August 29, 2007
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Clams, Lifelist,U.S. Open,
- Nadal Recovers From Slow Start to Advance
Robert Caplin for The New York TimesRafael Nadal dropped the first six points of his match, but went on to win 7-5, 3-6, 6-4, 6-
U.S. OpenNadal Recovers From Slow Start to Advance
Filed at 6:35 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) — Rafael Nadal recovered from a slow start, Venus Williams overcame a few glitches and Justine Henin ran right into the next round Wednesday at a U.S. Open where the favorites kept rolling.
Nadal dropped the first six points of his match against No. 123 Alun Jones and later called out a trainer to check on his shaky knees.
The second-seeded Spaniard eventually hit his stride and, once again relying on his legs, moved into the second round 7-5, 3-6, 6-4, 6-1.
”I have to improve in the knees so much more if I’m going to continue in the tournament,” Nadal said.
Williams had some speed bumps — six double-faults, 20 unforced errors — in beating Ioana Raluca Olaru of Romania 6-4, 6-2.
After launching a Grand Slam-record 129 mph serve in her opening match, Williams reached a top speed of 124 mph and had to be content with only one ace. The two-time Open winner and current Wimbledon champ moved into the third round.
”I want to be the last one standing with a plate over my head,” Williams said. ”I’m not stressed out on a few shots. Feel a little wiser.”
Henin also advanced into the third round, defeating Tsvetana Pironkova of Bulgaria 6-4, 6-0.
The top-seeded Belgian, bidding for her seventh major title, broke Pironkova’s spirit midway through the final set.
Caught close to the net, Henin raced back to the baseline, her legs churning at a full speed for a shot that won her the point. Pironkova flipped her racket in the air, then tried to catch it and missed.
”I know I have to work hard because I know a lot of surprises can happen, even if it looks easy,” Henin said. ”You have to be careful all the time.”
Former Open champion Marat Safin, crowd pleaser Ana Ivanovic, No. 8 Tommy Robredo, No. 10 Marion Bartoli, No. 11 Mikhail Youzhny, No. 14 Elena Dementieva, No. 17 Carlos Moya and No. 19 Sybille Bammer also won in straight sets.
”Hopefully, it’ll continue this way and keep it short,” Safin said after beating Frank Dancevic of Canada 7-5, 7-6 (5), 7-6 (7).
Tim Henman, playing his final Grand Slam event, also advanced. The unseeded Brit beat No. 27 Dmitry Tursunov of Russia 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4.
Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Jelena Jankovic were scheduled later in the day.
Ninth-ranked Daniela Hantuchova was the lone player in the upper echelon to lose during the first three days. In all, it was an early breeze for those at the top.
A night earlier, Maria Sharapova and Andy Roddick overpowered their opponents. Former champions Lleyton Hewitt, Martina Hingis and Svetlana Kuznetsova also won in straight sets.
The fifth-seeded Ivanovic defeated Aravane Rezai of France 6-3, 6-1. Popular on and off the court, her victory came a day after she received an unusual request from a fan.
”I was signing autographs after practice, the guy asked me to sign his forehead. I was like, are you kidding?” she said.
”I didn’t,” she said. ”I felt bad for him walking with a sign. I say, ‘I can sign your ball or shirt, but forehead?”’
Robredo beat Bobby Reynolds 6-3, 7-6 (5), 6-1 and Youzhny defeated Nicolas Devilder of France 6-0, 6-1, 6-2. In the women’s draw, Dementieva beat Petra Cetkovska of the Czech Republic, 6-3, 6-2 and Bammer downed Meghann Shaughnessy 6-4, 6-3.
Other ranked players to lose were No. 28 Ai Sugiyama of Japan, beaten by Ekaterina Makarova of Russia 6-4, 4-6, 6-2, and No. 30 Potito Starace of Italy, defeated by Ernests Gulbis of Latvia 7-5, 7-6 (4).
- Ten Things to Do Before This Article Is Finished
Ten Things to Do Before This Article Is Finished
1) Write a catchy opener.
“Zen has no goals,” according to a traditional koan. “It is always on its way.”
If so, Rachael Hubbard, a preschool teacher in Salem, Ore., will not be accompanying it. Ms. Hubbard has many goals — 78, to be exact. And it is only by dutifully ticking them off, she said, that she has found her path toward enlightenment.
