Friends, investigators seek answers in killing of O.C. couple

They met in college, two highly regarded basketball players who seemed to have the same winning touch on the court and off.

After blazing through high school and college with her outside shot, Monica Quan became the assistant women's basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton. Keith Lawrence, whose highlight shots are still there on his college website, became a campus officer at USC.

Now police in Irvine are scrambling for an explanation — and friends are looking for a way to express their shock — after Quan and Lawrence were found shot to death in their parked car on the top floor of a parking structure in an upscale, high-security condominium complex near UC Irvine.

The two had just announced their engagement and had recently moved into a condominium complex near Concordia University, where they played basketball and had gone on to earn their degrees.

Late Sunday, after a passerby noticed two people in the parked car, police said they found Lawrence slumped in the driver's side of his white Kia. Quan was next to him, also dead. The couple were shot multiple times, and authorities said they have tentatively ruled out the possibility of it being a murder-suicide or motivated by robbery. Nothing in the car, police said, seemed to be disturbed.

The couple's friends and family said they were shaken by the violent deaths of two people who seemed to have so much to offer.

Quan was a 2002 graduate of Walnut High School in the San Gabriel Valley, where she set school records for the most three-pointers in a season and a game. She played at Long Beach State and at Concordia, where she graduated in 2007. She went on to earn a master's degree before becoming the assistant coach at Fullerton.

Quan's father was the first Chinese American captain in the LAPD, and went on to become police chief at Cal Poly Pomona.

Quan was known for pulling students aside to offer encouragement, said Megan Richardson, a former player. Marcia Foster, the head basketball coach at Cal State Fullerton, described her assistant as a special person — "bright, passionate and empowering," she said.

Quan shared a love of basketball with her fiancee, Lawrence, whom she met at Concordia.

He too had been a standout basketball player, starting at Moorpark High, where he played point guard and shooting guard, said Tim Bednar, who coached Lawrence.

Bednar said that Lawrence, who came from a family of athletes, was talented, yet quiet and humble. After Lawrence graduated in 2003, he continued to participate in summer youth camps

When he returned for the camps, Bednar said, he was known as the "best basketball player that ever came through" the school.

"He was awesome with the kids," Bednar said. "They all wanted to be around Keith Lawrence."

Bednar heard from Lawrence when he needed a recommendation to become a police officer after graduating from the Ventura County Sheriff's Academy. In August, he was hired by USC's public safety department.

John Thomas, the executive director and chief of the department, said that Lawrence was an "honorable, compassionate and professional" member of the community.

"We are a better department and the USC campus community is a safer place as a result of his service," Thomas said in a statement.

On Monday night, Quan's friends gathered outside Walnut High School. One clutched a heart-shaped balloon, another carried a collage of her basketball playing days. Still another held a basketball.

Lawrence's friends and family put up a Facebook page. "RIP Keith Lawrence, you will be missed," it said simply. Within hours, 840 had left comments or indicated they "liked" it. Concordia put up a link to Lawrence's game-winning shot that carried the school into a post-season tournament.

Michelle Thibeault, 27, said in a Facebook message that she had known Quan for more than a decade. The two were on the same athletic teams and went to junior high and high school together. "Monica was loved by everyone," she said.

During a somber gathering at the Cal State Fullerton gymnasium Monday, Foster read a brief statement from Quan's brother Ryan.

"We just shared a moment of incredible joy on her recent engagement," he wrote, and then added: "A bright light was just put out."

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com

kate.mather@latimes.com

lauren.williams@latimes.com

Times staff writer John Canalis contributed to this report.

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Late-Night Infomercial Reviews: The Horror of the WaxVac

When you’re an insomniac freelance writer who works from home, you end up seeing a lot of infomercials, and eventually, those things will wear you down. No matter how skeptical you might start off, you will eventually get to a point where you’ll start to wonder if there actually is somebody out there with a better way to fry eggs, chop tomatoes and make milkshakes in the comfort of your own home. I mean, television’s never lied to us before, has it? That’s why I wanted to actually check out a few of these things to see if they really were the life-changing innovations they purported to be. Today’s experiment: The WaxVac.

