Less around and sorta about…

A few things that managed to catch my eye (mostly cos good folk slapped me upside the head with a cluebat) in the last day or so:

Well, Diane’s playing along with the “tag yourself: you’re it” game of “I wish I… ” Here’s Star Light, Star Bright I wish I hadn’t dropped into “third world county” just now and read this post because I was planning on just skipping around a few other places, like Sam’s and The Churning and maybe leaving a comment or two…

Peakah’s Provocations has been watching MMPs again… well, it’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it, I suppose: Perverted Justice Part II Dateline NBC followed up on a story on internet predators and how the private group Perverted Justice spends time roping in perverts who stalk the internet for sex with the young.

Committees of Correspondence Democrats will have an “issue agenda” Nancy Pelosi says that the Democrats will have an “issue agenda” for next year’s Congressional elections, but it will not include a position on Iraq. [Yeh… I wonder what that “issue” will be? Which of the Dmoncraps can lie most outrageously?]

Committees of Correspondence also has a link to a great story from Iraq (and as soon as his server’s back up, y’all can read it. :-). And From Iraq, this will make you smile, too.

Get your Carnival of Christmas posts in to Adam’s Blog, folks! The Carnival of Christmas Weekend Open TrackbacksChristmas is the most wonderful time of the year. The reason why is often list in the midst of the current “War on Christmas.” The Carnival of Christmas recognizes that Christmas is the time of Christ’s birth…

Asking for help: freedom folks. A Little Help Please. And, Words of Wisdom from Morgan Freeman Morgan Freeman says the concept of a month dedicated to black history is “ridiculous.” And rolling right along, Iraqis Vote, Lefties Whine

The Florida Masochist does some more masochistic demonstrations (dontcha know, dude that there are no end of bogus excuses? 🙂 Bogus Excuse #3

Diane’s Stuff is flogging the elephant in the dining room: Mandatory Driver’s Testing For Seniors What are your feelings about mandatory driver’s testing for seniors? Should there be a law? How strict should the tests be?

Bloggin’ Outloud proves that downright weird is in his bag of tricks: Friday Funny Stuff & Open Posts Open post at Bloggin’ Outloud – on one condition (well, you know, have some fun): Vote on your favorite funny. Includes “Smack the Penguin” and “Redneck Hunting Dogs.”

(Is this a habitual thing? 🙂

I don’t know how I found this site, but those of y’all who live in remote rural areas might find it useful on some level: How to Hunt Deer With a Mountaint Howitzer. I shudder to think what deer season would be like around here if some Third World Countyâ„¢ folks hear of this. Already the woods have too many nutcases who’ve converted their peashooters to full auto… *sigh* I’d like to put a rack on ’em and set ’em loose in the deerwoods during season…

Flogged (shamelessly, of course) at Stop The ACLU and Point Five.

Less around and sorta about…

A few things that managed to catch my eye (mostly cos good folk slapped me upside the head with a cluebat) in the last day or so:

Well, Diane’s playing along with the “tag yourself: you’re it” game of “I wish I… ” Here’s Star Light, Star Bright I wish I hadn’t dropped into “third world county” just now and read this post because I was planning on just skipping around a few other places, like Sam’s and The Churning and maybe leaving a comment or two…

Peakah’s Provocations has been watching MMPs again… well, it’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it, I suppose: Perverted Justice Part II Dateline NBC followed up on a story on internet predators and how the private group Perverted Justice spends time roping in perverts who stalk the internet for sex with the young.

Committees of Correspondence Democrats will have an “issue agenda” Nancy Pelosi says that the Democrats will have an “issue agenda” for next year’s Congressional elections, but it will not include a position on Iraq. [Yeh… I wonder what that “issue” will be? Which of the Dmoncraps can lie most outrageously?]

Committees of Correspondence also has a link to a great story from Iraq (and as soon as his server’s back up, y’all can read it. :-). And From Iraq, this will make you smile, too.

