Super Bowl reignites New York-Boston rivalry
NEW YORK/BOSTON |
NEW YORK/BOSTON (Reuters) – The rival camps have been infiltrating each other for centuries. New Yorkers head to Boston for an education. Bostonians follow their career paths right onto Wall Street.
In the struggle for supremacy, curses are exchanged, aspersions cast. These two great American cities cannot avoid one another, and they are on a collision course once again in the Super Bowl.
Sunday’s big game between the New York Giants (who really play in New Jersey) and the New England Patriots (home town: Foxborough, Massachusetts) is stirring passions across trading floors, bars and chatrooms throughout the U.S. Northeast, a proxy for greater battles over commerce, academia, cultural achievement and clam chowder.
“Half this firm has roots in Boston, the CEO is a Bostonian,” said Peter Kenny, managing director of the Knight Capital brokerage in Jersey City, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
“I don’t think there is another team that is represented on a fan basis at Knight other than these two teams, so that is really an intense conversation. It almost lacks humor, yet at the end of the day it’s a good thing, it is very much about camaraderie,” Kenny said.
New York surpassed Boston in population, cultural significance and financial strength about 250 years ago, and the rivalry has been lopsided ever since. Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles have taken turns as the challenger, but New York has reigned supreme.
“If the subject is sports, New York hustles to stay up with Boston. If the subject is economic, population, media and all that other stuff, it’s not really a competition,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, a history professor at New York’s Columbia University.
“But I don’t want to say anything against Boston,” Jackson said. “If all of America was like Boston, sophisticated, cultural, we’d be a better country.”
Blue-blooded Bostonians have seen New Yorkers as somewhat vulgar: cut-throat in business and eager to raid smaller cities of their treasures. Many lamented the loss of William Dean Howells, “the Dean of American Letters,” who moved from Boston to New York in 1886.
New Yorkers may go to Harvard or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a first-rate education, but they’ll return to seek fortunes on Wall Street, and they’ll take the Metropolitan Opera over the Boston Pops.
William M. Fowler Jr., a history professor at Northeastern University in Boston, said tension dates to the 1600s, pitting the Pilgrims and the Puritans of Massachusetts against the Dutch in New York.
They called each other names, one of which evolved into the word “Yankee,” which was “not exactly a term of endearment,” he said.
“We always have land problems,” Fowler said. “Massachusetts thought its boundaries went all the way to the Hudson River, and so the constant squabbles over that with the Yorkers, we called them Yorkers, they called us Yankees.”
The rivalry continued through the 19th Century, over railroad lines, maritime trade and access to the west, he said.
“It’s going to go on forever, I think,” he said.
In sports, New York has generally led with the ironically named baseball team the Yankees, taking 27 World Series championships while their arch-rival Boston Red Sox suffered a notorious 86-year drought. But Boston has become the undisputed leader in the past decade.
Red Sox championships in 2004 and 2007 helped erase the heartbreak over Babe Ruth, sold from the Red Sox to the Yankees in 1919 for $125,000, and lesser tormentors such as Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone. The Patriots have won three Super Bowls since 2002 and Boston’s NBA Celtics (2008) and NHL Bruins (2011) have also won titles this past decade.
Still, New England tempers run high toward the Giants, the team that ruined what was about to become a historic, undefeated season for the Patriots before they gave up a game-winning touchdown in the closing minute of the 2008 Super Bowl.
“That we are playing the Giants, the team that destroyed the perfect season, that further spices it up,” said Robert Reynolds, chief executive of Putnam Investments in Boston and once a finalist for the NFL Commissioner’s job in 2006.
Author Charles Fountain, who has lived in both cities, said Boston’s historic frustrations are played out on the sports fields.
“Had the Patriots lost it to (another team in 2008), it would be a melancholy moment and a lost opportunity,” Fountain said. “But it wouldn’t, I don’t think, hurt so much.”
(Additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak, Zach Howard and Ross Kerber; Editing by Julian Linden)
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Proposals, raised spending to mark Valentine’s Day
NEW YORK |
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Consumers will be digging deeper into their pockets to buy flowers, gift cards and chocolates on Valentine’s Day with average spending expected to rise eight percent over last year to nearly $200.
And along with their expanding wallets 4 million Americans are expected to pop the question or receive a proposal on Feb 14.
“We’ve seen a consistent trend of consumers saying they will spend more, from holiday shopping to 2012 travel plans, and spending plans for Feb 14 are no exception,” said Sonali Chakravorti, vice president at American Express.
In its latest spending and savings tracker American Express questioned 2,000 adults across the United States to gauge how much and on what consumers will be spending their money on Cupid’s big day.
Nearly half of people said they intend to celebrate at a favorite restaurant, seven percent more than last year. Flowers are still the most popular gift for a Valentine, followed by gift cards, jewelry and electronics.
Among couples getting betrothed, 30 percent said they would propose during a weekend getaway or vacation, which have been dubbed engagementcations.
To seal the deal, 48 percent of people think an engagement ring costing between $1,000 to $5,000 would be appropriate but 22 percent said up to $2,000 for bling would be more realistic, while five percent thought nothing of spending $10,000 or more on a ring.
Although nearly 40 percent of women think whoever asked for the date should pay for it, 14 percent said the bill should be split, but most unmarried men said they would cover the cost of the date.
Finances can be a delicate subject, so half of people don’t talk about money until they have been together six months and 20 percent of married couples did not broach the subject until after they have tied the knot.
After marriage money matters can be a cause of disagreements, although the poll showed arguments over household budgets, spending on the children and everyday purchases have declined since last year.
More men than women take credit for paying credit cards, property and school taxes and for filing income taxes, according to the poll, but 70 percent of women said they managed the household budgets.
