Take on the WFAN jumper

A crisis may have been averted but ended tragically when a Montvale, NJ man jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge during the evening rush-hour.    The unidentified man was apparently upset by the state of his backyard and the amount of work he needed to do to his old house, his distrust of the government but mostly his disdain for an afternoon talk-show host, all of which came out when he called the radio station WFAN as he was threatening to jump.  The man called the radio station demanding to speak with Mike Francesa, the popular WFAN midday host and Marconi award winner as he was standing on a ledge off the side of the bridge channeling a similar situation when a man was talked off the bridge by former WXRK morning show host Howard Stern two decades ag.  Sadly, unlike that situation, in this case the radio host was not able to talk down the would-be-jumper and in actuality seemed to only exasperate the situation

The jumper almost didn't get on the air when he first called into the station because of busy signals but  when he finally did get through, he was initially rebuffed by the call-screener who told him that Mr. Francesa was discussing horse-racing at this point and that it being a "Football Friday", they would not have time to discuss ad-hoc topics.   The man called back and was finally patched through at about 5:25pm EST, having to wait through the popular "20-20 sports" segment by popular sports anchor John Minko.   Unlike in the situation with Mr. Stern, the situation with Mr. Francesa was testy from the beginning and unlike the Stern situation actually ended with the death of the caller..

TOR has reached out to WFAN and Mr. Francesa both of whom declined comment citing an on-going  police invastigation

TOR has been able to get a copy of the transcript of the event thanks to @RNs_Funhouse a member of the anti-Mongo nation popularized on twitter and other social media.  As many readers know, WFAN does NOT make tapes of events on the air with Mr. Francesa public.

 

Francesa:  Kurt** in Montvale,

Caller:   First Time, Long Time

Francesa:  Hey Kurt, whats up?

Caller:   Mike, my house is a mess, my backyard hasn't been done in months and...

Francesa:  what does this have to do with the 5^th race in Saratoga?

Caller:   see, I just can't take it anymore, I'm standing on the GWB and want to end it

Fancesa:  Monz, get me Adrienne Watson on the line

Caller: see my yard is just a mess and I hate my job and

Francesa:  OK listen, school's out early today apparently

Caller: It's just so hard to be living in this life

Francesa:  Wait a second, so you're telling me that you're gonna jump off the George Washington Bridge because of your yard?

Caller:  yeah, well you always said that you're there for your fans and you'd help out however you can

Francesa :  I never said that

Caller:  you did, when we met back in 2000 at the Garden, we spoke about Marcus Camby and I told you about our

Francesa:  I have no idea what you're talking about it.

Caller:  Mike, see I'm a big fan but I have to say that sometimes there are other things that bother me

Francesa : Go ahead

Caller:  see you said that there was no way that Chapman and Miller was gonna get traded when I called last month

Francesa:  I never said that

Caller:  see that's it exactly, you make it sound like you didn't say it but you actually did say it

Francesa:  what I said was that Miller and Chapman were likely to get traded

Caller:  No, you said the opposite

Francesa:  waitasecond, waitasecond, you're telling me that I said that Chapman was not gonna get traded, why would anybody who had half a brain say that?

Caller:  I have audio

Francea: listen, you didn't hear that from me, maybe it was another one of the clowns on this station, go bother them with this nonsense

Caller:  But, Mike, it's just that you always say you didn't say that when…

Francesa:  Get off my phone, bye

Caller: aaggggjghhh     splash

Dead air

Francesa :  Ira from Staten Island, howayou?

