Taylor Swift Wedding Crasher Edition

August 22, 2012

From the evidence in today’s Boston dailies, Taylor Swift is not the most welcome guest in and around town.

Start with the Boston Herald, where the Track Gals (and Megan!) produced this startling report:

Kennedy mom: Taylor Swift crashed wedding

Taylor Swift crashed the Kennedy wedding in Boston over the weekend and did not leave after being twice asked to do so, the mother of the bride, Victoria Gifford Kennedy, told the Track yesterday.

But Swift’s publicist insisted that the country superstar was a welcome guest and that the bride was happy to have her share the spotlight.

A source at the hotel reported seeing Swift being asked to leave the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel where Kyle Kennedy, the daughter of the late Michael Kennedy and Victoria Gifford Kennedy, was celebrating her marriage to Liam Kerr on Saturday. So we rang up Vicki for the 411.

“They texted me an hour before the wedding and asked if they could come,” Vicki Kennedy said. “I responded with a very clear, ‘Please do not come.’ They came anyway. … I personally went up to Ms. Swift, whose entrance distracted the entire event, politely introduced myself to her, and asked her as nicely as I could to leave. It was like talking to a ghost. She seemed to look right past me.”

Funny, she does the same thing to us.

Over at the Globe, the hardreading staff’s plaintive request on WBUR’s Radio Boston last Friday – namely, would someone figure out if Swift actually bought a house on the Cape or not? – was very kindly answered in todays Names column.  And the answer is: Nobody knows.

It’s been widely rumored that the country singer, who’s currently dating Conor Kennedy, plunked down $4.9 million — a tiny fraction of her sizable fortune — to buy the 4,440-square-foot gray shingle spread across the street from Ethel Kennedy ’s place in Hyannis Port.

But it’s tough to confirm. The deed on the property is held by Coleman Limited Partnership of Greenwich, Conn., and calls to the previous owner, Nancy Coleman, were not returned. Meanwhile, an employee at the Barnstable County Registry of Deeds — who told us he’s talked to “tons” of reporters trying to confirm the sale — said if Swift did indeed purchase the place, her name would not necessarily appear on public records.

Okay, then. But one thing the Namesniks do know: “While Swift herself is welcome in town, some residents we spoke to aren’t so wild about the press and paparazzi that have followed her.”

Well, at least we’ve got that cleared up.

 

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Herald Snubs Globe’s RadioBDC Edition

August 21, 2012

In his column today, Boston Herald music scribe Jed Gottlieb laments the loss of local radio talent on Boston’s airwaves.

The Last DJs

Hub radio lacks character after purge

Boston’s airwaves have been stripped of personality.

Last month, the signal for alternative flagship WFNX (101.7 FM) was sold to Clear Channel, which turned the station into generic hits station The Harbor. In June, CBS Radio laid off staff and turned WODS (103.3 FM) classic hits into the jock-less Top 40 Amp Radio.

“I still feel like we just lost ’BCN (which went off the air in 2009) and ’FNX was the last man standing against all the robot radio,” said Parlour Bells frontman Glenn di Benedetto, who wrote the Hub rock anthem “Airwaves” in tribute to WFNX. “(Former-WFNX DJ) Julie Kramer said, ‘Your local DJ knows when it’s raining outside,’ and I put that in my song because I liked what it meant. With DJ-free radio, there’s no personality, no sense of community.”

That’s all true, if incomplete. Gotlieb fails to mention that ‘FNX has migrated wholesale to the Boston Globe’s RadioBDC, which describes itself this way:

RadioBDC is Boston’s only live hosted, streaming alternative station. We feature music, news, contests and the best breaking bands in the alternative format. Listen each weekday to hear Henry Santoro, Julie Kramer, Adam 12 & Paul Driscoll.

Is that essential to Gotlieb’s column? No.

Is it relevant? Yes.

Is omitting it petty? The hardreading staff says, definitely.

