The title above needs a small explanation : for younger readers, a slow news day was an occurrence before everything went live on TV, cell/smart phones and the Internet when nothing particular was recorded and the press would have to pull out conspiracy theories and cold Scottish lakes monsters with possibly a UFO sighting or two to have something to write about. With most of what humanity produced in the past and many of its intantaneous gratuitous useless thoughts along with it, there is no reason to lack material anymore. In fact, that same live network of sources has broken the slow news day twice since the period itself has changed meaning. When distance separated times of people, when someone on the other side of the world from you, sleeping while you’re awake, would learn of an event on different days, day equaled local time work day for a writer but now that the shop is open 24/7, it got even more personal and my personal news day runs from the previous day’s Post to when I sit down to write again ( a wildly fluctuating period ) so that when a real full day comes along, timing may make it worse. Such is the case today.
And it all begins near Paris with the exact news that would appear on a slow news day as a tiger has been spotted yesterday. Knowing about the wild, I immediately knew it was not true but still, it coincided with an event from earlier this week. To well-read people, French Tiger equals George Clémenceau, one of if not the pivotal character in World War One, the anniversary of which was celebrated all wrong this week. Bringing back memories of an arithmetically deficient world celebrating a millenary the wrong year on December 31st 1999 because zeroes look purrrty, November 11 2014 saw an anthology of pieces on WWI pouring down search engines. And I can’t help but ask why? That date – year combination is all wrong!
The war started on July 28 1914! November 11 is the date of the end, truce, armistice, etc but THAT came in 1918 and just turned 96 not a hundred? That war lasted over 4 years and cost 7 million civilians, 9 millions soldiers, injuring often definitively maiming three times as many! It cannot be reduced to a single date, especially an invalid one.
Anyhow, apart from Clémenceau and zoos there are no tigers in France. What a man photographed near a gas station was evidently a lynx!
Ville de Montevrain – Facebook
It still leaves big cats prints as found but also explains why it would cross the highway as it is in it’s natural habitat so to speak and why no young tiger is missing anywhere. And if wild, the police and soldiers looking for it should grab soporific dart guns ‘cause it ain’t gonna come and cuddle up by itself.
And an excellent example of broken news days since the Net as I found it before going to sleep but did not post just about that and the above link show the authorities corrected the tiger story by themselves ( or more likely by finally asking someone qualified to look at that picture ) before I could get back to you on it. Too slow … sigh! But still in France, I did not miss this news at least as suspicious as a tiger sighting ; the growth for the months at 0.3% finally rose above its point one flatline of recent months and as if that was not enough, Greece halted its recession at last while Germany is now idle! Whaaaaaaat? Naaaaaah! Really?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/11/14/france-greece-eurozone-growth/19013853/
That was enough of a weird story to kick things off but in the same nonsense range also came this jewel :
The excellent New England Patriots of the American Football NFL had a jolly nice idea. To show their supporters were legion, they offered those that tweeted their support a return image of a team jersey with their hashtag handle on it! of course, in that fulltitude of anonymous, it was certain that at least one would have a nasty sense of humor or maybe just be nasty. Result?
Click for link.
Yes, sad but at the same time a little funny and very revealing. Connecting every corp & shop to the global market through social media has swept us over; learning to use those tools may take a lot longer.
In news not involving humans, geology and cosmos are colliding. On Earth , it is an anniversary that bears sharing on an incredible news day. You can bet that islands emerging from the ocean near Iceland 49 years ago made the news :
http://earthsky.org/earth/surtsey-and-the-birth-of-new-islands?utm
But in space of course it is Rosetta and Philae’s adventures on a comet that are central. The ESA team has nor fixed the harpoon problem and the batteries are ending soon. In case the solar panels fail to take over, the scientists having tested temperature of the soil successfully decided to attempt drilling. Without the anchoring, there is a fair risk that in near total absence of gravity will send the lander flying off in reaction. But sampling the comet’s material so that onboard instruments can analyze it and send the data back is pretty much the main objective so that, other jobs being done …
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30050349
I’ll keep my readers posted on the mission tomorrow when it shifts power modes and suggests they check live reports until then.
And a little further out ( as Rosetta and 67P are near the martian orbit ) we find Uranus which is having a fit. A giant storm has astronomers in a frenzy and I am pretty sure that this alone but surely as combined with the recent huge Sun spot that looks just like it would have made one heck of a conspiracy theory by the unscientific end of the world brigade had it been a good ol’ slow news day.
And lastly, this piece is a true slow news day gem :
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/13/us-science-infanticide-idUSKCN0IX2BA20141113
I fail to understand why infanticide in mammals would be worth a Reuter article, it is fact known to biologists for decades. In a natural gregarious setting ( group ), dominant males that conquer the top ring of the pecking order will readily kill recent babies to make the mother available to reproduction faster by the new king of the genes ( itself ) thus favoring evolution of the species. It may not be moral by our view but it is the truth and holds entirely in the above sentence. If everyone understood that, we could stop resurrecting that bit of info every so often.
Back to human affairs! Amazon and Hachette buried the hatchet. There was in truth no other option for either. Amazon needs books to sell since it is its main business but Hachette needs the Internet platform too. Both saw their book sales drop during the brawl.Switching to full digital by customers and authors was heard discussed which might have spurred the 4th largest publisher in the World to settle and Amazon’s tactic of discouraging them from buying Hachette products worked so well that its own numbers plummetted. So, facepalm, they came to an agreement over the pricing of the books. Personally, I’m just glad they still make and sell paper books!
