and 43 minutes. Their verdict: Guilty on one felony count of devising a plan to cause serious bodily harm, with an intent to perform an act of violence. They recommended 30 months imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.

Every Sunday, Jessie turns up at Washington County Detention Center—dutifully, she said, "like a Catholic girl going to confession." But on Saturdays, when visiting hours begin at 8:30 a.m. and inmates' relatives start lining up before seven, Sammie doesn't regularly have guests.

Even though I was a total stranger who showed up unannounced, he was undaunted; in fact, through the window, we mimed a cartoony greeting that acknowledged our lack of acquaintance.

Through the echoing receiver, I told him that I'd been following his case since it first happened, that I was writing a long article about him, and that I'd already talked with his grandmother, who loves him very much. "I miss my grandma sooooo much," he said, smiling profoundly, eyes squeezed shut. "She's the best."

Behind the glass partition, Sammie looked surprisingly great. The photos from his trial made him seem wiry and diminutive, but here in his blood-orange jumpsuit, he appeared strong and masculine and physically healthy. He'd been lifting weights in the jail's gym and his forearms had grown thicker. The longhaired orphan in the mugshot has disappeared.

I asked what it was like getting arrested that day. "It was dumb," he said, plainly. "And difficult." He's still adamant the lunch-room conversation was a joke, that he was bullshitting with people he thought were good friends, people he thought understood his dark humor. And that he'd thought wrong. "Anybody who knows me knows I'd never ever do that in a million years," he said.

Ken Dossett, the minister who visited Sammie two days after his arraignment, told me, "As soon as he saw me, he just started crying: 'I didn't mean what I said.'" Ten months, a trial, and one guilty verdict have dried out those emotional denials, and now Sammie's disavowals are more resigned. "I've done nothing," Sammie said. "Yeah, I said something. I shouldn't have said that, I'm sorry." The apology is almost matter-of-fact.

"I've done nothing," Sammie said. "Yeah, I said something. I shouldn't have said that, I'm sorry."

I asked about school. He hated going. "I've been out for one year now and I haven't used one thing from school," he said. You're in jail, I countered. "But I work in the kitchen and I haven't used math. History? Come on." He spoke as if he'd been tricked.

Thoughtful discussions in jail were few and far between, he said, and he grew more reflective. "Maybe that was problem: School was too easy," he said. It was clear from our conversation that he was smart. "All the kids at school—everybody was just mean. The way I grew up, everybody supposed to be kind, you don't go around picking on people. If somebody needs something, you give it to them and you don't ask for anything back. My mom...she's insane, she takes in homeless people, people she doesn't even know."

Things became dark. "Jocks would pick on anybody they thought were inferior." His tone was wounded. "And girls." He sighed. He stewed. He addressed me directly. "No offense or anything, but in my experience, women at school are just. . . whores." There was silence. "It's bad—it's really bad that I think this."

He looked uncomfortable but almost relieved to be emptying his head, despite the awful honesty. "But I can remember in sixth grade, I can remember, I dated this girl for a few months. She was the most goody-two shoes virgin ever. Then I leave for a little while, and come back to Bartlesville in high school. Next thing I know, she's gone and had sex with half the town. What happened." He shook his head, stared at the counter. "What happened." He was crestfallen. "This place"—he meant Bartlesville, but also maybe the Earth—"is bad. It takes good people and makes them bad."

He spoke as if he'd lost faith in goodness. "I've been conditioned to believe that people are just shitty," he said. "That's one thing I've learned from this: 'Everybody's just shitty.' Everybody wants something in return. Guy gives some money to a homeless person, what's that guy want back in return? Later, he'll expect that guy's last cigarette."

A few minutes later, he smiled sadly and said, "Let's be honest—I'm a little messed up." We both laughed.

I asked if they'd given him counseling there.

"No, they don't care," he said. "They don't care if you're depressed or you're schizophrenic, they just lock you up." Before this, he'd been talking to a therapist weekly, sometimes daily, since he was a kid. "You say you're gonna kill yourself, they just throw you in a padded cell with a blanket. 'I need help.' 'Oh really?' Slam."

Had that happened to him? "No, I've actually not been in a lick of trouble when I've been in here. I keep to myself, I do what I'm told." This is true. His behavior had been so superb that he'd become a Washington County Detention Center trustee, a model prisoner with special privileges, job responsibilities, and visitations extended from 20 minutes to 45 or 50. In fact, this position will get him out of here sooner.

That day in the lunch room, Sammie was drunk, he said. "On a daily basis, I was going to school intoxicated," he said. "I call them, 'My dark days.' I really was completely obliterated. I can remember waking up to school and taking shots. I'd put vodka in water bottle at school; that way it looks like water, and you could drink it all day. By the time I left school, I'd be blackout drunk and not even remember the last period of school, not remember the rest of the day, wake up the next day, and wonder what the hell happened."

"I started drinking when I was eight years old," he said. "It didn't really become a problem when I was 12. Then I was an alcoholic until I went to jail."

