by phsiii

What’s the skinny?

BillR writes, “Don’t know what “shinny” is”:

Having grown up in southern Ontario, I knew it was a game sorta like hockey, so this is just a cheap pun. Wikipedia adds more detail, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinny

…which is interesting, because I played a lot of street hockey and never once heard it called “shinny”. Nor was raising the ball (never a puck!) forbidden, nor were teams chosen by throwing sticks into a pile. May be a regional thing. Body checking was indeed not part of the game, though of course it happened occasionally.

We’d get out there of a winter’s Saturday morning–the churchyard behind my parents’ house was ideal, except for all those cars on Sundays–and play until it got dark around 4, skipping lunch. Nothing quite like taking a frozen tennis ball to the ear after you’ve been outside in subzero temperatures for several hours: first you feel nothing, then it starts to itch, then burn.

Good times!

by zbicyclist

Out of Warranty

Tomorrow is our 50th wedding anniversary, so indulge your editor.

I clipped this cartoon out of The New Yorker many years ago, and it hung in my home office. I recommend it as good marital advice.

From The New Yorker in December, 1975, back when a stack of back print issues of that magazine sat in the corner of our apartment. Just a bit of a CIDU.

by zbicyclist

Merry Christmas

Just as in TV shows and movies, we don’t see people on the toilet, there must be part of the Santa experience they don’t show.

Santa – the true story

Yes, Fuzzy Math Gurus, there is a Santa Claus.

There are “facts” floating around the internet, “proving” that one Santa just couldn’t do it all, but they fail too see the obvious conclusion — FRANCHISING!  This also explains why “Santa” is often known as “Santa Claus”. 


Let me explain:

1.  Yes, it’s true Santa would need to make 822.6 visits per second, or 2,961,360 per hour.  However, if we assume that there are 740,340 worldwide Santas (the exact number is known only to the Salvation Army), then each Santa has to make 1 visit only every 15 minutes.

2.  Roughly speaking, this is

5 minutes for travel (footnote below)
1 minute for sorting out that house’s gifts
1 minute for chimney diving / lock picking
3 minutes for gift arranging
2 minutes for cookie eating
1 minute for exiting premises and returning to sleigh
2 minutes “slack” time for unforseen events (most commonly, large dogs)
—
15 minutes

3.  “Santa” is, of course, a very sought after title, and the geographic franchises to be the local “Santa” are subject to yearly adjustments due to population shifts.  The changes in the legal paragraphs governing geographic territories in the “Santa” agreement are called “Santa Clauses”, a term which eventually has been commonly applied to “Santas” themselves.

Thanks for the opportunity to clear this up.

Footnote: The travel time has been reduced considerably in this century by the use of “jet sleighs” manufactured by Boeing.  The original model 7 sleigh, in fact, is what gave the Boeing corporation its name.  Elves, noticing how the new sleighs (with, sadly, aluminum reindeer) bounced from housetop to housetop, cheered “Boing! Boing!”, which in an Elvin accent sounded like “Boeing! Boeing!”. 

[Mike Kruger, December 2003]