Greed, alas, is eternal

From time immemorial, merchants have relied on a simple axiom when pricing goods or services: Charge whatever the market will bear. Or as the uber-capitalist Ferengi of Star Trek would put it: "Why offer a fair price when you can hoodwink your mark into paying triple?" But all is fair in love and free enterprise. Well, almost all. Yesterday, the pinstriped Ferengi of Verizon Wireless unveiled plans to charge customers a $2 monthly fee for the f**king privilege of paying their bills online or by phone. The blowback by said customers was massive and instantaneous. By sunup, one online petition against the fee had garnered 95,000 signatures, per Reuters. Today, Verizon blinked and quickly scrapped its bid for robber barondom. "We take great care to listen to our customers," bleated Verizon CEO Dan Mead. Suddenly, the mea culpa went, there was no "need to institute the fee at this time." Yessir, nothing like getting your hand caught in your customer's pocket in broad daylight. Clearly, the mobile phone giant forgot Ferengi Rules of Acquisition No. 203: "Customers are like razor-toothed gree-worms. They can be succulent, but sometimes they bite back." Heh.

(Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Come Get Drunk And Cry

New York magazine's Dan Amira gets it exactly right when he writes: "The Most Honest New Year’s Eve Invitation Ever" -- adding: "We have all been to these, and they are exactly like that." Heh. It kinda reminds of that time, years ago, when I ... um, hmm ... never mind. I keep forgetting: what goes on the Internet stays on the Internet, forever.

Shopping While Male (sort of)

Granted, the holiday week between Christmas and New Years is notoriously slow, news-wise. It explains the plethora of zero-calorie articles now choking "the internets." (Slate: "What Will Beyoncé’s Birthing Experience Be Like?") Not to be outdone, the New York Times heaved one of its own notorious "trend" stories into the thin digital gruel. It asked rhetorically: Do Men Shop Like Women? Answer: "Women shop, men stockpile." No kidding. And Mars, like Venus, still orbits the sun, too. For most men, shopping is a chore not a social activity. Anyway, the Times inquired into les habitudes d'achat of a dozen or so Famous Men to support this obvious thesis. Topping the list (inevitably) is Graydon Carter, editor in chief of Vanity Fair (pictured above). The only thing bigger than Graydon's shock of trademark hair is his trademark ego. He regaled the Times with this bit of peacocking:

"A dozen or so years ago, I came across a Paul Smith knit shirt that just sort of hit with me. It was dark blue with long sleeves, and it had a slightly old-fashioned rolled collar. The three buttons in front were small, light blue enameled half-globes with penguins in them. I thought it might be the sort of shirt I could wear for years and went back to the shop on lower Fifth to get a few more, but they had nothing in my size. I have a passing acquaintance with Paul, so I wrote him asking if they could make up a few more like the one I bought and send me the bill. Which in time, they did. I still have the shirts. And I still wear them. And damned if I don’t wish I’d bought even more."

Oh brother. I just loved the line: "I have a passing acquaintance with Paul ..." For those condemned to toil as one of the unwashed "little people," as ex-BP chief Tony Hayward once put it, Paul is Sir Paul Smith, a menswear icon in haute couture circles. I don't know what's in your closet, but none of the buttons on my knit shirts have "penguins" in them. But it must nice to pen a letter to the knighted head chap, order few more "like the one I bought," and have the knits and the bill sent to me at his leisure. Wow. Talk about a three-alarm Poseur Alert.

The 'outhouse' that Newt built

Newt Gingrich -- who clearly can't catch a break -- is now taking some flak about his home in leafy McLean, Va. It's a nice house. According to the New York Times, it's a "5,206-square-foot stone mansionette, built in 1987." It also contains an Ann Kenkel-designed master bathroom with enough wall-to-wall mirrors and chandeliers to make Marie Antoinette blush. Why the Times felt it important to highlight the bathroom decorum (and provide a link to a lavish photo of it) remains a mystery. Upon seeing the bathroom, I was reminded of that scene in Men in Black where Will Smith tries to convince a woman that her recently departed husband wasn't really an alien: "In fact, you know what - you kicked HIM out! And now that he's gone you're gonna go into town ... find some nice dresses, get yourself some shoes, you know, find somewhere, maybe you can get a facial. And, uh, oh - hire a decorator to come in here quick, 'cause... DAMN."

