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PHOENIX STAFF — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:41:43 GMT

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The Melting Pot

ROBERT NADEAU — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:34:48 GMT

Dip into confusing dining
You can eat pretty well at the Melting Pot, but you need some focus and discipline.

LOBSTER FONDUE: Don’t overcook the protein, which can be dipped in six sauces.

Back when George W. Bush was smart enough to get a Harvard MBA, he began — as do all first-year students — with Production and Operations Management (POM), the basic barrier course. The class uses the case method, and the fun lesson in those days was that of Benihana, a chain of Japanese-style steak houses where waiter-chefs grill your food in front of you. In terms of POM, Benihana streamlines production by merging the roles of cook and waiter, and operates more efficiently by seating people with strangers at circular tables. The Melting Pot will soon have twice as many locations as Benihana, in part by doing the same trick with waiters as chefs. But by applying it to fondue — broadly defined here to include variations of the Mongolian hot pot — they’re able to charge mass-steak-house prices for less protein. Bring your marketing-class notebook, because part of the formula is for the menu to convince people that a fondue dinner consists of four courses, and to make the 16-page menu so confusing that most people buy a prix-fixe combination.

You can eat pretty well at the Melting Pot, but you need some focus and discipline. The urge to try everything makes for a diminished experience here, as it does at a wedding buffet. (Remember Nadeau’s Law of Buffets: look it over first, then take no more than three or four things you like.)

The menu says you should start with cheese fondue ($16/one or two; $8/each additional person). They offer six kinds, but four of you can usually have only one, since there’s a single heating element per table. (Tables for six have two heating elements.) If you’re not going for a package, give a nod to fondue history with the “Traditional Swiss Cheese Fondue.” The waiter heats up your pot and makes a production number out of mixing six ingredients in several batches. This is fondue as it was made by young couples with wedding-gift fondue sets in the 1970s. The wine never fully cooks off, so it’s sort of heady melted cheese, rolled up like spaghetti on cubes of bread (not stale enough our night) at the end of long fondue forks. You also have cauliflower florets, celery, and cubes of Granny Smith apple. You’ll run out of cheese before you run out of dipping food, so stick with bread and apples.

Mangia Pizza

MC SLIM JB — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:32:18 GMT

Hanging tough with a featherweight crust
Mangia channels a little bit of Naples with a thin crust and simple sauce of San Marzano tomatoes, but it doesn’t hew to the canon the way Gran Gusto does.

Crossword: ''No theme for you!''

MATT JONES — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:25:24 GMT

But some pretty sweet wordage anyway

Stepping-stone Sudoku XII

PSYCHO SUDOKU — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:15:36 GMT

Psycho Sudoku!

Celestial positioning system

DAVID SIPRESS — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:50:37 GMT

Reality check

Recession survival tips

BRIAN MCFADDEN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:19:34 GMT

Big Fat Whale

Once the pills kicked in . . .

KARL STEVENS AND GUSTAVO TURNER — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:18:55 GMT

Succe$$

Photos: Rise Against at T. T.'s

BRYAN MASTERGEORGE — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:24:03 GMT

October 7, 2008 at T.T. the Bear’s Place (MySpace Secret Show)

Rise Against
October 7, 2008 at T.T. the Bear’s Place (MySpace Secret Show)
Photo credit: Bryan Mastergeorge

Parental discretionary donors

SHUCHI SARASWAT — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:14:51 GMT

How Sarah Palin generated over $1 million in donations to Planned Parenthood
Polarizin’ Palin has people everywhere opening their pocketbooks to the pro-choice movement’s benefit.

More bad news for the Mets

MATT TAIBBI — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:09:45 GMT

Sports blotter: "Very bad times" edition
Look, it just isn’t seemly for us non–New Yorkers to laugh too much about the continued suckdom of the New York Mets, specifically their bullpen.