He's sworn off liquor, he said, but he can't imagine civilian life without weed. He can't help it: He started smoking pot when he was five. "I can remember this clear as day. Years ago, whenever my parents were smoking"—he means Jessie and his step-dad Jimmie—"I'd come in and poke my head. After a while, my step-dad says, 'You know the only reason he comes in here is to get high?' She's like, 'Yeah, pretty much.' He's like, 'Well, what do you think?' She's like, 'Just go ahead.'"

I would've been a different boy, Grandma, if I'd grown up with you.

Sammie did not remember living with his grandma as a toddler, he said. Apparently he didn't even know Reba had helped raise him until he was 16 and saw all the pictures of his childhood there.

"What's really weird," he said, "is that I remember at two years old, running through the house, and I tripped and fell into a glass table." He pointed to a scar on his head. "I busted my head open and I remember not doing anything about it. I remember I walked to my mom, showed her, and we went to the hospital."

But at that time, wouldn't he have been in his grandmother's care? "I really believe that people believe are conditioned to believe. I really think that if you tell somebody something for long enough, even though it might not be true—just keep telling them, and telling them, and telling them, and telling them—maybe eventually they believe it. Maybe that's a story my mom came up with and she just kept telling me and telling me and telling me, and eventually I just came up with it. It's happened before."

The guard knocked on the window. Time was up.

There were two things that Sammie had said, when we first sat down. One, regarding that conversation about attacking the auditorium: "My whole life has been a bunch of things that could have been avoided but weren't," he said, speaking slowly. "Just a bunch of wrong decisions. And that's all this was: another bad decision. I had a conversation with somebody I shouldn't have had."

The second, regarding the first thing he'd do when he got out of there: "Hug my mother and tell her I love her."

Was Sammie really going to shoot up the school? "I really don't think he would have done that," said his friend Delia Avilez. "He's talked about stupid stuff like that before, but he'd never act upon it."

"He wouldn't have done it because I know Sammie's heart," said Mo's mom Kelli. "We know Sammie. That's not Sammie."

"Everybody that knows Sammie knows he wasn't gonna do that," said his friend Dakota, who lives with Jessie. "He was just talking about blowing the school up—like any other kid who hates school would."

"I could imagine him saying something like that and not being serious about it—just laughing about it," his uncle Will told me. "Around my kids, he was a jokester. He had a lot of humor—that's how I imagine it went down. Someone ran with it; that's all it took." Besides, his nephew lacked the resources. "I don't think he had the capacity, the tools, to do something like that. He couldn't even afford to buy the bullets for the gun."

"He was just joking!" his grandmother said. "Kid say things, when they sit around, acting silly. I think that's the way it was with Sammie. He just said it without thinking what could happen, especially nowadays."

"All that pipe-bomb bullcrap? Wasn't there," Jessie said. "All he did was have a conversation. An inappropriate one, but a conversation nonetheless. He actually did nothing."

Tyler White, who was there for the conversation, saw it differently. "I think he was serious," White wrote me in a Facebook message. He had lost friends over this. He wrote: "I was in class I saw how he joked around he was funny but that day was diffrent and I believe that someone wouldn't say that unless they really meant it plus I saw him looking up all that shit on his computer."

"Can anybody say for sure, unless he were to reverse course and say, 'Yeah, I actually was going to kill people?,'" said Noesner, the former FBI crisis negotiator. "But if he persists that—'Nah, I was just joking, I really didn't mean it'—that may be true." Then again, he adds, it also might not. "Kids go to jail every week in this country for making a stupid threat and chances are they're never gonna carry it out. Your friend there can say it was a joke. Maybe it's a joke now that he got caught, but who's to say? Who's to say?"

Only Sammie knows. And does Sammie even know?

What was left, for many Bartlesville residents, was the mythic figure of the school shooter. Many of them believe Sammie Eaglebear Chavez has been insufficiently punished for the danger he presented. Before his November 12 sentencing, 23 members of the community—including district principals, parents, and school-department employees—submitted victim-impact statements to the judge, Curtis DeLapp, begging for a harsher punishment than the jury had recommended.

"Why? Because he may have had a poor childhood? Because he may have had depression or another crutch society likes to use to get out of personal responsibility? No excuse is good enough."

By state law, DeLapp could not legally deliver a longer sentence than the panel of 12 had suggested. But the purpose of these letters seemed to be to renounce Sammie publicly and to inform the 19-year-old that he is unwelcome in the Shady B. To wit:

As a mother and member of this community, I say that Sammy [sic] Chavez should be in prison for a much longer sentence, since he was willing to plan to kill students in such a horrific way. . . His fine should be such a high amount that he will never be able to pay it off and return to society. He doesn't deserve to be in society at all, much less one that he threatened children and public servants.

He may have had a hard time in high school, but does that give him the right to threaten everyone's peace of mind and education? NO!!!!!!!!!!