The Pitch

The WaxVac has what is unquestionably one of the best commercials on television, to the point where I actually get excited whenever it comes on. I just love how ludicrously confrontational it is right out of the gate, wasting no time at all in setting itself up as the only sensible alternative to the barbarism of using a Q-Tip to clean your ears. That they chose to do this by having a grown man jam a cotton swab into his ear and then shriek like he is being murdered with actual knives, a scene so great that they show it twice and then have a frowny doctor examine the damage? That, my friends, is just a truly beautiful bonus feature.

They do have a point, though. Every box of cotton swabs does, in fact, carry a warning about how you’re not actually supposed to use them to clean out the inside of your ear, which is weird when you consider that this is quite literally the only thing I have ever used them for. Apparently, that’s pretty dangerous, as evidenced by their 100% scientific animation of a Q-Tip shoving its way through your eardrum. I’m one of the very few lucky ones, it seems.

Really, though, I actually went into this one hoping it would work. My own ears are crazy sensitive to moisture, and if I so much as get a stray raindrop in there, they end up aching for days. It’s the reason I almost never go swimming. Well, that and the fact that I have exactly the body you’d expect from someone who watches infomercials all night. Either way, having something that could get all that moisture out of there before it could cause any problems would be nice, and keeping my earbuds from getting any more gross than they already are wouldn’t hurt either.

Obviously, I needed a tiny vacuum cleaner designed to suck earwax directly out of my head. What
could possibly go wrong with that?

The Process

According to the ad, you can get two WaxVacs — seen above with a copy of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand for scale — for ten bucks (plus shipping) by ordering it through their website. I’ll be honest with you, though: There was no way in hell I was going to plug my credit card number into the front page of a website selling earwax removal machines, no matter how charming their auto-playing videos may be. If you want my financial information without even the courtesy of a second webpage, then I’d better at least be seeing the hottest singles in my area naked.

Fortunately, since this was ostensibly a work-related earwax maintenance purchase, I had the option of getting Wired editor Laura Hudson to buy it for me. This, incidentally, is the only part of this entire process that I would recommend to anyone: Getting your boss to buy you things.

As it turns out, my reluctance was entirely founded. The purchase went off the rails almost immediately, as the $10 turned out to actually be $23.98 ($6.99 shipping and handling for each WaxVac), which you probably won’t notice until after you’ve been charged since it’s down at the bottom of the page — below the form you use to order the product, in a markedly smaller font size.

To make matters even more fun, Laura got a call on her cell phone the next day from the fine folks at WaxVac offering her “$100 in gas vouchers” (which she described as “almost certainly bullshit”) and then informing her that they would be shipping the WaxVacs to the wrong address (despite having my place of residence right there on the receipt) and that they couldn’t change it to the right one.

Three weeks later, they arrived.

The Product

If I were to ask you to describe the most pleasant sound you could possibly hear after you got out of the shower first thing in the morning, I’m pretty sure that we’d all agree that it would be the high-pitched whine of a vacuum cleaner motor, right? Well what if I told you that you could have this sound directly against your ear for up to five minutes? I know! It’s like a dream come true!

To be fair, the WaxVac isn’t all that loud unless you hold it right up to your ear, but since that is in fact the entire reason for it to exist, I’m pretty comfortable calling that one a design flaw. Considering that it’s not that much worse than just using a hair dryer, I’d be willing to overlook that if the machine itself actually did what it was supposed to do, but that’s not the case either.

It’s entirely possible that I have some kind of hardcore militant earwax that’s dug in there and won’t come out without the weapon of ear canal mass destruction that is the Q-Tip, but the WaxVac was not up to the task. I think the only “moisture and debris” that it was able to pull out were the bits that were dislodged from poking the nozzle around in there, which is what I would’ve been doing with a Q-Tip anyway. Except that once I was done, I would’ve just thrown the Q-tip away and gone on with my life instead of field-stripping the WaxVac and sterilizing it with rubbing alcohol.

Seriously, this thing is the pits. I gave it another shot before I sat down to start writing, and I swear to you, it actually made my ears feel worse. I’m just going to go ahead and just keep on risking having to visit a frowny doctor and explain that I sometimes jam sticks into my ear canal and then stare at them as though they have betrayed me. Hell, if this is the alternative, then I might actually prefer to go with one of those mind control ear slugs that Khan has Star Trek II.The WaxVac definitely lives up to the ad, but unfortunately, it’s only the part about how much it sucks.