'All I Ever Wanted'

For whatever reason (though it truly doesn't matter), singer Kelly Clarkson endorsed GOP candidate Ron Paul on Twitter last night. Clarkson, as you may recall, careened into our musical lives after becoming American Idol's first winner in 2002. "I love Ron Paul. I liked him a lot during the last republican nomination and no one gave him a chance. If he wins the nomination for the Republican party in 2012 he's got my vote. Too bad he probably won't," she tweeted cheerily. My reaction to this breaking news: Um, Clarkson is a Republican? That explains a lot. Scarier still, the political press considers this news.

OTUS, my man!

Oh, great. ABC News is birthing a new website for politics. They've christened it OTUS (meaning "Of The United States"). The name is a play on POTUS which, among DC reporters, is short for President of the United States. Get it? To further confuse things, OTUS will probably be pronounced as "Otis" -- as in "Otis, my man!" from the infamous scene in Animal House. Anyway, Jake Tapper, the network's top political reporter, "promises that OTUS will flag both the 'urgent and the ridiculous,' offer games, display correspondents’ Twitter feeds, and create a stock market-style ticker that assesses the rising and falling worth of candidates with social media," according to Slate alum Jack Shafer. In other words, Fluff R Us. To regurgitate an old cliche, we need another political website like we need a hole in the head. But, whatever. There's still plenty of room in the media rabbit hole we're all plunging down together.

Is Romney a RINO?

At the start of the year, Steve Benen predicted that the Mitt Romney juggernaut would get derailed once Republicans learned about his past moderate positions on hot button issues. Holding himself to account, the Washington Monthly pundit admits that he "wasn't even close to being correct." But his prediction was not without logic. After all, he writes, "We're talking about a French-speaking Mormon vulture capitalist named Willard, who used to support abortion rights, gay rights, gun control, 'amnesty' for undocumented immigrants, and combating climate change. He distanced himself from Reagan, attended Planned Parenthood fundraisers, and helped create the blueprint for the Affordable Care Act. He supported taxpayer-funded abortions and taxpayer-financed medical care for undocumented immigrants." Romney of course brazenly flip-flopped on all of those issues -- and (as I continue to predict) he is still likely to be the GOP nominee. But therein lies Romney's core problem. The GOP base, in their hearts of hearts, thinks Romney is a RINO (Republican in Name Only). Ironically, the base is probably not wrong.

'Twas two nights before Christmas

JUST BACK from your sixth gift-buying visit to the mall? Still have 100 Christmas cards to sign and mail? Does your home (which you still have to clean before the guests arrive) resemble a Kandahar battlefield? And if you hear one more version of "Jingle Bells" on the radio your head will explode, right?

Welcome to Christmas 2011 and its attendant madness. You can blame Clement Clarke Moore or Henry Livingston Jr. (historians aren't sure which) for your yuletide crisis. On this day in 1823, "A Visit from St. Nicholas" was published anonymously by one of the aforementioned men.

According to Wikipedia, our conception of Santa Claus (from the Dutch "Sinterklaas") and its Christmassy accoutrements sprang from this children's fairy tale. Before the mid-nineteenth century, Christmas customs in America were much simpler: "Church, dinner, dancing, some evergreens, [and] visiting." That's it, according to historian Emma Power. There was nary a Christmas tree, let alone the frenzy of gift buying and exchanging. Williamsburg-based writer Ivor Noël Hume notes, "In truth, most of the panoply of Christmas is the product of pagan tradition, of Victorian sentimentality, and of modern marketing that keeps millions of the world's elves in the manufacturing business." Which explains why the "visions of sugar plums" [i.e., Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3] really dance in your kids' heads today.

OK, time's up. It's T-minus 30 hours to Christmas. Stop reading and get back to work! Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

The real '1984'

It is hard to believe that Orwell's Oceania, the dystopian state that provides the setting for "Nineteen Eighty-Four," could actually exist. But it does. We know it as North Korea (or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea). And it currently imprisons some 25 million souls. The Atlantic's Max Fisher writes:

North Korea is saturated with state propaganda and little else. Outside radio signals are jammed, while radios blasting state messages are installed in every home and impossible to turn off. Fax machines and internet access are both illegal except for a small cadre of trusted elite. Computers must be registered with the police as if they were hunting rifles. Schools double as indoctrination centers; children are taught songs with titles like "We Have Nothing to Envy In the World" as soon as they can speak. Many towns in North Korea have no cars or little food beyond cornmeal, but every single one has a movie theater, where the 40 films produced every year by state-run studios depict the greatness of the Kim family and the awfulness of the outside world.

Expression is so limited that even certain colors are off-limits for personal use. Without exposure to any ideas or version of events from outside North Korea or even from fellow North Koreans not directly involved in disseminating propaganda, people have no reason to doubt the official version: they are living in the happiest, richest country on Earth, and they are constantly beset by an external threat that could end everything if they are not vigilant. The American threat is portrayed within North Korea as ever-present and horrifying.