Ira:  Listen Mike, that guy sounded kinda disturbed

Francesa:  listen, it's still summer time, the kids are out of school, what do you want to say about your Jets

Ira:  I think they are going to keep four QB's

  

**name of caller changed**

Take on the Weiner

There are a few days per year when I must get to the newsstand and one of those days was today when I just knew the NY Post would be in all its glory and they didn't disappoint. Sometimes the headline just writes itself and no headline makes for better writing than when Anthony "show me your" Weiner is involved. Yesterday they went with Pop Goes the Weiner which was pretty good but they outdid themselves with the Huma cuts off Weiner

Can't wait to see what tomorrow brings

Take on the cigarette butt litterer

Nothing annoys me more than a guy smoking a butt and throwing it into the street as if our community is his ashtray. I don't get how this is still socially acceptable in 2016, we wouldn't accept people throwing their lunch wrapper or junk mail onto the street corner but somehow this one is ok. It's as if we have decided as a people that smokers should get special benefits like allowing them to litter while at the same time giving everybody around them cancer

I wish they made the cigarette more potent so it would kill these littering pond scum more quickly.

Take on the medical records

When Donald Trump implores Hillary to release her detailed medical reports, we can't avoid giggling. This is the same guy who refuses to release his tax records, something every major candidate has done for four decades and something he killed Romney for not doing just once cycle ago. I'm not saying a bill of health wouldn't be somewhat valuable, but when it comes from somebody who has so far released a badly written letter from a deceased doctor written in a total Trump voice, it is laughable but then again maybe laughing is what we should be doing

Take on the iPhone battery

Every iPhone goes trough that period when it goes from a well oiled machine to a basic brick. It happens both gradually and suddenly as the battery slowly starts to deteriorate and one day it just sucks. This happened to me this week, basically I can barely make it through my hour bus ride commute on one charge, by the time I get to work the phone is sputtering and of course as with any iPhone, there is nothing you can do about it.
Why is he most frustrating is how quickly the battery leek drops. One minute it's 68% then it is 32% and then it just turns into a black screen

Take on BudLight Like a Rita

I always think that companies should stick with things that are part of their core competency and nothing is more clear than these Bud Light Lime-A-Rita things. I can't tell you how awful a Bud Light is, but somehow a Bud Light that is also a margarita might be worse. Somebody should slay the Clydesdales because the entire dream is dead

Take on the NYS license plate

I've hated the New York Sate license plate for years finding the puke yellow to be a terrible match with most car colors but I finally realized why I really hate it. I hate it because it is almost the exact match color of the NYC Taxi but not exactly. When you see a cab with that license plate the fact that the two colors are close but not the same is painful to my eyes. I'm not one who cares about color matching generally but this is one I cannot let go any longer, it is that offensive

Take on the @nytpolitics account

Over the last 24 hours, I can count 16 tweets by the @nytpolitics account and probably another 10 from their standard @nytimes account hyping some article about Cher supporting Hillary Clinton. Not only is this not interesting, it's not really relevant. Who cares why Cher thinks about politics, who cares what any celebrity thinks? But the bigger thing is that if this was US Weekly then maybe this would matter but this is the Gray Lady, not some tabloid

I have long wondered what the obsession is to find out who Kim Kardashian or Ellen or Kanye will vote for but in Cher's case it's even more odd because she isn't a big star anymore.

Literally nobody's vote will be impacted by what Cher thinks and nobody will likely read the article, so get it off my Twitter feed and start reporting on something interesting

Take on Ryan Lochte's endorsements

Ryan Lochte needs a new marketing team because the guys doing it now are not doing him any favors. The guy is losing sponsorships for speedos when those companies should be throwing their panties at hm.

Coming off of an Olympics where he virtually did nothing all that memorable other than beat the crap of a bathroom door, would seem like a disaster but any publicist worth their salt should exploit the hell out of this.

He needs one interview with Ellen or Robin Roberts and then he needs to channel it all up and make a fortune off his image, it will never be more marketable than it is right now

If I were his team, I'd be doubling down and marketing his juvenile frat boy drunken behavior everywhere. He'd be on SNL this week beating down bathroom doors with Michael Phelps stuck inside of them, like a fratboy superhero

I'd have commercials set up with GoDaddy with him diving into an empty pool filed with beer cans.

I'd have him set up with 5 hour Energy, going to raves in his speedos.