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Kiefer Sutherland honored by Harvard theater group

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Golden Globe-winning actor Kiefer Sutherland has been named Man of the Year by Harvard University‘s Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

Sutherland will be roasted and receive his ceremonial pudding pot at a ceremony scheduled for Friday.

The 46-year-old Sutherland has been in dozens of films but is perhaps best known for his role as Jack Bauer in the television series “24,” for which he won Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy awards. He is currently starring in the television show “Touch.”

Last year’s Man of the Year was Jason Segel.

The 2013 Woman of the Year, Marion Cotillard (koh-tee-YAR’), was honored last week.

Hasty Pudding Theatricals is the nation’s oldest undergraduate drama troupe.

The awards are presented annually to performers who have made a lasting and impressive contribution to entertainment.

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The New Old Age Blog: In Blended Families, Responsibility Blurs

Every year, Fran McDowell waited for the summer week when she would sing in a choral festival in the North Carolina mountains, then spend a few days in a lakeside cabin with close women friends.

That getaway grew more complicated to arrange — but perhaps more necessary — after her husband, Herb Beadle, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. They had a “gloriously happy” marriage — her first, his second — for 11 years, and she was more than willing to care for him in sickness as in health. But he could no longer manage alone in their Atlanta home.

For a few years, other family members pitched in to allow Ms. McDowell her cherished vacation. Eventually, though, she had to ask her husband’s daughter, a medical professional in another state, to take him into her home for a week.

She said no, then yes. Then, the day before Ms. McDowell was to drive him there, her stepdaughter again refused, leaving no time for alternate arrangements. If this had been her biological child, “I would have said, ‘Come on, don’t do this to me,’” Ms. McDowell said. Instead, reluctant to make waves, she canceled her trip.

“I think confrontation is riskier for stepparents,” she told me. “I was the compliant one who would bite my tongue rather than say what I thought.”

Ms. McDowell never told her stepdaughter, or anyone in the family, how angry and disappointed she was, or how difficult it was becoming to care for their father, who died three years ago at 86. She told the members of her dementia caregivers support group instead.

It was that group’s leader, Moira Keller, who e-mailed me to suggest this topic. A clinical social worker with the Sixty Plus program at Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, she wrote that “one of the biggest challenges I have is blended families in later life.”

Though I’ve written about the way the 1970s’ spike in divorces could complicate caregiving for adult children — more households to sustain, more siblings to either help or hinder — I hadn’t considered the impact on the older people themselves.

But Ms. Keller seems to be onto something. “The generation most likely to have stepchildren” — the boomers — “don’t need much care yet,” said Merril Silverstein, a Syracuse University sociologist co-editing a coming issue of the Journal of Marriage and the Family on stepfamilies in later life. “The crunch will come in 10 or 20 years.”

Initially, many adult children whose divorced or widowed parents remarry seem delighted, Ms. Keller said when we spoke. “They’re thrilled that Mom or Dad isn’t alone,” she said. “It’s a wonderful thing — until somebody gets sick.”

Then, she has found, “it gets really blurry. Who’s going to do what?” Grown children don’t have much history with these new spouses; they often feel less responsibility to intervene or help out, and stepparents may be unwilling to ask. Perhaps it’s unclear whether children or new spouses have decision-making authority.

“Older couples in this situation fall through the cracks,” Ms. Keller said.

Research shows that the ties which lead adult children to become caregivers — depending on how much contact they have with parents, how nearby they live, how obligated they feel — are weaker in stepchildren, Dr. Silverstein said. Money sometimes enters the equation too, Ms. Keller added, if biological children resent a parent’s spending their presumed inheritance on care for an ailing stepparent.

Adela Betsill, another of Ms. Keller’s support group members, married her longtime partner five years ago — her second marriage, his third. She has since given up her interior design business to care for Robert who, at 72, has also developed Alzheimer’s disease. His two children have had little involvement — perhaps because she’s just 49 and presumed able to handle everything.

