The Globe's Yvonne Abraham explains why she's been missing for the past four months: She was recovering from a concussion.
The Herald's Howie Carr, meanwhile, broke his elbow and wrist while bicycling early this morning.
If you subscribe to the Globe, you may have seen Yvonne Abraham's inspirational column on Sunday about the 15-year-old Nigerian immigrant at the Orchard Gardens School in Roxbury who became a champion javelin thrower because of how he used to use spears to catch zebras.
Only problem, as Robert A. Blewett, a professor who spent time in Nigeria as a Fulbright Scholar, reports: There are no zebras in Nigeria:
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!
Kevin Cullen did what he does best - covering stuff like the mob - then followed up with an outrage inducer about a poor maid who won't be seeing any of that $700 billion.
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.
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?
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.
Her column on Harvard Jr., a.k.a. Allston, is classic McGrory: Set up a straw man to be demolished with a withering sneer. In her case: Argue that all Allston residents are 19th-century peasants who must not be allowed to stand in the way of Harvard turning the entire neighborhood into a Seussian village of Frank Gehryesque structures.
Globe Editor Martin Baron has just told his staff that Globe staffers Kevin Cullen and Yvonne Abraham will be replacing Brian McGrory and Eileen McNamara on the left side of the metro section. Cullen could be a wicked cool columnist - he did a great job as police-beat reporter for the Herald and then the Globe (Abraham could be good, too, I'm just not as familiar with her work).
Baron's memo follows:
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