This would be worth millions

Take on Papa Bear

Bill O'Reilly is the highest rated FOXNews personality and except for the fact he sucks, he's great. I mean, he's a total moron but it is probably mostly show (Hannity is likely actually a women's underwear wearing Trumpette under his snappy crappy suits ). What gets me is when these guys give you crap like today's tweet which asked how this could be a terrible country who represses minorities if we win a a ton of gold medals

Obviously there is no answer to O'Reilly's rhetorical question other than to agree with his well thought out commentary because nothing makes you appreciate your country more than winning a gold medal in the decathlon

Take on the one problem with the Olympics

Saying there is one thing that you can't stand about the Olympics is kind of odd between the green pool, corruption, ridiculous unneeded Olympic stadiums, shit filled rowing events, doping, cheating, frat boy behavior and lame family stories there are thousands of things to choose from. But this is what we do and why you pay us the big bucks to do it.
I can't stand that NBC doesn't tell you what event we are watching. Between the Olympic Rings below the peacock, the WR or OR in the other corner and the time in the bottom, why can't they find a place to tell you if the race we are watching is the finals, the semi finals or some heat, that doesn't seem that difficult. Maybe it is their way to make you listen to the broadcast but I find it so annoying that sometimes you look up and cannot tell what the heck you are watching and whether it is an important race or a random heat

You got four years to get this right

Take on the new Trump

With the firing of his second campaign manager, Donald J Trump seems to have taken a new tact, although I can't imagine it won't really stick
The two most noticeable differences are the rhetoric on the stump and the sophomoric name calling on Twitter. The tweets are still happening, mind you, but it seems to have been either toned down or getting drowned out by the other tweets generating from the @realdonaldjtrump account.
By what is most noticeable is that on the stump he has been a little less edgy and a lot more lame and even he is embarrassed by it as you can tell by the way he's been wearing his Make America Great Again hat which he has pulled so far over his eyes that you can't see those nasty rat like things at all anymore

Jesus, let's hope he goes back off the rails soon because a tame Trump is a lame Trump

Take on the fertility clinic

I thought trying to buy an at-home sperm tester at the local CVS made for an uncomfortable situation but it was nothing than having to walk into a fertility lab.

I decided to get my post vasectomy check in the city as getting an appointment in New Jersey involved having to take a half a day off of work. I find a fertility clinic who runs the test for $75, set up an appointment for lunch time and I'm off. My first issue was that when I start to walk down to the place, I find out it down to a place which wound up being basically in the East River, so by the time I get to 1st avenue and 30th street, I'm a sweaty mess. I walk in and all of a sudden, it's all a bit weird. The people working there were as professional as can be expected but honestly when you walk into a place and they hand you a cup to jizz into, it is bound to be a bit awkward. After filling out some paperwork and handing over $75, they bring me to a special room with a leather chair, a stack of playboys, a DVD player and some Vaseline and tell me to ring the bell when I'm done. I'm in a shirt and tie, in the middle of the day and all of a sudden I think that I may not actually be able to perform even if it's a solo act.

I turn on the DVD, leaf through a couple of magazines and before I realize it, I find myself beating off in a dark room in the second floor of a non-descript townhouse in Manhattan .
I have to say that this wasn't exactly where I thought I'd be when I was thinking about my future as a twenty year old.

But I'm a professional and once I got into it a bit I was able to get myself ready and finished. I wash my hands, grab a napkin, seal the cup thing and I'm off

I guess this was a better way to spend my lunch hour than grabbing a $5 footlong from Subway

Take on Trump's psychological deflection syndrome

The further along we go the more apparent it is that Trump does this textbook Psychological Deflection.  I studied psychology in college and this is an example when a person projects their own inadequacies or issues upon somebody else to deflect it from them to attribute those qualities upon somebody else 