Fisher's piece ("Gulag of the Mind: Why North Koreans Cry for Kim Jong Il") is gripping. It is a sad reminder of what men will do (and have always done) for the sake of power and its maintenance for the few, or the one. North Korea serves the Kim family, and nothing more. And we have the audacity to call ourselves Homo sapien, Latin for "wise man." Not yet ...

Stretching in front of you the night's immensity
Hides the western hill where sleeps the distant sun;
Still with bated breath the world is counting time and swimming
Across the shoreless dark a crescent moon
Has thinly just appeared upon the dim horizon.
--But O my bird, O sightless bird,
Not yet, not yet the time to furl your wings.
―Rabindranath Tagore ("Hard Times")

What equality looks like

Thanks to the historic elimination of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy by President Obama, Fire Controlman 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta, left, assigned to the amphibious dock landing ship USS Oak Hill (LSD 51) could openly kiss her fiancée, Fire Controlman 3rd Class Citlalic Snell, upon her return from a deployment. To it's credit, the US Navy posted the photo on it's website.

The Bourne Idiocy, Part Deux

In As You Like It, Shakespeare famously wrote: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players [who] have their exits and their entrances."

However, many Hollywood stars think they're more than just "players" (and lotsa luck dragging them off stage). Some evidently believe stardom confers Cicero-like wisdom. Take Matt Damon. Doing his best Marcus Aurelius imitation (i.e., Jason Bourne in a toga), he recently told Elle magazine that he is disappointed with President Obama. "You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better,” he said. This, mind you, is coming from a college drop-out (Damon) with the gall to critique the guy who earned two university degrees, edited the Harvard Law Review and became leader of the free world while being black. But I guess starring as "Bill the Krill" in Happy Feet 2 has given Damon special insight into judging presidential leadership.

Even Elle noted Damon's "now-familiar tone of wounded idealism." Evidently, Damon & Friends thought they had elected the Messiah to the White House. With Resurrection 2.0 nowhere in sight, they're crestfallen. What they got instead was the most productive president in half a century and who operates with the brains, efficiency and, yes, ruthlessness of Michael Corleone. Just ask Obama's opponents in The Five Families worldwide. Yes, Obama had to compromise at times -- you know, like those dithering Founding Fathers -- and he hasn't gotten everything he wants. But Bach's Präludium D Major is still playing in the background. (Think The Godfather, the Baptism sequence.) And yet Damon is convinced that Obama lacks cojones and has little to show since inauguration. Why do the Wizard of Oz lyrics to "If I Only Had A Brain" suddenly leap to mind?

(Dorothy)
With the thoughts you'd be thinkin'
You could be another Lincoln
If you only had a brain ...

Damon's observation is meaningless, of course. Were he a starring member of a theatre troupe in 180 AD and he made similar remarks about Emperor Aurelius, Damon's head would quickly find itself mounted on a Roman pike. Gaius Barackus Obama is more forgiving. But, like the Godfather, he also doesn't miss a thing. The president put the matter into proper perspective when he addressed the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington: "I've even let down my key core constituency: movie stars. [laughter] Just the other day, Matt Damon -- I love Matt Damon, love the guy -- Matt Damon said he was disappointed in my performance. [dramatic pause] Well, Matt, I just saw The Adjustment Bureau, so ... right back atcha, buddy."

Trump This

Touré on Donald Trump: "Brash, bold, big mouthed, egotistical, certain he's right even when he's not. But he's also a liar — constantly lying about how much money he has and how important he is and how smart he is. He's the classic man born on third base who thinks he hit a triple. And he's an American obscenity: His self-absorption and media whoredom are gross, and his perversion of the presidential process was disgusting. Carnival barker indeed." (Hat tip: New York magazine)

Vegans vs. carnivores

Finally, a sensible vegetarian speaks truth to reality. Nicolette Hahn Niman writes: "As any attentive observer of nature knows, life feeds on life. Every living thing, from mammals, birds, and fish to plants, fungi, and bacteria, eats other living things. Humans are part of the food web; but for the artifices of cremation and tightly sealed caskets, all of us would eventually be recycled into other life forms. It is natural for people, like other omnivores, to participate in this web by eating animals. And it is ethically defensible -- provided we refrain from causing gratuitous suffering. ... Concerns about health, the environment, and ethical eating do not require giving up meat. What they do require is a new ethics of eating animals: one rooted in moderation, mindfulness, and respect." Amen. (By the way, the sign the lettuce-clad woman is carrying in the above photo reads: "Vegetarians Taste Better." The polar bear is thinking: "Yum, I bet she does." Heh.)

