Not interested | 5 years ago | August 7, 2001 | Seth Gitell explained why the Gary Condit story wasn’t big news in Boston.
“Welcome to Boston, still Hub of the Universe. The lack of local interest in the Condit story harks back to the days when Oliver Wendell Holmes described our gold-domed State House as ‘the hub of the solar system.’ For Bostonians, the Condit story is like some asteroid circling Pluto. This summer many of the big stories have been about State House players — Senate president Tom Birmingham, House Speaker Tom Finneran, and, most of all, Governor Jane Swift. The city’s remaining political energy is going into the race to replace Moakley, who died on Memorial Day. For other cities around the country — with languid and undeveloped local politics — the Condit story might be the hottest ticket in town. In Boston, it’s akin to getting seats to see the Rick Pitino–era Celtics.
“ ‘Boston is its own empire and has its own political obsessions,’ says William Schneider, who as CNN’s senior political analyst has done his share of talking about Condit. Schneider also knows Boston: he taught political science at Boston College for five years . . . ‘Boston is one of a handful of cities I know — [along with] San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago — that is obsessively interested in its own politics,’ he says.â€
Patriot games | 10 years ago | September 6, 1996 | Nick Nesson and Chris Wright attended Patriots training camp.
“How interesting can a football training camp be? This question had kept us up all night. First, the Patriots are not exactly the darlings of local sports fans. It seems the higher the hopes that the Patriots will do well, the lousier they play. Hopes this year are running very high, and, fittingly, last Sunday, in their first game of the season, they were hammered 24-10 by the mediocre Dolphins.
“And we’re not fans of the game. For us, a sack is something you put potatoes in; a recovery is something you do at Betty Ford’s; and a tight end . . . well. But we were going anyway. At 3 am the night before, we were sitting on the porch drinking beer and worrying. Tearing pages from the Patriots’ media guide, we bickered over who would interview which players. We both wanted number 93, Monty Brown — the guy who, the guide said, collected Batman memorabilia. We even had a question for him: if Batman were a football player, which position would he play?
“Only later did it occur to us what the interview dynamic would be; we’d be sitting there, pencils clenched, listening to some guy from the Globe ask about the advantages of having a quarterback who’s also a placekicker. Batman? Maybe not.â€
Protest laureate | 15 years ago | September 13, 1991 | David Barber checked out Billy Bragg’s latest record.
“If Bragg renounced his calling as a fistwaving firebrand for the guise of a gladhanding chart climber, it would qualify as the most astounding conversion in the annals of rock: wilder than Dylan finding Jesus, woolier than Cat Stevens chucking his mike for a mosque, more seismic than Madonna’s discovery of peroxide. And true to form, there’s certainly no hint of repentance on his latest disc, Don’t Try This at Home (Elektra), a 16-song cornucopia of rabble rousing and soul baring that once again shows why Bragg is pop’s reigning protest laureate. Never mind that his southpaw politics are getting whaled by the zeitgeist: this leather-lunged troubadour is going to have his hooks and harangue us too.
