I think this Bumble bobblehead (“The Abominable” from Rupolph) qualifies as the best bobblehead ever.

Rudolph is my favorite Christmas special.  Aren’t we all kind of misfits?

Honorable mention goes to the Grinch, Elf, and The Santa Clause.  Never got into A Christmas Story.  What’s your favorite?

-Nick

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1. Happy and healthy family
2. Great friends
3. Still self-employed
4. Not commuting to Nevada
5. Passport stamps, current and future
6. Huskies going bowling
7. Snow in the mountains
8. Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoe shoppers
9. Blog readers

Happy Thanksgiving!  What are you thankful for this year?

-Nick

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Today is National Margarita Day.  You can look it up.

Apparently it’s also George Washington’s birthday.  I’m sure he’d be proud.

-Nick

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Is Valentine’s Day just a corporate-created “holiday” designed to part us from money?

No.  While Hallmark has certainly capitalized on the popular holiday, Valentine’s traditions long predate the company’s 1910 founding.

The origins of Valentine’s Day can be traced all the way back to the Roman empire, when two Christian priests named Valentine were martyred.  Both were apparently killed on or around February 14th.

Still, there was no connection between these martyrs and romantic love worthy of a holiday.  So people starting mixing their stories and traditions.  A thousand years after his death, Saint Valentine was a much more romantic figure than we was in real life.  According to wikipedia:

“Since Legenda Aurea still provided no connections whatsoever with sentimental love, appropriate lore has been embroidered in modern times to portray Valentine as a priest who refused an unattested law attributed to Roman Emperor Claudius II, allegedly ordering that young men remain single. The Emperor supposedly did this to grow his army, believing that married men did not make for good soldiers. The priest Valentine, however, secretly performed marriage ceremonies for young men. When Claudius found out about this, he had Valentine arrested and thrown in jail.

There is an additional modern embellishment to The Golden Legend, provided by American Greetings to History.com, and widely repeated despite having no historical basis whatsoever. On the evening before Valentine was to be executed, he would have written the first “valentine” card himself, addressed to a young girl variously identified as his beloved, as the jailer’s daughter whom he had befriended and healed, or both. It was a note that read “From your Valentine.”

That story, combined with existing Greek and Roman February holidays dedicated to love and fertility, meshed together to form our Valentine’s Day tradition.

The earliest known Valentine’s “card” was a 15th century poem written by Charles, the Duke of Orleans, to his wife.  From then on, handwritten cards with romantic verses became very popular until the age of mass-production and the industrial revolution.

After that, companies like Hallmark were well-positioned to take advantage of the then-longstanding Valentine’s tradition.  But Hallmark’s relationship to the commercialization of Valentine’s Day is no different than the Christmas-tree farmer’s relationship to Christmas; they didn’t invent the holiday, but are happy to sell to those who celebrate it.

-Nick

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As always, great to see all the family and friends.  It was a busy, busy week.

Mochi had a playdate with his new buddy Manju, but he was kind of antisocial.

I got to go skiing with Chris and dad.  Fresh snow at Alpental!

We also exchanged lots of beer.

We hit up the Harry Potter exhibit at the Science Center and stuck around to explore the rest.  There was this whole new section of brainteaser puzzles.  It was fun except there were no hints for when you’d get stuck… and I got stuck a lot.  It ended up making my brain hurt, but it felt successful when you got it.  Bryn and Stace got tied up in a knot for a really long time but refused to give up.

The pup was also gifted some antlers that really must have weighed him down!

We had to cut our trip short to head back to California to see the Huskies in the Holiday Bowl.

-Nick

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A retelling of the nativity for the digital age:

I like the “Avoid Romans” checkbox and the wise men shopping at Amazon!

And the low-tech atheist response: a billboard in New Jersey.  Come on guys, I expect better!

Merry Christmas all.

-Nick

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Thanks Simon for sending this.  The story apparently appeared in a 1990 issue of Spy Magazine, and is originally attributed to Richard Waller.

No known species of reindeer can fly.  There are, however, 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified.  While most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer.

There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world.  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 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 seems logical), this works out to 822.6 visits per second.  For each 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 poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 35 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 1000 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 714,200 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.

353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as a spacecraft reentering 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.

Conclusion: if there was a Santa, he’s dead now.

-Nick

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It’s been a rough year for the biz, which has at times turned me into a giant grumpy stress-ball.  Wish I could blame the economy, but it’s almost entirely my fault.  I’m thankful for my amazing community of family and friends who have helped me through it and brightened each day.

-Nick

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The history nerd in me thought this was funny.

-Nick

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It’s a holiday everyone can enjoy!

And you can get a free short stack at IHOP.  Donations encouraged to support local children’s hospitals.

-Nick

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