Adrian Walker

Closing arguments could come today in the Suffolk Superior Court trial of Quincy Butler and William Wood. But you haven't heard of them because they're only charged with stabbing a woman to death and shooting out her boyfriend's eye in a drug-fueled 2004 home invasion in Dorchester, and this is their fourth trial on the charges, so it's understandable that reporters are just too fatigued to care anymore, especially when the alleged run-away nebbish with the fun fake name is on trial so far away, like in a whole other courtroom in the same building.

Same thing happened at their third trial, last year, which took place at the same time some loathsome Brit was on trial in Middlesex County for murdering his wife and daughter in Hopkinton, and which was declared a mistrial, following two other mistrials.

And by "media," I include the Globe's Adrian Walker, whose column today breaks new ground in not telling you anything you didn't already know about the Defendant.

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?

So yesterday, I predicted that after Yvonne Abraham and Kevin Cullen wrote emotionally gripping columns, Adrian Walker would follow up with a column about Bob DeLeo.

One guess what Walker wrote about today.

First Dianne Wilkerson and her Dejavu story. Now Walker reports he - and many other people - were had by Jake Severino, a bright young Dorchester man who, it turns out, is not dying of cancer like he told Walker he was back in September.

Jake Severino had a simple explanation for why he started telling the world he was dying. "I wanted to be loved," he said. "I wanted to be loved more than I was."

Ron Wilburn, the "Cooperating Witness," talks to the Globe's Adrian Walker. Fans of Boston political intrigue need to go read the interview now, if you haven't already.

Ed. Frequent Critic of Walker Note: Adrian, this makes up for all those columns on the Red Sox and beach erosion in Winthrop.

Michael Pahre wonders why the feds waited until now to nab Wilkerson - since based on that affidavit, they had her cold last year. Are more dominoes about to fall? If so, Pahre predicts the next to go is Boston Licensing Board Chairman Daniel Pokaski - painted in a particularly unflattering way in the affidavit:

... BLB Chairman Pokaski will probably resign within weeks -- if not days -- because he stood to gain financially from the August 2007 meeting that allegedly resulted in him approving a temporary license for Dejavu while the state legislature approved a pay raise for him. ...

Meanwhile, Pahre raises an issue about the Globe: In all its wall-to-wall coverage in print today, the Globe made absolutely no mention of the role played in all this by its own Adrian Walker. Is the paper embarrassed the feds painted its columnist as a patsy used by Wilkerson to help blackmail the city council and Pokaski to get her client his liquor license?

It's not like Walker didn't want to write about the case. Yesterday, boston.com posted his musings. But after two paragraphs generically writing about his July column, Walker spent the rest of the piece sighing about what a shame Wilkerson had become. What did Wilkerson say to him to convince him to write that July column? We have no idea.

And got Adrian Walker of the Globe involved in her seamy little game. Allegedly, of course.

But Walker shouldn't feel too badly: Aside from then City Council President Maureen Feeney, pretty much everyone involved comes off as an inadvertent enabler of an unscrupulous, determined Wilkerson in the federal complaint against her.

Remember last year when the city council sought state legislation so it didn't have to hold a preliminary election to reduce the number of at-large council candidates from nine to eight?

According to the criminal complaint against her, Wilkerson threatened to hold up that legislation unless the city granted a full liquor license to a proposed restaurant on Melnea Cass Boulevard (unfortunately for Wilkerson, the guy giving her all those bribes wore a wire the whole time).

The affidavit claims that for her cash payments, Wilkerson worked it: She sent letters to all city councilors demanding a hearing on liquor licenses. She convinced Walker to write a column pushing the joint's application - by painting the holdup as proof the city licensing board had it out for non-insiders.

And, allegedly, she then threatened the city council: Get Deja Vu its full license or she'd hold up the election bill. City Council President Maureen Feeney got mad, the complaint alleges, but agreed to meet with Wilkerson.

Then Wilkerson put a hold on a second bill, which would have given raises to Licensing Board staffers. And she got Therese Murray to call Feeney to push for the license.

The Licensing Board eventually did agree to grant the license, after Wilkerson lifted her "hold" on the pay raises and agreed to sponsor legislation to get Boston more liquor licenses. And the council got its home-rule legislation to eliminate the preliminary.

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

Yesterday, we had Kevin Cullen declaring Delaware a Confederate state.

Today, Elias finds two factual errors in Adrian Walker's pointed, if schizo column on the former firefighter running for Jim Marzilli's seat (pointed because it's a poke in the eye of Boston firefighters, schizo because two-thirds of the way down, Walker tells us that voters in that district, which does not include Boston, don't care about the firefighter issue, and so he suddenly veers into education):

Honestly, does anyone fact check anything anymore at the Boston Globe?

Is there some virus going around the Globe newsroom that makes metro columnists start writing about sports? Yeah, I get it, sports is the lifeblood of this town, so, OK, write about Manny Ramirez because you can't be bothered to leave your desk to actually find something new to write about, but sheesh, at least say something original.

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.

Not a clue why somebody would do that, but somebody did - with his column from today. Can you notice a difference?

The column itself is a plea for the legislature to pass a same-day registration bill for voters. Sounds good to me, although does anybody know what the president of the League of Women Voters was studying in grad school back in 1986? Because I'm finding it difficult to believe somebody who'd gotten to grad school would not realize that if you're registered to vote in Amherst, you can't just show up and vote in Cambridge (at least, not yet). If it's anything related to political science, or sociology or any other field that requires some working knowledge of our political system, she might want to find another example to use to push the bill.

And the question is: Does Adrian Walker's column provide any new insights into Boston Fire Department scandals?

Howie Carr does the same basic column, only better, aside from a couple of Shaughnessy-like references to events that happened 30 years ago that have absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.