Such disdain was fairly consistent among the letters, as was the assumption that Sammie Chavez had been about to commit an extensive rampage on Friday, December 14:

My husband would have lost his wife that day. My children would have lost their mother. I have parents and siblings who were also impacted to a great degree just knowing how close death was . . . on the day Sammy [sic] Chavez decided to take the life of as many as he could. Why? Because he had a poor childhood? Because he may have depression or another crutch society likes to use to get out of personal responsibility? No excuse is good enough.

We all know what he had planned. The proof was evident in many ways.

Please consider sentencing Sammy [sic] to a lifetime.

Most of the pleas were submitted anonymously "out of fear of retaliation." Some authors elaborated on this anxiety, including this elementary-school professional:

Mr. Chavez has been in my building several times in my year and a half before the incident occurred. He would come with a "friend" who was picking up a sibling after school. Knowing that he has been in my building gives my staff and I chills. He knows that there are innocent children here. He could have very easily committed the crime in my building, knowing the dismissal process. That terrifies me.

What terrifies me even more . . . That "friend" he accompanied to my school on numerous occasions was the one who gave information which led to exposing Chavez. What if Mr. Chavez comes back to get revenge on the "friend" and the members of his family?

"It is all a misunderstanding," Sammie responded to the court in writing. "I never threatened no one."

Ken Dossett, the minister who visited Sammie, has promised him a job at On the Rock Ministries, the Christian recreation center he co-founded in 1998, where Sammie skateboarded as a sixth grader. When a parole office called Dossett to confirm this offer, he said the woman on the phone told him, "That's really good, because there're not too many people lined up right now to offer him any aid or support."

But even Dossett, a man only concerned with pleasing the Lord, anticipates a backlash. "There may be some people in the community—my wife's already talked to me about it—who say, 'I don't want my kids going down there because you got Sammie working down there,'" he said. "I believe this is what the Lord would have us do: Reach out to him and give him sanctuary and a place of refuge, a place where he can straighten himself out."

Other Bartians who've expressed any sympathy or compassion have heard the same thing Dossett has: Friends and acquaintances insist they'd feel differently if they'd had loved ones in the school. "One of my staff members whose husband works at the school was saying, 'How would you feel if your wife was a school teacher and she came under that threat?'" Dossett said. "I said, 'Well, I would want to feel just as I do now—that this young man has value or redemption, regardless of what he proposed to do.'"

On Tuesday, November 12, Judge DeLapp formally sentenced Sammie Eaglebear Chavez to 30 months in prison, a $5,000 fine, and a year of follow-up supervision by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. He was barred from future contact with Bartlesville Senior High or its employees. Before the hearing, Sammie's uncle and his grandmother Reba had mailed the judge letters of support. That morning, Will and his kids said a special Indian prayer. Jessie wore a blue turtleneck sweater and a necklace. Mo was in black.

Judge DeLapp addressed the thick file of victim-impact statements by saying, "I want to make clear for the record today the court cannot disregard [jury sentencing recommendation] and impose a sentence beyond that, nor do I think the court would do that."

"I know they're disappointed he's not in jail longer," District Attorney Kevin Buchanan—who ignored all my requests for comment, including an in-person visit to his secretary—told local Channel 6. Buchanan tried to explain that this was "a challenging case," because Chavez hadn't gathered weapons. "Each case in the future, I think, is going to depend. . . on the degree to which somebody has actually gone to follow through with their plan and prepared to carry out some sort of violent act." Each case in the future.

Before graduation, Tyler White quit school. He was labeled a snitch.

This past Wednesday, a suspicious backpack left in a Bartlesville High hallway sent the building into lockdown. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol bomb squad came to investigate. Inside the bag, they found school supplies.

Sammie expects to be released early next year. He told a parole officer that he plans to live with his mom, get his GED, and maybe someday study psychology. But after reading all those outraged victim-impact letters, he's looking to escape Oklahoma. "Sammie and I have decided to leave Oklahoma once he is done with his probation," Jessie texted me after his sentencing. "He wants to move to Oregon. Weed is legal there. :-)"

[Top image by Jim Cooke, photo via AP]

To contact the author, email camille@gawker.com.

We all know that "zen" is both a word and an idea. But what about "zenp?" Nope. That's just a meaningless sound. But what if that sound meant: "a frog?" See? Nowwww, you're getting it.

The koan: "Calling Card"

Keichu, the great Zen teacher of the Meiji era, was the head of Tofuku, a cathedral in Kyoto. One day the governor of Kyoto called upon him for the first time.

His attendant presented the card of the governor, which read: Kitagaki, Governor of Kyoto.

"I have no business with such a fellow," said Keichu to his attendant. "Tell him to get out of here."

The attendant carried the card back with apologies. "That was my error," said the governor, and with a pencil he scratched out the words Governor of Kyoto. "Ask your teacher again."

"Oh, is that Kitagaki?" exclaimed the teacher when he saw the card. "I want to see that fellow."

The enlightenment: The teacher welcomed his guest in. "Kitagaki, eh? You know, that's also the name of the Governor here."

"Ha. Yes. Well. That's me."

"Is it? Oh... is that what your card said?"

