Kevin Cullen

So last summer, Kevin Cullen spent his summer vacation in Delaware. And now we know he spent his summer vacation this year in New Jersey. Maybe next summer, if the Globe still offers employees vacations, it can just leave his space blank the day after his break, so readers can write down their own thoughts.

Kevin Cullen does a nice job explaining how a company that paid a $50-million fine for supplying substandard concrete for the Big Dig is now getting state road contracts again.

But Michael Gee says it a lot better.

Globe columnist Cullen likens relationship between Globe and NYT Co. to that between debtor and loan shark. Overall, it reads like a resigned realist, laying it out.

This installment of the loansharking metaphor is relatively free of violence, but tune in for the next exciting episode.

People wouldn't have to pay taxes if they're lovable scamps. It's right up there with his let Townies kill a Vermonter before they die plan.

Kevin Cullen sticks up for Chuck Turner today, decrying the court order that prevents him from publicly discussing any pre-trial evidence the feds hand over to his lawyers.

Three things:

Is it a bit odd that Cullen is writing about the court order when the Globe itself has yet to report on it? That might explain why he doesn't discuss the part of the order in which the judge slaps around the U.S. Attorney's office for its prosecution of the case to date.

Second, the Caped Columnist really should find his own voice instead of imitating Howie Carr and making up monickers for the people he writes about ("Comrade Turner," how droll).

Third, Tovarisch Cullen places great emphasis on video of Turner allegedly accepting a bribe:

Anybody who hasn't seen that video, or read or heard talk about it, is either dead, deaf, or blind, and in any case is so insulated from everyday life as to preclude them from being qualified to sit in judgment of a parking violation, much less a man's liberty.

Last I checked, I still have a pulse; I can hear you, my loyal reader, whining about me bashing Cullen yet again; and I can see Cullen's lead, something about Kate Winslet, perfectly fine. And yet, I've never seen that video!

Where is it? I've certainly seen the screen capture (or as Clever Kev might call it, "the photo") the feds released, purportedly from a video. But actual movin' pictures of Chuck Turner being handed a wad of bills? Anybody have a URL for that?

Yesterday, Kevin Cullen declared Boston the Worst City in the World because we haven't seen fit to temporarily rename a street after some rock band that played here once. Hey, Kevin, I'm personally outraged there's no plaque commemorating the time the seminal rock band the B-52s played the Orpheum back in the early 1980s, whom can I call, and can I count on your support?

Today, Adrian Walker does one of his patented rewrite jobs and explains that a) There's a big hole in the middle of Downtown Crossing, b) Tom Menino refused to walk by it the other day and c) The city's in a heap of financial trouble. Absolutely none of which we'd read in any Globe stories over the past week, right?

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.

As Adam Reilly notes, Kevin Cullen can write a great column when he wants to. Today, Cullen dissects America's newest op-ed sensation, Libyan Thug in Chief Muammar Qaddafi, whose musings on Palestine the New York Times ran today, a few weeks after the Globe ran his plea for the U.S. to leave Russia alone.

Cullen does this through the lens of a local resident whose brother Qaddaffi has kept locked up for years for daring to call for free speech in Libya. Along the way, Cullen asked Globe editors why they ran that piece, for which a Washington, D.C. public-relations firm was paid (no doubt quite nicely) to pitch:

... A Globe editor said that after receiving the pitch from the PR firm, the paper called the Libyan embassy in Washington to confirm Khadafy wrote the piece. Satisfied with its authenticity, and with editors believing it was "well reasoned," the paper ran it. ...

South Shore Pragmatist read Kevin Cullen's column today, at first wondered when the Globe hired Howie Carr, then realized it was just Cullen doing a little play acting, right down to the made-up nicknames for sleazy solons, at least until Cullen realized he still works for the Globe and actually had to write something original, which he finally got to in the bottom third of the column.