Get your Carnival of Christmas posts in to Adam’s Blog, folks! The Carnival of Christmas Weekend Open TrackbacksChristmas is the most wonderful time of the year. The reason why is often list in the midst of the current “War on Christmas.” The Carnival of Christmas recognizes that Christmas is the time of Christ’s birth…

Asking for help: freedom folks. A Little Help Please. And, Words of Wisdom from Morgan Freeman Morgan Freeman says the concept of a month dedicated to black history is “ridiculous.” And rolling right along, Iraqis Vote, Lefties Whine

The Florida Masochist does some more masochistic demonstrations (dontcha know, dude that there are no end of bogus excuses? 🙂 Bogus Excuse #3

Diane’s Stuff is flogging the elephant in the dining room: Mandatory Driver’s Testing For Seniors What are your feelings about mandatory driver’s testing for seniors? Should there be a law? How strict should the tests be?

Bloggin’ Outloud proves that downright weird is in his bag of tricks: Friday Funny Stuff & Open Posts Open post at Bloggin’ Outloud – on one condition (well, you know, have some fun): Vote on your favorite funny. Includes “Smack the Penguin” and “Redneck Hunting Dogs.”

(Is this a habitual thing? 🙂

I don’t know how I found this site, but those of y’all who live in remote rural areas might find it useful on some level: How to Hunt Deer With a Mountaint Howitzer. I shudder to think what deer season would be like around here if some Third World Countyâ„¢ folks hear of this. Already the woods have too many nutcases who’ve converted their peashooters to full auto… *sigh* I’d like to put a rack on ’em and set ’em loose in the deerwoods during season…

Flogged (shamelessly, of course) at Stop The ACLU and Point Five.

Less around and sorta about…

A few things that managed to catch my eye (mostly cos good folk slapped me upside the head with a cluebat) in the last day or so:

Well, Diane’s playing along with the “tag yourself: you’re it” game of “I wish I… ” Here’s Star Light, Star Bright I wish I hadn’t dropped into “third world county” just now and read this post because I was planning on just skipping around a few other places, like Sam’s and The Churning and maybe leaving a comment or two…

Peakah’s Provocations has been watching MMPs again… well, it’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it, I suppose: Perverted Justice Part II Dateline NBC followed up on a story on internet predators and how the private group Perverted Justice spends time roping in perverts who stalk the internet for sex with the young.

Committees of Correspondence Democrats will have an “issue agenda” Nancy Pelosi says that the Democrats will have an “issue agenda” for next year’s Congressional elections, but it will not include a position on Iraq. [Yeh… I wonder what that “issue” will be? Which of the Dmoncraps can lie most outrageously?]

Committees of Correspondence also has a link to a great story from Iraq (and as soon as his server’s back up, y’all can read it. :-). And From Iraq, this will make you smile, too.

Get your Carnival of Christmas posts in to Adam’s Blog, folks! The Carnival of Christmas Weekend Open TrackbacksChristmas is the most wonderful time of the year. The reason why is often list in the midst of the current “War on Christmas.” The Carnival of Christmas recognizes that Christmas is the time of Christ’s birth…

Asking for help: freedom folks. A Little Help Please. And, Words of Wisdom from Morgan Freeman Morgan Freeman says the concept of a month dedicated to black history is “ridiculous.” And rolling right along, Iraqis Vote, Lefties Whine

The Florida Masochist does some more masochistic demonstrations (dontcha know, dude that there are no end of bogus excuses? 🙂 Bogus Excuse #3

Diane’s Stuff is flogging the elephant in the dining room: Mandatory Driver’s Testing For Seniors What are your feelings about mandatory driver’s testing for seniors? Should there be a law? How strict should the tests be?

Bloggin’ Outloud proves that downright weird is in his bag of tricks: Friday Funny Stuff & Open Posts Open post at Bloggin’ Outloud – on one condition (well, you know, have some fun): Vote on your favorite funny. Includes “Smack the Penguin” and “Redneck Hunting Dogs.”

