Ten good minutes

It remains half a mystery to me why Boston's Howie Carr has not received the sort of national prominence once accorded Chicago's Mike Royko. Carr is both funnier and a better reporter than Royko ever was--and all due respect, as Royko's column, which inexplicably (and wonderfully) ran in the Saturday Phoenix Gazette of my youth, was something of a revelation. I remember when Jane Pauley was basically shoved out at The Today Show in favor of the fetching blonde, Deborah Norville, and while everyone else was pissing and moaning about Norville's qualifications, only Royko was writing, Christ, how smart do you have to be to read the news and talk to people?, and at least she's something to look at, and how many of us look half as good in the morning?, and couldn't read the news in a bikini?

I don't have the article at hand, but for years I kept it tucked into my English reader, and I brought it out every semester to read to my freshman comp students, as a means of preaching the values of contrarian thinking and creativity.

Anyway, back to Carr. I write his lack of prominence is "half a mystery" because his writing tends to be Hub-centered; an analogous parochialism kept maybe the best newspaper columnist of the last fifty years, Murray Kempton, from achieving fame due his worth. Columns of Carr's like this reveal a knowledge of Bay State politics that is encyclopedic almost ward to ward.

I'm half a country removed from the inner workings of Southie and Jamaica Plain. No matter: seeing a new Carr column appear is tantamount to saying, "I'm really going to enjoy the next ten minutes of my life." Sample this, which almost had me falling out of my chair:

What if they had a primary election and nobody came?

That’s the way Sept. 19 is shaping up here. It’s only six weeks from Tuesday, and if you had to pick the next governor right now the favorite is . . . Deval Patrick.

Amazing. His bumper stickers say “No Ordinary Leader.” Considering the type of people who have them on their cars, they should say “Take Me to Your Leader.”