Bruins and Whitey and ohmygod, My Head Hurts

We’re on news overload here. Sal DiMasi got convicted. The Bruins won the Stanley Cup. And then yesterday, WHITEY WHITEY WHITEY. God only knows what’s going to happen tomorrow: will James Michael Curley rise from his grave? The T run on time? The missing Isabella Stewart Gardner paintings show up? Mitt Romney find something other than a $100 bill in his wallet?

I’m not sure there was a better summing up of the wild last week we’ve had than this video of some Southie guys crashing a TV interview of Whitey Bulger’s landlord in Santa Monica. About 30 seconds into the tape, a heavily accented voice chirps in, “Did he seem excited when Boston sports teams won? Especially the Bruins?” Just to prove it was from Southie, the voice repeated the question and provided his own sarcasm inflected answer, “Was he excited last week when the Bruins won? I bet he was.”

And if you’re looking for even more worlds to collide here, it turns out that the voice belonged to the brother of Billy Baker, a former contributor to this magazine who’s currently a reporter at the Boston Globe covering, of course, reaction to Whitey Bulger being caught.

N.B. In all this week’s Southie-palooza, if you’re looking for a good Southie story that’s not explicitly about Whitey but all about Southie culture, check out a piece Baker did for us two years ago called, “A Masshole in Full,” about neighborhood folk hero Robbie Concannon. Consider it your comic relief.