"Yes, well, I crossed it out, because, you know, zen and all..."

"Oh, not at all. So funny. I thought the card said 'Kitagaki, Grover of Kyoto.' I was like, 'do I look like I want to sit around talking to a Sesame Street character? I'm a busy man!' I thought it was so weird."

"Honestly, this isn't the first time this has happened. The font they gave me on these new cards is just... when I saw it, I was like, 'Is this Comic Sans? Did I click the box for Zapf Dingbats by accident? Am I going crazy here?' First and last time I use that printer, believe me."

"Funny, funny. Well, anyhow. Since you're here let's discuss the slaves."

This has been "Zen Koans Explained." I'm okay, you're potato.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

An Illinois woman was arrested last week after she secretly returned to the home of her ex-boyfriend and allegedly set up a series of deadly booby traps around the house.

Police in Pekin say Amanda Pollard, 28, was seeking revenge after being kicked out of the house by Joshua Brewster, 33.

The two had been living together at 311 Catherine St. until December 1st, when Brewster phoned 911 and asked for help evicting Pollard.

Pollard agreed to leave, but when she returned the next day, with Brewster's permission, to pick up her belongings, she reportedly threatened to set fire to the house with Brewster inside.

The following day, Brewster sensed Pollard may be up to something, and asked a friend to stop by his residence.

Sure enough, Pollard was inside, laying her traps.

Pollard confessed to putting rat poison in Brewster's coffee, but court documents show she also put rat poison in his cereal, urinated in his mouthwash, and attempted to electrify his bed by cutting an electric blanked cord and placing it under his mattress.

"Payback's a bitch," Pollard reportedly told Brewster's friend.

Pollard was subsequently arrested and booked on charges of felony unlawful tampering of food, misdemeanor trespassing, and misdemeanor damage to property.

She remains behind bars in lieu of a $50,000 bond. Her court date has been set for December 26th.

[screengrab via CINewsNow]

This is how a pair of Gawker writers planned to not crash the 2013 employees-only Buzzfeed holiday party:

Step 1: After work, purchase and eat one (1) sandwich four (4) blocks away from Webster Hall, the site of the 2013 employees-only Buzzfeed holiday party.

Step 2: Walk to Webster Hall; pause in front of the entrance.

Step 3: Report back to editor John Cook that Gawker Media was unfortunately unable to infiltrate the 2013 employees-only Buzzfeed holiday party. Sorry, John—there was just no getting in.

Step 4: Retire to their respective warm beds and Hulu delights.

Step 1, launched at 19:00, went off without a hitch, although the chosen restaurant did not carry a wide selection of America's most popular soft drinks, which was disappointing.

Halfway through the execution of Step 2, the plan fell apart. At approximately 7:20 p.m., in the course of a cursory pass by the entrance of Webster Hall intended only to discharge the barest minimum duty to attempt to enter a party that was clearly inviolable, the 2013 employees-only Buzzfeed holiday party crashed into Gawker Media.

"Buzzfeed?" shouted a man in the doorway, like carnival barker.

"Uh...er…ah…" stammered the writer in a wine-colored sweatshirt, while everyone—including his companion—stared at him expectantly for no fewer than 71 minutes. Finally, an idea struck him: "...Yes?"

Before you could say "Wow, you're bad at lying!" the duo's wrists were bound in lime-green plastic bands; their identities checked against an official roster of guests ("Could it be under another name?" Almost certainly not!). Once it was clear there was no record of their invitation or RSVP, they were admitted without issue.

Inside the expansive wood-floored Marlin Room, 300 young people clustered in groups of coworkers they already knew and smiled nervously at the dark. Some, under a disco ball near the stage, stand-danced to seasonal hymns like Nelly's "Hot in Herre" while holding drinks. The bars (two) were tended by what one employee described as "a sexy Santa," as well as a handful of other non-themed humans of average to above-average sexual attractiveness. Buckets of small candy sticks—crooked at one end to represent the staffs of the shepherds who visited the infant Jesus on his birthday 2,013 years ago, and flavored with peppermint extract to represent the peppermint candies Jesus would have loved if only he had been alive to eat them—were scattered around the room. The candy canes were hung from the women's décolletages with care. Everyone became an amateur mixologist accidentally incorporating the flavor of sticky sweet peppermint into white wine, vodka sodas, and beer.

As in any heartwarming Christmas tragedy, Santa had brought lots of GIFs for everyone. Televisions suspended high over one of the bars broadcast Beyoncé serving a Photoshopped pizza in silent perpetuity as drinks were poured. At a makeshift photobooth near the entrance, employees could become GIFs themselves by posing for a series of pictures in front of a backdrop studded with shiny Christmas bows. Also like a GIF were the encounters between the Gawker employees and the Buzzfeed revelers who hated them; encounters that played out almost identically over and over again on a horrible loop. Enforcement of the company's famous "No haters" policy, it seemed, was as lax as the party's security.