Mets bullpen woes continue
Look, it just isn’t seemly for us non–New Yorkers to laugh too much about the continued suckdom of the New York Mets, specifically their bullpen. In fact, most of us decent folk should have watched the spectacle of the Mets trying to win a pennant with Luis “Kerosene Can” Ayala closing games down the stretch with horrified relief, with a There But for the Grace of God sort of attitude — it could have happened to anyone. Of course, a good team would have had at least two decent relievers on the roster at the start of the season, providing insurance against injury to its closer. In the case of the Mets, whose closer (Billy Wagner) is a very little left-handed guy who throws 98 by recklessly hurling his body at the plate 30 times a night, they probably should have wanted better insurance behind their top guy than, say, Scott Schoeneweis.

But the Mets didn’t nail down that insurance policy, and that’s why general manager Omar Minaya gets paid the big money. No one else wins 89 games a year and comes up two feet short of the goal line quite like Minaya. Once revered for his ability to deal away multiple future all-stars for aging quick-fixes — the Grady Sizemore/Brandon Phillips/Cliff Lee for Bartolo Colon deal was the signature Minaya (then with Montreal) move until recently — he has since rebounded and become best known for his ability to mismanage the massive budgets of big-market contenders. And he’s especially skilled in loading expensive and superfluous back-end years onto otherwise reasonable veteran free-agent deals. This year’s Mets, for instance, headed into this season with more than $26 million committed to three 89-year-old injury-prone washouts (Pedro Martinez, Moises Alou, and Orlando Hernandez), while letting their left-handed starter-with-upside, Oliver Perez, enter free-agency. That’s not just good business, it’s the Minaya way.

Anyway, one of the great Minaya deals of the past few years was something that at the time seemed like a small transaction: the 2006 trading of innings-eating young starter Brian Bannister to the Royals for unproven relief prospect Ambiorix Burgos. Burgos was sort of a souped-up version of Craig Hansen — he hit 99 on the gun but couldn’t find the plate with a map. Bannister slipped a little this year, but in the two years since the deal he’s pitched nearly 350 innings and won 21 games for the worst offense in the American League. Burgos has since pitched 23 innings, missed the 2008 season due to elbow surgery, and, now, allegedly killed two people. Suffice to say Kansas City is probably happy with the deal.

City Hall domino effect

DAVID S. BERNSTEIN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:06:30 GMT

Sam Yoon starts the MayorMania
Political prospects are being reassessed inside the rumor-hungry walls of City Hall, all because of an invitation to a party 3000 miles away.

Political prospects are being reassessed inside the rumor-hungry walls of City Hall, all because of an invitation to a party 3000 miles away.

A fundraiser for At-Large City Councilor Sam Yoon in Northern California was pitched by its hosts as a way to help elect Yoon “first Asian-American mayor of Boston.” One of the organizers posted the invite with those words to his personal blog, where it soon came to the attention of the Boston media.

Yoon fueled the fire by issuing a conspicuous non-denial — which he continues to stand by. “I haven’t made a decision,” he tells the Phoenix.

Some City Council insiders are convinced that Yoon has indeed decided to launch a mayoral bid. That complicates matters for fellow citywide councilor Michael Flaherty, who is widely believed to be planning his own campaign for mayor. Those same sources say Flaherty will run regardless of Yoon’s decision — though it would certainly affect his campaign strategy, and perhaps the timing of his final decision and announcement.

If Yoon and Flaherty both do take the plunge, that would create two openings among the four at-large seats — heightening interest in what is already likely to be an active City Council race.

Two candidates have announced their bids for next year’s at-large contest: Republican Doug Bennett, who works at the Suffolk criminal clerk’s office, and Haitian community organizer Jean-Claude Sanon. At least two others — Felix Arroyo Jr. and Tomas Gonzalez — are rumored to be considering campaigns. Meanwhile, the mayoral intrigue may be one contributing factor in district councilor Michael Ross having apparently lined up the votes needed to secure the presidency of the council next year.

The Phoenix has learned from several sources, including two councilors, that Ross has — at least for the moment — secured the necessary seven votes to succeed Maureen Feeney as leader of the 13-member body.