He says that Hillary gets tired and needs to go back home to sleep in her bed when he himself goes back to Trump Tower every night

he implies that Hillary's health is an issue but the letter he released seems forged

he makes a huge thing about veterans yet gets caught up in the Kahn debacle 

he calls Cruz- Lyin' Ted yet he is caught doing the same countless times 

he speaks about the Russians having access to Hillary's server yet he has deeper ties than anybody and implored them to do it 

he called out Romney for not releasing his taxes, yet he doesn't do it himself 

he knocks McCain for being captured when he didn't even go to war

he speaks about a dishonest press yet he hires Roger Ailes and, by the way, his son in law owns a newspaper

he speaks about trade packs losing American manufacturing jobs yet he sends out a ton of his Trump branded products outside

he speaks about corruption in Washington but readily admits that he has given millions to campaigns for access and favors

he speaks about immigrants as if they are a cancer to society yet he is married to one who, apparently, came here under questionable circumstances 

he knocks Clinton on infidelity yet has had three wives one of which he apparently cheated on

he speaks glowingly about his children yet  there is the one from his second marriage who he completely forgets 

it's like kid who does something wrong but just can't avoid telling his parents that he did.  He just invites the scrutiny 

Sent from my iPhone

Take on Ryan Lochte and the other three swimmers

when the reports about Ryan Lochte and a couple of his swimming buddies getting robbed at gun-point in Rio started coming up two days ago, I sent an email to two friends.

from:  TOR to Christopher J XXXXX, Cathy XX

I bet that Ryan Lochte was at at one of those fine Brazilian establishment frequented by our friend last night when he got "held up at gunpoint"

they dismissed it as TMZ fodder, but I knew better.   There is no way that a 30 year old Olympic champ who dyes his hair and has a reputation of partying was going to check out a Fine Art Exhibit on a Saturday Night at 3AM.   He may have been going to check out art, it just was more of the performance art type..

today it comes out that RIO police have held their passports and are continuing the questioning of them.    I know that he looked flat coming out of that 200M individual medley finishing in 5th, and now you know why

Take on Roger Ailes

You can't kill a cockroach!!

Roger Ailes, one of the most despicable human beings to have ever walked down sixth avenue in NYC (and that is saying a lot) just can't be killed. He sexually harasses women for two decades at FoxNews gets ousted, along with the ultimate golden parachute, and within a couple of weeks he's on Trump's campaign staff. If there was ever a man who could turn this campaign around, it is Roger Ailes who knows more about media, coverage, spin and greasing the right wheels than anybody and we should all be afraid. Right now the official role is only as a debate coach, but let's not bury our heads in the sand, Roger Ailes plays to win and he will be the one guy who might actually turn this thing around...that is until he gave Ivanka's ass

Take on the crazies

The crazies are convinced that Obama is a secret Muslim and hates America yet their choice has direct ties to Russia including Ivanka vacationing with Putin's girlfriend, Manafort doused with Russian underground money, Trump's reluctance to releasing his taxes which people are (seriously) speculating is because of ties to Russia and of course Trump's open public courtship with Putin    Add to that his battle with Kahn, his insult of McCain and the fact he makes all his crappy suits in China    There is nobody who seems to have less regard for America than Donald J Trump, yet OHannibeck and company let him skate.  

 

I can't imagine the outrage if this was the other way around

 

Sent from my iPhone

Take on the SpermCheck home test

I realized that six weeks have past since I went under the knife which was the amount of time my doctor said I needed to come back to make sure the pipes were clean. Apparently, even after a they cut the supply line, there is a chance a couple of the suckers stay alive waiting to cause major trauma upon an unsuspecting 40 year old father of three, so they want you to come back in and ejaculate into a cup so they can check. Not wanting to go back to a doctor's office for this (I'm not good under pressure) I searched the interweb for something I could do a bit more discreetly and low and behold there is an over the counter option. It's like the equivalent of an over the counter pregnancy test but for dudes. The issue is that after I got home from CVS, the one they sell is not the vasectomy version but the fertility version which just tells a dude whether he has Michael Phelps swimmers (two stripes) or if he has that weird Ukrainian dude who looked like he puked in the pool (one stripe). The issue is that it only tells you how strong the athletes are not whether they pool has been cleared because a two year old dropped a deuce in the pool.