Thus, though Robert’s son works from an office in their home, if Ms. Betsill needed to go out and asked him to remind his father to eat lunch, “he might, or he might not,” she said. “I don’t think he realizes it’s a burden.” So she has not asked.

Would it be different if she were his biological mother and he saw her wearing out under the strain? She thinks so, but it’s hard to know. After all, biological families also experience plenty of conflict and avoidance as elders age.

Still, that sense of reciprocity we often hear from caregivers — she took care of me when I was young, so I need to help out now that she’s old — doesn’t apply in late-life stepfamilies. Ms. Betsill didn’t raise this man, or his half sister.

Older couples who marry or remarry often discuss their finances, Ms. Keller has found. (An elder attorney, Craig Reaves, discussed the legal consequences here.) But illness and dependence may prove even more difficult subjects to broach.

“If I could yell one thing from a mountaintop,” Ms. Keller said, “it’s to talk about this stuff, too. Who’s going to take care of you if you become sick? Talk about that while you’re still healthy.”

---

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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DealBook: $24 Billion Buyout for Dell, Biggest Since 2007

9:32 a.m. | Updated

Dell announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to go private in a $24.4 billion deal led by its founder and the investment firm Silver Lake, in the biggest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis.

Under the terms of the deal, the buyers’ consortium, which also includes Microsoft, will pay $13.65 a share in cash. That is roughly 25 percent above where Dell’s stock traded before word emerged of the negotiations of its sale.

Michael S. Dell will contribute his stake of roughly 14 percent toward the transaction, and will contribute additional cash through his private investment firm, MSD Capital. Silver Lake is expected to contribute about $1 billion in cash, while Microsoft will loan an additional $2 billion.

Dell’s board is said to have met on Monday night to vote on the deal. In its statement, the company said Mr. Dell recused himself from any discussions about a transaction and did not vote.

As a newly private company – now more firmly under the control of Mr. Dell – the computer maker will seek to revive itself after years of decline. The takeover represents Mr. Dell’s most drastic effort yet to turn around the company he founded in a college dormitory room in 1984 and expanded into one of the world’s biggest sellers of personal computers.

But the advent of new competition, first from other PC manufacturers and then smartphones and the iPad, severely eroded Dell’s business. Such is the concern about the company’s future that Microsoft agreed to lend some of its considerable financial muscle to shore up one of its most important business partners.

“I believe this transaction will open an exciting new chapter for Dell, our customers and team members,” Mr. Dell said in a statement. “Dell has made solid progress executing this strategy over the past four years, but we recognize that it will still take more time, investment and patience, and I believe our efforts will be better supported by partnering with Silver Lake in our shared vision.”

Still, analysts have expressed concern that even a move away from the unyielding scrutiny of the public markets will not let Mr. Dell accomplish what years of previous turnaround efforts have failed to achieve.

Nevertheless, the transaction represents a watershed moment for the private equity industry, reaching heights unseen over the past five years. It is the biggest leveraged buyout since the Blackstone Group‘s $26 billion takeover of Hilton Hotels in the summer of 2007, and it is supported by more than $15 billion of debt financing raised by no fewer than four banks.

“Michael Dell is a true visionary and one of the pre-eminent leaders of the global technology industry,” Egon Durban, a managing partner at Silver Lake, said in a statement. “Silver Lake is looking forward to partnering with him, the talented management team at Dell and the investor group to innovate, invest in long-term growth initiatives and accelerate the company’s transformation strategy to become an integrated and diversified global I.T. solutions provider.”

Mr. Dell first approached the board about taking the company private in August. That prompted the board to form a special committee, with JPMorgan Chase and the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton as advisers. It was charged with considering alternatives to a management buyout, including other deals or borrowing money to pay out a special dividend.

To help ward off accusations of self-dealing by Mr. Dell, the special committee has hired an independent investment bank, Evercore Partners, specifically to oversee a 45-day “go shop” period in which the company will solicit other potential buyers.

“The special committee and its advisers conducted a disciplined and independent process intended to ensure the best outcome for shareholders,” Alex J. Mandl, the head of the Dell independent committee, said in a statement. “Importantly, the go-shop process provides a real opportunity to determine if there are alternatives superior to the present offer from Mr. Dell and Silver Lake.”

