By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston

BOSTON (CBS) — Say it ain’t so, Tommy Boy. Say it ain’t so! Not the … bird!

Alas, it is so. Tom Brady has a middle finger, and it was raised high into the New York City sky on Monday night, captured by the cameras of the paparazzi.

The earth-shattering story was “reported” by Brazilian magazine Quem and shared by the Twitter account Only In Boston on Tuesday. And the results are sure to be devastating.

From Quem, via Google translate:

“Tom Brady was angered by a taxi driver and decided to take out their anger there. This is because the player who was walking with his wife, Gisele Bündchen , the streets of Manhattan in New York, on Monday night, did not like the driver at high speed as he crossed the street.” “Brady proved very angry with the taxi driver and showed the middle finger to the driver. The attentive cameras of the paparazzi, of course, recorded the time of the obscene gesture of the American football player.”

Oh. The humanity.

Of course, this is just one version of the story. It’s just as possible — and heck, darn near likely — that Brady had actually encountered Roger Goodell, or one of the appellate judges from last week, and wanted to send a friendly hello. Or perhaps somebody had just tried to sneak a nightshade into Brady’s salad. We know that Tom wouldn’t take too kindly to such a gross offense.

Whatever the case, we learned two things about Brady from this whole sordid affair. First and foremost, we learned that the character who exploded at the funny-looking store employee in that Funny Or Die video might not have been a major stretch for Brady to play. But secondly, we learned that literally everything Tom Brady does becomes international news. Whether it’s his preference for pool cover color, or his unique diet, or now his possession of human emotion following a Dustin Hoffman-esque experience in New York City, everything Brady does manages to make news.

Stay tuned until tomorrow, when “Tom Brady Breathes Air” hits the Internet around lunchtime.