Right-wing Boston talk radio host Jay Severin was suspended yesterday after calling Mexicans "criminaliens," "primitives," "leeches," and "women with mustaches and VD." Wait, what?

[A bake sale is held outside the Massachusetts Statehouse today, in reaction to the news that Boston's public transportation system, the T, is $8 billion in debt; image via AP]

Barney Frank is now the recipient of two lengthy, glowing magazine profiles—though each in magazines aimed only at his constituents. One is Moe Tkacik's Boston Magazine piece, and the other is in The Advocate, which also gives Frank the cover. Unless you are a right-wing dick convinced that black people buying houses is what caused the economic meltdown, you will only love Barney Frank all the more more upon reading each.

Forget cover girl Tina Fey and her scary scar story. The most interesting tale in this month's Vanity Fair is that of Christian Gerhartsreiter aka Christopher Chichester aka Christopher Crowe aka Clark Rockefeller. He's the mystery fellow who was arrested this summer after kidnapping his daughter, Snooks, whom he lost custody of during his messy divorce. Though he's a nefarious conman, he's also a brilliant one, with a fascinating story, as detailed by VF's Mark Seal. And we're kind of obsessed with it. It's a crazy, crazy thing.

Shock! Barack Obama's Aunt Zeituni, described lovingly in his memoir Dreams From My Father, lives in Boston "in modest circumstances," according to the Times of London. Zeituni Onyango lives in public housing in South Boston, and tells the Times she is praying for Obama. She's even donated money to his campaign! It's not clear whether the Obama campaign or the candidate know she's in Boston, though her unwillingness to speak to reporters until after the 4th suggests that someone knows, right? Onyango is Obama's father's half-sister. The Times also tracked Obama's mysterious "Uncle Omar" to Boston, where used to run a convenience store. Then he was evicted and now they don't seem to know where he is. Obama's many, many relatives on his father's side are of great interest to the British press, for some reason. Back in August, the Telegraph reported that Italian Vanity Fair found Obama's half-brother living in obscurity in Kenya. Why does the British press care so much? What does it matter? It is kind of sad, yes, that many of Barack Obama's distant relatives live in poverty. This is perhaps why he is such a wealth-redistributing socialist? Once Obama is elected, of course, he will seize Joe the Plumber's mansion and use it to house his many, many illegal immigrant relatives.

Last year, the city of Boston, which has not suffered a terrorist attack since the Revolutionary War, where the terrorists were the good guys, shut down in a panic after Time Warner's cartoon channel paid two stoners to place lite-brites around town. Bomb squads were called in to remove the cartoon character advertisements, train stations shut down, and traffic over the Charles River was halted. Boston, unembarrassed at causing a national panic over advertisements that had been in place for weeks in dozens of smarter cities without incident, promptly blew up a suspicious traffic counter installed by the DOT. And over the weekend, Boston's Logan Airport was shut down for 17 hours after a poodle escaped. Choochy the poodle got out of her kennel as she was being unloaded after a Saturday night flight. "About 15 state police, firefighters, operations personnel and even electricians chased Choochy late into the night," delaying "at least eight flights." They finally caught Choochy, laying on the tarmac, at 1 p.m. on Sunday, when Choochy got tired. Good work, Boston. Image: (c) Jana Kohl and Robert Sebree, www.ararebreedoflove.com, used with permission from (c) holder.

Uh oh, the Madonna divorce may be getting ugly and, God bless us all, public. While muscling her way through her Sticky & Sweet show in Boston last night, the Queen of Pop made reference to the "emotionally retarded" when introducing a song about her soon-to-be-ex-husband, film director Guy Ritchie. Which, um, zing? She also opened the show with her tune "Human Nature," which is about not being sorry about things and features the oft repeated lyric "I'm not sorry." Though, she's been hinting at this for a week now. You may remember that last week ol' Madge was in New York, and said cryptically at her concert: "In exactly 29 moves, the Queen will dump the King." She had 29 tour dates left at that point, and I guess she was hoping to keep the gargantuanly expensive divorce (like lots of millions of dollars, or about six pounds) under wraps until her tour ended. But, I guess she was just too giddy about the exciting, shitty news so she made sly and self-important references to it in beloved old Boston and I guess we'll eat it up. A messy public divorce would be just the right thing to take Maddy from her too-comfortable role as fitness-crazed London mommy to bitter, song-spewing, 50-year-old chick from Detroit with scores to settle. Madonna's been way too nice for the past few years. Let's hope that her Beantown outburst means that the bitch is back. [Daily Mail]

Do you ever wonder how to dress for the coming clima(c)tic apocalypse? Fear not. This week, WSJ fashion reporter Teri Agins answered urgent questions from fashion-minded readers. When one fretting citizen wrote in wondering what Agins thought "of the 'rule' on not wearing white after Labor Day," she thoughtfully responded:

I am coming to you live from a bus bound for Boston, Taxachussetts. It is staffed by non-menacing robots and cost only 18 space credits. Hopefully my head will stay firmly attached to my neck.