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Is Taylor Swift a Cape Cod Homeowner? Edition

August 20, 2012

When the hardreading staff last left our Taylor Swift bureau, we had received conflicting reports about whether she had actually purchased a house next door to/across the street from Ethel Kennedy’s manse in Hyannisport/Hyannis Port (per the Boston Herald/Globe).

Then . . . nothing. No resolution. Just confusion and anxiety.

Which was alleviated not at all by this piece in the Herald’s Inside Track today:

Taylor Swift’s storybook romance

Taylor Swift’s summer fling with the Kennedy clan continued over the weekend. On Friday, she and her BF, 18-year-old Conor Kennedy, were smooching in Hyannisport, on Saturday, they were in Boston for a Kennedy wedding and yesterday, they were back in church in Centerville.

The fun began Friday afternoon when Conor and Tay Tay, both dressed in shorts, played a little tonsil hockey on the dock in Hyannisport. The lovebirds were soooooo busy macking on each other, they paid no attention to boaters who were cruising the busy dock, taking in the PDA.

Right – later they went to the wedding, then the lovebirds sashayed through Haymarket and the North End, then it was back to the Cape where they attended Sunday Mass and where Swift MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT OWN A HOUSE.

The Track Gals (and Megan!) – normally a storehouse of information – don’t say.

The hardreading staff just wishes someone would.

 

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Elizabeth Warren Affirmative Action Edition

August 19, 2012

The Boston Sunday Globe has a Page One feature on Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren that a bookend to the Globe’s big takeout on Scott Brown two weeks ago. That one dealt with Brown’s “searing childhood” and “improbable rise.” Today’s piece is about Warren’s relentless rise in the academic world (with a headline Brown must love, since he never misses an opportunity to brand Warren an egghead):

For Professor Warren, a steep climb

Original scholarship, and singular ambition, drove her legal career

The piece is generally positive (as was the Brown piece), and seems to answer the question the Herald has been endlessly asking: Did Elizabeth Warren use her claim of Native American heritage to improve her professional prospects?

The answer, according to the Globe, is no.

Her unorthodox career trajectory has been scrutinized since she became a candidate for Senate, particularly after the revelation that for years she had listed herself as a Native American in a professional directory often used by law school recruiters.

Critics insinuated that she must have leveraged her self-professed heritage to advance her career in the 1980s and 1990s when law schools were under pressure to diversify. However, in two dozen interviews with the Globe, a wide range of professors and administrators who recruited or worked with Warren said her ethnic background played no role in her hiring.

That won’t end the Herald’s hammering away at Warren over this issue, largely because of this:

In a recent interview, Warren declined to authorize Harvard and Penn to release her personnel records from the private universities where she taught. Her opponent, Senator Scott Brown, has requested that she do so, to satisfy questions about whether race played any role in her hiring.

The records, she said, are not what defined her as an academic.

“The core of my career is my teaching and my writing,” she said, insisting she was hiding nothing in her records. “It’s all out there.”

Well, not exactly all.

Other fun facts from the piece:

• Silent on the race and gender wars that divided campuses in the 1980s and 1990s, she was never a liberal crusader.

She was not even a liberal.

She was a registered Republican as recently as 1996.

• [On the University of Pennsylvania’s controversial rejection of tenure for feminist professor Drucilla Cornell] Warren told the Globe that she did not work against Cornell. But she refused to say how she voted when the faculty had to decide whether to grant Cornell tenure.

• [On turning down a full-time position at Harvard in 1993] She told the Globe in 2009 that she found Harvard to be a “hostile environment” for women. But in a recent interview, Warren downplayed that concern, saying instead that she declined the job because her husband wasn’t offered one, too.

All in all, there’s plenty of material here for supporters and critics alike of Professor Elizabeth Warren.

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Whitey Bulger Moll 1.0 Edition

August 19, 2012

Atop yesterday’s Boston Globe Metro section:

Teresa Stanley, Bulger’s other longtime mate, dead at 71

She was the other woman in James “Whitey” Bulger’s life, the one who spent nearly 30 years with the gangster but refused to leave her family to stay with him on the run.

