Editorial: Slow news day? Give us mystery

The wake is shown on a poor quality satellite image apparently from "Goggle Maps".

We call them slow news days.

Days when quirky stories rise to the top of the daily list that newspapers around the world compile, as they assess content for each edition.

The Daily Mail's website team in Australia must have had a slow news day recently. Because a story that originated in Australia has surfaced on the UK paper's website, highlighting a strange wake in Oke Bay, Bay of Islands. A strange wake that Mr Pita Witehira of Hamilton, who owns property in Oke Bay, reckons came from a 12m taniwha.

The wake is shown on a poor quality satellite image apparently from "Goggle Maps" (that's right, Goggle) as a single wake line. The absence of white foam rules out boats, and it is too big for a shark and turns too sharply for a whale.

Hence it must be a taniwha, Mr Witehira hypothesises.

The story gets weirder when debunkers say ... "no, no, a catamaran could cause this". How two catamaran hulls go into one wake, I'm not sure.

But the story appears to have gained some traction, and online comments have been swapped re the wake's source. Most people seem to think it is a boat.

It's worth observing that underneath the story, several other stories are promoted.

One of them is "Nine unique dog breeds you may never come across".

A little like our taniwha.

Some of you will say - is this news?

Sure it is. In a week when innocent people die in a Sydney cafe siege, and more than 130 children - and I still find this hard to fathom - are slaughtered by Taliban fighters in Pakistan, perhaps we need some distraction from the awful realities of the world. We call it balance, even if the news day is a slow one. Sometimes, it's nice to smile when you read something in the newspaper.