Yesterday, Yvonne Abraham brought us to tears with her column about the loving couple married for 62 years who died within hours of each other.

Today, Kevin Cullen tries to get us mad at Vermont because a thug from Charlestown out for some country air or something up there went after a guy with an ax and wound up getting himself killed.

What will tomorrow bring? No doubt Adrian Walker will have us gripping the edges of our seats with his thoughts on Bob DeLeo.

Take the local angle (Dorchester ACORN office broken into) away from Abraham's Wednesday column and she says absolutely nothing that Dahlia Lithwick didn't write last Thursday on Slate. She even cites the same Barnard professor to make her case.

They must've been eating their columnist Wheaties, because last week we didn't have a single column about state fairs in other parts of the country or boring thumbsuckers called in at the last moment. They actually worked it. Yay, Globe metro columnists!

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Yvonne Abraham files a nice, simple, well told column on a Dorchester gangbanger who had an epiphany in jail and now is trying to get his life straight in college. Peter Gelzinis expresses angst

about the really important things in life, but gets too tied up in knots and his head explodes in a paroxysm of random thoughts - at one point he started wagging his finger at us and telling us we all suck because we cared more about the Celtics victory parade than Curt Schilling's shoulder, which is enough to make the reader go "huh?" and wonder if maybe Gelzinis should stop downing entire six packs of Red Bull in a single sitting.

The Urban Paramedic is back from basic training and blogging again. And with his Boston job not resuming for another week, he has time to work up a head of steam over Yvonne Abraham tearing into the current president of the Upton Street Neighborhood Association in the South End for daring to call the Pine Street Inn "a very, very nasty place." The UP, who has been there, explains, in some detail that the Inn really is a very, very nasty place:

... The whole facility stinks of urine and body odor. The belongings of the residents are filthy. In fact, most of the residents are filthy.

Night is the worst time. The snoring of 400 people in varying degrees of health makes an incredible racket. Arguments break out. Residents sneak into the rest rooms to shoot up heroin. Others get drunk. They steal from one another. Violence is not unusual.

The staff is extremely dedicated. I give them a world of credit, because they try extremely hard to set rules that will give the homeless a decent place to sleep. But it's an uphill battle. Residents sneak needles and syringes into the shelter. And bottles of booze. And occasionally knives. ...

John Gonzalez weighs all three of the columnists and finds them wanting:

... In a city that needs bold opinions, particularly now that Bailey is gone, who among them is up to the task? Walker is inconsistent. So is Abraham, who just returned to writing this spring after spending much of her first year as a columnist on maternity leave. Cullen, meanwhile, exhausted much of his first year finding his chi. What kind of cattle prod does it take these days to make a Globe columnist earn his feed? ...

He also provides the rules for the Kevin Cullen drinking game. Yes, you get points for every Irish reference.

Yvonne Abraham breaks the news that Apple opened a store on Boylston Street last week and expresses her discomfort on learning that Apple is a for-profit concern and her amazement that, despite that, some people really like its products.

Humble suggestion: This is the sort of thing that would make a more worthy metro column.

That must explain why metro columnists at the Boston Globe keep writing about things happening nowhere near Boston (another example).

Then again, it's not like the paper's metro columnists could really write about the big local story, now could they?

With a cute column about becoming an American.

Yvonne Abraham in City & Region: Who knew Boston public schools are so great?

Michael Blanding in the Globe Magazine: Boston schools suck and are getting worse.

Now, Abraham does mention problems, and Blanding briefly mentions successes (mainly as a bridge to still more horror stories like one about parents taking their kid out of a public school because he kept getting bitten by a special-needs kid), but left hand? Meet right hand. Also: Seems very odd to have a magazine cover story about how Boston schools suck without giving the new superintendent, who supposedly is known for the sort of innovative programs the writer gushes about, a single sentence.

Ed. parent of Boston public school student note: The truth is somewhere between the extremes. We got lucky, our daughter's in a good school, seems to be doing well, and none of her schoolmates have ever bitten her. But the Boston Public Schools can be a frustrating, even terrifying experience for parents. We are, to be honest, scared of middle school and high school (although a bit less so now that her school's gone K-8): If she doesn't get into Latin (or if she does get in but we decide it's not for her), what do we do? If somebody has a good word to say about any middle school in the city, I'd love to hear it.