In keeping with the seasonal theme, the receptions of the interlopers ranged from "frosty" to "nuclear winter." As a suspected pedophile would be received at Christmas brunch, so were those wearing the dark mark of Gawker Media received at the 2013 employees-only Buzzfeed holiday party. Everywhere the Gawker employees went, anxiety, trepidation, and polite alarm fell like thick, wet snow. Those who knew the identities of the writers visibly stiffened in their presence; one slowly backed away into a crowd while talking, as if attempting to escape from a lunatic. (Those who did not know—spouses and dates, mostly—were lovely.)

"How did you get in?" people demanded again and again (and again and again and again and again). The most commonly expressed sentiment (said with eyebrows and pauses and popping veins but never, explicitly, with words) was I would rather not be seen talking to you. There was no room at the inn, or in the stable, or at the stable across the street. And everyone looked so festive.

Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith, while not effusive about their presence, did not appear actively to wish death upon the Gawker writers, which was, by 10 p.m., the kindest response they could hope for. He suggested that he might like to attend Gawker Media's own holiday party (at the time, still two days away), but only if not invited.

Three drinks and one knocked-over bowl of candy canes later ("Oh my God, I'm so sorry"), the tide changed. A Buzzfeed publicist strode to the center of the dance floor and introduced herself to the Gawker writers, confident and serene like Jesus laying hands on a leper.

"I heard Gawker was here," she smiled. "I'm impressed you got in. You should stay!"

It was time to leave.

A 60-year-old man who was sentenced to five years in jail after getting caught in bed with an 11-year-old girl has had his conviction tossed out after his victim told the court she was in love with him.

According to Italian media, the man is a social services worker from the southern town of Catanzaro, and the girl, a disadvantaged youth, was placed in his care.

A police raid on the man's seaside cottage resulted in the two being found together in bed.

The man was found guilty of sexual violence against a minor and sentenced to serve five years behind bars, but the sentence was vacated last week by the local Supreme Court after the victim professed her love for the perp.

The judges determined that the two were in a "romantic relationship," and ordered a retrial.

It is unclear if this decision will ultimately lead to a full acquittal.

[photo via Shutterstock]

Two students were injured this afternoon during a shooting at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. The gunman, who was a student at the school, is dead, reportedly from a self-inflicted gunshot.

Our original post is below:

According to multiple reports, at least two people were injured during a shooting this morning at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado. There are unconfirmed reports of an active shooter, a critically injured student, and a fire at the school.

There are unconfirmed reports of an active shooter, a critically injured student, and a fire at the school.

Police have reportedly surrounded Araphoe and all schools in the area have been put on lockdown. We'll update as more information becomes available.

UPDATE 3:55 PM: Arapahoe Sheriff Grayson Robinson just announced that one student was critically injured, reportedly as he confronted the gunman, and another suffered minor injuries. Both were taken to a nearby hospital.

Robinson confirmed that the shooter was found dead inside the school, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The shooter's identity has not yet been released, but Robinson said he was a student at the school.

The shooter was reportedly roaming the school with a shotgun, searching for a particular teacher—who was notified and left the school—when another student confronted him.

UPDATE 3:47 PM: Authorities have reportedly confirmed that a 15 or 16 year-old student was shot.

CONFIRMED: One 15/16-year-old victim with a gunshot wound. Unknown gender, unknown condition. #ArapahoeHighSchool

— 9NEWS Denver (@9NEWS) December 13, 2013

And one student is in critical condition, according to a hospital spokesman.

SCREENGRAB: Evacuated students outside High School near Denver where "active shooter" situation unfolding. pic.twitter.com/kk9sUVINRj

— Steve Grzanich (@SteveGrzanich) December 13, 2013

Copter4 showing many students evacuating school safely, now more calmly. Gathering on the track. pic.twitter.com/XANooNIVmb

— Tim Wieland (@CBS4Tim) December 13, 2013

[Image via Heather Burke]

Mark Zuckerberg is a success story, having gone from Hollywood sociopath and interview nightmare to mere super-dork. He's awkward, but much of the alienating superweirdness has been coached away. But Instagram honcho Kevin Systrom is still one bizarre, robotic dude.

At a press event this week, Systrom gathered a room full of chilly New York tech reporters, PR bobbleheads, and lukewarm expectations, to reveal a new product. Only a new product wasn't debuted, but rather a way to send direct messages on Instagram. This is even less interesting than I'm making it sound here, and yet Systrom, clothed in a cardigan like the Martin Embassy had dressed him in the morning, took to the stage with faux-enthusiasm.

It was the sort of eagerness that you'd summon if you'd studied file footage of humans giving excited, important presentations before, studied them for centuries as your Emotion Matrix was slowly uploaded and refined. But his performance didn't work. It's hard to watch. Systrom, in the stilted monotone of a man reading his own obituary, describes brunch as "revolutionary." He tries to connect with the crowd by mentioning his new puppy—but speaks of how fun it's been to "use" the animal, the way one might refer to a can opener or, well, Instagram. It is creepy.