With Hendry Street condos going for record prices and soup kitchens and drug dens long since converted into chic bistros, it's just a wonderful time to be in Boston - unless you're a metro columnist for the Boston Globe, in which case it's become so hard to find local stories that you find yourself writing about poor people in Uganda and Catholic food pantries in Washington, DC.

Credit to Adrian Walker for not regurgitating last week's news in his column today, which tells us how one mother channeled her grief over her son's murder into a foundation trying to stop more murders. So it's probably being really nitpicky to ask if it would have ruined the column to provide a link for people who might want more information about the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute. He was probably just following corporate edicts against using URLs that don't start with boston.com...

That's because Joe Keohane does a much better job, explaining why today’s Adrian Walker column is sub-par, even for him:

... [T]oday's column on Deval Patrick’s book deal not only contains the most lazily pedestrian takeaway imaginable (Deval needs to prove he's going to stick around and govern), but comes about a week and a half after BZ's Jon Keller broke the story in the first place, and, I would argue, five days after the rest of the press stopped intensively covering it. ... Why, oh lord, do the good ones always take the buyouts?

On the one hand, his column today tells you absolutely nothing you either couldn't have read in a news account or couldn't have already thought to yourself, given a spare 30 seconds (this is just a terrible, terrible tragedy and how many more little kids have to die before we, as a society, do something about it?).

On the other hand, he did write a column about actual breaking Boston news that people are actually talking about (as opposed to some issue several days after the fact that most people could care less about), so give him a hand for that.

Charge will be dismissed in a year if he stays out of trouble, completes alcohol counseling.

Earlier:
Adrian Walker may have a problem.

Walker arrested on OUI charges while in a Globe car early Sunday. Pleaded innocent in Dorchester District Court.

Globe brief.

No.

Compare his column with Peter Gelzinis's column on Saturday, when this was all still breaking news.

I challenge you to find anything insightful or memorable in Adrian Walker's confused column today, in which he breaks the shocking news that we have a primary today and that the Patriots lost on Sunday.

Walker also manages to declare that the Massachusetts primary is both important and unimportant, that Mitt Romney is "one of the state's most popular politicians" and that "the four major candidates couldn't get enough of Massachusetts over the final 72 hours," which is probably causing heads to roll in the Globe newsroom, since nobody there reported on all of Mitt Romney's active campaigning in Massachusetts over the past three days.

Adrian Walker does it again: Re-write a news story from the day before. Today, Walker ponders the possibility that Mitt Romney could lose Massachusetts on Tuesday. Globe readers might be forgiven if they get the feeling they read the same exact thing the day before. Because they did. Now, there's something to be said for columnists who explain the news, who give us valuable insight into the key events that shape our lives, yada, yada, but Walker never does that. He just keeps turning out forgettable regurgitations.

Adrian Walker has the gall today to complain that the city-council election this year is the quietest ever:

While it is tempting to blame the low-key council for at least part of the public's apparent apathy, that wouldn't be entirely fair.

Let me rewrite that sentence for you, Adrian:

While it is tempting to blame the almost non-existent coverage of the council election by the Globe and Herald for at least part of the public's apparent apathy, that wouldn't be entirely fair.

Although it would certainly be deserved. It is great that Michael Pahre at Brighton Centered and Harry Mattison at the Allston Brighton Community Blog did such wonderful jobs covering the election this year (the Tab also did a commendable job). It is just an absolute joke that daily newspapers with "Boston" in their names devoted more ink and electrons to "Britney Spears" between Sept. 1 and today (48 Globe mentions and 22 Herald mentions) than to the "Boston City Council" (9 mentions in the Globe and 9 in the Herald). Christ, the Globe couldn't even be bothered to report the results of a September preliminary election in Roxbury until FOUR days after the fact.

Yes, Adrian, it is, indeed, a shame that the biggest issue of the campaign might prove to be a couple of anonymous mail drops instead of something like crime, or education, or property taxes or even just Tom Menino. Now look in the mirror and explain to yourself how absolutely none of that is your fault.

Ed. obligatory hairshirt: I, too, did a sucky job covering the election; pretty much everything I posted consisted of links to Brighton Centered, the Allston Brighton Community Blog and the Tab, except, of course, for sentence after sentence about the anonymous mailings. My one saving grace: I'm not sitting here going "tut tut."

I'll leave it to fumin' Joe Keohane to explain why Walker's column today (on people complaining about the towing the city is doing because other people were complaining our streets have become an open trash heap) is so inane. But a couple of questions:

Does Walker live somewhere other than Boston? Because he obviously doesn't know what happens to streets where cars are parked when the sweepers come - especially in the winter (by springtime, it's like Revere Beach, there's so much sand).

That having been said, did the city notify people first before it began enforcement? We're not New York and we don't have anything like "alternate side of the street parking" implanted in our brains from birth. A city that can put little paper leaves with leaf-pickup information on every single doorknob in the city twice a year can surely find the resources to put little paper cut-outs in the shape of tow trucks on everybody's door - even here in Roslindale, which Walker says is one of the hardest hit areas (must be down by the Square, since up here in the foothills along the Hyde Park frontier, we never see tow trucks).

Earlier:
City forces her to push her dead car across the street.

Yes, it is nitpicky of me to point out a mistake in Adrian Walker's column today that is of no real importance: The road in West Roxbury named after Bill Weld's ancestors is Weld Street, not Weld Avenue.

But looking for mistakes was all I could do to keep from keeling over, asleep. Walker seems like a good person, a decent reporter, but his columns increasingly read like entries in the World's Dullest Column competition. It was funny/sad back in April when he was gone for three weeks (vacation?) before anybody noticed. Read more