Santa is one very fast, fat man

Other things to occupy your mind with other than COVID-19 - Santa stretches time like a rubber band, in order to deliver all the gifts in one night.



According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), there are 2,106 million children under age 18 in the world. If we assume that each household has in average 2.5 children, Santa would have to make 842 million stops on Christmas Eve, traveling 221 million miles. Given the different time zones, Santa has 36 hours to deliver gifts, therefore his average speed would be approximately 650 miles per second. It is less than the speed of light (therefore, it’s, theoretically, doable but still quite hard for a chubby old man).


December 18, 1957 -
David Lean's epic glimpse into the insanity of war, The Bridge on the River Kwai, premiered in the US on this date.



Prior to casting Alec Guinness, producer Sam Spiegel tried to persuade Spencer Tracy to play the part of Colonel Nicholson. Tracy had read the book and told Spiegel emphatically that the part must be played by an Englishman.


December 18, 1966 -
Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas aired for the first time on CBS on this date.



Thurl Ravenscroft received no screen credit for his singing, an oversight Dr. Seuss attempted to rectify by sending letters to every major columnist in America identifying Ravenscroft as the singer on You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch. He is also part of the chorus on the other two songs.


December 18, 1966 -
The Pink Panther cartoon series premiered with the episode titled The Pink Blueprint on this date



The Pink Panther character, created for the animated opening credits of The Pink Panther movie, was so popular that this short was produced as a starring vehicle for the character. The short marks the only time a studio has won an Oscar with its first cartoon release.


December 18, 1969 -
The sixth film in the James Bond film series, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, starring George Lazenby, Telly Savalis, and Diana Riggs, premiered in the US on this date.



According to George Lazenby, he and a crew member played a prank on Angela Scoular (Ruby), the Bond Girl who writes her room number on the inside of James Bond's bare thigh. The crew member warmed a sausage, and they put it under Bond's kilt. When Scoular puts her hand under the kilt, she is ever the professional and hardly reacts.


December 18, 1970 -
The cult classic western, El Topo (The Mole), directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky and starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, and Mara Lorenzio premiered in the US on this date.



The title of the movie and the main character's name are a metaphor of the underground cinema in the sixties. The mole digs holes so as to emerge from the underground to the surface. This was happening with some low-budget movies that quickly gained mainstream popularity.


December 18, 1987 -
The sleeper hit romantic comedy, Moonstruck, directed by Norman Jewison, written by John Patrick Shanley, and starring Danny Aiello, Nicolas Cage, Vincent Gardenia, Olympia Dukakis and, oh yea, Cher, premiered in the US on this date. (This is a big favorite in our house.)



Norman Jewison has stated that the climactic kitchen sequence was the most difficult scene that he ever shot in his career. The crew were dismissed and Jewison rehearsed with the cast for some time, using a stage production approach. Only after the actors perfected their timing did he decide where to put the camera.


December 18, 1989 -
An I Love Lucy Christmas episode, nicknamed "The Lost Episode" because it was not included in the syndication package, was shown for first time in over 30 years on this date.



The Christmas episode was not included in the usual syndication package because of its holiday theme and because it mostly consists of flashbacks to previous episodes.


December 18, 1998 -
Warner Brothers releases the romantic film You've Got Mail (A remake of the 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner,) directed by Nora Ephron and starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, on this date.



The scene where Joe accidentally closes the door of Kathleen's shop on the balloons was unscripted. Tom Hanks actually did that, and ad libbed the line, "Good thing it wasn't the fish." Nora Ephron thought it was so funny that she kept it in.


December 18, 2009 -
Twentieth Century Fox began printing money when James Cameron's Avatar, starring Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana, was released on this date.



James Cameron originally planned to have the film completed for release in 1999. At the time, the special effects he wanted increased the budget to $400 million. No studio would fund the film, and it was shelved for eight years.


Genes, do not a family make (parts 1 & 2)


Today in History:
December 18, 1626 -
Christina (Kristina), Queen of Sweden, later known as Maria Christina Alexandra, Minerva of the North, Protectress of the Jews at Rome and sometimes Count Dohna, was born on this date. Like most royalty and some presidents, Christina did not have to carry money, a passport or consistently spell her name the same way.

Kristina's father, King Gustav II Adolf, wanted a boy and decreed she be given the best education possible. Christina's mother, Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg, an early proponent of Jewish guilt as a tool for childhood rearing, repeatedly told Kristina about the 'horrors' of sex and childbirth. These factors may have prejudiced Christina against the prospect of having to produce an heir to the throne and convinced her to adopt the dress and manner of a man.