Dell itself was advised by Goldman Sachs and the law firm Hogan Lovells, while Mr. Dell retained Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz as legal counsel. Silver Lake was advised by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse, RBC Capital Markets and the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

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Suspected child molester left L.A. archdiocese for L.A. schools

A former priest and suspected child molester left employment with the Los Angeles archdiocese to work for the L.A. Unified School District, officials confirmed Sunday.

The former clergyman, Joseph Pina, did not work with children in his school district job, L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy said. He added that, as a result of the disclosures, Pina would no longer be employed by the nation's second-largest school system.

Over the weekend, Deasy was unable to pull together Pina's full employment history, but said the district already was looking into the matter of Pina's hiring.

"I find it troubling," he said of the disclosures about Pina. "And I also want to understand what knowledge that we had of any background problems when hiring him, and I don't yet know that."

L.A. Unified itself has come under fire in the last year for its handling of employees accused of sexual misconduct.

Pina, 66, was laid off from his full-time district job last year, but returned to work episodically to organize events. One event he may have helped organize was a ribbon-cutting Saturday for a new education facility. School district officials over the weekend, however, could not confirm that. Pina did not attend the event, and the district could not confirm payment for any help he may have provided.

Pina's name emerged in documents released by the archdiocese to comply with a court order. His case was one of many in which church officials failed to take action to protect child victims and in which first consideration was given to helping the offending priests rather than their victims, according to the documentation.

A just-released, internal 1993 psychological evaluation states that Pina "remains a serious risk for acting out." The evaluation recounts how Pina was attracted to a victim, an eighth-grade girl, when he saw her in a costume.

"She dressed as Snow White ... I had a crush on Snow White, so I started to open myself up to her," he told the psychologist. "I felt like I fell in love with her. I got sexually involved with her, but never intercourse. She was about 17 when we got involved sexually, and it continued until she was about 19."

In a report sent to a top Mahony aide, the psychologist expressed concern the abuse was never reported to authorities.

Pina's evaluation also includes a recommendation "to take appropriate measures and precautions to insure that he is not in a setting where he can victimize others." Pina continued to work as a pastor as late as March 1998.

School district officials could not verify Pina's hiring date over the weekend, but he took a job with L.A. Unified as the school system was carrying out the nation's largest school construction program. His job involved community outreach, building support for school projects, while also finding out communities' concerns and trying to address them, officials said. Such work was crucial to the program, because even though communities wanted new schools, their locations and other elements could prove controversial. Such projects frequently involved tearing down homes or businesses, environmental cleanups, and the blocking of streets and other disruptions.

"His duties were to rally community support and elicit community comments regarding schools in a neighborhood," district spokesman Tom Waldman said.

Pina's work did bring him into contact with families, frequently at public meetings organized to hear and address their concerns.

Projects that Pina worked on included a new elementary school in Porter Ranch and a high school serving the west San Fernando Valley, Waldman said. The high school, in particular, generated substantial public debate as a district team and a local charter school competed aggressively for control of the site.

The $19.5-billion building program is winding down, and, as a result, many jobs attached to it have come to an end. Pina's was among them.

The dedication he may have helped organize Saturday was for the Richard N. Slawson Southeast Occupational Center in Bell. Participants told KCET-TV, which first reported Pina's school employment, that he had assisted with community outreach on that project. The adult education and career technical education facility has 29 classrooms as well as health-career labs and child care for students. The school opened in August 2012.

Pina "was slated for some additional temporary work when the issue came to our attention last week and that work was canceled," Deasy said.

It may have been Pina who first alerted district officials that his name appeared in disclosed documents, Deasy said. Pina called a senior administrator in the facilities division. So far, no untoward issues have emerged regarding Pina's work for L.A. Unified.

howard.blume@latimes.com

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Apple Shows Signs a Major Interface Overhaul Is Coming

The Jony Ive era is upon us.

It has become increasingly clear since the ouster of Scott Forstall as Apple’s iOS chief, and the elevation of design wunderkind Ive to oversee both product industrial and user experience, that Apple is planning an iOS and OS X interface overhaul.