(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; editing by Paul Casciato)
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Chardonnay marks 100th birthday of growth in U.S.
NEW YORK |
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Chardonnay, the world’s most popular white wine, dates back centuries, but it owes much of its history in the United States to a winemaker who planted the grape in California 100 years ago.
Ernest Wente, of the family-owned Wente Vineyards east of San Francisco, brought cuttings from Montpelier, France in 1912 and planted them in California.
Now, although worldwide there are 34 clones of Chardonnay, most of the Chardonnay produced in California is from the Wente clone.
“Nobody really thought about the great white grape of Burgundy being planted here,” said Carolyn Wente, a fourth generation member of the family who heads the winery that was established in 1883.
“Now 75 percent of all the Chardonnay planted in California is Clone 4 — the Wente Clone,” she added.
Chardonnay has proven to be a big success for winemakers in Northern California. Up and down the California coast, wineries such as Jordan, La Crema and Matanzas Creek in Sonoma, Parducci in Mendocino and Ortman Family Wines in Paso Robles grow the Wente clone in their vineyards.
Randy Ullom, of Kendall-Jackson wines in Healdsburg, California described it as “the workhorse of Chardonnay. It’s everywhere,” he said.
Corey Beck, the winemaker for Francis Ford Coppola Winery in Geyserville, California, agrees.
“(I am) a fan because even in cool regions it tends to ripen evenly and it always has a lot of flavor,” he explained.
Carole Meredith, a winemaker and former geneticist at the University of California, Davis said winemakers like Chardonnay because it is a very forgiving grape.
“It’s not so much a chameleon as it is versatile,” she said.
Chardonnay is produced around the globe, particularly in America, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. Its green grapes yield the flinty white wines of Chablis, the nutty aromas found in Chassagne-Montrachet and the biscuity smells of Champagne.
In California and New Zealand the white wine has an aroma of tropical fruits.
Meredith and other researchers used DNA techniques to trace Chardonnay back to its roots in France as a cross between Pinot, a grape probably brought by the Romans, and Gouais blanc, an Eastern European variety considered so mediocre there were attempts to ban it.
Winemakers say that great wines are made in the vineyard and the better the fruit, the better the wine. But with Chardonnay winemakers do not have to rely on nature to make a good wine.
“Chardonnay is very amenable to winemaking techniques,” Meredith said. “There are a lot of things one can do in the winery that will change the way it tastes.”
Thanks to its array of flavors, its easy growing, high yields and adaptability, winemakers produce millions of bottles of Chardonnay with a wide range of styles and prices.
“It’s not that Chardonnay doesn’t reflect the vineyard. It’s just that you can’t immediately attribute what you’re tasting to the vineyard,” Meredith said.
(Reporting By Leslie Gevirtz; editing by Patricia Reaney)
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Jennifer Lopez unsure on marrying again
(Reuters) – Three-times married Jennifer Lopez said on Monday she doesn’t know if she’ll wed again after splitting up with her Latin pop singer husband Marc Anthony last year.
“Let’s see, I don’t know. It’s not time to think about that yet, do you know what I mean? Like, it’s still fresh,” the singer and “American Idol” judge told Matt Lauer on TV talk show “Today.”
Lopez, 42, who split with Anthony in July after seven years marriage and two children, also fielded questions regarding comments she made about her divorce in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine last August, when she said “I love myself enough to walk away” from her marriage with Anthony.
“Everything I wanted to say about the divorce I said in that article, and Marc and I agreed that we weren’t going to talk about it publicly again,” said Lopez.
“We’re human and it’s not the easiest thing in the world but I think we handled it with a lot of grace and a lot of caring and a lot of love,” she added
The “On The Floor” singer teamed up with her ex-husband on their “passion project,” new talent show “Q’Viva! The Chosen,” to find the best artists from Latin America for a stage show in Las Vegas. “Q’Viva” debuted on Saturday on Univision and on 20 other TV networks in Central and South America.
(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Jill Serjeant)
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Madonna plans 10 schools in Malawi with new partner
(Reuters) – Madonna on Monday announced plans to build 10 new schools in Malawi with a new partner after mismanagement forced the pop star to scrap her first project there last year.
The singer, who has adopted two children from the impoverished southern African nation, said she hoped the 10 new schools would educate at least 1,000 children a year, half of them girls.
That is double the number of children she hoped to help with her previously planned academy for girls, which was scrapped in March 2011 because of mismanagement and cost overruns.
Madonna said her Raising Malawi charity was teaming up this time with the non-profit group buildOn, which has constructed 54 primary schools in Malawi in the last 19 years.
“I am excited that with the help of buildOn, we can maintain our ongoing commitment to move forward efficiently. We now will be able to serve twice as many children as we would have served with our old approach,” Madonna said in a statement.
“I have learned a great deal over the last few years and feel confident that we can reach our goals to educate children in Malawi, especially young girls, in a much more practical way. Constructing smaller schools in partnership with buildOn has restored my faith that we can accomplish what we promised we would,” she added.
Madonna’s earlier plan to build a state of the art girls school for about 400 girls just outside the Malawi capital Lilongwe collapsed last year, and the board of her Raising Malawi charity was fired. The New York Times said at the time that $3.8 million had been spent on the school with little to show for it.
The singer has lent $11 million to the organization which she co-founded in 2006.
Malawi has more than half a million children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic and is ranked by the United Nations as one of the world’s 20 least developed countries.
Madonna’s plans for new schools came at the start of a busy week for the singer, actress and director. Her new movie “W.E”, which she wrote and directed, opens in U.S. movie theaters on Friday, she is performing at Sunday’s halftime show at the 2012 Super Bowl, and will release the first single from her upcoming new album on Feb 3.
(Reporting By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)
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