Life in the Fast Lane

Christmas — the day many of us go to great lengths to spend time with our loved ones near and far to celebrate the birth of Christ and to be thankful. Life in the Fast Lane wishes all of our readers a heart-felt Merry Christmas, especially those alone on this day.

Merry Christmas Mr. Bean – Part 1

Merry Christmas Mr. Bean – Part 2

Merry Christmas Mr. Bean – Part 3

Merry Christmas Mr. Bean – Part 4

Christmas Lights Gone Wild

This display was the work of Carson Williams, a Mason, Ohio, electrical engineer who spent about three hours sequencing the 88 Light-O-Rama channels that controlled the 16,000 Christmas lights in his annual holiday lighting spectacular for Christmas 2004. His 2005 display included more than 25,000 lights that he spent nearly 2 months and $10,000 to hook up.

Snoopy vs. The Red Baron — Snoopy’s Christmas

Little Drummer Boy — David Bowie & Bing Crosby

New Home for Santa?
In an effort to revive its shaky economy, the tiny ex-Soviet state of Kyrgyzstan has declared itself the new home of Santa Claus — citing Swedish engineering firm that determined the ideal spot for Santa’s global toy delivery center — and named a mountain peak after Santa, to join Mounts Lenin, and Yeltsin, declaring 2008 “The Year of Santa Claus.”

Photo Reuters

“Its slogan will be “Kyrgyzstan is the land of Santa Clauses.” said Kyrgyz tourism authority spokeswoman Nurkhon Tajibayeva.

Santa Claus has long been known to live at the North Pole. But if he were to relocate in Central Asia and started westwards on his traditional Christmas Eve trips, Kyrgyz officials said he would have a more efficient delivery route.

“He can eliminate time-consuming detours and avoid subjecting his reindeer to undue strain.” said engineering consultants at Stockholm-based Sweco, who used geography and demographics in their research.

A group of professional mountain climbers will pitch the country’s flag at the newly renamed peak, while a world festival of Santas is planned for the capital’s main square.

Santa on the Radar — 1 Billion to Log On for Progress Tracking
An expected 1 billion people around the world were expected to log on to track Santa’s progress after he left the North Pole to begin his epic delivery of presents — tracked closely by radar and satellite and jet fighters following the sleigh.

Photo DBDragon

The people behind the website “Norad Tracks Santa” are America’s top-secret radar defense experts, run by the North American Aerospace Defense Command. For only 1 night a year, the organization set up to defend the US from incoming missiles sets its sights to track Santa.

When Santa Claus left the North Pole to begin his epic delivery, he was tracked closely by radar and satellite, and by jet fighters following the sleigh. And this Christmas Eve they expected a billion hits as the website showed his progress around the world in real time. This year the images from Santa Cams are in 3D thanks to a link-up with Google.

90 year old Harry Shoup was to follow the reindeer all the way — the man who started all this 52 years ago after taking a very strange phone call. Harry recalls the story, “Oh my goodness, I’ll never forget it.” On December 24th 1955, he was colonel in charge of a massive radar system built to give the US early warning of the Soviet. The Cold War was at its height. The Pentagon was building nuclear missiles, and the Kremlin was doing the same. From his base in Colorado Springs, in front of a massive 3-storey map of the world, Colonel Shoup was keeping watch for Communist bombers.

“The red phone rang.” he said. That never happened, and it meant serious trouble. The red phone was the emergency line — it could only be his commander calling, or the Pentagon. “I picked it up and I said, ‘Yes, sir? This is Colonel Shoup.’”

The hesitant voice of a small boy said, “Are you really Santa Claus?”

Shoup was taken aback. “I looked around my staff and I thought, ‘Somebody’s playing a joke on me. This isn’t funny.’ I said, ‘Would you repeat that, please?” The boy asked again if he was Santa Claus. “I knew then that there was some screw-up on the phones.”

A local Sears Roebuck store had advertised a Santa line, but the wrong phone number had been published. Instead of talking to a Sears volunteer, the child got through to one of the most important lines in America.

Shoup’s granddaughter Carrie Farrell, working for Google in California said, “My grandfather was shocked at first.”

