Santa Dead ?

[CrvenBan]

VICAR TELLS CHILDREN SANTA IS DEAD
(BBC News)

Youngsters at a Christmas carol service were devastated when the Reverend Lee Rayfield told them Santa Claus was dead.

Even parents at the service in Maidenhead, Berkshire, were shocked to hear Mr Rayfield say it was scientifically impossible for Father Christmas to deliver so many presents so quickly.

Mr Rayfield has admitted making a serious misjudgment in telling the story to children as young as five.

Mr Rayfield also told the youngsters that reindeer would burst into flames if they had to travel at the speeds necessary.

Mother Sue Smee was at the service with her five-year-old and nine-year-old sons. She said: "Children are not children for very long and it is not his job to tell them things like this. It has left us parents with a lot of explaining to do today."

Mother-of-four Sarah McCreery, also from Maidenhead, said: "It would not have taken a genius to look out at the congregation and realise how young the children were. It was totally inappropriate."

Mr Rayfield, whose comments came from an internet story on how scientific research could dispel the myth of Santa, is now writing a letter to parents apologising for the blunder.

The incident happened at the packed Saint Piran's School carol service at St Mary's Church in Maidenhead on Monday night.



LOL?

[k3vin]

that's just stupid...

[Superted]

Children should be told the truth so they dont get uhurt later on in life and find out their parents have lied to them.

But isn't it amazing.....how one guy came up with this to advertise cola, and this one guy has brought so much happiness to children all aroudn the world.....I wish i could shoot him.

I've just been told cola made 'santa' but was originally from France.

[Epinephrine]

Santa's red suit and big beard (i.e. how we see Santa today) was popularized by ads by Coca-Cola in the 1920s/1930s I believe, but they didn't INVENT him. Just the big red suit.

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There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) 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 household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each. Santa has about 31 hours or 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 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, or course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposed of our calculation), 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--3000 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. 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). 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 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 acceleration 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. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.
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-Epi

[Playback]

well said epine.

[Superted]

father christmas is magic though, i wish i was father christmas....all this childrens homes you'd have free access too...could do so much in one night....thats why he rests for a year, cuz he's shattered from all his "work"