The biggest game of the year will be on television screens across the country this weekend as the undefeated New England Patriots take on the New York Giants. But the much-anticipated football game won't likely be showing on screens inside the churches this year.

Notes: Fox finds home with Pettys after years at Yates

FONTANA, Calif. -- Thursday's opening day of the final session of Sprint Cup Preseason Thunder, at California Speedway, marked the completion of the first week that Bobby Labonte's new car chief, Raymond Fox, had spent working for Petty Enterprises on its No. 43 Dodge.

Small Plates offers eclectic choice of nibbles

When I was in college in a small Midwestern town, I had a friend, now a chef, who cohosted frequent dinner parties with his roommate. We would pile into their sparsely decorated, wood-floor apartment, and they would serve our ragtag bunch bowls of bicolor soup with drizzles on top and carefully constructed towers of ingredients that often, but not always, tasted good together. Handwritten menus offered choices to circle with the Sharpie making its way around the table, and the wine always flowed.

I hadn't thought of those gatherings in years, until I ate at Small Plates in Harvard Square. Then I remembered the bare-bones romance of them, the sense of experimentation and possibility, and the well-intentioned stumbles, born of ambition. A meal at Small Plates is reminiscent of a dinner party in the university-town apartment of someone who is cooking to please you.