(Is this a habitual thing? 🙂

I don’t know how I found this site, but those of y’all who live in remote rural areas might find it useful on some level: How to Hunt Deer With a Mountaint Howitzer. I shudder to think what deer season would be like around here if some Third World Countyâ„¢ folks hear of this. Already the woods have too many nutcases who’ve converted their peashooters to full auto… *sigh* I’d like to put a rack on ’em and set ’em loose in the deerwoods during season…

Flogged (shamelessly, of course) at Stop The ACLU and Point Five.

Santa Claus: the physics

The information I’ve reproduced below is nothing new. It’s been around for fifteen years now, so I’m sure most of y’all have seen it. But if you have tots in the house, now’s the time to decide: when and how do you want them to learn the truth? They’ll find out sometime anyway. Do you want them to look back on all those years you lied to them and learn the cold hard truth that they cannot trust their parents, or would you rather tell them the truth now?

Powered by Castpost

heh

SPY magazine (January, 1990), offered this lil classic gem…

No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seemes logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal anount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison – this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth. 5.353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enourmous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion: If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

Presented for peer review at Blogging’ Outloud, Robinik and Stuck on Stupid.

Santa Claus: the physics

The information I’ve reproduced below is nothing new. It’s been around for fifteen years now, so I’m sure most of y’all have seen it. But if you have tots in the house, now’s the time to decide: when and how do you want them to learn the truth? They’ll find out sometime anyway. Do you want them to look back on all those years you lied to them and learn the cold hard truth that they cannot trust their parents, or would you rather tell them the truth now?

Powered by Castpost

heh

SPY magazine (January, 1990), offered this lil classic gem…

No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seemes logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal anount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison – this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth. 5.353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enourmous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion: If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

Presented for peer review at Blogging’ Outloud, Robinik and Stuck on Stupid.

Santa Claus: the physics

The information I’ve reproduced below is nothing new. It’s been around for fifteen years now, so I’m sure most of y’all have seen it. But if you have tots in the house, now’s the time to decide: when and how do you want them to learn the truth? They’ll find out sometime anyway. Do you want them to look back on all those years you lied to them and learn the cold hard truth that they cannot trust their parents, or would you rather tell them the truth now?

Powered by Castpost

heh

SPY magazine (January, 1990), offered this lil classic gem…

No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to to 15% of the total – 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seemes logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal anount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh – to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison – this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth. 5.353,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enourmous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion: If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s dead now.

Presented for peer review at Blogging’ Outloud, Robinik and Stuck on Stupid.

I wish…

Over at Bou’s, and she says, “If you’re reading this, you’re tagged”…

Man. I already did one blogosphere meme pool game this week!

But, dutiful reader that I am… here ’tis. List three things you wish in this format:

1. Finish the sentence: "I wish I ..." - - Basically, pretend you had up to three wishes to change something about you. A restriction is that [you] cannot wish to change someone else. For example, you can say; "I wish I weighed 30 pounds less." But this wish is not for this meme; "I wish my spouse weighed 30 pounds less."

2. If you are reading this, you are "tagged" with this meme.

OK, here goes:

1.) I wish I were a patient person. *tap, tap, tap, tap* NOW, already! C’mon! *sheesh* I’m not gonna wait all day. Get with it!

2.) I wish I didn’t care if the Mets were in the Series next year. Not that I’m so fond of the Mets, you know, but well, it’d be a sign of the approaching Appocalypse or something. (Even cooler would be if the Met were in the Series. “Did you see that? Did you see that?!? The soprano belted that ball right outa the park with her high “C”!”) Hey! Wish came true already! Yay!!! I don’t care if the Mets (or even the Met) is in the Series next year! Wow! This stuff really works!

3.) I wish I didn’t feel obligated to play these silly games. ZOWEE!!! Another wish come true! Now I can just play ’em cos I want to (cos bloggers who take themselves too seriously to play games are fulla B.S.)

But I’m still waiting on the patience thing. Nah, I’m not. Better things to do than wait around on something like that.