There is nothing like having to return a SpermCheck box at your local CVS when you don't have a receipt. They ask you a hundred questions, call over a manager and make them give you your drivers license number to boot. Glad to know the entire town now thinks my boys can't swim

Take on IK Enemkpali

A year ago a little know Defensive End basically ended Geno Smith's season by punching him in the jaw and opening the door for Ryan Fitzpatrick. Today it all came full circle when he suffered what was described as a "major" knee injury and basically ended his season. I'm sure Geno's got a nice little smile on his face today. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy than IK. I'm sure Geno's got a little smile going and nobody can blame him

Take on the cheap Chinese takeout

I have a friend who is convinced that all the cheap Chinese restaurants are set up to spy on Americans under the guise of cheap food.  I'm talking about those places where they have the 12x12 pictures on he walk illuminated by fluorescent light.  Think about it, it's a perfect front, every town in America has one, so they never look out of place yet there are never any people who actually eat there.  They also almost always have some 9 year old kid at the place which is undoubtedly there version of The Americans

The same guy also told me that he is preparing for the apocalypse and that when it does, he plans to blow up all the credited in and out of Vermont, so he along with his Vermontian brethren will finally rule the world 

Sent from my iPhone

Take on the Hillary tweets

Hillary is better than Trump in everything...except maybe tweeting. It is not because Trump is this masterful Tweeter, but he is always interesting. Hillary on the other hand is kind of like following your crazy aunt on Twitter, it's mainly just boring but except for one or two examples, it is also very bland and vanilla. I am not sure it matters, you could make a very solid point that being good in expressing yourself in 140 characters is not presidential since the most popular tweeters are morons like Kim Kardashian and nobody wants a celebrity whose only real accomplishment is marketing themselves being president

Take on USA basketball

I root hard for the US Olympic team in every single event, except for one, basketball. There is. It an event I root harder for Austalia, Austria or Albania than when these overpaid losers take the court. I hate them all and hope they get beat by 50 every game and in the process they all sprain their wieners. I swear to you that if the US played Russia that I will be out there rooting hard even if they went with Putin running the point , Stalin as the off-guard, Lenin as a flex-3, Khrushchev as the four and Trump cleaning up inside 

Take on the green pool

The diving pool in the olympics went from light blue to lime green in about 12 hours and nobody knows why. I have no clue but I have to guess that they probably used a third rate filter or that maybe Michael Phelps has been hanging his sack in there in between races. But really there has to be some explanation because this thing looks like they are diving into the foot bath at the Korean foot massage place when I put my feet in it and let me tell you, there is nobody in their right mind who wants to dive into that face first

Take on Trump's "many people"

You know whenever Trump starts a sentence with "many people are saying.." we are in for a hell of a shitstorm. Trump's entire campaign seems to revolve around, or at least be stoked by, ridiculous conspiracy theories and whenever you see "many people are saying" it's like a dog whistle for the morons who believe this crap. Today he went with the already widely debunked theory that Hillary's email account lead directly to a murdered Iranian scientist but using his technique of saying without saying, Trump is able to change the narrative from one shitstorm to another, no matter how ludicrous the assertion. His "many people" are just the wackos on his Twitter feed who are like the voices he hears in his orange head and who have about as much credibility as those homeless guys yelling about 9/11 being an inside job, Elvis still being alive, Area 51, the moon landing (this one is actually likely to be true/false), Obama's birth certificate, Beyonce's clone, MH370 going to Kazakhstan (also likely to be true), the Sandy Hook dad being a paid actor and thousands of others. But Trump can say them because he's not really "saying" it, he's just a reporter telling us what is out there. We should be thankful for bringing this stuff to light

Take on the Russian doping thing

First a third of the Russian Olympic team gets banned from the Olympics because of widespread doping and now the entire Russian Paralympic team got booted for doping. The NYT had an entire expose recently where they showed how the doping worked with secret compartments which was ridiculous in both its complexity and its ridiculousness

This Putin guy can't be trusted with anything, Crimea, Syria, Olympic sports, Paralympic sports...I' calling it now, somebody check the Russian Special Olympic team

