The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 17

B5 Names B6 Pop! B7 Annie's Mailbox B8 Book Review B9 WD LTD Movie Directory Classified B8-9 B10-12 LJZJ The Boston Globe Monday, May 8, 2006 Alex Beam Barry and the V. Babe the time you read this, San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds may have eclipsed Babe Ruth in the home run department But 1 I Jim t.S'cCnl:- vcv-Y m-Ai-mrtiW mum tit -fii -ti-' ii ifil M1.rilff-tlfv-att,fril---.-iir'------- RICK FRIEDMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Nearly 1 1 years after first enrolling at Harvard, the Weezer frontman is about to earn an English degree. Ten days after graduation, he's getting married. nn' he How Rivers Cuomo discovered meditation, got through Harvard, and found a wife By Joan Anderman i globe staff Rivers Cuomo, the rock star, is craning his neck to follow Lynn Festa, the English professor, who is delivering a whirlwind lecture in Harvard's Holden Chapel. The course is called Sex and Sensibility in the Enlightenment, and Cuomo's desk is piled with lined paper, on which he scribbles calmly and constantly.

His signature thick-rimmed glasses have been replaced with an understated pair of wire spectacles. In his running shoes, baggy trousers, and striped T-shirt and in his drive to score an A from this notoriously tough prof Cuomo is indistinguishable from his classmates. The 35-year-old frontman for the rock band Weezer, Cuomo is finally going to graduate from college. Right now he's in the final weeks of an ambling undergraduate odyssey that's unfurled piecemeal, between world tours and million-selling album cycles. Every few years he moves his spartan collection of belongings and an acoustic guitar to Cambridge and knocks off another semester.

This spring Cuomo's taken up residence in Cabot House, where each day he studies for 10 hours, sleeps for six, and meditates for two. With the exception of one A-minus and a B-plus, major disappointments he'd rather not dwell on, Cuomo is a straight-A student. He eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the Cabot House cafeteria, and after class on a recent weekday Cuomo exits the buffet with fa-lafel, potatoes, quiche, carrots, and milk. It will be followed shortly by a plate filled with numerous desserts. When he was on the road last year touring behind Weezer's fifth album, the Rick Rubin-produced "Make Believe," Cu- CUOMO, Page B6 there is one department in which Bonds will never overtake the Babe: the department of mythology.

Bonds has become a modern-day Iago, reviled on almost every street corner for his crimes against the sacred institution of baseball. overweening monster" Slate magazine.) By contrast, Babe remains the subject of collective adoration, a chubby, jovial Falstaff cherished in loving memory through the gauze niters previously reserved for Doris Day in her 60s or Ronald Reagan in his 70s. Just the other day I heard Ruth compared to Albert Einstein and Franklin Roosevelt as one of the seminal figures of the 20th century. The black man is the villain; the white guy is the hero. How many times have I seen this movie? Only about 50,000, I'd say.

Ruth may have been plodding, but he was far from lovable, as Leigh Montville's just-published biography, "The Big Bam," makes clear. In fact, there is virtually no sin that has been attributed to Bonds that the Babe didn't commit first and more so. Brutish behavior? Even though Ruth was the first baseball player to hire a full-time public relations aide, there were plenty of incidents his flack couldn't cover up. Ruth charged an umpire and on another occasion threw dust in an ump's eyes. More than once, the Babe plunged into the grandstands to take on a heckler, the kind of impulsive (and understandable) act that may shorten basketball player Ron Artest's career.

One of the offending fans called Ruth "a low down bum." You don't need a fertile imagination to figure out what epithets Barry Bonds hears from the stands. Like Bonds, and all superstars, the Babe lived a life almost completely apart from his teammates. After a youth spent in a work home, Ruth's greed as an adult proved to be insatiable. Contracts meant nothing to him, and he cannily lobbied in the press for huge raises, threatening to switch careers if his employers failed to meet his ever-increasing salary demands. Did someone mention breaking the rules? Lusting after money, Ruth embarked on a lucrative exhibition tour scheduled right after the 1921 World Series, in open defiance of Article 4 of the Major League Code.