A rule adopted by the Council this past year, which limits councilors to two consecutive years as president, bars Feeney from retaining her post. Feeney has supported Steve Murphy to succeed her, with backing from Mayor Tom Menino, according to several sources. But Yoon and Flaherty are supporting Ross, say sources — some of whom speculate that the two mayoral hopefuls may believe the relatively independent Ross will give them a more open platform to conduct high-profile hearings critical of Menino’s administration. Others close to Ross strongly deny any such arrangement. (Yoon would not confirm for the Phoenix whether he has committed his vote, or to whom.)

Financial fallout

DAVID S. BERNSTEIN — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:40:05 GMT

The devastating wall street crisis has a potential silver lining — if you’re a Massachusetts politician looking for a foothold
The current US financial disaster will roil Massachusetts residents in myriad ways.

FREEFALL WINDFALL: Will Tim Cahill benefit politically from the economic crisis?

The current US financial disaster will roil Massachusetts residents in myriad ways. But while most of us worry about our jobs, our mortgages, and our heating oil, rest assured that some in the state are thinking hard about how all of this will affect their political careers.

Massachusetts State Treasurer Tim Cahill, for example, has been keeping a significantly high profile in recent weeks, doing on-air interviews with NECN and giving quotes to almost every publication in the area. That’s no shocker — in a massive financial crisis, the guy handling the state’s billions figures to have something useful to say.

But it’s hard not to see Cahill’s ubiquity as at least partly political. Cahill, a Democrat, is much rumored to be mulling a run for governor — against Deval Patrick in 2010, or sooner if Patrick heads to Washington as part of a Barack Obama administration. “Tim Cahill hasn’t been too shy about what his ambitions are,” says one close State House observer.

Of anyone in the state, Cahill arguably has the most to gain — or lose — politically from the subprime-mortgage catastrophe that has devastated both Wall Street and the US economy. He could be seen as the one who guided the state through rocky shoals, or as the guy in charge of the patient when it started to flat line.

The last treasurer who ran for governor — Shannon O’Brien in 2002 — was pilloried for the poor performance of the state pension fund after 9/11. “[Mitt] Romney basically blamed me for the stock-market crash,” says O’Brien. “You can be doing the best job in the world, and they’re only going to see the latest numbers.”

A cynic, then, might suggest that Cahill is trying to proactively ensure that he comes through this as a hero, rather than a goat. He made sure it was widely reported, for example, that he had to go through hoops to secure funds for the state’s local-aid payments at the end of September. He told that story both to illustrate the need for congressional action and to cast himself as the man whose expert action saved towns from ruin.

Cahill also has been criticizing the Patrick administration, and the state legislature, all year. He blasted the budget they passed this summer as unaffordable — which now looks prophetic, as Patrick seeks to strip hundreds of millions from it through “9C” emergency cuts. He further criticized the numerous bond bills enacted this year as potentially overloading the state’s debt.

Bull disclosure

ADAM REILLY — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:05:35 GMT

As the candidates prep for the final debate, it’s a fitting time to ask: why do some journalistic conflicts of interest become scandals, while others get almost no attention at all?
As the presidential candidates prep for the final debate of 2008 — which will take place on October 15 in Hempstead, New York, with CBS’s Bob Schieffer moderating — it’s a fitting time to ask: why do some journalistic conflicts of interest become semi-scandals, while others get almost no attention at all?

As the presidential candidates prep for the final debate of 2008 — which will take place on October 15 in Hempstead, New York, with CBS’s Bob Schieffer moderating — it’s a fitting time to ask: why do some journalistic conflicts of interest become semi-scandals, while others get almost no attention at all?

Just this past week, Gwen Ifill’s (allegedly) problematic role as moderator of the vice-presidential debate was the big story. The problem, according to conservatives, was that — as author of the upcoming The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama (Doubleday) — Ifill simply couldn’t be fair to Republican V-P nominee Sarah Palin, since an Obama victory will be a boon to her book. Even some of Ifill’s defenders were critical, such as PBS ombudsman Michael Getler, who said Ifill and/or the debate organizers should have drawn attention to her book far earlier.