Take on the lame Olympic sports

Nothing sucks more than those lame Olympic sports that nobody cares about. I'm not talking about swimming or archery or dog throwing but the ones with professional athletes like tennis, basketball and golf. The Olympics is about the track and field and swimming events, not about the ones where a bunch of multi millionaires travel to Rio in their offseason to soak their wild oats.
First of all, these sports suck unless it's a major or an NBA final and since most of the good players don't come out, they suck worse. But that isn't the reason they really suck, they really suck because they just aren't Olympic sports, those sports are the ones defined by the fact that their biggest stage are the olympics. You couldn't get me to watch my own kid swim in a competition but I' glued to the TV to see some 6 foot 10 inch Ausie beat some bad-ass Chinese dude wearing pink shorts in the 400meter freestyle, I'd rather poke my we out than watch gymnastics, unless it's on NBC at 8:30pm in the summer and there is nothing less interfering than watch a bunch of juiced up meatheads run a 100 meter dash except when it's the biggest event in the world
I'll watch all of it but guarantee that if I see Carmelo or Venus or Jason Day that I'll turn it off because well, they all suck

Take on the Trump endorsement of Paul Ryan

We just watched Long Fingers Trump's full throated endorsement of Paul Ryan and genuine gratitude for John McCain's service and we have to say we're impressed.

There are four things wrong with that sentence. The first being "full throated" since it sounded more like an old lady reading off bingo numbers at the VFW, the second being "impressed" because it came a few hours after Reince Preibus and the RNC threatened to pull money from the campaign and this was obviously just him trying to appease them. The third being, "long fingers" since we all know the Donald has cocktail wieners for digits. The last thing was that the glowing part of the John McCain portion felt as contrived and painful as having to apologize for having peed on the seat of the handicapped stall.

But I guess for Trump, today was a good day.

Take on the odd connection

TiVo went on some kind of social media blitz today I guess looking for attention, and somehow they found it. They mentioned that Babe the movie about an adorable pig who travels to cities around the world was released 21 years ago, which seems like sort of an arbitrary number to
celebrate the occasion but what was more off was that they then polled their tens of followers the question what their favorite way to eat pig was. I have no problem with the poll but in conjunction with the story of the pig frolicking around in NYC, it seemed a bit odd

Then again, they got us taking, so something worked

Take on Newt

Newt Gingrich is a wretched human being whose name does him justice since he comes across as a slimy lizard but even he can see the trouble of his ways. Three weeks ago, people were talking about him possibly being Trumps's running mate and today he is saying that he isn't even sure he can support Little Fingers. This has to be one of the most strategic about-faces, I have ever witnessed because there is nothing that Trump has said this week that wasn't at least something you could have imagined him saying. I get the Kahn thing is bad, the "can't we just nuke the Middle East" this is terrifying and the entire just change jobs if you are being harassed is outrageous but really, is it any worse than what he's said before?
Why now, after everything he has said, would Newt drop out??? One reason...the polls. People are jumping off the Trumptanic as fast as they can right now and Newt is not going to be waiting for the string quartet to finish their last song.

Take on The US Olympic opening night uniforms

How the heck are we supposed to scare rebellion out of the Ruskies seeing white pants and boat shoes?
The US team unveiled there absolutely horrible uniforms that they will be busting out for the opening ceremonies and I have to say that unless they want to be stuck on an island with a fat captain and a professor, these are terrible

The baby blue jacket is lame, the horizontal stripes will make Carmelo Anthony look like he ate Chris Paul, the white pants only work on menopausal women and anybody wearing those boat shoes should be forced to drink the sewage water they'll be rowing in

Take on the pajamas

We often bitch and complain that all the luxury and fun has been taken out of flying with the security, hidden fees and delays but we should be fair when the airlines actually do something right. Delta now gives you pajamas when you fly to and from Asia, and not just some crappy set like those terrible socks they give you, an actual decent pair.
I learned a long time ago that if you have any hope of getting a decent night sleep on a plane, you have to get out of your jeans and put on pajamas, so for me this want new or even necessary since I packed my own pair. Nobody can sleep with their balls scrunched into their five hole and a shirt that you've had on for 24 hours straight. It's really the only civilized way to travel