Isegoria

Douglas Kern opens All I Want for Christmas… with an amusing take on Christmas loot:

Recently I read that in Austria and some Latin American countries, the bringer of gifts at Christmas is not Santa Claus, but rather the Christ Child. I like our way better. The notion of the Christ Child as the dispenser of Christmas loot raises troubling theological dilemmas that Santa just doesn’t present.

When Santa accidentally gives your kid a copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, it’s just shabby elf labor gone awry, but when The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is giving your offspring ultra-violent video games, it’s a harbinger of the apocalypse. And while it’s no big deal when Santa gives you a pair of Dockers that’s a size too small, what is God try to tell you when his Son gives you size 32 instead of 34? Does God want you to lose weight? Does 32 have a sacred meaning in Aramaic? And if you take them back, what will you tell Saint Peter when, on Judgment Day, he asks what you did with the in-store credit at Sears? Multiply all these problems by a hundred if you’re a Calvinist. There you are, painstakingly scrutinizing yourself and your position in life to see if you’re a member of the elect, and the Christ Child leaves you a sign of God’s will: a $30 gift card for Applebee’s. What could it mean?

The Truth About Where Your Donated Clothes End Up:

According to various estimates, here’s what happens to your clothing giveaways. In most cases, a small amount of the items, the best quality castoffs — less than 10 percent of donations — are kept by the charitable institutions and sold in their thrift shops to other Americans looking for a bargain. These buyers could be people who are hard up, or they could be folks who like the idea of a good deal on a stylish old item that no longer can be found in regular stores.

The remaining 90 percent or more of what you give away is sold by the charitable institution to textile recycling firms. Bernard Brill, of the Secondary Recycled Textiles Association, told ABC News: ‘Our industry buys from charitable institutions, hundred of millions of dollars worth of clothing every year.’
So, at this point, the charity you have donated clothes to has earned money off of them in two ways — in their shops and by selling to recyclers. Then the recycler kicks into high gear. Most of the clothes are recycled into cleaning cloths and other industrial items, for which the recyclers say they make a modest profit.

Computerized efficiency helps UPS handle busiest time of year:

The back of his UPS truck is stacked floor to ceiling, but neatly, with boxes sticking an inch or so over the edge of their shelves — lip loaded, in UPS jargon. That makes it easy for Alles to grab the packages. They’re also slanting downward toward the truck’s outer wall — the better to stay put when Alles takes a corner.

And thanks to technology on which UPS is spending $600 million company-wide, Alles, a driver out of the firm’s distribution center in Elm Grove, feels confident that the 500-odd packages, which he will deliver to 344 stops, have been loaded in the correct order.

His handheld computer, meanwhile, will tell him the sequence for his route, one of 179 running out of Elm Grove on this day. All told, Alles and his fellow drivers here will deliver about 65,000 packages over the next several hours.

UPS has long been known for efficiency.

Drivers don’t run. That might cause injuries, which definitely aren’t efficient. They do, however, move briskly — about two steps per second. A residential stop should take 30 seconds, steering wheel to steering wheel, spokeswoman Donna Barrett said.

While at a stop, drivers are supposed to hang their key ring from a finger so it’s handy when they get back behind the wheel, where they simultaneously start the engine with their right hand while fastening the seat belt with their left.

Shock Waves Can Save Hearts:

Extracorporeal cardiac shock wave therapy sounds like something Capt. Picard might need after a run-in with the Borg. But it’s actually a new, real-life way to treat end-stage heart disease.
A team of Japanese researchers found that blasting the heart with shock waves helps patients grow new blood vessels and increase blood flow.
[...]
Shimokawa and his colleagues aimed low-energy pressure waves at the chests of nine patients with end-stage coronary artery disease. During a typical session they hit 20 to 40 different areas of the heart with 200 pulses each. Blood flow increased and symptoms were alleviated in all patients, suggesting the growth of new blood vessels.

The researchers used a shock wave generator made especially for the heart. Using its fine adjustments, they could focus waves on a 2-square-millimeter area, and aim them virtually anywhere.

‘Hibernating’ man survives for 3 weeks:

A man who went missing in western Japan survived in near-freezing weather without food and water for over three weeks by falling into a state similar to hibernation, doctors said.

Mitsutaka Uchikoshi had almost no pulse, his organs had all but shut down and his body temperature was 71 degrees Fahrenheit when he was discovered on Rokko mountain in late October, said doctors who treated him at the nearby Kobe City General Hospital. He had been missing for 24 days.