You read this? you’re tagged. but I won’t know about it unless you track back to this post or leave a comment with a link to your “I wish I… ” post, so get with it.

[BTW, see that big blank space over in my left sidebar? It’s where the Ipso Facto Comic blog goes. Typepad is “down” and displaying only archives from a week to ten days ago for Typepad accounts, so… just wait. It’ll be back.]

I wish…

Over at Bou’s, and she says, “If you’re reading this, you’re tagged”…

Man. I already did one blogosphere meme pool game this week!

But, dutiful reader that I am… here ’tis. List three things you wish in this format:

1. Finish the sentence: "I wish I ..." - - Basically, pretend you had up to three wishes to change something about you. A restriction is that [you] cannot wish to change someone else. For example, you can say; "I wish I weighed 30 pounds less." But this wish is not for this meme; "I wish my spouse weighed 30 pounds less."

2. If you are reading this, you are "tagged" with this meme.

OK, here goes:

1.) I wish I were a patient person. *tap, tap, tap, tap* NOW, already! C’mon! *sheesh* I’m not gonna wait all day. Get with it!

2.) I wish I didn’t care if the Mets were in the Series next year. Not that I’m so fond of the Mets, you know, but well, it’d be a sign of the approaching Appocalypse or something. (Even cooler would be if the Met were in the Series. “Did you see that? Did you see that?!? The soprano belted that ball right outa the park with her high “C”!”) Hey! Wish came true already! Yay!!! I don’t care if the Mets (or even the Met) is in the Series next year! Wow! This stuff really works!

3.) I wish I didn’t feel obligated to play these silly games. ZOWEE!!! Another wish come true! Now I can just play ’em cos I want to (cos bloggers who take themselves too seriously to play games are fulla B.S.)

But I’m still waiting on the patience thing. Nah, I’m not. Better things to do than wait around on something like that.

You read this? you’re tagged. but I won’t know about it unless you track back to this post or leave a comment with a link to your “I wish I… ” post, so get with it.

[BTW, see that big blank space over in my left sidebar? It’s where the Ipso Facto Comic blog goes. Typepad is “down” and displaying only archives from a week to ten days ago for Typepad accounts, so… just wait. It’ll be back.]

I wish…

Over at Bou’s, and she says, “If you’re reading this, you’re tagged”…

Man. I already did one blogosphere meme pool game this week!

But, dutiful reader that I am… here ’tis. List three things you wish in this format:

1. Finish the sentence: "I wish I ..." - - Basically, pretend you had up to three wishes to change something about you. A restriction is that [you] cannot wish to change someone else. For example, you can say; "I wish I weighed 30 pounds less." But this wish is not for this meme; "I wish my spouse weighed 30 pounds less."

2. If you are reading this, you are "tagged" with this meme.

OK, here goes:

1.) I wish I were a patient person. *tap, tap, tap, tap* NOW, already! C’mon! *sheesh* I’m not gonna wait all day. Get with it!

2.) I wish I didn’t care if the Mets were in the Series next year. Not that I’m so fond of the Mets, you know, but well, it’d be a sign of the approaching Appocalypse or something. (Even cooler would be if the Met were in the Series. “Did you see that? Did you see that?!? The soprano belted that ball right outa the park with her high “C”!”) Hey! Wish came true already! Yay!!! I don’t care if the Mets (or even the Met) is in the Series next year! Wow! This stuff really works!

3.) I wish I didn’t feel obligated to play these silly games. ZOWEE!!! Another wish come true! Now I can just play ’em cos I want to (cos bloggers who take themselves too seriously to play games are fulla B.S.)

But I’m still waiting on the patience thing. Nah, I’m not. Better things to do than wait around on something like that.

You read this? you’re tagged. but I won’t know about it unless you track back to this post or leave a comment with a link to your “I wish I… ” post, so get with it.

[BTW, see that big blank space over in my left sidebar? It’s where the Ipso Facto Comic blog goes. Typepad is “down” and displaying only archives from a week to ten days ago for Typepad accounts, so… just wait. It’ll be back.]