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TONGUE-TIED
Carr puts Menino’s mumbles on the Web
BY DEIRDRE FULTON
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Howie Carr is lucky he pissed off Mayor Thomas Menino years ago. Ever since Carr originally dubbed the occasionally unintelligible Hyde Park native "Mumbles" — way back when Menino was acting mayor of Boston — relations between the two have "been on the frosty side," Carr wrote in an e-mail interview this week. But if they weren’t already, things would definitely be icy now. Carr, who earned — and maintains — his provocative reputation by taking Boston’s politicians to task, usually uses his radio talk show (3 to 7 p.m. weekdays on WRKO 680 AM) or his Boston Herald column as the platforms for criticism and condemnation. But earlier this month, he turned to the Internet, where he’s taking full-blown jabs at Menino’s fumbling and mispronunciation of words like "homeless," "homelessness," "prostate," and "barn." A Boston Globe report started it all. After reading that Menino’s campaign committee — in an attempt to cut jokesters off at the pass — had purchased Web-site domain names such as meninomumbles.com and mumblesmenino.org, Carr "felt slighted that I hadn’t received proper credit for coming up with the moniker, ‘Mumbles,’ and decided to rectify the oversight." He also ridiculed the notion that the campaign could grab every mumbling permutation — they overlooked www.mumblesmeninosucks2005.com, for example. They also forgot what is now Carr’s site: mumblesmenino.us. Carr has loaded the site with parody and real-life sound clips; his personal favorites are "[a]nything with ‘knuckleheads’ in it," and Menino’s homelessness mix-ups. The clips can make Menino sound like, well, a knucklehead. Menino’s camp claims not to have seen the site, and offered no comment. But perhaps they should be pleased that Carr thinks only Menino, alone among the city’s mayoral contenders, is worthy of such treatment. Asked if he’ll do some equal-opportunity pranking, perhaps of Menino opponent Maura Hennigan, Carr responds: "No plans to do a Maura site. No material, and no discernible interest in cyberspace as far as I can measure."
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