“I don’t think Apple will ever stop refining their OS’s and interfaces, and with Jony Ive at the helm we should expect to see improvements,” Gartner analyst Brian Blau told Wired. While Apple issues yearly updates to its OS, and minor updates at other points during the year, Blau said the “timing is anyone’s guess.”

The latest sign that changes are afoot is a job listing seeking senior software engineers for Apple’s iLife suite. The posting calls for “an enthusiastic Cocoa engineer to help us re-imagine how user interfaces should be built and work.” That doesn’t sound like a simple facelift. That sounds like the ground-up revamping of a core software suite — iLife, included in every new Mac, includes iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand.

Apple also is looking for someone to create character-driven dialog for Siri and help the digital assistant develop a distinct personality. Another job listing calling for someone to help create a new set of APIs and frameworks, suggesting big changes are coming to the iOS platform.

While a redesign seems to be in the works, that doesn’t mean it would happen overnight.

“Updates to major portions of the user interfaces aren’t easy; they don’t want to break what is effective today nor can they break how their developers integrate with the platform,” Blau said, “yet maybe there are additional features and functions that would offer more flexibility, usability and performance within the context of supporting the large library of third-party apps.”

All of this follows that shakeup in Apple’s senior leadership. Beyond moving Forstall aside and putting Ive in charge of Apple’s overall look and feel, the company put Craig Federighi, formerly the head of Mac software engineering, in charge of both the iOS and OS X development teams. With Federighi leading the technical side, covering things ranging from user interface and applications to developer frameworks, and Ive championing Apple’s “human interface” and industrial design, the iOS and Mac operating systems could sync together much more closely in the future and share far more design elements and experiences.

iOS has remained largely unchanged since it launched in 2007: A simple home screen populated by square icons that have rounded corners, and a dock of four permanent icons at the bottom. Things have gotten shinier, sure — the experience is more polished, the icons have more shading, detail, and nuance. But it’s nothing revolutionary. It’s the same story with OS X, which launched with Cheetah in 2001. The last major redesign came in 2007 with Leopard, which has for the most part given us OS experience we’re now used to. Snow Leopard, Lion, and, most recently, Mountain Lion added features, cloud integration, and track pad gestures, but these were evolutionary, not revolutionary, changes.

We’ve been using touchscreen smartphones for half a decade now, and PCs, for some of us, for three decades. And yet, things like the calendar, notes, and to-do lists (among other applications) still harken back to analog days when those tasks were done on paper.

Times are changing. A hallmark of the Forstall era, a design feature known as skeumorphism, surely will be kicked to the curb as Ive takes the reins on Apple user experience. Skeumorphism basically brings in design elements from the real world into the digital, and it can end up looking kitschy. A music player that mimics the look of a record or cassette player or a notepad app accented with a torn edge like a ripped sheet of paper are perfect examples of skeumorphic design. Steve Jobs loved this aesthetic. The leather stitching so prominent in iCal reportedly apes the leather in Jobs’ Gulfstream jet. So what’s the problem?

They’re metaphors of the past, as Wired’s Clive Thompson wrote in February. They stifle innovation and limit imagination and can end up looking haphazard and messy.

“Clean edges, flat surfaces will likely replace the textures that are all over the place right now,” an anonymous Apple designer told The New York Times of what we could expect from Ive following Forstall’s firing in late October.

The early days of the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad perhaps necessitated skeumorphic design to acclimate users to new apps and programs that accomplished tasks in new ways. But it’s no longer needed. The concept of the desktop and the graphical user interface isn’t foreign anymore. We’re grown comfortable with the swipes, double taps and myriad other gestures that can dismiss applications or open up shortcuts in the blink of an eye. With these gestures in mind, gorgeous, simple apps like Clear can exist and show that a to-do list on a touchscreen device need not resemble its paper counterpart — and be far better for it.

The next era of Apple user interface should embrace the touchscreen and trackpad inputs that have become indelible with their respective operating systems. With a generation coming upon us that may have never seen a record player, a rotary dial phone, or even a paper notepad, these nostalgic nods to times past have not only lost their relevance, but become a hindrance. Unfettered by such real world design hangups, the sky is the limit for the future of Apple’s computer interfaces under Ive.