Instead of cutting the cherubic miscreant a break, Commissioner Kenesaw Landis fined and suspended Ruth, and made the punishments stick It was a rare loss for Ruth, the spoiled man-child who almost always got his way. Yes, of course, Ruth was nice to children, and so is Bonds, at least according to the latest episode of ESPN's "Bonds on Bonds." But both superstars were and are able to control what we see. One of Ruth's many ghostwriters thought his client's showy displays of affection for the younger set were "a put-on and a sham." Others disagreed. Whatever the case, familial affection, to put it gently, was not the Babe's strong suit. There are other similarities between these two men who are being treated so differently by history.

Like Bonds, Ruth developed something of a persecution complex. They're all after me," Ruth complained after Commissioner Landis lowered the boom. "If I'm not wanted in organized baseball, all they have to do is tell me, and I will step down and out." Most astonishingly, Ruth was taunted throughout his career for being black As a young man, his sallow features and puffy lips earned him a nickname that can't be printed in the newspaper but that dogged him throughout his life. Near the end of his book, Montville writes: "Was the Babe, by legal definition, a black man? He had heard the bad words for as long as he had played. He had been handed the wrongful stereotype that would be attached to the black athlete the natural talent, abilities transmitted by the touch of God, not acquired through industry and intelligence.

He never had the chance to manage a team. So many of the pieces fit. If not a black man, he had been touched by the prejudices against a black man." Perhaps Ruth and Bonds have more in common than we realize. Like a superhero comic, '24' thrives in (: a two-dimensional world A 'Opal' aided by marketing firm that targets teens By David Mehegan GLOBE STAFF Since the downfall of Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore whose novel was yanked from stores and whose two-book contract was canceled by her publisher last week, attention has focused on Alloy Entertainment, the little-known book packager that shared the copyright with her. What has received scant notice is that the parent company, Alloy Media Marketing, is not really in the publishing business.

It is an advertising and marketing firm that specializes in selling stuff and helping others sell stuff to teenagers and preteens. Alloy's editors helped Viswanathan who had been referred to them by the William Morris literary agency lighten her tone and flesh out the plot of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." Though it remains unclear exactly what influence Alloy editors had, president Leslie Morgenstein wrote in an e-mail last week that no one helped Viswanathan write the actual words of the book that, it turns out, liberally borrowed from at least three authors. Apart from two terse e-mail responses, Alloy has refused to talk about what it does and how. Jodi Smith, spokeswoman for the parent company, likewise rebuffed requests for an interview with senior executives. But there's not much mystery about the operation.

According to the company's website, Alloy Media Marketing was founded in 1997 by Matthew Diamond and James K. Johnson, now the chief executive and chief operating officers, respectively. Their idea was to help advertisers ALLOY, Pag B7 A- By Matthew Gilbert GIOBE STAFF "24" is flat. Fox's Chicken Little suspense series has no depth of character, no visual dimensionality, and the silvery, monochromatic lighting of a damp basement. The acting is so shallow and garish you al- most want to tummy-tickle Mary Lynn Rajskub's Chloe, or give her a noogie, or stun-gun her Notebook anything to snap her out of that eternal glower.

And the message of "24" something about ends justifying means and the American triumph of good over evil is simplistic, to say the least. And that's what makes the show so cool, almost brilliant. "24" is flat because it is a TV-ized comic book, an electronic re-creation of a drawn superhero adventure. It is a TV series that operates by so many of the aesthetic rules of comics and graphic novels, you can almost see thought and speech balloons above the characters. Once you think about the series from that perspective, its weaknesses and excesses are forgivable.

Indeed, they make good sense. The Monday night show, building to a two-hour crescendo Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beamglobe.com. KtLStY MCNEALFOX.