Clark Rockefeller-the mystery man with no driver's license, social security number, or tax history, who kidnapped his daughter in Boston last week-has been caught, the Post is reporting. "Fugitive Clark Rockefeller was taken into police custody in Baltimore today. His kidnapped daughter is safe and sound and in police hands, law enforcement sources said. Details of his capture were not immediately clear."

Hello from cloudy Boston. I'll be reporting live from the hub of the universe all week, as I attend the first annual Dog Sit For Your Parents While They're in Vancouver Convention. Blind items are, of course, universal so I will still be posting them for your enjoyment. After the jump we've got one of Crazy Days and Nights' long tone poems about tweens, and an item that's probably some British lady you've never heard of. But we'll soldier on anyway. Even though I seem to have caught a cold. I doubt drinking for 12 hours in the pouring rain on Saturday had anything to do with that. (If it does, I blame on John Ehlers.) Go Celtics!

As I've long feared, a zombie menace will soon stalk my beloved home city of Boston. Not the snarling, bloodied kind you see in movies, thankfully. Rather it will be a snarling, boozy Judy Garland (famed singer/actress/complete basket case) zombie. Long dead from the drugs and the drink and the sadness, Garland (who begat ol' herpes McGee, Liza Minnelli) will be featured "live in concert" with the Boston Pops this summer. The press release for "Judy Garland In Concert" promises "Judy herself returning to the stage for the first time in 40 years." Shiver! What could they possibly mean?

Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. He is, more or less, dying. So we can rely on our own New York Post to relay that fact as efficiently as possible. They do, of course, call him a "brave icon," but there's really not a lot of love lost between the rabidly conservative Post and the grand old liberal Kennedy. Boston's tabloid, the Herald, goes with a show of support. The poor Daily News splits the difference.

Actor and monologuist Mike Daisey, who has been a rising star in the past few years, has a new show at Joe's Pub called How Theatre Failed America. It failed? Really? It's over?? Well, not exactly. Daisey is really saying that it is failing, that the whole medium is becoming very corporate, increasingly in that last bastion of artistry, regional theatre. There are no more acting companies! Nowadays, New York actors are just shipped in for single runs, then hurry back to the city. For example, the American Repertory Theatre in Harvard Square (that's, um, in Cambridge. Which is, um, across the Charles river from Boston), dissolved most of its famous company in the early aughts. And (in my opinion) has suffered a downfall in quality since. (Carry the company torch, Steppenwolf!) Daisey, as it would happen, recently had a very negative experience at the ART. Not one that necessarily dealt with corporate control of theatre, but rather with lovable old Christian nuts.

Lawmakers in Boston just banned bottle service, the preferred method by which douchebags imbibe their shitty vodka. Have we been wrong about Boston this whole time? Wait, Happy Hour is illegal there too. So no, we were never wrong. Phew! [Daily Swarm]

[Actress Kate Hudson filming "Bride Wars" in my glorious hometown of Boston, Mass yesterday; image via INF]

Magnetic Fields cellist Sam Davol, whose most famous song is The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side, has sold his downtown Manhattan loft and moved to Boston, where he and his wife bought a 2,200 square foot apartment for $1 million. [NYT]

The saddest part of the on-going WGA strike just might be that it'll prevent Catholic priest David Ajemian from successfully stalking Conan O'Brien. The priest, 46, was arrested last week after sending O'Brien weird letters, harassing his parents and finally showing up at Late Night's studio. "I want a public confession before I ever consider giving you absolution—or a spot on your couch," Ajemain wrote in one of his stalky letters. The Boston Globe points out that Ajemain went to Harvard, just like Conan, so maybe they totally know each other because how big could Harvard be? The Church has placed Ajemain "on leave." We are not sure what being "on leave" from being a Priest involves but maybe now he's allowed to take "spots" on people's couches. [Boston.com, TSG]

Frank Gehry, whose daring and whimsical sheet-metal buildings all basically look the same, is being sued by MIT for flaws in his goofy $300-million design for their Stata Center. The center looks, in Gehry's words, "looks like a party of drunken robots," and MIT is apparently surprised that it might not have very good drainage or other things found on non-$300 million buildings that nonetheless have stood up quite well for some time without "masonry creaking" or what have you. Why did everything go wrong? Because fancy architecture is basically like extortion!

There's long been a dearth of good movies set in (and especially filmed in) poor Boston (a.k.a. "Philly On the Charles"). Except The Departed and Mystic River but both of those were by dudes from real places (New York and California, specifically). So Slate's Patrick Radden Keefe is kinda excited about this new movie from Ben "Almost From Boston" Affleck, We Own the Gone Baby Gangster Clayton. Marky Mark and Russell Crowe are in it probably? But it was filmed in the real-life Boston with real-life Bostonians! Except the Bostonians were a little too "real life" and they make Boston look bad.