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Bolshoi ballet chief heads to Germany after attack

MOSCOW (AP) — The artistic director of the Bolshoi ballet said he knows who ordered an acid attack that left him with severe burns to his eyes and face but won’t say, voicing hope that investigators will soon name the perpetrator.

Sergei Filin checked out of a Moscow hospital Monday and headed to Germany for further rehabilitation.

Filin, 42, wore shades and a bandage on his head, and skin on his face was red and swollen from burns. But he spoke energetically and seemed to be in a good mood as he walked out of the hospital accompanied by his wife.

“My body is full of strength and energy,” he told reporters.

Filin earlier told Russian state television that he knew who ordered the attack but wouldn’t give names. “My heart tells me who did it,” Filin told Rossiya 24 television in an interview broadcast late Sunday.

He said that investigators would visit him in Germany as part of the continuing probe.

An attacker threw sulphuric acid in Filin’s face in Moscow on Jan. 17, as he was returning home from work.

“I felt enormous, unbearable pain,” Filin recalled in the television interview. “I fell face down in the snow and started rubbing my face and eyes with snow.”

His colleagues said the attack on Filin could be in retaliation for his selection of certain dancers over others for the prized roles.

The Bolshoi has been plagued by intrigue and infighting that have led to the departure of several artistic directors over the past few years.

Filin told reporters Monday as he was leaving the hospital that he’s still seeing as if through a mist as his eye treatment is continuing, and added that he will have to undergo further eye surgery in Germany.

“I don’t care about my face, my hair, my looks,” he said in the television interview. “I’m ready to be completely bald, look like a Frankenstein. It will have no impact on my heart, on my soul. All my inner self, all my energy is focused on recovering eyesight.”

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Recipes for Health: Quick One-Dish Meals, Some Cooking Required — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

This week, in response to readers’ requests on the Recipes for Health Facebook page, I focused on quick one-dish dinners. You may have a different opinion than I do about what constitutes a quick meal. There are quick meals that involve little or no cooking – paninis and sandwiches, uncomplicated omelets, scrambled eggs, and meals that combine prepared items with foods that you cook -- but I chose to focus on dishes that are made from scratch. I bought a cabbage and a generous bunch of kale at the farmers’ market, some sliced mushrooms and bagged baby spinach at Trader Joe’s, and used them in conjunction with items I had on hand in the pantry and refrigerator.

I decided to use the same rule of thumb that a close French friend uses. She refuses to spend more than a half hour on prep but always turns out spectacular dinners and lunches. My goal was to make one-dish meals that would put us at the table no more than 45 minutes after I started cooking (the soup this week went over by 5 or 10 minutes but I left it in because it is so good). For each recipe test I set the timer for 30 minutes, then let it count up once it went off. All of the meals are vegetarian and the only prepared foods I used were canned beans.

I do believe that it is healthy – and enjoyable -- to take time to prepare meals for the family (or just for yourself), even when you are juggling one child’s afterschool soccer practice and homework with another child’s dance recitals and homework. Sometimes it is hard to find that half hour, but everybody benefits when you do.

Soft Black Bean Tacos With Salsa and Cabbage

Canned black beans and lots of cabbage combine in a quick, utterly satisfying one-dish taco dinner. They can be served open-faced or folded over.

1 tablespoon canola or grape seed oil

1 teaspoon medium-hot chili powder (more to taste)

1 teaspoon ground lightly toasted cumin seeds (more to taste)

2 cans black beans, with liquid

Salt to taste

8 corn tortillas

1 cup fresh or bottled salsa*

3 ounces either queso fresco, feta, or sharp cheddar, grated or crumbled

2 cups shredded cabbage

*Make fresh salsa with 2 or 3 chopped roma tomatoes, 1 or 2 jalapeños or serrano chiles, a little chopped onion or shallot if desired, salt, a squeeze of lime juice, and chopped fresh cilantro

1. Heat the oil in a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat and add the chili powder and ground cumin. Allow the spices to sizzle for about half a minute, until very fragrant, and stir in the black beans and 1/2 cup water. Cook, stirring and mashing the beans with the back of your spoon, for 5 to 10 minutes, until thick and fragrant. Be careful that you don’t let the beans dry out too much. If they do, add a little more water. Remove from the heat.

