Whitey, you’re yesterday’s news

I’m tired of his partner in crime, Steve “The Rifleman’’ Flemmi. (You can’t make up these names.) I’m tired of the ghastly details of Bulger’s murderous sprees. What I’m really tired of is the “Where’s Waldo’’ obsession over where the scumbag is.

Is Whitey sweeping out stalls at a racetrack in the Black Sea port of Constanta? Is he a hunter-gatherer in a sarong in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia with a wife and a bunch of children?

Is Whitey driving a bus in Lyon? Nah, he’ll be 80 in September and we know how badly the ancients have been driving these days. So is he in a coma in Cork? Or has he met his maker in a village outside Lima?

Who cares? James “Whitey’’ Bulger, the vicious criminal who did his dirty work out of South Boston for years, has nothing to do with the Boston of 2009. A sizable chunk of this city has either never heard of the guy or is vaguely aware of him as a model for Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Departed.’’ Meanwhile, the audience for his story has been shrinking. Those hooked on it, like the story itself, are growing long in the tooth.

Ever so briefly, Bulger is alleged to have killed 19 people and did pretty much every horrible thing you can do over the course of a 40-year career in badness. His heyday was the decade from the late 1970s to the late 1980s.

We are nearing the end of what appears to be the final wrongful death lawsuit filed against the federal government by relatives of two people allegedly killed by Bulger and a third possibly killed by him. This is an important trial about FBI corruption, and the plaintiffs seek to hold the feds accountable for their unspeakable behavior.

They charge that the FBI bears responsibility for the deaths because the feds, primarily through the efforts of a corrupt agent in the Boston office named John Connolly, protected Bulger and Flemmi, both of whom were FBI informants, as they pursued their murderous schemes. It was Connolly who warned Bulger in 1995 that he was about to be arrested, allowing him to fly the coop. (Connolly is doing hard time for a long time.)

The only reason we are still reading and watching and listening about Bulger is because the FBI continues to fight this case, as it has other wrongful death lawsuits. Had it not taken this position, Bulger would be a distant memory for most of us. And the feds seem doomed to lose this case. While federal Judge William Young will not issue his final ruling on the case until the end of September, he appeared ready two days ago to award close to $2 million to the plaintiffs. “I’m prepared to find there’s a massive and widespread coverup going on here,’’ he said from the bench.

This trial has brought up the gamy gang history in Boston like the monster Rodan rising from Tokyo Bay. We are reintroduced to the nasty Winter Hill Gang, which Bulger ended up running. There’s more, much more. Local news organizations have closely followed the proceedings, as they should. By and large, they have not hyped the Bulger story, but stayed close to what transpired at the trial.

That said, the coverage of this tawdry old news doesn’t make the stuff any less tiresome. “I’m tired of Whitey, too,’’ says Dick Lehr, coauthor of the definitive “Black Mass: The Irish Mob, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal’’ and a former colleague at this paper. “This is a bad rerun of an old story. There is no new information. I put this in the government’s lap. The FBI should have settled this up and made amends. This is the cleanup of that mess.’’

So Whitey, wherever you are: You are now more than a murderer. You’re a bore.

The Observer wrote a column a few weeks ago about how BlackBerrys ruin our lives. It’s worse than I thought. I talked to a lawyer friend after it was published who said if he didn’t answer a BlackBerry message at 11 p.m., he would be considered “a non-responsive lawyer’’ and receive a black mark on his record.

In that column, I investigated and rejected BlackBerrys at the big Verizon store in downtown Boston. The plot has since thickened. A nice public relations lady working on the Verizon account named Ariane Doud e-mailed me with a fiendish offer: She would loan me an upgrade from my vanilla phone to a device halfway toward its big bad boy, the BlackBerry Storm.

I accepted and soon received in the mail a Verizon LG enV3, a nifty-looking device with a name out of NASA. I liked the big numbers on it for dialing, but I couldn’t find any of the other applications on it. My wife then informed me that it opens. Who knew? There I found a big screen with a menu that alerted me to its many capabilities: music, voice mail, mobile e-mail, videos, text messaging, GPS, Web browser, bilingual capability (English and Spanish) - it goes on.

With help from another nice woman at the public relations agency, I sort of mastered a fair number of apps. But I soon realized the only one that interested me was the Verizon version of GPS, available at $2.99 a 24-hour pop. After the novelty wore off, I confess I never used the phone and am returning it as instructed.

This was a wonderful experience for a number of reasons. First, I resisted temptation. Second, it confirmed that my interest in gadgets remains flat-lined. Third, I learned you have to open the thing to find the apps. That’s one small victory for Sam, one giant leap for Samkind.

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.