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/technology/amazon-hachette-ebook-dispute.html
Another business venture is brewing as Halliburton ( the dark power group associated with ex-Vice-President Dick Cheney ) is in talks to buy or merge with Baker Hughes. You can see this as anecdotic by capitalization since together these 2nd and 3rd of oil services company will still be worth only half that of top dog Schlumberger but by revenues, the two merged would be at par with it ( Hal + B.Hugh / 24.8 + 22.3 = 47.1 to 45.25 B$ / Schlum). Of course the divestments to avoid antitrust laws issues would have repercussions for other field players worldwide and the move is a classic monetary globalization response to the lowering of oil prices initiated by Saudi Arabia since June. Since really linked to how our world is controlled by finance, this news might have been too realistic, lacking in oomph and umpa lumpas, and might not have made it to global attention even on a slow news day.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/11/13/baker-hughes-halliburton-idINL2N0T32PA20141113
Before concluding, I have to say a word on something that in my honest opinion should not be news, no matter which day. I am still about to talk about it, you’ll rightfully argue but I’ll retort that it is simply one of those cases mentioned in my About Page at the top and Statement of intentions at the beginning of this blog to the effect that,
For clarity’s sake, a cat being a cat, it may occasionally have to be called a cat.
From the massive and varied offerings of the Discovery constellation of channels comes the best ( science ) and the worst of TV shows. It is of one of the latter that I want to talk, namely Honey Boo Boo. And covered by the above warning against political correctness, let me say that these people are dimwits at best and light retards more likely. It may not be nice to say so but using dubious euphemisms brings on to mumble jumble and not reality. The cast ( not crew ) of this show are not fully equipped for real life which is probably why they’re on TV instead.
For those lucky enough to have missed it, a big fat slob of dim-witted lady has four kids, supposedly from a scrawny half-watt lightbulb of a redneck, all daughters. The oldest, daughter of a never seen pass lover was sexually abused by an ex-boyfriend of the mom since convicted and recently returned to freedom at which point the mom recently married to the homunculus started seeing him again which when it appeared in the media prompted the end of the show and the interest of child services worried for Honey Boo Boo, a pudgy mental void of 9, the moronic antics of which the public is invited by sirupy politeness and pseudo-equalitarian openness to others to mistake for endearing child stuff for a whole hour every week. Latest informations now give another sex offender ( yup, you read right, a different pervert ) as the possible biological father of the third in-line of the four girls ( Pumpkin, probably a volume analogy )! So to summarize, June the mom has a fetish for rapists, is still in partial denial over the ordeal of her oldest kid by way of that, unfaithful to her pygmy of a husband, not that safe to her star tadpole and not getting any brighter. The only untouched child is Chubbs, the second, hopefully relocated to a safe house of the FBI’s by now. And yet she is the child of the same sex fiend that Mom now says is that of the third one too but in her case, we always knew? There is little to gain by going on and it is best to immediately conclude that A- in the immortal words of Bertha in two and a Half Men sitcom ; these “people are crawling over each other like a box of hamsters .” and B- in light of Sons of Guns star being arrested for raping his daughter in August, ( and contractual disputes with other stars in a lesser key ), fake documentaries and constant “beachin’” between hosts ( although that may very well be on job hours to sell more crap, maybe it would be time to research your idiots a little more before yelling action or supposing that you already did to suppose that this flow of horrible behaviour is simply a result of the attempt by Discovery to showcase lowlifes ( forgot Gypsy Sisters there, isn’t that one of yours too? ) engaged in their excesses at warp speed thanks to the presence of your cameras in order to lull the central and hardest working third of the nation that all is well despite their efforts barely keeping up with needs if even by offering close-ups of the cesspool running down the gutter.
Haaa, deep breath, there, had to say it, feels better!
http://www.etonline.com/news/153905_honey_boo_boo_family_tree_complete_break_down_of_everyone/
And finally, who, who I ask my readers, is the tsar of deceitful use of the rhythm of the news, hiding his acts behind other wars but springing to the forefront like an Ivan-in-the-box if there a stage? Yes, Vlad, probably thinking that 36 hours was fame enough for a simple probe seeing how is country send the first one in space period ( although a mere hop by comparison 😉 ), is opening his new one-man show :
Too funny, Putin is accusing the West of a lack of logic as the G20 ( 20 biggest economies’ club which includes Russia ) since they apply economic sanctions against his country due to the Ukraine mess ( where both sides are accusing each other daily of murdering a still-born ceasefire ) at the same time!
LMAO! That absence of causality to effect he comments on live but the fact that the same European Union that imposes sanctions backed the money for Ukraine the opponent to buy Russian gas, in effect bypassing its own sanctions, he failed to notice even though I mentioned it :
http://definitivelapseofreason.com/2014/11/01/last-news-of-october-2014/
But the clown is not all smiles :
Rhythm people, rhythm is the secret of a good joke delivery, take the counter-part of any situation, make it outrageous and show it to be impossible at the right moment.
The sanctions make no sense when they hurt their intended target but fine when they are not applied. What a great line! I wish I had though of that. 😀
So there you go, 10 improbable if not impossible news tackled before lunch!
Time to do the dishes; see you later, Tay.
Free Bonus Track : GOP leader says new Congress will not repeal Obamacare … entirely.
http://www.ibtimes.com/john-mccain-full-obamacare-repeal-wont-happen-1722885?ft=3aj78&utm
Definitive Lapse of Reason 
Pingback: Modi’s Mojo and other news. | Definitive Lapse of Reason