2. Heat the tortillas, two or three at a time, in a dry skillet over medium-high heat, or in a microwave. Top with the black beans, salsa, cheese and cabbage. Fold the filled tortillas over if desired and serve. Alternatively, one at a time, place a tortilla on a plate, top with the beans and cheese and heat through for 30 seconds to a minute in a microwave. Then top with salsa and a generous handful of cabbage, and serve.

Yield: Serves 4

Advance preparation: The refried black beans will keep for three days in the refrigerator. You will have to moisten and thin them out with water when you reheat them.

Nutritional information per serving: 398 calories; 11 grams fat; 3 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 4 grams monounsaturated fat; 15 milligrams cholesterol; 56 grams carbohydrates; 13 gram dietary fiber; 887 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 17 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Bucks Blog: The Question You Should Be Asking About the Stock Market

Carl Richards is a financial planner in Park City, Utah, and is the director of investor education at the BAM Alliance. His book, “The Behavior Gap,” was published last year. His sketches are archived on the Bucks blog.

With the stock market up more than 100 percent from those scary days in early 2009 and up 16 percent in 2012 alone, we’re now hearing plenty about how small investors are getting back into the market. Andrew Wilkinson, the chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak Associates, referred to it as a “a real sea change in investor outlook.”

It seems we’re in danger of repeating the same old cycle of swearing off stocks forever during scary markets, missing a huge rally and then deciding it’s time to buy when stocks are high again. On the flip side, I’ve had a number of conversations with Main Street investors who are asking if now is the time to sell because the Dow Jones Industrial Average is hovering near 14,000 and the S&P 500 stock index is around 1,500 again.

So which one is it? Should everyday investors be buying or selling?

Do you see the problem here?

If we’re investing based on what the market has done, it’s a recipe for disaster. Recent market performance tells us almost nothing useful about what the market will do in the near future. Logically it seems like it should, but a quick review of the market’s performance during the last six years should be evidence enough to convince us that it doesn’t.

Remember how you felt in March, 2009? I bet you didn’t feel like investing, and you weren’t alone. Almost no one did. It was a scary time. But it turns out that it would have been a brilliant time to invest. Again, not because of what the market had done, but what it was about to do.

But there was no way to know that in March 2009.

Did anyone expect (or feel) like 2012 was going to turn into a 16 percent year? In fact, almost all the unfortunate souls that make their living predicting the markets got 2012 wrong.

Here’s the thing we need to remember: we have no idea if now is the time to be buying or selling. But the good news is that it’s not even the question we should be asking. Instead we should be asking, “How can we avoid making the big behavioral mistake of selling low and buying high (again!) in the future?”

Instead of worrying about getting in or out of the market at the right time, take that time to focus on crafting a portfolio based on your goals. Start by taking out a piece of paper and writing a personal investment policy statement that addresses the following:

1. Why are you investing this money in the first place? What are your goals?
2. How much do you need in cash, bonds and stocks to give you the best chance of meeting those goals while taking the least amount of risk?
3. What actual investments will you buy to populate that plan and why? Make sure you address issues like diversification and expenses.
4. How often will you revisit this plan to make sure you’re doing what you said you would do and to make changes to your investments to get them back in line with what you said in number 2?

A personal investment policy statement can be one of the most important guardrails against the emotional investment decisions that we all regret in hindsight. So, when you get worried about the markets and are tempted to sell everything you own that has anything to do with stocks, go back to that piece of paper. If your goals haven’t changed, forget about it.

And when you get excited about that initial public offering that your brother-in-law says he can “get you in on,” pull out that piece of paper. If your goals haven’t changed, forget about it.

When your neighbors are all wrapped up in how the latest apocalypse du jour is going to ruin everyone’s retirement, pull out that piece of paper. If your goals haven’t changed, forget about it.

I know this might not work all the time. In fact, it might not work at all when we’re scared and dead set on getting out. But my hope is that having something we wrote when we weren’t scared will give us a little time to pause and ask a few questions before we do something that might end up being a mistake.

As a result, maybe, just maybe, we can shift the focus away from whether now is the right time to buy or sell and place it squarely on whether that decision fits into our own, personal investment plans.

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