Sagan's God

"Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others—for example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein—considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws." (Carl Sagan, astronomer/astrophysicist, died this day in 1996 at age 62)

Quote of the Day

"Given the evident inability of any of the current candidates to generate enthusiasm in even one third of Iowa Republicans, and the fact that the caucus 'winner' could well be someone that 3/4 of the voters rejected, I am comfortable predicting right now the winner of the GOP Iowa Caucuses: President Obama." (Keith Humphreys, Stanford University)

Once upon a midnight dreary

Sometimes, a photograph or work of art best captures the legacy of a leader. Behold what North Korea's Kim Jong-Il left behind. The vibrant, interconnected, illuminated areas are located in South Korea. The north, alas, is a black hole trapped in a moonless midnight.

(Photo: A Department of Defense satellite image of the Korean Peninsula at night, circa 2006. The sole patch of light seen above the DMZ emanates from Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, home of the ruling junta and their luxury compounds.)

Nether regions, the last frontier

Writing for The Atlantic last week, Ashley Fetters opened a certain kimono by asking: Is female pubic hair in America going extinct? Talk about link bait. Needless to say, this can't-miss feature story has gone viral. Apparently, the ubiquitous Brazilian wax is de rigueur for women under 30 (though not exclusively so). Citing a scholarly Indiana University study (yes, they actually research this stuff), Fetters says more women than ever have adopted the Barbie look down under. "[N]early 60 percent of American women between 18 and 24 are sometimes or always completely bare down there, while almost half of women in the U.S. between 25 and 29 reported similar habits," Fetters reports. The reasons are variable. They include the influence of pornography, the pursuit of better hygiene and a supposed effort by women to "take control of their bodies" -- you know, Sex And The City-style. But I think Dr. Hilda Hutcherson, a gynecologist at New York's Columbia University Medical Center, has identified the real reason behind the surge in nether region grass-trimming. Per the LA Times, she told ABC News: “For every single thing that's normal about a woman's body, there's a man trying to change it […] The last frontier was the vagina." Take note, ladies.

(Painting Credit: Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). Nude Looking over Her Right Shoulder. 1917.)

Buh-bye, Dear Leader

 

From which of these "Dear Leaders" would you buy a used car? Right. I'd pass on both, too. The son and heir apparent, Kim Jong-un (pictured at right), makes even Scrooge look like Santa Claus. Exuding warmth is clearly not a hereditary trait. I generally avoid speaking ill of the dead. But in the case of Kim Jong-Il, 69, who died from heart failure over the weekend, I hope a special place has been reserved in Hell for him. Per New York magazine, "A wearer of four-inch lifts in his shoes, [Kim Jong-Il] reportedly gathered the shortest people in Pyongyang with the promise of a wonder drug, and then exiled them to uninhabited islands to die." Worst, as National Journal writer Michael Hirsh has noted, "North Korea's regime has come the closest of any society to what Orwell called, in 1984, the literal inability to conceive an unorthodox thought. Good riddance. Let's hope that the new Dear Leader is not a chip off the old block.

Another inconvenient truth

"There’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power, people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end." (Christopher Hitchens)

Re-chiseling the Ten Commandments

The late Christopher Hitchens thought that the Laws of Moses, the Ten Commandments, were seriously overdue for a re-write. "It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words 'Thou shalt not,' ” he wrote in a piece for Vanity Fair last year. In fact, he asked, why not toss the Tablets and simply state the obvious in their stead? To wit:

"Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above."

"In short," Hitchens wrote, "Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form." Amen.

(Illustration credit: Edward Sorel / Vanity Fair.)

Marley's Ghost

"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

And so begins the familiar tale, "A Christmas Carol," by Charles Dickens, published this day in 1843. A few passages later, we meet the crotchety protagonist, the business partner of the dearly departed Jacob Marley, as he sat "busy in his counting-house" on Christmas Eve:

EXTERNAL heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did ...

“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

In his preface, Dickens famously wrote in part: "I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly." May it do so, indeed. Happy holidays.

Passage of a poet-president

Vaclav Havel: "The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less." The former Czech Republic president, a dissident playwright who inspired the non-violent "Velvet Revolution" that brought down communism in Czechoslovakia, died today at age 75.

Selling madness by the bottle

Among the sentient, the reasons to keep Newt Gingrich out of the White House are legion. But the GOP candidate's response to a question by CBS News host Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation" this morning should probably top the list:

SCHIEFFER: "One of the things you say is that if you don't like what a court has done, that Congress should subpoena the judge and bring him before Congress and hold a congressional hearing ... how would you enforce that? Would you send the Capitol Police down to arrest him?"