Systrom doesn't need you to like him. He's rich off that Facebook acquisition money, and barring a nuclear device at the stock exchange, will remain rich until he dies. But he wants to be liked, despite an android personality and nothing of apparent interest to say—call it the Zuckerberg Dilemma. I'm told he recently showed up at a party in the most deliberately HELLO I AM COOL MAN fashion, stepping out from a helicopter with his girlfriend in a red dress, all done up in a gaudy suit. No one else had taken a chopper.

Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, despite being private monsters in their own right, turned their respective companies into cultural fixtures because they make people like them—they beat you over the fucking face with charisma until you just nod and hum and click and buy. You can buy many choppers, but you can't buy that kind of stunning super-humanity—though maybe Systrom can spring for a few more of Zuckerberg's publicity coaches. Until then, here's a tip for a person who wants us to change our daily habits around his software: you pet dogs, you don't use them.

Because every movie you don't care about has already been recycled at least once, Paramount has decided to begin rebooting the ones you actually do care about — starting with The Naked Gun.

According to Variety, the studio is moving forward with a Naked Gun "spin-off" staring Ed Helms as Frank Drebin, a role previously occupied by the late, great Leslie Nielsen.

Thomas Lennon and R. Ben Garant of The State and Reno 911! fame will write the script for what Variety calls "a new spin on the Drebin character."

(Here's what a previous script for a proposed Naked Gun 4 looked like.)

Based on the short-lived TV series Police Squad!, The Naked Gun franchise spawned three hugely popular films between 1988 and 1994.

Ed Helms seems to be Hollywood's go-to guy for unnecessary reboots of classic films: Earlier this year, he was reportedly tapped to play the lead in the New Line's reboot of National Lampoon's Vacation.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly attributed the reboot to New Line.

[H/T: Slashfilm, photo of Ed Helms via Getty]

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is considerably better than the first movie in the trilogy. It has a more coherent structure, genuinely interesting character development, and fucking awesome dragon action. I liked it a lot — yet I was painfully aware of how bad the movie was. Here's what you'll enjoy in The Hobbit, even though it isn't good.

Extremely light spoilers ahead.

Bilbo's Character Arc

The Desolation of Smaug is a kind of a road movie in structure, with our main character plodding toward a destination and meeting adventures along the way, including a shape-shifting bear-man, capricious wood elves, a confusingly random cast of orcs, some kickass giant spiders, a greedy king in the merchant village of Lake-town, and finally — yes! — Smaug the dragon. The tone weaves between swashbuckling adventure and epic fantasy-horror, with Bilbo's cleverness coming to the fore as one of the party's greatest assets.

One of the obvious problems with this movie, which countless critics have pointed out, is that director Peter Jackson chose to stretch a short, light adventure novel into three massive epic films. This leads to the enormous problem of what the hell you do with all that extra time, and Jackson's answer leads to both the best and worst parts of the film.

Let's start with what I thought was the best part of Jackson's adaptation: He turns Bilbo into a much darker figure than in the novel, a man who is haunted by the ring in ways that are believably complex. In this movie, especially, we get to see Bilbo feeling the ring's power — he uses it in the fantastic spider fight, and we see how it fills him with a sense of power and wrath that are fundamentally different from his usual sunny/snarky character. After he begins to use his blade Sting in more than just self-defense, actor Martin Freeman gives Bilbo a hundred-yard stare that befits a person who has seen darkness and benefited from it.

What Bilbo goes through is very different from Frodo, who suffers from the pain of bearing the ring but never personally experiences the benefits of its power. Bilbo, on the other hand, is a true foil to Gollum — we can almost hear him thinking "my precious" as he contemplates the ring that saves his ass and those of his companions at pretty much every turn. As great as the Lord of the Rings movies were (and yes, they were truly great), they never gave us anything like a believably ambivalent character, whose motivations are as murky as a real person's would be.

So Jackson has used his trilogy to turn Bilbo into a more disturbing, troubling character than JRR Tolkien's original hobbit was. I think that makes the experience of watching the movie much more interesting, especially because it helps us understand why Bilbo can outwit a creature of pure evil like Smaug. This Bilbo knows what it is to inhabit the world of evil, and uses that knowledge to flatter and sneak his way around a force far more powerful than anything in Middle Earth.

I Hope You're Not Afraid of Boredom

That said, we're still dealing with a move that's three hours long, and has about one adventure per hour. When Jackson isn't using that extra time to develop Bilbo's character, he's decided to take up our time with action sequences so long that they outstay their welcome about halfway through.

Probably the worst offender in this department is the famous barrel escape scene from the city of the woodland elves. When the elf king Thranduil finds the dwarves in Mirkwood, he orders his son Legolas and captain of the guard Tauriel to capture them. Dwarf leader Thorin, remembering how Thranduil's troops refused to come to their aid in the war against the orcs, pretty much spits in the elves' faces — so they're facing a lifetime in elf prison.

In the book, this scene is fairly short, and it's a demonstration of Bilbo's cleverness — he uses the ring and his wits to sneak around and rescue everybody by stashing the dwarves in barrels and tossing them in the river to float away. But in the movie, it becomes an enormous, bloated scene with Kili flirting with Tauriel for what seems like an hour, and then a giant elf vs. orc vs. dwarf battle as we zoom through the CGI froth of the river.

