Net Humor

• The good, the bad, & the ugly
• Santa Statistics

The good, the bad, & the ugly
Thanks to Ol'WDB

Good: Your wife is pregnant.
Bad: It's triplets
Ugly: You had a vasectomy five years ago

Good: Your wife's not talking to you
Bad: She wants a divorce
Ugly: She's a lawyer

Good: Your son is finally maturing
Bad: He's involved with the woman next door
Ugly: So are you

Good: Your son studies a lot in his room
Bad: You find several porn movies hidden there.
Ugly: You're in them

Good: You have a date with Adonis
Bad: You can't find your birth control pills
Ugly: Your daughter borrowed them

Good: Your husband understands fashion
Bad: He's a cross-dresser
Ugly: He looks better than you

Good: You give the "birds and bees" talk to your 8 year old daughter
Bad: She keeps interrupting
Ugly: With corrections

Good: The postman's early
Bad: He's wearing fatigues and carrying a shotgun
Ugly: You gave him nothing for Christmas

Good: Your son is dating someone new
Bad: It's another man
Ugly: He's your best friend

Good: Your daughter got a new job
Bad: As a hooker
Ugly: Your coworkers are her best clients
Way Ugly: She makes more money than you

Santa Statistics
Thanks to Roy Reed
rcreedv@juno.com

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

2. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels from 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 1/1000 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 home. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the globe (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 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 pokey 27.4 miles per second. A conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

3. The payload of 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 over 500,000 tons, not counting Santa himself. on land, the conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even if we grant that the "flying" reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, the job couldn't be done with 8 or even 9 of them - Santa would need 360,000 of these mega-reindeer. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, by another 54,000 tons, or roughly 7 times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

4. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintllion 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 5th house on the trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result from accelerating from a dead stop to 650 miles per second in .001 seconds would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

5. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

Merry Christmas!