And so this is Christmas...

Christmas is different things to different people. For example, in Japan, Christmas Day is not a holiday, and it is something more akin to Valentines Day than it is to a religious celebration. Why? I don't know, but in Japan, Christmas is a day on which you go out on a date, and not a day to spend with family. For other people, the 25th is a celebration of the birth of Christ, a day of goodwill towards all men. For me, Christmas is about family, and whenever I spend time with family, it always means that I regress a little.

Anywhere else, I'm a 25 year old go-getter, travelling the world, entertaining law professors and judges with witty comments, and crap like that. When I come home to my parents, though, I always seem to regress into a 5 year old - see the photo to the right. The day I come back to Australia, my mum drives me to the pharmacy to get some cold medication (I brought the bird flu back to Australia... sorry), and the pharmacist asked me if I didn't mind it if the medication caused drowsiness. Mum, in all her comedic genius, piped up "That's alright. He's a teenger. They're always drowsy." She laughed. The pharmacist laughed. The cute sales girl who I had just been flirting with laughed. I was picking the shattered pieces of my pride off the floor. (The point being that I'm not, in fact, a teenager...)

So it turns out that Santa does not, in fact, ride a red sleigh, but rather, a red fire truck. I have the proof below.





The silly bastard drove up and down the street that our house is on, pelting sweets at little kids and innocent bystanders. Mum and I hurried barefoot out onto the sidewalk, dragging the dog on the leash behind us, to see if he'd throw any our way, but seeing as neither one of us looked pre-pubescent, the outlook wasn't good. Luckily, though, the devil-spawn children that live next to us came out just as Santa was about to pass our house, and he threw a bunch of sweets up into the air in our general direction... pandemonium ensued.

Mum had to keep a hold of the dogs collar so that she wouldn't eat the sweets, wrapper and all, and I had to keep a hold of mum's collar so that she wouldn't snap at the little kids who thought it might be ok to venture onto our driveway to get the sweets that came in our direction. I managed to get two and put them in my pocket, and mum got four straight away and growled at the little red haired girl who tried to get at her fifth... long story short - mum got the caramel sweet, and we haven't seen the little girl since. "Christmas is a time of goodwill towards all men", the saying goes, it does not say anything about goodwill towards little girls...

If you get bored this holiday season, why not club some penguins? (I hold the family record at 344.2 - try and beat it) Also, if you don't have any problems with dirty jokes, try listening to a christmas song from Australian comedian, Kevin Bloody Wilson... it is not the kind of song to listen to in polite company, though.

Merry Christmas,

Kallun.

5 days till Xmas

It's just under 1 week to Xmas, and it's hard to feel the yuletide joy when you know that Santa won't be coming to deliver any presents. How do I know that he won't be coming?

Well it's not because he and his reindeers died in the big sand storm out in central Australia in 1988... I since found out that was just a lie told to me by my parents. Why did they tell me this? I don't know, but these are the very same parents that set up our backyard at Easter with a number of booby-traps consisting of carefully placed bricks held up by sticks, hovering over carrots - all with the unholy purpose of squashing the Easter Bunny to death... and if that failed, my uncle had a shotgun loaded and ready to go. But my childhood traumas are different matter...

Also, it's not because I've been a naughty boy this year. Sadly, try as I might, compared to my friends, I'm a bloody angel. I challenge anyone to prove otherwise...

It's because he doesn't know where I'll be for Xmas. I didn't give him the address that I won't be in Tokyo on Xmas day by the deadline for the finalisation of the mailing list (last week I believe). But even if I was in Tokyo, he wouldn't have a hope in hell of finding me - the Toyko street system being as convoluted as it is.

Santa'd have to hook up some new-fangled navigation system to his sleigh... and he'd have to be able to understand Japanese in order to under the directions give to him by the navigation system... and he'd have to make it past the guards of my dormitory... it's not looking likely.

And that was the big surprise. I won't be in Tokyo for Xmas. I'm already back in Australia, to visit my parents... I wasn't going to tell them, I was planning on surprising them. This is why I haven't posted anything in a while, because the only thing I've been doing is getting ready to come back to Australia on sunday. But there was no telling what plans they would've made for the weekend, so it was entirely possible that I'd arrive at the airport and I'd have to catch a taxi... and I'd get home, and there wouldn't be anyone there... they'd be off on some dirty weekend somewhere, and wouldn't return until the next day... and I'd be sitting there, all by myself and no way to get into the house... it was a bit of a gamble.

But I'm back now, and the sun in Australia doesn't quite reach Tasmania, so I'm sitting here, in "summer" in a pair of jeans and 2 jumpers freezing my arse off... it's only moderately warmer than Japan right now.

Santa versus the Laws of Physics

I laugh myself stupid everytime I read this...

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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 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.

Merry Christmas...

Can you tie a bowtie?

I can. I managed to do it on my first try, too. I like to credit my success at the competition to my bowtie. Not only does it make me look dashing (see exhibit #1 below), but it instills fear in the other competitors. Its a tradition for the competitors who represent my university to wear a bowtie at the competition... in honour of our Professor who heads the organising committee. Aunty M thought that I should just've painted a bullseye on my back for all the attention it attracted. Other people at the competition suggested I take it off, but I know that they were just jealous... My other teammates were embarassed by it - I loved it. Not only did I wear it at the competition, but unlike my colleagues, I wore it to and from the event also. Some think I look stupid wearing it - I don't care. Unfortunately, I don't know when I'll be able to wear it again, so it'll probably stay locked away in my cupboard...

------------------------Exhibit #1-----------------------

-------------------The tie is slightly uneven----------------

The long hair is a different matter, though. I didn't get time to get it cut, but I plan on getting it done next week sometime. It'll be much shorter.

The sky has fallen

Something massive happened on Sunday. The world stopped spinning on its axis, fell out of orbit, and has been launched on a trajectory that has us all now hurtling towards the sun to our impending, and very uncomfortable, death...

Or at least that's the impression you would get from listening to my teammates when we found out that we 'lost' the negotiation/arbitration competition. When I say 'lost', I mean '2nd in the country', but I think that my teammates would have preferred not entering the competition at all if we had've known that we'd come second. Me... personally... I think it's a great result, but I get in trouble every time I say that, so I've stopped. Now I just think it everytime I hear another person moan about how the Fates have colluded to ruin their lives. We should've won, but I've moved on.

It's hard, though, when you hear people around the university commenting on the 'loss'. Like today, in my translation class, 2 guys who sit infront of me were wondering where another one of the students was. This student was the leader of my university's teams, and had taken the month off classes in order to prepare for the competition. Nice guy, but devastated that we 'lost'. Anyway, the conversation I overheard went like this:

[Guy 1] "Where is x-san?"
[Guy 2] "Didn't he say in his email that he would be back in classes from December?"
[Guy 1] "Yeah, but that was once the competition was finished, and it finished over the weekend."
[Guy 2] "How did they go?"
[Guy 1] "They totally screwed up our unbeaten record. They lost the competition for us."

At which point, my Japanese language tutor, another student in the class, who had also overheard the conversation and knew that I had participated, was frantically waving his hands from across the room, trying to stop me from starting an argument with them. I wasn't going to start an argument, but I was going to bludgeon them to death with my textbook. My hardcover copy of Gorove, "Developments in Space Law" was heavy enough to take both of them out. I'm glad he stopped me, though, because I would have regretted it - it's impossible to get the blood out of paper...

But its all over now, and my workload has decreased significantly - such that I now have more time to pursue my life ambition... World Domination!