GINGRICH: "Sure. If you had to. Or you'd instruct the Justice Department to send a U.S. Marshal."

Yowzer. Dumbfounded (like me), the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen wrote:

"Just so we're clear, this week, a leading presidential candidate articulated his belief that, if elected, he might (1) eliminate courts he doesn't like; (2) ignore court rulings he doesn't like; and (3) take judges into custody if he disapproves of their legal analyses. I hope it's unnecessary to note that Gingrich's vision is stark raving mad."

Yet, one wonders given Newt's rise in the polls. Granted, Aristotle was right when he said, "There was never a genius without a tincture of madness." The trouble with Newt is that, like the proprietors of Jonathan Swift's proverbial tavern, he sells madness by the bottle. Yet Gingrich's grandiloquence illuminates a larger, more consequential point that John Updike articulated so well: "A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world."

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

Christopher Hitchens died last night at age 62. The National Journal tweeted that the New York Times literally stopped the presses to publish his obit on A1. That alone speaks volumes about stature of the thinking man whom many called "the Hitch." The deluge of tributes to his outsized personality and polemics is wondrous to behold. Some of his antagonists even tipped their hats. Even his Achilles Heel ― an overindulging fondness for smoking and alcohol ― is remarked about with awe. All this, ironically, for an Englishman most Americans have never heard of. That, too, alas, speaks volumes about us writ large. Hitchens was a candle that flickered defiantly in what sometimes feels like an intellectual Dark Age. We are the worst for that light being extinguished prematurely.

I shall miss the heft and worldliness of his arguments, his complexity and nuance, his unflinching fidelity to the truth as he saw it, the breathtaking audacity of his stand against organized religion (which he saw as "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry"), the shimmering brilliance of the prose he produced so effortlessly, and his wicked Wodehousian humor (think Jeeves and Bertie Wooster). And then there is his bohemian voice, now silenced. "[V]irtually no one else on earth talked the way that Christopher talked, with that degree of precision, passion, learnedness, and lethal wit. Yes, his mots were mighty bon," wrote John Heilemann today. That, too, I will miss. Hitchens, to my mind, is among the last of the great 20th century intellectuals. We may well endure a Long Winter before we see the likes of him again.

Time's Joe Klein nailed it when he wrote:

"He may have been among the last of his kind–truly, a thought-full man of letters, rather than of “takes” and sound bites. ... I worry that Hitch is taking with him a world, a world of contemplative reading and writing―the very opposite of what I am doing right now, posting an immediate reaction to his death on this blog. He lived life perpetually intoxicated, not just by booze (he was happily soused during our English debate), but by books and words and thoughts and ideas. I will miss him, and all the excesses he cherished. We need more such, and are left with less."

There are some great remembrances out there. Heilemann's here and Christopher Buckley's here, are two of the best thus far. But Hitchens touched the literate commoner, too. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers wrote:

"I once went to hear Hitchens speak in San Francisco. Afterward, he was signing books. I was broke and didn't have enough money for a book, but I got in line just to thank him for his articles denouncing Kissinger, which meant a lot to me and my parents, who were both deeply affected by the Vietnam War. I told him all this. He listened - he seemed as good at listening as speaking - and he asked me all kinds of questions. We talked for a bit, and finally he asked if he could sign something. I told him I didn't have enough money for a book. Without hesitating, he pulled one off the pile, asked for my parents' names, and inscribed the book to them. One of the best moments of my life. I loved the man. He's left the world to a bunch of fucking lightweights, but we have to try our best."

Fred Kaplan, who knew Hitchens, is right about not sentimentalizing him. "Hitch could be a real shit if you fell on the wrong side of his favor," wrote Kaplan. "Among our mutual friends, he had fallings-out, in some cases multiple ones, with almost every one of them. And yet, at some point, they always fell back in. He was too irresistible and, in a pinch, too good a friend." RIP.

Santa by the numbers

So, just how does Santa Claus deliver the goods to every Christian soul under age 14 on the Night before Christmas? I mean, we're talking about one bearded dude with a limited-capacity sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. Sounds a tad impractical. But -- no worries, kids. Writing for The Atlantic, Philip Bump (yes, that's his real name) does the math: "There are just over 526,000,000 Christian kids under the age of 14 in the world who celebrate Christmas on December 25th. In other words, Santa has to deliver presents to almost 22 million kids an hour, every hour, on the night before Christmas. That's about 365,000 kids a minute; about 6,100 a second. Totally doable."