Teresa Stanley died of lung cancer Thursday morning at her home in South Boston, surrounded by her family. She was 71.

And the Boston Herald?

The dime-droppin’, mob-mockin’ feisty local tabloid had  . . . nothin’.

The Saturday Herald headline that wasn’t:

Bulger Now Minus His Reluctant Plus One

Instead, the Herald had this lame website caboose yesterday afternoon:

Teresa Stanley, former Whitey moll, dies of lung cancer at 71

Teresa Stanley, the onetime Whitey Bulger moll who left behind a cross-country life on the lam to return to her family in South Boston, has died of lung cancer, her family said. She was 71.

“She was truly just a beautiful woman,” her son-in-law, Ron Adams, told the Herald. “To look at her, you would know that. But what a lot of people didn’t know is how beautiful she was on the inside as well.”

Yeah, except the Globe’s quote from Adams was much better:

“She was a beautiful person, both inside and out, who carried herself with tremendous grace and dignity, at times under some difficult and challenging circumstances,” her son-in-law, Ron Adams, said Friday during a brief telephone interview. “She died peacefully surrounded by her family and friends. She will be missed by all.”

Bottom line: The Herald got totally pwned by the Globe on this story.

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The Young Immigrunts Edition

August 16, 2012

(With apologies to Ring Lardner)

Today’s Boston bakeoff features the new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allows young undocumented immigrants avoid deportation and obtain work permits for at least two years.

For once, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald are perfect complements to one another: the Globe has facts, the Herald has opinions.

The Globe piece is a standard, albeit sympathetic, news report detailing the particulars of the new policy and documenting the efforts of would-be applicants to take advantage of it.

Earlier Wednesday, about 20 members of the Student Immigrant Movement gathered on Friend Street in Boston to share tips and pointers on filling out the application.

Isabel Vargas, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic when she was 8 years old, told others at the meeting, held in the offices of Greater Boston Legal Services, that the opportunity to apply would transform her future.

“When I apply for a job, I don’t have to be all nervous about what Social Security number I’m going to give,” Vargas, 20, said.

Today’s Herald, meanwhile, has no news report but does feature two opinion pieces.

The first is an editorial:

Immigration muddle

President Barack Obama has created what looks to be a 50-state muddle as local officials are left to grapple with the consequences of his unilateral rewriting of the nation’s immigration policy.

Now make no mistake, we’re with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg andNews Corp. [NWS] head Rupert Murdoch (the former owner of this paper) in their call for genuine immigration reform that will contribute to the country’s growth. The two men were in town Tuesday to make their pitch for just such a new and dispassionate look at the issue.

But Obama’s election year epiphany that he could implement his own version of the DREAM Act by executive order, granting at least a temporary amnesty to young illegal immigrants, has left states to sort out what exactly that will mean.

The second is an op-ed:

Obama ‘law’ helps illegals

What does President Barack Obama call a bill which has repeatedly failed in Congress?

A law!

The Department of Homeland Security yesterday began accepting applications for the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) amnesty program. The move will award renewable two-year grants of legal status, including work cards and Social Security numbers, to illegal aliens claiming to have arrived before their 16th birthday.

Huh – maybe this division of labor between the Globe and the Herald will catch on.

One could cover Red Sox games, for instance, while the other concentrates on the players’ submarining of Bobby Valentine.

Or one could cover the U.S. Senate race while the other makes Indian jokes.

Oh, wait – they’re already doing that one.

P.S. You really should read Lardner’s The Young Immigrunts (linked above). It’s a hoot.

 

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Dorchester Gangbang (Or Not) Shooting Edition

August 15, 2012

Front-page piece in today’s Boston Globe:

3 lives of joy, hope cut short in an instant

The four young women styled one anothers’ hair and painted one anothers’ nails. They remained inseparable even after high school, as they set out on promising career paths. And in a sudden burst of gunfire Sunday night in Dorchester, three were gone.

On Tuesday, the parents of the victims of the Harlem Street shootings recounted the shock and heartbreak they felt when they learned of their daughters’ deaths. But they also shared the memories of three bright lives snuffed out by an unexplained act of violence.