So why didn’t they? Here’s one possible answer: Schieffer, who in 2004 also moderated the third presidential debate. Like PBS’s Jim Lehrer and ABC’s Charlie Gibson, who moderated the first two debates four years ago, and like Ifill herself, Schieffer is a respected veteran journalist. He also, however, has close ties to the president. Schieffer’s brother Tom had, with George W. Bush, been a part owner of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers franchise; after Bush’s 2000 win over Al Gore, the president named Tom Schieffer ambassador to Australia. (He’s now our ambassador to Japan.) What’s more, Bob Schieffer and the president had, according to a 2003 piece by Washington Post media writer Howie Kurtz, previously golfed, watched baseball games, and visited spring training together.

Schieffer’s links to Bush didn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t moderate effectively in ’04, but they did raise questions. Scratch that: they should have raised questions. Instead, save for a few exceptions — including a debate-day post from Daily Howler blogger Bob Somerby — the issue of Schieffer’s conflict went largely undiscussed.

Consequently, it would be understandable if Ifill considered launching a defense of herself and her book — but then thought: Screw it. Schieffer didn’t have to stick up for his integrity. Why should I?

Above conflict?
In retrospect, it’s easy to see why the Ifill story took off and the Schieffer story fizzled. For one thing, nowadays stories move into the mainstream from the partisan periphery (e.g., worldnetdaily.com, which triggered the Ifill stampede this past week) way faster than they used to. For another, while media unfairness has gone from a right-wing talking point to a bipartisan preoccupation, John McCain has made the charge of liberal bias especially incendiary this year. What’s more, the 2004 Schieffer-moderated debate came just one month after Dan Rather’s controversial story on George W. Bush’s years in the Texas Air National Guard, which focused attention on charges that CBS was biased against Bush, not for him.

Hot love

SARA FAITH ALTERMAN — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 23:57:52 GMT

Taste the flames inside Boston's secret world of fire artists
For once, a scantily clad goth woman swinging chains of neon-orange fireballs over her head isn’t doing so because I’ve pissed her off.

For once, a scantily clad goth woman swinging chains of neon-orange fireballs over her head isn’t doing so because I’ve pissed her off. Instead, this neo-renaissance nymph is gracefully snakelike, smiling and shimmying like a modern day Gypsy Rose Lee — only with globes circling her head like flaming Milky Way moons. This act, seemingly reckless and so dependent on her mastery of the physics of circular motion, is actually a very delicate dance.

The fiery orbs on her chains are known as “fire poi”; the woman, Dominique Immora (her stage name), is a “fire spinner.” She’s just one of several performance artists who are lighting the Boston-area dance world on . . . um . . . yeeeah.

Of the four elements of nature, fire is by far the sexiest, druggiest, and rock-and-rolliest. After all, Hendrix didn’t climax his performance at Monterey by dousing his guitar with water. Fire has danger appeal, and, here in Massachusetts, an air of forbidden fruit, thanks to our infamously Puritanical blue laws, which prohibit almost anything that involves an open flame, short of a cookout. This buzz-kill legislation would seemingly put a damper on Dominique and her fireballs, but it hasn’t fazed her or the tenacious coterie of locals who, while pussyfooting elvishly in secret nooks around Greater Boston, are slowly preparing the fire arts for their moment in the spotlight.

Quest for fire
Why are people so obsessed with fire, anyway? From Prometheus to Lucifer to Smokey Bear (“Smokey the Bear” is, surprisingly, incorrect. Who knew?), our most notorious mythological characters and feared eternal punishments are associated with blazes of glory or damnation. Our heroes fight it, our mavericks play with it. It’s in our bellies, under our asses.

A high-school history teacher of mine once told our class that the Huns, ignorant to the concept of cooking, used to sit on their meat to warm it, creating a primitive, smelly tartar of sorts. I don’t know if that’s true, but surely we’d still be attempting to warm up the fruits of yesterday’s kill by shoving it under our freezing haunches were it not for the magical cooking properties of fire.