The colonel said he wasn’t Santa and asked to speak to the boy’s mother, and explained what had happened to her. When the boy was told he had actually reached the radar command centre, he asked a question that would have massive implications for the base and for millions of children in the half-century to come. “Do you know where Santa is then?”

Colonel Shoup, laughing by now, decided to play along, and spoke to the men who were mapping data on to the huge picture of the world. “They were able to find out where Santa was on the radar.” says Carrie Farrell. Really? “Oh sure.” says the 36 year old new technology expert, deadpan. “Yeah.”

The red phone rang countless times that night, and with each call, the radar team got more excited about this diversion from their ultra-serious work. “Everyone there went along with it.” said Carrie. The bosses didn’t at first – until Col. Shoup convinced them it was a very good public relations tool for their new defense technology. “The guy comes off as being a bit hard on the outside, but he realized this was a chance for them to stand for something good.”

The next Christmas the military advertised its capability to tell everyone where Santa was. Over the years a call to Norad became a part of the build-up to Christmas for many children in the US, but it remained an American secret until an internet version was launched in 1998.

Photo Getty Images

The viewers have grown rapidly in recent years.. Last year the website – now in 5 languages – received 941 million hits from 210 countries. The phones were manned by 750 volunteers who took 65,000 calls and answered 96,000 emails. “My grandfather really does realize the scale of what this has become.” says Carrie Farrell. “He loves his legacy.”

Carrie, who knew Christmas Eve as the time for Grandpa’s ritual said, “It was a family occasion with my grandfather at the helm. We would all sit there and he would tell us the story of Santa Claus, and his own personal story involving Santa.”

Then he would get on the phone to the base commander. “We got the inside track. There was one set of information that was given to the public, but we got a little bit more information. When he told us we had to go to bed right away or Santa wouldn’t come, we did as we were told, because we knew he knew where Santa was.”

Working for Google since 2001, surprisingly, the link-up with Norad wasn’t her idea, but came from an engineer who got to spend 20% of their time on personal projects. “I hadn’t told too many people about my grandfather until I heard about that.”

This year Norad used the Google Earth application which allows users to zoom in on a realistic landscape anywhere in the world using satellite photographs and overlaid with information, which included Santa’s sleigh as it moves through the sky.

Santa’s route changes year to year, but always involves starting after sunset somewhere around New Zealand. Traditions vary — in Argentina, Sweden and Germany, the presents have to arrive on Christmas Eve. That makes for a complicated journey, but by flying west from the Antipodes, Santa can pass through different time zones and give himself at least 24 hours to make the deliveries to an estimated 75 million homes.

Santa waves to the crowd at a hospital. Photo Skasper

Many theories abound how he makes it all happen. Skeptics say you would need 214,200 flying reindeer travelling at 650 miles per second, which would cause them to burn up in the sky like a meteorite. But astrophysicist Knut Jorgen Roeed Odegaard from Norway says the heat should be no problem if Santa has “an ion-shield of charged particles, held together by a magnetic field, surrounding the sleigh.”

Dr. Larry Silverberg is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. He says Santa is a super-scientist who travels in a “relativity cloud” that makes the rest of the world appear frozen in a moment and gives him all the time he needs.

“Based on his advanced knowledge of the theory of relativity, Santa recognizes that time can be stretched like a rubber band, that space can be squeezed like an orange and that light can be bent.” says Dr Silverberg. “Relativity clouds are controllable domains — rips in time — that allow him months to deliver presents while only a few minutes pass on Earth. The presents are truly delivered in a wink of an eye.”

As for Norad, it has little time for skeptics. “The fact that Santa Claus is more than 15 centuries old and does not appear to age is our biggest clue that he does not work within time as we know it.”

Norad tracked Santa using 47 radar installations along the northern border of North America, and orbiting satellites that use infra-red to detect launched missiles – or Rudolph’s glowing nose. There are also Santa Cam digital cameras at key locations around the world, and Canadian CF-18 fighters to escort the sleigh through North American airspace.

Sources: Yahoo News and The Independent

Related stories:
The Night Before Christmas

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