Weekly Obsessions

If you're in the mood to pig out on pig, put this paper down immediately, call Oliveto (5655 College Ave., Oakland, 510/547-5356), and get a reservation for any night you can between Feb. 8 and 11, when the restaurant serves its special Whole Hog menu, devoted to the delights of salumi, offal, pasta, and entrees, all pork-based. This is the sixth year of the festivities, and they're celebrating the introduction of chef Paul Bertolli's new line of traditional Italian sausages and other cured meats, soon to debut in retail stores. From the deliriously good menu, we can personally recommend the plate of pork liver pâté, ciccioli, and campagnola pâté; another of coppa di testa, mortadella, blood sausage with pine nuts and raisins, and salame cotto; and the "mixed fry" of pork trotter, brains, artichokes, spring garlic, and Meyer lemon. We're looking forward to trying the gnocchi del casentino with little pork meatballs and the cotechino with lentils this year. But whatever you do, don't miss the potatoes cooked in pork renderings! M.B.

We knew Donald Rumsfeld guards information like a wolverine guards its den. (As legend holds, the helmet-haired beast will leap from trees to kill intruders that wander into its territory.) What we didn't know was how Rummy's weasel cunning could dampen the spirits of the curious, even, perhaps, the professionally curious among us. The number of Freedom of Information Act requests for Department of Defense records has dropped nearly 25 percent since Rummy marked his turf, from 94,479 in 2000 to 73,814 in 2003. In the same span, the number of requests fully completed by the DOD fell by a similar percentage. We asked for data from 2004 but were told to file a FOIA request. L.O'B.

Two weeks ago, in an unprecedented act of public onanism, architect Mario Botta celebrated the 10th anniversary of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by marveling at the splendor of his erection. "Beautiful," he said, gushing anew over every square foot of the squat, pompous building he designed. Beautiful? SFMOMA? Our civic Barcalounger? Our lamprey (as one Chronicleletter writer noted)? Botta himself called the building "a sumo wrestler defending the city from a growing downtown," which we assume was a compliment. Different strokes, we guess. T.C.