Good news for animals in entertainment on the first Norther!

Happy Norther!  After teasing my readers twice, it's time to celebrate.  First, I'll be a good environmentalist and recycle the conversation between the Archdruid and me about fake holidays.

I'm single-handedly keeping alive a fake holiday called Wester, which is the first Sunday following the first Full Moon after the Autumnal Equinox.  When I first posted about it, my Discordian friend claimed it for Discordianism.  As far as I'm concerned, it's still a Discordian holiday.
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Wester is funny; presumably that was the day that some messiah or other descended from the living?
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>I agree, Wester is funny.  As for an anointed one descending from the living, sorry, that wasn't part of the Wester story that I heard.  However, the holiday has its own animal mascot, the Wester Squirrel, which goes around and gathers goodies to hide instead of hiding goodies to pass out like the Easter Bunny.
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Druids would likely demand a Souther and a Norther, too, with a Souther Wombat and a Norther Lemming as animal mascots; I'll leave you to decide what if anything they do with goodies.
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Ah, but which solstice gets which holiday?  At first, I was not amused by your suggestion, as I thought one parody holiday was enough.  Then I slept on it and not only was I OK with it, I decided that Norther would come after the Winter Solstice and Souther would come after the Summer Solstice.  Why would a lemming visit in the middle of summer?  Norther would usually have little competition for holidays, at least in the U.S., most of the time.  Next year, it would fall on January 15th, the day before MLK Day.  Not a bad three-day weekend!

So that's the story of how I'm celebrating a fake holiday that the Archdruid came up with.  Oh, well, the Norther Lemming approves.


As this is also Sunday, it's time for an entertainment update.   I have just the one for a holiday with an animal mascot.  Follow over the jump.

ABC News reports that Ringling Brothers Circus Announces It Is Closing Down.

Fans of the greatest show on earth face that all good things must come to an end.

I bet the circus thought that eliminating elephants from the show would help their business, not hurt it.  Unfortunately, it interfered with Americans' entertainment, so their fans punished them for it instead.  Score one for PETA under the category "catastrophic success."  No, I'm not a fan of PETA.

Speaking of successes for animal rights activists, Newsy reported last week SeaWorld San Diego has its last Shamu show.

The park will have its final show Sunday, but the whales won't completely stop doing tricks.

This comes as no surprise, as I had posted SeaWorld phasing out its current Orca shows in San Diego in November of 2015.  Still, the timing was eerie, both because of its conjunction with the Ringling Brothers/Barnum and Baily Circus announcing that it was closing down and because it was nearly three years to the day after I first wrote about "Blackfish."  I know both are coincidences, but it is also one of those times when the news seems to speak to me.

Enough of this good week for animals and animal rights activists but a bad week for fans of the circus and other animal shows.  Stay tuned for tomorrow's celebration of Martin Luther King Day on Monday.