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Thanks to the federal government's partial shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics skipped its monthly Big Reveal at 8:30 a.m. Friday.

There was no September employment report.

Without access to the BLS numbers, data junkies were left to scrounge around for lesser reports. Maybe if they could suck in enough small hits of other statistics, they could feel that old familiar rush?

Nope. Nothing can replace that BLS high.

"You do miss it," said Harry Holzer, Georgetown professor and former chief economist for the Labor Department. "I watch it closely. It's the single best number to explain what's going on" in the U.S. labor market, he said.

The BLS report surveys both employers and households. Also, it comes out monthly, rather than quarterly. Holzer said that frequency provides enough snapshots of wages and hours to create a kind of flowing documentary about jobs.

So here we are — with no new picture to advance the story.

But instead of dwelling on what we don't have, let's think of this as "Faux Friday" — a day offering plenty of data, just not from the BLS. Simply lower your standards, pop open a near-beer and let's go over the almost-important data that we did get this week:

— ADP's payroll report showed a gain of 166,000 private sector jobs for September — in line with what employers had been adding all summer.

— Initial claims for unemployment benefits increased by 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 308,000 last week. That number, based on state data, was somewhat better than the expected 314,000 new claims.

— PNC Financial Services Group Inc.'s Autumn Outlook survey of small and medium-size businesses showed 16 percent intend to add full-time employees during the next six months, while 8 percent plan to cut workers.

— The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas said companies announced plans for 40,289 layoffs in September, down 20 percent from August.

— Glassdoor, an online site for jobs, released its quarterly Employment Confidence Survey, conducted online by Harris Interactive. That showed only 15 percent of employees are afraid of being laid off, the lowest percentage since the fourth quarter of 2008.

The Government Shutdown

Without Key Jobs Data, Markets And Economists Left Guessing

Britain's Conservative-led government delivered a one-two punch for more pillars of Britain's social benefits system this week. It announced more cuts to the country's social welfare programs — moving ever-closer to "workfare."

It started when George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, told the Conservative Party's annual conference that starting next April, some 200,000 people who have been unemployed for two years or more will be offered three choices: undertake unpaid community work; report to a job center every workday; or take part in a full-time intensive program to work on the personal issues that have kept them out of the workforce.

If they don't, they'll lose their benefits check.

"No one will be ignored or left without help. But no one will get something for nothing," Osborne told the Tory gathering. "Because a fair welfare system is fair to those who need it, and fair to those who pay for it, too."

Iain Duncan Smith, the country's work and pensions secretary, told the BBC that when similar requirements were enacted on a smaller scale to address the problem of "playing" the system, about 70 percent of recipients stopped claiming benefits.

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The eye-popping new movie Gravity will make you very grateful you're planted on terra firma. It's a thriller directed by Alfonso Cuaron, in which shuttle astronauts on a spacewalk are stranded after a collision with a vast cloud of space debris.

And one of those astronauts — played by Sandra Bullock — is left on her own, hundreds of miles above Earth. She's running out of oxygen and tumbling untethered through the void of space.

Bullock tells NPR's Melissa Block that she spent much of the shoot by herself inside a cube, basically doing a kind of modern dance to help create the illusion of a zero-gravity environment.

"I likened it to Martha Graham," she says. "It was slow, modern, interpretive movements at 30-percent speed. And so my body would move as in weightlessness and contract the way your body would move in zero gravity."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered some rare, if fleeting, hope Thursday in regard to his country's relationship with Iran.

In an interview with Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep, he said the election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani "might" offer an opportunity for diplomacy and that he would "consider" meeting him.

"I don't care about the meeting. I don't have a problem with the diplomatic process," Netanyahu said.

"You're saying you would meet him?" Steve asked.

Transcript: NPR Interview With Prime Minister Netanyahu