Two years ago Ms. Hubbard compiled what is known as a life list, a contract with herself enumerating dozens of goals she hoped to accomplish before she died (build a house for Habitat for Humanity, read “Pride and Prejudice,” etc.) and posted it online.
“I just felt like I was slowly getting older and was looking around saying, ‘Well, I haven’t really done a whole lot with my life yet,’ ” she recalled.
But once she began the journey prescribed by her list, it quickly became an addiction.
“Earn a master’s degree” (No. 5): check.
“See a dinosaur fossil” (No. 27): check.
As for her latest challenges, “become quadri-lingual” or “swim with dolphins,” well, she is only 24.
“Hey, I am actually accomplishing things with my life,” she said, “even if it’s little by little.”
2) Distill the point of this article in a “nut graph.”
Once the province of bird-watchers, mountain climbers and sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the life list has become widely popular with the harried masses, equal parts motivational self-help and escapist fantasy.
3) Demonstrate the popularity of life lists.
Evidence of the lists’ surging popularity is all around. The travel writer Patricia Schultz currently has two “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” books lodged on The New York Times paperback advice best-seller list, two in an avalanche of recent life-list books, like “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” and “101 Things to Do Before You Turn 40.”
In December, Warner Brothers will release Rob Reiner‘s “Bucket List,” starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as cancer patients who set out on a series of life-list adventures, including a Harley ride on the Great Wall of China.
Multiple life-list oriented social-networking Web sites have cropped up, inviting strangers to share their lists and offer mutual encouragement. Even Madison Avenue has chimed in. Visa is currently running a print campaign built around a checklist called “Things to Do While You’re Alive” (and credit-worthy, presumably).
4) Offer an explanation of the phenomenon.
And no wonder life lists are so ubiquitous. They are, proponents say, the perfect way for anxious time-crunched professionals to embark on spiritual quests in a productivity-obsessed age. The lists are results-oriented, quantifiable and relentlessly upbeat. If Aristotle were alive, he might envy the efficiency of a master list in which the messy search for meaning in life is boiled down to a simple grocery list: “get a tattoo,” “learn to surf.”
5) Consult the experts.
“People are dying to make this list, and most haven’t been given a chance since grade school,” said Josh Petersen, a founder of the Robot Co-op, a Seattle company that runs the Web site 43Things.com, which since 2004 has enrolled 1.2 million members who post customized life lists, find others with similar goals and encourage one another to check them off. Sky diving ranks 24th in popularity; losing weight, unsurprisingly, is first. “Pull a prank involving 100 lawn gnomes” is a goal shared by 65 members.
“In school you’re asked, ‘What do want to be when grow up?’ ” Mr. Petersen said. “Then people stop asking the question.”
Caroline Adams Miller, a life coach and motivational-book author in Bethesda, Md., asks that her clients create their own list of 100 things to accomplish. “What it does is give you a road map for your life,” she said. “To check items off your list gives you a sense of self-efficacy, or mastery.”
Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University, agrees that people are happiest when making progress toward clear-cut goals, but said that those who set unreasonable goals (or overly ambitious timelines to meet them) set themselves up for stress. “Evolution vested us with a carrot — happiness — and a stick — anxiety,” he explained. “We feel happy when we make progress toward our goals, anxious when we don’t.”
6) Include the celebrity angle.
There was a time when life lists seemed mostly favored by overachievers who viewed their years on earth as heroic narratives. As recounted in “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” the motivational speaker and self-described adventurer John Goddard wrote a list of 127 life goals when he was 15 — pilot the world’s fastest aircraft, milk a poisonous snake — and now, at age 88, says he has checked off 110 of them. (He has yet to visit the moon.)
The college football coach Lou Holtz jotted down a life list of 107 items that included telling jokes on the “Tonight” show and winning a national championship. By 1988 he had done both.
Last year Ellen DeGeneres asked celebrity guests to share their lists on her talk show. Orlando Bloom vowed to learn to play the bongos. Beyoncé Knowles promised to take ballet lessons.
7) Return to the experiences of everyday people.