Indeed, perhaps our cat-in-a-shiny-thing-factory infatuation with all things ablaze comes from biological inherence. After all, fire is our friend. We need it for heat, for light, for transforming sinewy animal flesh into savory, juicy hunks of culinary glory (duh, Huns). Fire fueled technology booms, gave us more effective weapons, and allowed us to see the people we were killing with those weapons after the sun had set. And, of course, without soft candlelight, mustachioed creepers with beer bellies and only a general geographic clutch on the lady button wouldn’t have a shot at getting laid. Without fire, the world would be a colder, darker, hornier place.

Words as music

MARGARET DORIS — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:27:41 GMT

Alan Lupo was many things — among them, the best metro columnist Boston may ever see
He originally set out to be a jazz critic.

STUFF RIGHT: In addition to his print work, Loops was a valued member of WBZ’s I-Team in the late 1970s.

Friends remember Alan Lupo.

The people's gravelly voice: Alan Lupo, 1938 - 2008. By Clif Garboden.

He originally set out to be a jazz critic. Alan Lupo, who died September 29 at a “very young” 70, loved jazz. Swing jazz in particular, and especially Artie Shaw, the child of immigrants, the poor Jewish kid from New Haven, the product of a broken home, who managed to become both a failed writer and a brilliant jazz clarinetist.

Lupo — or as he was known in these parts, Loops — was a more than adequate musician himself. But he wasn’t much for reading music. Mostly he played by ear, from the heart. So when he first showed up at UMass-Amherst marching-band practice back in the mid 1950s, an enthusiastic Lupo fell right in step — or so he thought — with his band mates belting out The Washington Post March. As the score’s last triumphal notes faded into the ether, one lone clarinetist kept going. And going.

They all — the trombones and the tubas, the flutes and French horns — turned around and looked at him. Finally, someone clued him in: “You cut those notes in half.” Make the count twice as fast as written. Cut time.

Lupo survived, to become a devoted member of not only the marching band but the concert band. His other ambition did not fare as well. By the time he hit the Columbia School of Journalism, in 1959, Lupo had morphed from a fledgling music critic to a faithful interpreter of the lives most often overlooked.

“He could hear the music of peoples’ voices, the music of urban speech, and he could replicate it perfectly,” remembers his wife of nearly 50 years, writer and BU journalism professor Caryl Rivers. Lupo and Rivers met at Columbia and, in a profession studded with nearly as many broken marriages as empty bottles, they became one of journalism’s great love stories. A Jewish guy from working-class Winthrop and a Catholic girl from middle-class Silver Springs, Maryland — a recipe for sitcom disaster, except, “He thought I was perfect,” explains Rivers. “And I thought he was.” They raised two kids, Steve, now an FBI agent, and Alyssa, an actor, and doted on three grandchildren.

Hoover? Damn!

STEVEN STARK — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 05:25:34 GMT

George W. Bush’s failures may have set off a tectonic shift in US presidential politics, commencing a Democratic Party reign
It doesn't matter how many negative ads are broadcast or how many moose are slain on the tundra, candidates and their actions don't transform our politics nearly as much as outside events and circumstances do.

It doesn’t matter how many negative ads are broadcast or how many moose are slain on the tundra, candidates and their actions don’t transform our politics nearly as much as outside events and circumstances do. Thus, if Barack Obama ends up winning a substantial victory next month, it may as much mark a revolutionary turning of the page in our politics as it would be a triumph for him. A decisive Obama win could have profound effects for at least a generation, ushering in a new political era marked by Democratic Party dominance (and triggered by the failures of George W. Bush).

Our presidential politics tend to be fairly consistent, divisible into eras clearly defined by national traumas that radically redraw party lines. The Civil War not only gave birth to the Republican Party, for instance. It also launched a long era during which the GOP’s supremacy on the presidential level was rarely challenged. Of 18 elections held from 1860 through 1928, the GOP won 14. The Republicans lost only when the Democrats nominated an extremely conservative candidate (Grover Cleveland — who won twice) or when the Republicans split themselves in half (1912, with the effects extending to the 1916 election).