Aaron Weber explains why Cullen's recent Ungrateful Sallie Mae column does a good job at pulling at the heart strings (family of a dead Marine having trouble getting the company to forgive $100,000 in student loans he took out), but does a terrible job explaining why the family might still owe the money. And that, Weber (who works in the loan field) concludes, might be because Cullen couldn't be bothered to ask basic questions:

... Is it budget cutbacks that prevent Kevin Cullen from doing any actual leg-work on his articles? Because really, there's nothing to this piece except that it sucks to die and it sucks to borrow money and not be able to repay it, and that's not actually news.

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! Read more

Guess not.

Something to be proud of, one supposes.

Maybe Kevin Cullen has finally returned from his extended summer vacation and is going to start writing thoughtful columns about life in Boston, like today's column on putting a year's worth of woes for Boston firefighters in perspective. One can hope, anyway.

That would certainly explain why he spent a total of 15 minutes writing today's column - a new set of insults for "Herr Whacko" - rather than doing any original reporting:

And Clark, just one more thing: When you look at the visitors' log at Nashua Street jail, and see an empty space, you'll know it was me.

Quite so.

Quite so? Yep, that's going to be some piece Kev is working on.

Earlier:
Herr, herr, herr.

Furthering my thesis that Kevin Cullen would make a great blogger is today's column, the top half of which involves his reaction to people writing him to tell him Delaware was not a Confederate state. You can just picture him down in ma's basement, going "Oh, yeah?!? I'll show YOU, you SOBs! I'm so gonna blog about this!" You know, just like when Boston Magazine was sort of mean to him.

Bonus Cullen weekly column count:

Columns about Delaware: 2
Columns about Boston:   0

Adam Reilly counsels him:

Yo, Kevin--As a Globe metro columnist, you've got one of the best jobs in Boston journalism. But you're supposed to write about Boston, not yourself. The next time someone points out that you made a factual error, just acknowledge it in a straightforward way. Don't waste 670 words explaining why it wasn't a big deal. ...

Satirist. Social commentator. Sports reporter. And now, travel writer. Yeeha, let's all jump in the car and drive to the Delaware State Fair! Oh, but let's get a copy of the Herald so we can keep up with what's happening back in Boston.

Is Kevin Cullen now auditioning for a job at the Herald?

Never have the good people of Richmond met more guys wearing Sansabelt pants and reeking of halitosis that could melt the glaciers. Folks at roadside farm stands report of men roughly the size of manatees emerging from cars with low-number license plates to ask in barely discernible accents the same question: "Where's the closest packie?"

After getting directions, our honorable representatives, without exception, asked a follow-up: "How late they open?"

Points for gratuitous cheap shots; demerits for just making stuff up.

By day, he's an amazing reporter, writing wonderful articles, but by night, he's busy complaining about Manny Ramirez and riffing on stuff he read in the Herald.

Kevin Cullen says this story was hard to write. But even though you know how it ends, you'll read it to the end.

So Kevin Cullen follows up his hard-hitting column on Boston Police and the death of David Woodman with an inane, took-15-minutes-to-write column about how awful it is that Sox fans chant "Yankees suck." Great, so now Kevin is that annoying aunt who's always trying to wipe your face at family get-togethers with her napkin and lecturing you about how awful kids today are.

Soxaholix says:

... What I especially love about the media castigation is how every anti-chant column has the columnist getting all breathless that he and he alone has discovahed the elusive logical fallacy that "the Yankees, you know, don't really suck so you shouldn't say that they do."

He's a bit late to the game, but Kevin Cullen today writes what Dan Kennedy calls a first-rate column on the guy who died after being detained by police during the post-Celtics-win crackdown.

After reading Kevin Cullen's thoughts on Manny Ramirez today, it would be easy to ask why a metro columnist is writing about this rather than, oh, asking how a 7-year-old came to be shot while playing kickball or, oh, how a woman died when her car was raked by gunfire or, oh, whether police overreacted in responding to that woman with the cleaning supplies.

Easy, but incomplete. Because one also has to ask whether Cullen even reads his own paper, since the CHB wrote the same basic column on Tuesday and Bob Ryan expressed the same basic thoughts on Wednesday. Maybe Cullen was at a retreat, missed those two columns, but saw Yvonne Abraham's summation of all the questions in the Woodman case and concluded the paper had already had enough serious local opinion this week.