According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, while both male and female reindeer grow antlers in the summer each year, male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December.
Female reindeer retain their antlers till after they give birth in the spring; therefore, according to every historical rendition depicting Santa’s reindeer–every single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen–had to be a girl.
Kimo is a bus driver for the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority. One day Kimo is headed to work on his bus route, when he runs across a delivery van stranded at the side of the road. The van driver works for the Happy Hollow Park and Zoo. He pleads with Kimo to do him a favor.
He offers a $100 bill to Kimo to help him deliver a truckload of penguins to the zoo, because they needed to be there within the hour. Agreeing, Kimo proceeds to load two dozen penguins onto his bus. Then, off they drive towards the zoo.
An hour later, the delivery driver gets his van fixed and heads off to the zoo to catch up with his delivery. As he’s driving down the road, he see’s Kimo and the busload of penguins heading in the opposite direction. He turns his van around and chases in pursuit. He finally catches up to the bus and pulls over Kimo on the side of the road. In an irate voice he asks, “Hey, Kimo. I thought I gave you a $100 dollars to go and take the penguins to the zoo for me?”
“Calm down,” Kimo says. “I took the penguins to the zoo. We had change left over, so now I’m taking them to the movies!”
Note: the links for “penguins” have penguin information or webcams. The links for “zoos” include places around the world to see penguins.
Ole and Lena’s bull took sick and died, so they needed to go to the auction to buy a new one. Ole had to get the crops in and couldn’t leave the farm, so Lena took the Altamont Corridor Express to Escalon to buy a bull. If she was successful, she would take the train back to the farm, then she and Ole would go to town with the truck to pick up their newly purchased bull.
The bidding was furious at the livestock auction, and Lena found herself bidding on the last remaining bull. It took everything she had but ten cents, but she was finally the successful bidder.
Unfortunately, the train home was fifty cents. “Please, Mr. Conductor, couldn’t you make an exception just once?” pleaded Lena. “Sorry lady,” he replied, “but you can send your husband a telegram to tell him your problem. The office is just down the street.”
At the Telegraph office, Lena asked, “Mister, how many words can I send to my husband for a dime?” “It’s ten cents a word,” the clerk answered. Lena pondered her dilemma, then finally said, “OK, here’s da message:
FROM: laocoon@doomgloom.edu
TO: Trojan Army Listserv < Trojans-L@troy.org >
RE: WARNING!! BEWARE GREEKS BEARING GIFTS!
Hey Hector,
This was forwarded to me by Cassandra–it looks legit. Please distribute to Priam, Hecuba, and your 99 siblings.
Thanks,
Laocoon
WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!
IF YOU RECEIVE A GIFT IN THE SHAPE OF A LARGE WOODEN HORSE DO NOT DOWNLOAD IT!!!! It is EXTREMELY DESTRUCTIVE and will overwrite your ENTIRE CITY!
The “gift” is disguised as a large wooden horse about two stories tall. It tends to show up outside the city gates and appears to be abandoned.
DO NOT let it through the gates! It contains hardware that is incompatible with Trojan programming, including a crowd of heavily armed Greek warriors that will destroy your army, sack your town, and kill your women and children. If you have already received such a gift, DO NOT OPEN IT! Take it back out of the city unopened and set fire to it by the beach.
FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!
Poseidon
FROM: hector@studmuffin.com
TO: laocoon@doomgloom.edu
CC: priam@timeo.danaos.et.dona.ferentis.gr
RE: Greeks bearing gifts
Laocoon,
I hate to break it to you, but this is one of the oldest hoaxes there is.
I’ve seen variants on this warning come through on other listservs, one involving some kind of fruit that was supposed to kill the people who ate it and one having to do with something called the “Midas Touch.”
Here are a few tipoffs that this is a hoax:
1) This “Forward this message to everyone you know” crap. If it were really meant as a warning about the Greek army, why tell anyone to post it to the Phoenicians, Sumerians, and Cretans?
2) Use of exclamation points. Always a giveaway.
3) It’s signed “from Poseidon.” Granted he’s had his problems with Odysseus but he’s one of their guys, isn’t he? Besides, the lack of a real header with a detailed address makes me suspicious.
4) Technically speaking, there is no way for a horse to overwrite your entire city. A horse is just an animal, after all.
Next time you get a message like this, just delete it. I appreciate your concern, but once you’ve been around the block a couple times you’ll realize how annoying this kind of stuff is.
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. But it is estimated that 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.
2) 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 15% of the total 378 million according to the 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.
3) 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 seems 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, 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, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
4) 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 amount, 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 traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft 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.
Physics Carols O Gravity, O Gravity, All Newton’s theories crowning, Where e’er we be, land, air, or sea, We’re subject to your “downing”
Milpitas community wisdom says, “When you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.” But in Milpitas businesses, the city government and (sometimes) our schools often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:
Buying a stronger whip.
Changing riders.
Saying things like, “This is the way we have always ridden this horse.”
Appointing a committee to study the horse.
Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
Comparing the state of dead horses in today’s environment vs. in history.
Changing the requirements, declaring, “This horse is not dead.”
Hiring contractors to ride the dead horse.
Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
Declaring that “No horse is too dead to beat.”
Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
Funding a study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
Purchasing a product to make dead horses run faster.
Declaring the horse is “better, faster and cheaper dead.”
Forming a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
Revisiting the performance requirements for horses.
Saying this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