“On the second day, the sun was out, I was in a field, and I felt very comfortable. That’s my last memory,” Uchikoshi, 35, told reporters Tuesday before returning home from hospital. “I must have fallen asleep after that.”

Doctors believe Uchikoshi, a city official from neighboring Nishinomiya who was visiting the mountain for a barbecue party, tripped and later lost consciousness in a remote mountainous area.

His body temperature soon plunged as he lay in 50-degree weather, greatly slowing down his metabolism.

Wow. Baby put into X-ray machine at Los Angeles airport:

A woman sent her one-month-old grandson through an X-ray machine at Los Angeles International Airport, security officials said on Wednesday.

The woman, who spoke little English and was traveling to Mexico, put the infant in a plastic bin used to hold loose carry-on items for security scanning at the busy airport on Saturday morning.

Security screeners saw the baby as it started to pass through, pulled the bin out, and immediately sought medical assistance for the child, Transportation Security Administration spokesman Nico Melendez said.

The baby was examined at a local hospital and judged not to have received a dangerous dose of radiation.

The media-savvy folks at the Chester Zoo in England have said that they expect a virgin birth:

Flora, a pregnant Komodo dragon living in a British zoo, is expecting eight babies in what scientists said on Wednesday could be a Christmas virgin birth.

Flora has never mated, or even mixed, with a male dragon, and fertilized all the eggs herself, a process culminating in parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. Other lizards do this, but scientists only recently found that Komodo dragons do too.

“Nobody in their wildest dreams expected this. But you have a female dragon on her own. She produces a clutch of eggs and those eggs turn out to be fertile. It is nature finding a way,” Kevin Buley of Chester Zoo in England said in an interview.

He said the incubating eggs could hatch around Christmas.

If you enjoy animation, I recommend watching “animation anorak” Mark Kermode interview Gorillaz co-creator Jamie Hewlett on the Culture Show.

Johnny on Drawn! remarks that Hewlett’s influences include zombies, Daffy Duck, and the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine — but he neglects to mention Tony Hart.

The Yellow Kid is — arguably — the first modern comic strip:

Comics in America started with The Yellow Kid. At least, that’s how the oft-told story goes. But like most oft-told stories, it’s a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, that feature didn’t start out as comics, at least not in the modern sense of the word, a sequence of panels carrying a narrative — at first, it consisted of a single large illustration. For another, it wasn’t actually the first — newspaper and magazine cartoons had been growing in prominence ever since the ability to print them existed, and are known to have existed in America as early as the middle of the 18th century. In fact, an entire comic book, The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, appeared in an American paper as early as 1842. For a third, the name of the feature wasn’t The Yellow Kid.

Cartoonist Richard Felton Outcault started drawing funny pictures about New York tenements in 1894, for Truth magazine. The first appeared in that year’s June 2 edition. On Feb. 17, 1895, one of them was reprinted in Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, The New York World, inaugurating the series from which The Yellow Kid would eventually emerge. By the end of that year, Outcault was doing full-page ones, in color, on a weekly basis, under the title Hogan’s Alley (which appeared on a street sign as early as the very first of the Truth magazine cartoons). Gradually, there emerged a distinctive young character, identifiable by a bald head, huge ears, and a bright yellow nightshirt, which later had his dialog written on it. He wasn’t usually addressed by any particular name (although when that did happen, the name was was Mickey Dugan), but readers came to know him as The Yellow Kid.

I bring this up because, after I linked to that US presidents timeline game, someone I know — Hi, Cate! — put up a newspaper comic strip timeline game, and I was certain that The Katzenjammer Kids was the first comic strip.

In fact, I’m pretty sure The Katzenjammer Kids was the “correct” answer to the Trivial Pursuit question on the subject, and I got it “right” a few years back while playing with a group of unsuspecting non-geeks (or marginal geeks).

At any rate, the popularity of The Yellow Kid led Hearst to hire Outcault away, and George Luks continued using the character in Pulitzer’s World. Both papers became known for The Yellow Kid:

The papers that ran it were often referred to by New Yorkers as the “Yellow Kid” papers or, simply, “the yellow papers”. During the Spanish American War (1898), when their sensational and unreliable reportage reached a fever pitch, that style came to be known as “yellow journalism”.

It was only years later that comics evolved into their more stylized form — with big-headed kids who didn’t look quite so deformed, and who spoke via word balloons, rather than text on their nightshirts.