The Morning Briefing - July 21, 2015
MONTCLAIR – “Checking out the buns” has a whole new meaning at one Montclair diner, where the manager is being charged with recording patrons on his smartphone as they used the unisex bathroom. Seems like an all-new fetish to add to the books, after a child at Manny’s Diner found the phone underneath the sink, angled toward the toilet, recording videos, and showed it to mom and dad, NJ.com reports. Call it the diner’s “Tuesday Surprise.”
PARSIPPANY – Why should military and emergency responders be the only ones who receive a formal send-off from their colleagues? About 40 tow truck operators yesterday paid their final respects to “Butch” Hubert, whose flag-draped casket was put on top of a flatbed tow truck, the Daily Record reports. Then, 40 tow trucks lined up and took him for one final ride, with the fullest honors of the Garden State Towing Association.
ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL – Future historians will be stunned to discover the liberal state of New Jersey elected a governor who defunded Planned Parenthood for six straight budgets and now wants Planned Parenthood to lose funding across the land. NJ.com reports that Christie was in conservative South Carolina responding to the undercover video showing a senior Planned Parenthood official talking about the disposal of aborted fetuses. Christie sees this PR mess as yet more justification to strip funding. In liberal New Jersey, Christie considered it a budget issue. Now, as a true-blue conservative Presidential candidate, it has been escalated to a moral one.
IN OTHER IMPORTANT NEWS
DEEP SPACE – E.T. went home, and now some rich people are willing to spend $100 million to find him. Tech billionaire Yuri Milner is teaming up with famed physicist Stephen Hawking to launch an unprecedented program to find extraterrestrial life. The money will be used to direct the world’s most powerful telescopes and computers to scan deep space for life beyond Earth. The project scope includes about a million nearby stars, the entire plane of the Milky Way and about 100 nearby galaxies. Say hi to Kirk for us.
ENGLEWOOD, Fla. – Yet more proof that nice guys finish last as a 77-year-old Florida man has been fired as a toll collector for accidentally undercharging a truck driver and then paying the difference from his own pocket. And so ends the 30-year career of this toll collector, assigned over the decades at the Gasparilla Island bridge toll booth in southwest Florida. WBBH-TV reports this is not the first time the toll collector has used his own money to pay the tolls. He’s been talked to about all this good will, but apparently he refused to listen.
THIS DAY IN HISTORY
It was this day in 1959 that the Boston Red Sox catch up with the times, as the final team in baseball to break the color barrier, signing backup infielder Pumpsie Green.
WORD OF THE DAY
Scabrous – adjective
Definition: Risque, salacious or indecent
Example: “How many more scabrous remarks before Republican voters put an end to the “Trump for President” campaign?