True story: in the winter of 1650 the magnificent Queen Kristina of Sweden summoned Rene Descartes to Stockholm to tutor her in philosophy. With his trademark optimism ("I think warm, therefore I am not cold"), he accepted the invitation and hurried up from Paris. Not long after his arrival, he died of pneumonia. But I digress ...



Queen Kristina, or the Girl King as she liked to be known, (as opposed to King Ludwig of Bavaria the Boy Queen, but that's another story) chose the rather shockingly ungodly motto (probably sarcastically) that "Wisdom is the Prop of the Realm." She abdicated in 1654 converted to Catholicism and dashed around Europe on a white horse, wearing men's clothing and studying philosophy and sleeping with men and women. She is one of the only few women buried within St. Peter's Basilica.



In the 1930s, she was portrayed by Greta Garbo in the film Queen Christina. Garbo basically modeled her later life on this character except for the converting thing.


Liberty and Prosperity

New Jersey was the third state admitted to the Union, on this date in 1787. It was the first state to sign the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. It derives its name from the isle of Jersey, just off England's shore (and also near Britain).

The official state bird of New Jersey is the American Goldfinch.

The state bug is the honey bee (apis mellifera).



The state tree is the red oak (Quercus borealis maxima). The state flower is the common meadow violet (Viola sororia). The state shell is the knobbed whelk, also known as the conch shell (Busycon carica gmelin). The state fish is the brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis), the state animal is the horse (Equus caballus),

and the state dinosaur is the Hadrosaurus (Hadrosaurus foulkii).

The eggplant is not the official vegetable of New Jersey because it's not a vegetable. It's a fruit - berry, actually - and New Jersey claims to produce two-thirds of all the eggplant in the world. (It's a bogus claim, and one that leaves me wondering not so much about the world eggplant situation, but the mindset of whoever thought it would enhance New Jersey's reputation if people thought it was the world's leading producer of eggplant. I mean, eggplant?)

Blueberries became the official berry of New Jersey in 2004. Before that, many thought it was almost certainly the eggplant, which would predictably cause great confusion among persons accustomed to putting berries in their cereal.

New Jersey has a population of 8.48 million on 7,417 square miles of land. It's the fifth smallest state in the country. With 1,134 people per square mile, it's the densest state in the nation. The relative density of New Jersey should come as no surprise to anyone who's ever driven behind a car with Jersey plates.

And we didn't have to mention the president's golf course.


December 18, 1839 -
In New York City, John Draper makes a daguerreotype of the Moon,

becoming the first person in the U.S. to photograph a celestial body.


December 18, 1892 -
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite publicly premiered in Saint Petersburg, Russia, at the Maryinsky Theater on this date.



The first performance of The Nutcracker was not deemed a success. The reaction to the dancers themselves was ambivalent. Reception was better for Tchaikovsky's score.


December 18, 1940 -
Hitler issued formal orders to the German armed forces to begin the detailed planning for the invasion of Russia, known as Operation Barbarossa.



On the same day Hitler gave a speech to officer cadets which outlined his philosophy, central to which was his belief that the German people needed more ‘living space’ or ‘Lebensraum’:

Whatever the military arguments around the invasion of Russia it was the perceived need to seize more ‘Lebensraum’, combined with his long standing, deep seated hatred of ‘Bolshevism’ that lay as the prime motivator behind the decision to launch Barbarossa.

(I'm not clear if this will be on the test.)


December 18, 1965 -
Gemini VII splashes down in the western Atlantic Ocean with command pilot Frank Borman and pilot Jim Lovell Jr. on board.



The mission was launched on December 4 for the purpose of physiological testing and spacecraft performance evaluations.


Before you go - This is the ten year anniversary of the passing of the the singer Kirsty MacColl. I can think of no better remembrance of her than playing this holiday classic.





After their second album Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, The Pogues wanted to release a Christmas single. Instead of a cover song, lead singer Shane MacGowan and banjo player Jem Finer decided to write one themselves. The first attempts to record this were as a duet with MacGowan and Pogues bass player Cait O'Riordan. They didn't have the song ready for a Christmas single, so they recorded it for their third album, If I Should Fall From Grace With God, which was produced by Steve Lillywhite. Lillywhite took tapes home and had his wife, Kirsty MacColl record a scratch vocal, but her voice was so good that they decided to keep it.


And so it goes

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