There are other fight scenes that feel equally interminable, including a wizard battle that isn't in the novel at all. I won't give too much away here, but suffice to say the magical showdown feels incredibly tacked-on, and the CGI in it is embarrassingly bad. (Though I will admit that I enjoyed finding out what Sauron's eye really represents.)

The Cities and the Dragon

A lot of the movie's padding also comes in sequences where we are plunged into the detailed, gorgeous worlds of the cities and villages we visit on our way to the Lonely Mountain. Unlike the bloated fight scenes, however, these moments almost never overstay their welcome. The woodland elves' home is fascinating and gorgeous, constructed from massive, carved tree trunks over a natural landscape of rocks and gushing water.

And when we finally arrive at the dwarfs' homeland of Erebor under the mountain, we feel keenly what this city represents to both Thorin's party and the many villages (like Lake-town) surrounding it. We've learned, during a satisfying adventure in Lake-town, that Smaug's desolation is economic as well as literal. Without Erebor's precious gems and fine metallurgy, the locals have grown poor and desperate. Many people depended on Erebor, and not just for emotional or mythical reasons. It was the region's economic lifeblood — and ownership of it has been a constant struggle for centuries.

So when Thorin enters the halls of Erebor, touches the walls, and and gazes upon its incredible halls, stones, and utterly massive metal-working facilities, you feel that this isn't just a symbolic homecoming for him. This city is meaningful for reasons that have nothing to do with ancient prophesies, or good and evil. It is home, but it's also a livelihood. Just as Bilbo's character becomes more complex in this movie, so too does the party's quest to reclaim Erebor.

Finally, this complexity and incredible city concept design extend to the flat-out amazing scenes with Smaug. The dragon looks sinuous and alive. I wouldn't change a single thing in these scenes, and in the ensuing battle between the dwarves and the dragon. These take our party throughout the city of Erebor and show us just how fantastic Jackson's art and CGI team at Weta can be, when they are given the time and budget. The Smaug bits don't make up for the bloat in the rest of the movie, but they are superlative.

Sauron's Motivations

All the dragon-fighting and barrel riding in the movie are taking place against a backdrop of Sauron's growing strength. There's a lot of awfulness here, unfortunately, because the scenes with the orcs and Sauron are among the weakest in the movie.

Sauron is always ordering the orcs to do things that seem kind of random — chase those guys! no wait, do my bidding over there! — and we get to know one bad guy orc (Thorin's nemesis) only to have him sent off screen for seemingly no reason. He's replaced by an even uglier orc. Why? Um, I'm not sure but now wizards are doing stuff. And now there is some magical light that looks like it was designed by a kid playing Minecraft!

That said, one theme emerges from these unfortunate bits with Sauron. We know that his goal is to start a war, which will mostly result in the orcs trying to take over lands that currently belong to elves and humans (Smaug has already taken the dwarf city for them). We get a clear sense that the worst evil we can imagine in Middle Earth is the evil of starting a war, and by extension the imperialist project of taking lands and livelihoods from the natives.

This theme is true to Tolkien, who had seen the horrors of World War I and was haunted by them for his whole life. It's clear that his novels are fantasy renderings of the wars he had seen, and their aftermath. The Desolation of Smaug may be a bloated mess, but it's also an anti-war movie about how good men are wrecked by combat and prosperous cities decimated by aerial combat weapons. As a movie, it's incoherent and occasionally boring; but still, you may find yourself liking it in spite of yourself.

Seasick Mama performing at a party hosted by Maker Magazine, F/A/M, and Curious Yellow Design. She is pretty awesome.

With Fox News airing its grievances over the erection of Festivus poles in the state capitols of both Florida and Wisconsin, it's only right that man whose father invented the holiday be allowed to have his say.

"Am I to understand that some humanoid expressed outrage that the baby Jesus was behind a pole made of beer cans?," Seinfeld writer Dan O'Keefe asked Mother Jones.

It was an actual O'Keefe family tradition before it became a fictional Seinfeld holiday. "It was fucking weird, man," O'Keefe was quoted as saying.

When word spread among the Seinfeld staff, O'Keefe initially rejected the idea of turning his dad's invention into a script for Seinfeld.

Eventually, however, he sat down with co-writers Alec Berg and Jeff Schaffer, and together they came up with Festivus's equally memorable customs.

Chief among them, of course, is the Festivus pole — the focal point of Fox News's latest weird War on Christmas outrage.

News of the pole's juxtaposition with the traditional nativity scene sent host Gretchen Carlson frothing.

"Both displays have equal right to be there," said O'Keefe. "But, you know, the Fox News outrage machine kicked into high gear, and I'm sure there were some hair-sprayed talking heads bobbing up and down, being outraged about it."

O'Keefe assured Carlson that no Festivus pole made of PBR cans (his dad's favorite, BTW) was about to invade her home and knock down her Christmas tree.