Globe Metro editor Jennifer Peter on Twitter:

In the Boston Herald, though, it’s a whole different story.

Kin: ‘Beautiful’ shooting victim wasn’t gangbanger

The grief-stricken relatives of one of the women killed in Sunday night’s Harlem Street triple homicide said the “beautiful” mother of a 5-year-old daughter had no gang ties even as police continue to probe a possible gang link into the bloody shootings — and victims’ families desperately grasp for answers.

“For me, I don’t care what you were into. No one deserves to get attacked,” Mary Monteiro, 50, whose goddaughter, 22-year-old Genevieve Marie Phillip, was identified as one of the four woman shot — three fatally — as they sat inside a car in Dorchester.

The piece later reports, “Officials have said the attack was not random, and a gang hook is possible.”

To the hardreading staff, this story neatly encapsulates the parallel worlds of Boston’s dailies – and daily life.

The lovely and the ugly, side by side.

 

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Taylor Swift Cape House Edition

August 14, 2012

Today’s Boston Herald Inside Track has the inside story on the newest Bay State homeowner:

Country crooner Taylor Swift spent an action-packed weekend with the Kennedyclan in Hyannisport then jetted home to Nashville yesterday to make a “big announcement” on her official YouTube channel.

Tay Tay, who dropped a cool $5 million for the house next door to her new boyfriend Conor Kennedy’s grammy Ethel (Stage 5 Clinger alert!) was snapped sporting a red polka-dot bikini top as she frolicked with Conor’s dad, Bobby Kennedy Jr., and other members of the political dynasty on the Cape.

Yay Yay for Tay Tay, right?

Not so fast, my friends.

According to the Boston Globe’s Names column, it’s not next door to Ethel’s crib and it’s not a done deal:

Taylor Swift — who has spent much of the summer frolicking around Hyannis Port with her boyfriend (and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s son) Conor Kennedy — might be one of the community’s newest homeowners. We say “might,” because despite reports that the country-pop singer has purchased the home across the street (photos at right) from Ethel Kennedy (Conor’s grandmother), Swift has yet to confirm the sale, and we have yet to see public paperwork that proves that she’s the owner.

At least the two papers agree she’s been “frolicking.”

Regardless, this needs to be sorted.

And swiftly.

 

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Bob Kraft/Ricki Noel Lander (Or Is That “Landed”) Edition

August 14, 2012

Patriots owner/Myra Kraft widower Robert Kraft is once again “upon the Town!” (to borrow from James McNeill Whistler’s legendary Ten O’Clock lecture, which you should absolutely read).

Via the decidedly less august Boston Herald Inside Track:

Hanging in the Hamptons

Patriots bigwig Bob Kraft and his lovely lady friend Ricki Noel Lander hit Pharrell Williams’ annual ‘Apollo in the Hamptons’ fundraiser Saturday night. The event for the legendary New York theater drew a crew of boldfacers including Usher, Jennifer Hudson and the Isley Brothers. The Pats poohbah spent the rest of the weekend at his house on the Cape, where he was spotted on a paddle board, sans Ricki.

Sans Ricki, avec Ricki – this is just wrong.

The Boston Globe didn’t have this story.

Good for them.

 

 

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Paul Ryan, Paul the Time Edition

August 13, 2012

After Mitt Romney (R-How You Like Me Now?) announced his choice of running mate Saturday morning, the Paul Ryan Express roared through the news media, very much including Boston’s dailies.

Sunday’s Boston Herald front page (via The Newseum’s Today’s Front Pages):

The local tabloid devoted its first 10 news pages to Romney’s Veep Leap, along with one editorial and three – count ’em, three (here, here, and here) – op-ed columns.

Crosstown, the Boston Globe gave three broadsheet pages to the story, along with one editorial.

(Just for scale, the Globe’s kissin’ cousin New York Times featured four-and-a-half broadsheet pages, plus one Sunday Review piece.)

The Paul Ryan Express just accelerates from here.

 

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