Hey all, happy Moanday.
Here’s yesterday’s column. Hope you enjoy.
A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – BY PAIGE NICK
SLOW NEWS DAY
You know it’s a slow news day when this is the big story: ‘Scientists discover century’s most boring day.’ I tore this article out of the newspaper a while ago and I’ve been meaning to write about it ever since.
Basically, to summarise, a bunch of scientists got together and decided to feed 300 million facts into a computer so that they could come up with the one day in the last century when the least happened.
Now I don’t know for certain, but it’s my guess that back when some poor schmuck spent his entire youth holed up in his parent’s basement, building a computer, I don’t think this was quite the use for it that he had in mind. Surfing porn maybe, inventing Wiki-leaks perhaps, Google stalking your ex, definitely, but playing spider solitaire for three hours straight, or calculating the most boring day in the century. Definitely not!
In fact, I think that had he known that this is what we would be doing with his work all these years later, he probably would have been out there getting laid and smoking pot, like everyone else, instead.
So back to the scientists. It turns out that The World’s Most Boring Day was a Sunday. The 11 April, 1954. Remember it? No, I didn’t think so, there’s not that much to remember.
On this uneventful day 57 years ago, there was apparently:
– A general election in Belgium. (Yawn.)
– The death of Jack Shufflebotham, a footballer who played a few games for Oldham. (I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but it doesn’t matter how fancy you spell it, it’s still pronounced ‘shuffle bottom’.)
– A planned coup in Yanoan, a French Colony in India, which never quite got off the ground. (Hence you never having spent any holidays taking photos and buying souvenirs in the bustling metropolis of Yanoan.)
– And the only birth of any importance on that day was that of a microwave electronics expert, named Abdullah Atalar. (Hold me back, all this excitement might kill me.)
You have to wonder, doesn’t that team of Cambridge scientists – some of the greatest minds of our time. Men and women who have collectively spent years, decades even, studying to become world-class scientists, researchers and doctors – don’t they have anything better to do? Because if they’re sitting around bored, surfing the net, trying to decide what to work on next, there’s always AIDS or Cancer they could look into, I’m just saying.
You could also argue that the day they decided to figure out what the most boring day was, could have also been a pretty good contender for the most boring day itself. There couldn’t have been anything good on Television. And guaranteed it wasn’t in the month that the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition was launched, or during The Super whatever, footie season or Wimbledon.
The article ended with this gem, ‘…The irony is that this day is interesting for being entirely boring.’ Are you still with me, or did you nod off there for a second?