Non-celebrities tend to use their lists to overcome more-fundamental hurdles. Stacey Morris, 40, a sales manager at a housewares company in Ventnor, N.J., created a 100-item list after consulting with Ms. Miller, the life coach, because she said she felt unmotivated and “needed more focus.” Several of her items seemed vague (“develop a more positive attitude,” for example), but the goals have forced her to take specific steps toward self-improvement, she said.
To make good on her vow to “develop persistence,” she trained herself to pause at work every 15 minutes to record the activities she had just finished. The point, she said, is to eliminate distractions like inessential phone calls. She says she has doubled her daily productive hours.
“Having a life list,” she said, “changed my life.”
When she turned 40, Jill Smolinski, a single mother and freelance writer in Los Angeles, drew up a life list that unearthed ambitions she hadn’t known she had. “The first thing I wrote was ‘live in a beach house,’ ” said Ms. Smolinski, now 46. “That’s weird. I didn’t even know that was important to me.”
“Within a week, I was going for walk and noticed a beach house for rent,” she said, adding, “and I’m standing in it right now.”
The list also yielded a novel. Her book “The Next Thing on My List,” about a woman who vows to live out a dead friend’s life list, was published in April by Shaye Areheart Books.
8) Explore grand theories about the lists’ popularity.
Ms. Schultz, the travel author, who has sold 2.5 million copies of her first book and has seen it spun off into games, desk calendars and a Travel Channel show, surmised that there were demographic factors behind the sudden interest in this alluring, if gimmicky, pursuit.
“Seventy-nine million of us baby boomers are at a point in our life that this is the moment to stop and take stock,” she said. Ms. Schultz, 54, added that she had visited 80 percent of her 1,000 must-see places. “If ever there was an awareness that this is no dress rehearsal, this is it.”
Those in midlife, wrestling with issues of personal worth, seem to be the target for many of the life-list books, like “Fifty Places to Play Golf Before You Die,” by Chris Santella (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2005).
But Justin Zackham, 36, who wrote the screenplay for “The Bucket List” and was one of its executive producers, argues that the life-list impulse is actually strongest among members of Generation X, like himself: those who have grown up watching boomers stress out over high-paying conventional jobs and have vowed to chart their own course.
“We grew up as a generation questioning all that,” said Mr. Zackham, whose own life list includes sky diving (check) and “get a bunch of movies made” (check). “People do more lists now because they are actually thinking outside the typical progression of what life is supposed to be like.”
9) Postulate that life lists show a universal longing for adventure, fulfillment and grace.
The concept of the life list is as old — and American — as the self-improvement regimen that the young Jay Gatsby scribbled inside his tattered copy of “Hopalong Cassidy,” in which he vowed to “practice elocution, poise and how to attain it.”
Decades later the life lists of average Americans do not seem unlike those of people who strived to be extraordinary, and became so. For a companion book to “The Bucket List,” Mr. Zackham collected life lists from dozens of celebrities and high achievers. Jerry Rice, the football great, said he wished to visit Rome. Mr. Freeman, the actor, said he hoped to attain the perfect golf swing.
“These people pretty much want the same thing you do,” Mr. Zackham said. “So how extraordinary are they — or how un-extraordinary are you?”
10) Find a humorous “kicker.”
Then again, some Americans lead lives too extraordinary to augment with a life list.
For his book, Mr. Zackham visited Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion and asked him what he still hoped to experience.
“Nothing,” was Mr. Hefner’s answer to him. “He said, ‘I honestly can’t think of anything I don’t already have.’ ”
- In a ’64 T-Bird, Chasing a Date With a Clam
Erik Jacobs for The New York TimesNOT SO HUMBLE Fried clams, big bellies bulging, at the Clam Box in Ipswich, Mass.
In a ’64 T-Bird, Chasing a Date With a Clam
RECAPTURING a childhood memory is nearly impossible. Chasing after it in a black 1964 Thunderbird convertible with red interior certainly helps.
The memory: lightly fried clams with big, juicy bellies, like the kind I munched on nearly every summer weekend growing up in Swansea, Mass. The car, owned by my friend Bob Pidkameny: a nod to my godfather, a local celebrity and stock car driver, who would pile my two cousins and me into whatever sleek beauty he was tinkering with and take us to Macray’s in Westport, Mass. There we sat — three lard slicks — digging into red-and-white cardboard boxes, while screams from the riders on the Comet, the wooden roller coaster at a nearby amusement park, floated across the highway.
