AT LARGE Fake News Wednesday: Whitey Bulger Demands His Depends, Metamucil Back

BOSTON (CAP) - Feared legendary mobster James "Whitey" Bulger seemed to have lost none of his swagger or arrogance in his first court appearance after 16 years in hiding, brazenly asking the judge to "return my Depends and my Metamucil, gosh darn-nabbit!"

"Do you want me to wet myself right here on the bench, for cryin' out loud?" he added, then coughing up and apparently swallowing a large wad of phlegm. "And you better darn well get me my Metamucil. You don't wanna see me when I'm not regular."

He then glared icily at the prosecutor in what could have been a soulless look of pure evil, or gas.

FBI agents captured the 81-year-old Bulger in Santa Monica, Calif., after following him home from the Bay Cities Deli, where the mobster had allegedly eaten a corned beef sandwich, lean, on marble rye with a pickle spear and a club soda, followed by some lime jello.

"He was driving very suspiciously," said FBI Special Agent Josh Harwood, who noted that he was going about 10 miles per hour below the speed limit, cut off two other drivers and then shook his fist at them like it was their fault, and took an extremely roundabout way to get to his home, apparently trying to avoid having to make left turns.

"And his blinker was on the entire time," noted Harwood.

FBI lured Bulger out of his apartment by sending two young boys onto the front lawn of his apartment complex, ostensibly to retrieve a baseball that had rolled there.

"Get offa my lawn, you darn kids!" witnesses quoted Bulger as yelling at the boys. "Or I'll give ya something to complain about, gosh-a darn it!"

"That's when we slapped the cuffs on him," explained Harwood.

Bulger did not resist, according to authorities, although he did convince agents "make a pit stop" at a Wilshire Boulevard 7-Eleven on the way to FBI headquarters, where he spent approximately 45 minutes in the rest room generating various bodily noises as agents stood awkwardly outside the door, checking their watches.

"And we couldn't go in there for about two hours afterwards," said store owner Praveen Nawwaf, waving his hand in front of his nose as if to indicate a strong odor. "It was very unpleasant," he noted, adding however that it's something he's gotten used to with the up-tick in senior citizens coming in to buy cat food since social security ran out.

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

Whitey, is that you?

Can someone tell me how Massachusetts' favorite most-wanted fugitive Whitey Bulger manages to travel all over the world without anyone batting an eye? Now he's in Canada, supposedly. If you or I tried to get into Canada, we'd probably wind up in a holding tank for having fruit in the car.

You would think somebody would have spotted Bulger and turned him in by now. I know I look for him whenever I'm traveling -- usually what I do is when I see an elderly man in sunglasses or a trenchcoat, I take his picture immediately. If the guy doesn't smash my camera and hit me in the side of the head with a crowbar, I figure it wasn't Whitey.

Anyway, I propose that it's time we just stop looking for the guy and redirect those efforts to looking for terrorists and people who are liable to do some actual damage. How many problems is an 80-year-old mobster actually going to cause? And if he really is living in Canada, that's punishment enough.

Is it me, or are the criminals getting better looking?

A sure sign of a suffering economy: more attractive criminals.

Used to be you’d see those faces staring out at you from the signs in the post office and you could see why they’d turned to a life of crime. With their crusty, wizened visages, what else were these people going to go into? You could see them walking into a career councilor and being immediately steered toward larceny.

But lately — as evidenced by the Quincy (Mass.) Patriot Ledger’s excellent “Mass Most Wanted” series — more and more of them are looking young, happy and well-adjusted. Did these people really need to break the law? It looks like they’d do fine as yoga instructors or baristas.

But with those jobs scarce these days, I guess they’re going in to pickpocketing and identity theft, not to mention bank robbing. At least some of them are turning themselves in after turning up in the Patriot Ledger — and after they get out of the can, they can always try modeling.

And to think, people are starving in Japan

Times are still tough for many, but you know what the economists say: You can tell the recession is lifting when people start throwing food at each other again. Well, have I got some good news for you!

You read right here about the vicious girl-on-girl bagel attack in Cohasset, Mass. All had hoped that was an isolated incident, but no such luck: Earlier this week we also saw a dispute among two teens in Cambridge that resulted in a duck sauce debacle.

When police arrived, they saw the victim “covered in sauce” and the living room “disheveled” and “covered with food.”

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, during Lexington’s Festival Night — an annual event that welcomes Santa to Lexington Center — a police officer was attacked by a man wielding a glazed donut. In that case the perp was charged with disorderly conduct, assault on a police officer and, presumably, extreme irony.