But the Great Depression redefined the political landscape (with an assist from Herbert Hoover’s initial bumbling reaction to the crisis), giving the Democrats the upper hand in almost a mirror image of what had previously transpired. From 1932 through 1964, the Democrats won seven of nine elections. They ultimately lost power in that period after the GOP nominated Dwight Eisenhower, an apolitical national hero whose ideology was so amorphous that even the Democrats had sought him as a national candidate shortly before he began his political career as a Republican.

In 1968 the political map again dramatically changed, when the unrest caused by the Vietnam War — combined with conservative reaction to the civil-rights revolution — gave the Republicans another demographic and cultural advantage. Beginning in that year and continuing until our most recent election, the Republicans have won eight of 11 presidential contests. Modern Republican dominance has, in fact, been broken only when both the Democrats nominated a more conservative candidate from the GOP’s southern base (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) and when the GOP was either split in half (thanks to the candidacy of H. Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996) or the nation was facing the aftermath of the only presidential resignation in history (1976, following the bowing out of Richard Nixon two years before).

Old trickster

IAN SANDS — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:30:50 GMT

At age 78, able-bodied Alan Abel’s life is still one big joke
On New Year’s Day 1980, telegrams sent from Utah arrived at the New York Times and the Daily News announcing that 50-year-old media hoaxter Alan Abel had suffered a heart attack at a ski resort near Orem, Utah. He left behind a wife, Jeanne, and daughter, Jennifer.

HOAX-US POCUS: Alan Abel posing as Jim Rogers, founder of a group that sought to abolish breast-feeding, calling it incestuous and responsible for many of society’s ills

On New Year’s Day 1980, telegrams sent from Utah arrived at the New York Times and the Daily News announcing that 50-year-old media hoaxter Alan Abel had suffered a heart attack at a ski resort near Orem, Utah. He left behind a wife, Jeanne, and daughter, Jennifer.

It seemed like a tragedy, to be sure.

In the obituary published the next day, the Times wrote, “Mr. Abel . . . made a point in his work of challenging the obvious and uttering the outrageous.”

News of Abel’s fate sparked an outpouring of tribute. Mourners sent more than 100 letters to his old house in Westport, Connecticut, bemoaning the loss; several dozen orders for flower arrangements were placed with a florist.

Only thing was, Abel wasn’t dead.

He’d been holed up at a friend’s apartment in New York City.

The whole thing started when, during negotiations with a movie studio for rights to his life story, he overheard two lawyers in an elevator saying they should wait until the prankster died, then “buy the rights for peanuts from his estate.” So Abel decided to oblige them.

A few days after the obits ran, a second flock of telegrams went out to the press reading, REPORTS OF MY DEATH HAVE BEEN GROSSLY EXAGGERATED. THERE WILL BE A NEWS CONFERENCE TOMORROW AT 12 NOON AT THE BILTMORE HOTEL.

It would be the first time the Paper of Record would have to retract an obituary.

Modest beginning
Abel, bless his heart, has been pulling shit like that for nearly 50 years. In 1959, he embarked on his first high-profile hoax, a tongue-in-cheek crusade to clothe naked animals “for modesty’s sake” under the banner of the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA), a stunt that landed him and SINA’s “president” (actor/writer/friend Buck Henry) guest appearances to explain their position in character on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and the Today Show. The campaign was an attempt to poke fun at the professional moralists of the ’50s, do-gooders who were, according to a write-up on Abel’s Web site, “busy censoring bikini-clad women, outspoken books and films, and classic statues.”

Since the SINA gag, Abel has baited media into covering a fictitious Jewish grandmother’s presidential campaign (1964); his very own “Omar’s School for Beggars” (1975), which he says was “a satirical commentary on the rise of unemployment and homelessness in America”; a sham wedding he threw for former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and a WASP (1979); and a campaign to ban breast-feeding (2000).

Our Disappeared

PEG ALOI — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:24:57 GMT

Fascinating historical clips mixed with personal interviews
Between 1976 and 1983, some 30,000 people were kidnapped and killed by the Argentine military dictatorship.

Scarlet letters

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:23:03 GMT

The uptight killjoy in us
Sarah Vowell’s fifth book, The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead) — released on October 7 — examines New England Puritans with a meticulously researched, critical-yet-comical eye.