Happy Friday!
PENTAGON REPORTEDLY HAS A THREE-DAY IRAN PLAN SCHEDULED AROUND YOUR BALLOT
The New York Times reports the US and Israeli militaries have drawn up plans to hit Iran again, with the clock set for after the November 3 midterms. The target list is nuclear facilities, energy infrastructure, and missile and drone arsenals. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went to Israel this week to talk it over with Netanyahu, and both air forces have been flying over Iraq to rehearse the maneuvers. Some American planners reportedly believe a three-day campaign could do enough economic damage to move Tehran's position, which is a bold pitch in month eight of a war that already pushed energy prices and inflation up worldwide. The buildup runs to three aircraft carriers, thousands of Marines, fighter aircraft and special operations forces, complete by early November. Officials also noted that darkness over Iran lasts longer that time of year. So the schedule is built around an election and a sunset chart. Nobody agrees on what already didn't happen. The Financial Times said Netanyahu had a multi-day offensive ready for the weekend of October 10 until Trump blocked it. Netanyahu called that report untrue and biased and declined to say which part. Israeli defense officials say no operation was ever ordered, so there was nothing to cancel. The White House won't discuss plans that may or may not exist. Iran, for its part, has threatened to answer by hitting Gulf energy sites, data centers and undersea internet cables.
STEELERS CANCEL THEIR PARIS FAN PARTY
The Steelers and Saints play Sunday at Stade de France in the first NFL regular season game ever held in France, and to warm up the crowd Pittsburgh booked a Steelers House fan party at a bar in the Bastille neighborhood. There is an authorized march scheduled to begin at Place de la Bastille on Saturday. The team pulled the plug Thursday, citing "recent events in the Bastille neighborhood" and calling it a precaution in an area that has seen recent disruptions, which is how a billion dollar franchise says somebody finally looked at a map. The game is not moving. NFL exec Peter O'Reilly said it was never in danger and pointed out that PSG hosted Barcelona on Tuesday without the city tipping over. Goodell said Wednesday that he's made all the preparations and that he spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The league's own fan house is still running Friday and Saturday, so officially every party in Paris is safe except the one the Steelers were throwing. TJ Watt's wife Dani already asked publicly why the game hasn't been moved. The scale depends on who's counting. Police logged 855 arrests in the Paris region after last Saturday, with national totals reported in the thousands. The government put nationwide turnout around 550,000, organizers said closer to 800,000. Police deployment goes up 20 percent this weekend, and Stade de France sits in Saint-Denis, about five miles from the bar nobody is drinking at now.
Which Came First?
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Which Artist came first
MINNESOTA FARMER COMBINES HIS CORN AND FINDS AN 11-FOOT SCORCHED METAL DOME
A farmer in Scott Township, Minnesota was combining corn on October 14 when he ran into something that was not corn. Deputies got the call around 3:30 p.m. and confirmed a charred metal object roughly 11 feet in diameter, which the Stevens County Sheriff's Office officially described as "presumably a space object." That is the whole statement. Presumably. The timeline is the good part. The farmer figures the thing had been lying there about six weeks, based on the corn growing underneath it. An 11-foot piece of burnt spacecraft sat in a Minnesota field for a month and a half and nobody noticed, because it's a cornfield and nobody walks around in there until harvest. It has serial numbers on it, so somebody out there knows exactly what it is. Sheriff Jason Dingman says he can't name which federal agencies responded because it's an open investigation, which is cop for "they didn't tell me either." The leading theory from people who track this stuff is a Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket that launched September 15 and sent its upper stage back through the atmosphere over Kansas and Minnesota. The diameter lines up. Nothing has been officially confirmed, and until it is, western Minnesota gets to keep a flying saucer in the evidence pile.
CROWS MAKE UP THEIR MINDS ABOUT TWICE AS FAST AS YOU
Researchers at the University of Tübingen sat two carrion crows in front of a touchscreen full of drifting white dots and asked them to peck which direction the cloud was going. The birds pecked the correct side in an average of 235 milliseconds, twice as fast as primates given the same task in earlier studies, at a comparable average accuracy of 74 percent. Less than a quarter second to commit. You have spent longer than that deciding whether to reply to a text. Speed did not cost them anything. The crows hit nearly 100 percent accuracy when there were a lot of dots and the motion was obvious, which is more than can be said for anyone trying to merge on the highway. The team also found that 70 milliseconds after the dots appeared, activity in hundreds of neurons in the nidopallium caudolaterale, the avian analog of the primate prefrontal cortex, already predicted how the crow would answer. Crows last shared an ancestor with mammals more than 300 million years ago and have no layered neocortex at all. Nieder's read: "a brain does not need a mammalian neocortex to perform sophisticated computations." The honest caveat, which the researchers put in writing: the study used only two birds and made no direct comparisons to primates, so the human numbers are borrowed from older experiments.
80-TON BOULDER FINALLY FELL AFTER 104 YEARS
For 104 years, Polar Caves Park in Rumney, New Hampshire invited families to stroll under an 80-ton granite slab called the Mysterious Hanging Boulder. A hand-painted sign on the trail explained that the rock was cracked all the way through, rested on three contact points, and had about 75 percent of its weight hanging directly over your head. That was not a warning. That was the pitch. On Oct. 18, the last day of the 2026 season, the rock finished the job. It came down on the wooden walkway through the Boulder Maze and smashed a section of it. Nobody was hurt. A hiker named Nicole filmed the aftermath, piles of busted railing with the boulder sitting on top, and said on camera she was pretty sure people were supposed to be walking out there. The geologists are not stunned. Joe Licciardi, a glacial geology professor at the University of New Hampshire, said a glacier parked it in that hanging position thousands of years ago. Jan Earle, a geologist who has worked with the US Geological Survey, said it was a balanced rock, so once more weight hung over the edge than sat on the base, gravity and erosion only needed time. Earle's comparison was an old car rusting until it falls apart. Park officials declined to say more and will assess the site over the offseason before the 2027 season.
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