point a didn't work out so he moved on to point b which was where everybody was hanging out anyways. at first there was a lot of talk about point c and some speculation about d and points after that. but as time went by at point b, this kind of talk made everybody annoyed. i mean, point a hadn't worked out for anyone except for a couple of folks in the past and they just proceeded immediately to point c, supposedly. actually, for most people at point b, if you could gain their confidence, they'd privately voice great doubts a's existence. and the more time that passed at point b, the more suspect even the idea of point a became, not just for us but really for anyone, including those people who left. so we trashed point a because it worked great wonders for us in consoling ourselves about the fact that point b had begun to look increasingly like a permanent home for us. still, there were a few dreamer-types around who refused to come (?) to point b and suddenly insisted on a's possibility as well as c, d, e and on out to z.

but this made everybody feel bad, you know, like they were lacking or failing, so it was tacitly agreed upon that these people were just crazy and since they wouldn't pledge their allegiance to point b it was hard to accommodate them. but some use was eventually made of them, which didn't pay well but seemed to appease them and amuse the rest of us for a while until both of them developed debilitating addictions and died off. then we were sad but not overly so and not for too long because it was these addictions that did them in, not point b or us. i mean, christ, we gave them what they wanted, which was condescending applause for their little dances and songs, pictures and skits, humorous memoirs filled with melodramatic and ridiculous nonsense all about points a and c, which, come on, is useless if you live in the real world. shit! i cant get anything done anyways because people always call me on the telephone saying, "we love you jesse, we love you joseph, we love you helmut, we love you drako, we love you tricky dick, we love you vaughn, ron and even dan even though you cant spell for shit. we don't love you despite the fact that you have no ambition but because you don't and we don't either." i can barely keep my own campaign going with all the freaks and distractions of point b, much less drum up some interest in other people's crap about other places. you cant live in a castle made of sand unless its got a sand bank that dispenses actual paper currency. i mean, the point is we live here in the middle of point b so get with the fucking program. sure, you might ask, "what is the program?" and i wouldn't really be able to tell you but i will really be able to run it. and that's good enough for me because that's the way things are. point a, point c, point d, t, o, m, a, t, o, e - tomatoe

Jesus dies.

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 10 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 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 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. 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.

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

Merry Christmas.