Fried clams are to New England what barbecue is to the South. Like barbecue, the best clams come from small roadside shacks run in pragmatic mom-and-pop style. Flinty Northerners, like their porcine-loving counterparts, can be fanatically loyal to their favorite spots. To eat at any place but Macray’s was considered familial treason when I was growing up — it was Macray’s or nothing, until it was shuttered and we were set adrift.
This summer, in search of the clams of my youth, Bob and I covered more than 625 miles, visited 16 shacks and unashamedly basked in the attention the Thunderbird commanded from Branford, Conn., to Portland, Me., and back. In between rolls of antacid and scoops of ice cream, the unofficial finish to a fried-clam meal, we found that this summertime classic is even more fleeting than the season of its peak popularity.
Storms, public taste, government warnings about saturated fats, even school vacation schedules conspired to keep the clams of my memory mostly out of reach. But every once in a while, fate jiggered events and passed me a pint or two of the luscious, plump-bellied beauties I remember.
To many New Englanders the humble clam, which stars in chowders, clambakes and clam cakes, reaches its quintessence when coated and fried. And ever since July 3, 1916, when Lawrence Woodman, a k a Chubby, the founder of Woodman’s in Essex, Mass., fried a clam in lard normally reserved for his famous potato chips, cooks have been trying to create the perfect fried clam.
But unlike pit masters who rabidly guard their secret sauce recipes, fry cooks are an open book. All work with the same four elements: soft-shell clams, a dipping liquid, a coating and oil. According to almost all the cooks and owners I met the liquid is usually evaporated milk, and the coating is nothing more than some combination of flours: regular, corn or pastry. Most places use canola or soybean oil, which are high in unsaturated fats. Only Woodman’s and Essex Seafood, in Essex, Mass., still fry clams in pure lard.
So why are the clams I dream of so hit-or-miss?
“I’ve been doing this for 21 years,” said Dave Blaney, owner of the Sea Swirl in Mystic, Conn., “and the hardest part is training the new kids.” He explained that it takes two weeks to train summer help, usually college students, but it requires almost two months of supervision to turn them into bona fide fry cooks. He warned me about visiting shacks too early in the season (when the students are gearing up) or too late (when the exodus occurs, and deep-fryers can be left in the hands of most anyone — the owners’ sons or daughters, say, or the cleaning help).
Improperly cooked clams can range from oil-laden to burned. Indeed, the Clam Shack in Kennebunkport, Me., a favorite place I’ve been recommending to friends for years, presented Bob and me with a pint of puny dark-brown clams that tasted faintly of burned liver. Champlin’s Restaurant in Narragansett, R.I., another well-regarded spot, served clams so overcooked we dumped them after eating only a few. In both places, the kitchen crews looked like a cast from “The Real World” on MTV.
The Sea Swirl’s clams, on the other hand, were golden, with a light crunch, and the bellies, while on the smaller side, were plump and filled with ocean flavor. What caught my attention was that the siphons, or “necks,” were snipped off. That made for a soft chew, without the rubber-eraser bite common to most fried clams — even, I must admit, those from the hallowed boxes I remember at Macray’s.
I asked if this was a customary practice of purveyors. “No, I snip them here,” Mr. Blaney said. “Otherwise I’m at the mercy of the supplier, and I can’t afford that.” Of all the places we visited, only the Sea Swirl offered completely snipped necks; the others sold clams with just the tops nicked off.
This snipping, though, shouldn’t be confused with the iconic, and tasteless, clam strips featured on every Howard Johnson menu in New England. These impostors can be as varied as de-bellied steamers — a rarity — and slices cut from the “tongue” of the larger multipurpose Atlantic surf clam. No strip has the oceanic flavor of a true steamer with its belly firmly attached.
It was later that day, after leaving two small Massachusetts shacks empty-handed, that we understood just how much weather influences what we eat, or rather do not eat. As a result of several days of heavy downpours and runoff earlier in the week, the clam flats, the most highly prized of them off the coast of the state’s North Shore, specifically Ipswich and Essex, were closed.
The water can take several days to normalize after a big storm, according to Curt Fougere, a great-grandson of Chubby Woodman and the manager of Woodman’s. That’s why those smaller spots, which don’t sell as many clams as Woodman’s, had to turn us away. Larger places with purchasing muscle can buy from Cape Cod or even as far away as Maryland and Canada, but none of those clams have the Ipswich richness, a byproduct of the nutrient-filled mud.
