Light Friday: Heaven on eBay, Pinched Grinch, Mashed Artichokes…

by Mike Devlin | December 16th, 2005

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…a haunted 1992 Buick, a song for engineers, Santa Claus: An Engineer’s Perspective, and so much more in this week’s exclusive Getting-Close-to-Christmas Edition of Light Friday.

Light Friday: Bird Stories, Car Stories, eBay Find of the Week…

Light Friday: Bikini Fridays and other Odd Office-Related Requests

Barbara Walters and the eBay Find of the Week

Coming up on Tuesday (December 20, 9:00 EST; check your local listings) is an ABC News special broadcast in which Barbara Walters “…takes viewers on a journey around the world — to India, Israel, and throughout the United States. She interviews people of different religious and scientific beliefs, each with strong opinions about the afterlife. They discuss their visions of heaven, what they believe happens to the body, and why it is important to believe in heaven.”

Maybe Barbara should’ve just looked on eBay. This week’s Ebay Find of the Week is from a licensed and practicing nurse in Kihei, Hawaii, who claims to know exactly where Heaven is — for a starting bid of only $25,000. Oh, and the seller — trustworthy and with excellent references — also has the cure for cancer and knows the way to achieve world peace. Seems a reasonable sum, considering.

Runners-up for this week’s eBay Find of the Week include a 1992 Buick haunted by Dale Earnhardt Sr. ($1,500 starting bid), a replica Area 51/Groom Lake Vehicle Access Pass (with a starting bid of a paltry 14 grand), and the World’s Largest Popcorn Popper (starting at a measly $4K). Hmm. Maybe we can pool our resources and find out the way to Heaven, and escape to a hardened bunker within Area 51 driving a haunted Buick towing the World’s Largest Popcorn Popper. “Oh, the weather outside is frightful…”

First, The Grinch Stole Christmas. Then, Someone Stole the Grinch.

These days, you just can’t leave an 8-foot-tall inflatable Grinch out in front of your house in Mandan, North Dakota. Lori Ihli and Mike Moszer awoke this past Sunday morn, only to discover that someone pinched their Grinch. The $60 Grinch was staked down with cords and attached to a fan to keep it inflated. According to the article, “Moszer also said it has a zipper on the side, not easy to see, to increase deflation time. ‘Even if you use the zipper, it still takes a good three or four minutes to deflate,’ he said.” The couple left other decorations in the yard, including a confused blow-up bear and a lonely Grinch dog. “I’m not going to take the other decorations down,” Moszer said. “I’m not going to let something like this ruin Christmas.” Way to go, Mo’.

Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Engineers

(Sung to the familiar Willy Nelson tune about Cowboys)

Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be engineers
Don’t let them fix radars for middle-class bucks
Make ‘em be cowboys and bikers and such.

Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be engineers.

They’ll work overtime and they’ll never be home
Not even with someone they love
Engineers ain’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold
They’d rather give you Dolby Surround than diamonds or gold
Palm pilot on belt loop and high water pants
Every day goes the same way
And if you don’t annoy him and he don’t complain
He’ll probably rewire the house.

(Repeat Chorus)

An engineer loves sweaty computer shows and new sci-fi movies
Microprocessors and robots and socks that are white
Them that don’t know him won’t like him and them that do
Sometimes won’t know how to take him
He’s not weird he’s just different and his pride won’t let him
Ever be anything other than right

“What the Hell is Wrong with You? Why Do You Get Strange at Family Gatherings?”

The above quote is from one of this blog’s favorite unholiday holiday films, The Ref. As it turns out, there may be a good reason why people get stressed over Christmas dinner: the food. According to this article at Anonova, “Traditional Christmas fare can lead to repeated changes in blood sugar levels, according to Paul Clayton, president of the forum on food and health at the Royal Society of Medicine. Dr. Clayton and Helen Conn, a food scientist, reviewed the content of the traditional Christmas lunch for a TV programme.” The researchers found that traditional holiday fare is low in vitamins and minerals but has a high glycemic index.

“There are tremendous psychosocial pressures at Christmas. There are people you haven’t seen for ages and maybe don’t want to see, you’re probably suffering from spending a lot of money and on top of it, you have your blood sugar levels all over the place and that is not a good recipe for a calm, relaxing day,” said Dr. Clayton.

The cure? Replace the potatoes with mashed artichokes and include slowly digested foods such as sprouts.

Yeah, right. Pass the stuffing, Doc.

OK, This One’s Been Around…

…but some things are timeless.

Santa Claus: An Engineer’s Perspective

I. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, because “Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions,” this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15 percent of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

II. Santa has about 31 hours’ of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of Earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means 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, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them — Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

IV. Obviously, 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This would dramatically increase reindeer temperature in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake.

The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 lb. Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 lbs. of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.

(But, as mentioned on one site, keep the milk and cookies out just in case.)

Enjoy your weekend…