"I don't think it has the Mordor-like, sinister political significance that's being attributed to it by right-wing talking heads," O'Keefe told the magazine. "It's a manufactured news event. The intention of the newscast is to feed the false War on Christmas narrative that is everywhere."

Up next: Feats of Strength.

[H/T: Mediaite]

ABC News and The New York Times have known since 2007 that Robert Levinson, the ex-FBI agent who was kidnapped in Iran, was not, as the U.S. government and his family claimed, an independent businessman: He was working for the CIA. The Times’ report today discloses this timeline; ABC News’ report does not—but a source at the network confirmed to Gawker that ABC reporters discovered the CIA connection in 2007 as well. At the request of the government and Levinson’s family, however, both outlets repeatedly stated, without any caveats, that Levinson was on a “business trip” when he was captured. A review of their coverage indicates that ABC News did so at least 7 times, and the Times at least 3 times.

It’s one thing for a news outlet to keep secrets at the request of the government, or in order to keep someone safe. It’s another thing to affirmatively and knowingly spread lies. And this isn’t the first time the Times has knowingly repeated false information at the request of the CIA. The paper was criticized in 2011 after it revealed that it had known that Ray Davis, an American accused of murder in Pakistan, had been a CIA contractor, even as it repeated false statements from Barack Obama claiming he was a diplomat.

Here are the lies, for the record. First, ABC News:

December 2, 2009: “Levinson, now 61, was last seen March 9, 2007, while he was on a business trip to Kish Island, Iran. At the time he disappeared, he was working for a private investigative firm and had left the FBI 10 years prior.”

September 23, 2011: “After more than four years of negotiating for information about the disappearance of U.S. citizen and former FBI agent Robert Levinson during a business trip on Iran's southern coast, U.S. officials are hopeful this week's release of two American hikers will now shine a spotlight on the cold case.”

September 24, 2012: “He disappeared in March 9, 2007 while on a business trip to the Iranian resort island of Kish.”

March 6, 2012: “The FBI today offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the rescue of former agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in Iran on a business trip five years ago this week and is being held hostage by an unknown group.”

January 8, 2013: “Robert Levinson was kidnapped while on a business trip to Iran's Kish Island in 2007.”

January 9, 2013: “Levinson, a private investigator, was on a business trip to the Iranian island of Kish in 2007, when he went missing.”

January 9, 2013: “Levinson was captured while on a business trip in 2007.”

And the New York Times:

April 16, 2009: “A former F.B.I. agent who went missing in 2007 while on a business trip, Robert Levinson, is also believed to be imprisoned.”

November 11, 2009: “Robert Levinson, a former F.B.I. agent who traveled to Iran on a business trip, has been missing since 2007.”

May 4, 2010: “Mr. Ahmadinejad took a slightly harder line on the question of Robert Levinson, a former F.B.I. agent who disappeared while on a business trip to Iran three years ago.”

(In other reports, the Times explicitly caveated claims that Levinson was on a business trip, attributing them to either his family or government officials.)

The Associated Press, which first reported Levinson’s CIA ties on Thursday evening, confirmed the circumstances of his capture in 2010. Since then the wire service has published just one story, on November 27 on this year, indicating Levinson was on a business trip.

To contact the author of this post, email trotter@gawker.com

[Photo credit: Associated Press]

Well, basically anyways. Matthew Perry is writing and starring in another television reboot of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple for CBS.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Perry and co-writer Danny Jacobson are currently developing the project centered on a mismatched set of male roommates, which is aiming for a series pickup next fall. The show is likely to get a pilot pickup, given its attached penalty if the network does not choose to shoot the pilot epiosde, though the series based on a set of mismatched roommates isn't guaranteed a series order. The project is being developed as a multi-camera, the same format as Friends, bringing Perry back to a medium in which he shines. His last two comedy undertakings, Mr. Sunshine and Go On, were both single camera comedies. Perry has a good relationship with CBS, after his recent arc on the network's hit drama The Good Wife.

Perry is the only Friends alumni whose post-Friends success has faltered: David Schwimmer has undertaken a successful directing career (with adorable sojourns as the voice of a skittish giraffe in Madagascar), Matt LeBlanc has been enjoying continued success and Golden Globe Best Actor victories from Showtime's Episodes, Courteney Cox is on Cougar Town, Lisa Kudrow has garnered critical acclaim for Web Therapy and a recent buzzy turn on Scandal, and Jennifer Aniston does a few indie movies here and there.

Clusterfuck is a card game you can play at parties. It's about sleeping with everyone around you. Easiest way to score an instant win? Have a threesome (in the game).

It's part of Cards Against Humanity's '12 Days of Holiday Bullshit.' Best of all? It's free.

Created by Zach Gage, Doug Wilson, and the Cards Against Humanity team, Clusterfuck looks like a fun way to spend some time with friends during the holidays. Although you probably shouldn't bring it to family dinner. If you didn't sign up for the Holiday Bullshit, you can download the game for free here.