“Cape Cod clams tend to be gritty,” Mr. Blaney said, “because they come from sandbars rather than mud flats.” Maryland steamers, while deliciously large, are too soft, he said, and break apart while cooking. Maine clams are considered the closest to Ipswich clams, and are the most common substitute.
In between shouts from classic car enthusiasts along Route 1, Bob and I theorized about the reasons for the dearth of the big-belly clams. We batted around global warming, pollution, disease, but none seemed likely to have knocked out only the pudgy clams. No, the biggest threat, we discovered, was far more menacing: fashion.
“Clams kind of go through cycles,” said Terry Cellucci, an owner of J. T. Farnham’s, one-third of the famous Essex clam shack trifecta that includes Woodman’s and Essex Seafood. For years, she explained, smaller clams have been in vogue. “Right now that’s what our customers like, so that’s what we buy.” The same was true of most every place we visited. The clams at Farnham’s fried up dark golden and pleasantly crunchy but were missing that burst of juicy belly brininess.
Two diners at the next table in Farnham’s, Janice Shohet of Lynnfield, Mass., and her guest, Stacey Malcolm, of Wichita, Kan., were of the plump-clam camp. When asked their favorite of the three popular Essex spots, Ms. Shohet tapped the table. “I like it here — it feels like a real seaside place,” she said, referring to the deep-blue inlet outside. Then she mentioned the most important clue to my past: “But we love the Clam Box, too. They give you a choice of big or small bellies.”
As we pulled up outside the Clam Box, eight miles northwest in Ipswich, Mass., the first thing we noticed — aside from the whimsical roof that looks like (what else?) an opened clam box — was the line snaking out the door. It numbered more than 20 and according to the owner, Marina Aggelakis — known to all as Chickie — had started forming, as always, 30 minutes before opening.
Taking Ms. Shohet’s advice, I searched the huge menu above the order window and found the one line of neat, tight printing I was hoping to see: “Big belly clams available on request.” The Clam Box was the only shack on our trip to offer up this critical piece of information unbidden.
When I ordered a pint of the big bellies, the woman behind the counter winced: “Are you sure? They’re big.”
“I’m positive.”
“You’ll only get about nine,” she said.
“That’s fine.”
She tried once more to dissuade me, but I resisted. When my number was called, a tray was pushed through the pickup window: on it was a mound of golden clams with bellies so big and soft the coating was chipping off. The necks, though not trimmed like those at the Sea Swirl, had none of the elastic bite I had encountered in many pints along the way. And the bellies dripped sweet, briny clam juice down my chin.
To pull this all off, Ms. Aggelakis uses only Ipswich clams unless bad weather or high demand causes her to turn to Maine suppliers. She also double-dips her clams while cooking. Excess coating stays behind in the first deep-fryer, allowing for cleaner cooking in the second. In addition, she closes the restaurant between lunch and dinner — unheard-of — to change the oil, ensuring a clean taste all day long.
It was an offhand comment, though, that gave me the final piece of the puzzle: darker-fried clams, she said, have a nuttier taste, while the lighter version lets the clam flavor predominate. Bingo. “I like to please my customers,” she added. “Some like them big, small, lightly fried, dark — we give them what they want.” Funny, the concept of requesting anything special at a clam shack’s takeout window had eluded me for 40 years.
Putting together the experience from the trip, I decided to try my hand at customizing my meal at Lenny’s Indian Head Inn in Branford, Conn. First, I called ahead because we had had two days of steady rain. The clams were frying. When I ordered, I asked the waitress, a bubbly young woman, if the restaurant had big-bellied clams. She wasn’t sure, so went to ask the cook.
She returned deeply crestfallen. All he had, she said, was medium-size, “but he’ll try to pick out the biggest ones.” Equally crestfallen, I agreed and asked for them to be lightly fried.
What was placed in front of me 10 minutes later was a platter with clams nearly as large as those at the Clam Box. They had a light golden almost tempuralike coating. And the bellies? They were briny, sweet and so juicy a lobster bib wouldn’t have been out of the question.
I could almost hear the screams from the Comet again.
