Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Monday, December 18, 2006
Christmas hypocrisy
In this exclusive excerpt from "Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior," Miss Manners brings her patented wit and unfailing wisdom to Christmas Day and presents.By Judith Martin
Christmas is an important day for everyone to practice hypocrisy. Does that offend you? Miss Manners is so excessively polite that she rarely has the wicked pleasure of offending people, and you must allow her to relish the sensation for a moment before she explains what she means and spoils the effect.
There now. Miss Manners feels quite herself again and is prepared to discuss Christmas behavior with appropriate sobriety. What she means is that Christmas is an excellent time for people to forgo the honest expression of their true feelings and adjust — not to say dissemble — their behavior in order to cater to the feelings of others. Take the difficult matter of midafternoon on Christmas Day. Everyone always feels cross then. This is perfectly understandable. They have been up too early. They have had little rest the night before, either because they have had visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads or because they were trying to put together a vision for someone else, which had some of the parts or the directions missing and should have been put together by the store, which refused to do so.
Some people are cross because they did not get what they wanted, and some are cross because they did and are now tired of it or are feeling postpartum depression. Some people are stiff from sitting in church, and others are stiff from sitting on the floor with the electric trains, and some are both.
Those who have Christmas dinner at night are cross because they are starved, and those who have it at midday are cross because they are overstuffed, and all of them are beginning to wish they had not eaten the candy canes off the tree.
Christmas hypocrisy requires that everyone conceal these feelings and behave kindly and patiently to others. It is especially important on Christmas that children be reinforced in their hypocritical behavior. Children must be taught to express pleasure and surprise when they open presents, concealing their actual assessment of the acquisitions if this is inconsistent with the official emotions. They must be instructed to refrain from making such true statements as "I already have one." And they must be taught the unnatural act of reading the card before opening the package. They must also be forced into another unnatural act, that of sitting down and writing letters of thanks immediately — letters that express enthusiasm and gratitude with the best artifice they can muster in order to make the emotion sound genuine. (This is, incidentally, an excellent midafternoon activity for calming down overexcited children. Their little eyelids will be drooping in boredom in no time, and there will be a merciful moment of quiet in the house.)
Even adults accustomed to faking verbal and written joy often need practice in Christmas hypocrisy. It is not easy to sound convincing when one is expressing a wish to "help." Everyone at a Christmas gathering should be falsely shining with the apparent desire to set the table, pick up the torn wrappings, go for a walk in the snow as far as the garbage can and fix the children's malfunctioning toys. If you do not like the term "hypocrisy," Miss Manners will permit you to call it "doing unto others."
Merry Christmas Everyone!
Christmas is an important day for everyone to practice hypocrisy. Does that offend you? Miss Manners is so excessively polite that she rarely has the wicked pleasure of offending people, and you must allow her to relish the sensation for a moment before she explains what she means and spoils the effect.
There now. Miss Manners feels quite herself again and is prepared to discuss Christmas behavior with appropriate sobriety. What she means is that Christmas is an excellent time for people to forgo the honest expression of their true feelings and adjust — not to say dissemble — their behavior in order to cater to the feelings of others. Take the difficult matter of midafternoon on Christmas Day. Everyone always feels cross then. This is perfectly understandable. They have been up too early. They have had little rest the night before, either because they have had visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads or because they were trying to put together a vision for someone else, which had some of the parts or the directions missing and should have been put together by the store, which refused to do so.
Some people are cross because they did not get what they wanted, and some are cross because they did and are now tired of it or are feeling postpartum depression. Some people are stiff from sitting in church, and others are stiff from sitting on the floor with the electric trains, and some are both.
Those who have Christmas dinner at night are cross because they are starved, and those who have it at midday are cross because they are overstuffed, and all of them are beginning to wish they had not eaten the candy canes off the tree.
Christmas hypocrisy requires that everyone conceal these feelings and behave kindly and patiently to others. It is especially important on Christmas that children be reinforced in their hypocritical behavior. Children must be taught to express pleasure and surprise when they open presents, concealing their actual assessment of the acquisitions if this is inconsistent with the official emotions. They must be instructed to refrain from making such true statements as "I already have one." And they must be taught the unnatural act of reading the card before opening the package. They must also be forced into another unnatural act, that of sitting down and writing letters of thanks immediately — letters that express enthusiasm and gratitude with the best artifice they can muster in order to make the emotion sound genuine. (This is, incidentally, an excellent midafternoon activity for calming down overexcited children. Their little eyelids will be drooping in boredom in no time, and there will be a merciful moment of quiet in the house.)
Even adults accustomed to faking verbal and written joy often need practice in Christmas hypocrisy. It is not easy to sound convincing when one is expressing a wish to "help." Everyone at a Christmas gathering should be falsely shining with the apparent desire to set the table, pick up the torn wrappings, go for a walk in the snow as far as the garbage can and fix the children's malfunctioning toys. If you do not like the term "hypocrisy," Miss Manners will permit you to call it "doing unto others."
Merry Christmas Everyone!
CHRISTMAS - FOOD FOR THOUGHT
No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT 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. This is to say that for each Christian 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 0.78 miles per household, a total trip of 71.604 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding 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, 15 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 300 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 214,200 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 spacecraft's re-entering 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.
In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's been vaporized by now!
Now, in Spain, we have the Three Kings or the Three Wise Men who are responsible for
distributing presents and it seems they are a lot better organized than Father Christmas as they also have pages who help them. As most people live in flats, all the kings have to do is to jump off their camels and walk into the flat either via the window or the balcony hence cutting down the time spent in each household. All children receive something from them, good kids get what they want (x-boxes, playstations, computers etc... gone are the days when all they wanted was a doll or a car) BUT beware if you have been a naughty child, for then all you receive is a piece of coal, yep, black coal! (It's actually sweet sugar candy). Just as Father Christmas, every household leaves a snack for the kings and the camels. I have upheld this tradition by leaving them booze and a carrot. Now, if everyone does the same, we either have very drunk kings and overweight camels, or kings who actually throw away what you leave them, which would make them terribly ungrateful!
By the way, the kings have just 8 earth hours to deliver the presents, but we all know that THEY can stop time, hence they can deliver them at their leisure and NOT at the speed of sound like Father Christmas!
my cat
Christmas curiosityChristmas is just around the corner, and many people will give in to children's whims and buy a pet. Because of this, I feel I must tell them that pets are living beings, and the playful puppy or the pretty kitten are going to grow and they may not be so cute anymore. Having a pet means responsibilities, and it means having to spend money at the vet's, proper nourishment, exercise, and lots of care and loving attention. They have to be trained and you have to expect damage in the house until they learn. You can expect them to live for about 10 years give or take and they will be totally dependent upon you for their care.
These animals are not things you can just abandon in spring simply because your kids have got bored with them, so think twice before you say yes to a pet at home.
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