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International News Title: Santa Calls It Quits *With apologies to the New York Sun.* DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.' Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus? VIRGINIA O'HANLON. 115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET. Virginia, your little friends are right. There used to be a Santa Claus, but not anymore. Oh, he is real, dear girl. He most certainly exists. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. But he has gotten out of the gift-giving game. It all started a few years ago when agents from the Occupational Health and Safety Administration stormed into his workshop, waving a warrant. An elf disgruntled over Santa's decision not to stock decaf in the break room had dropped a dime, and when the agents arrived they found more than a dozen violations of federal rules. Elves were making toys without proper safety equipment. Melted ice on the floor had pooled, creating a slip-and-fall hazard. There was no eye-wash station or Automated External Defibrilator in the facility, let alone an ADA-compliant sign for one... it went on and on. They walloped Santa with more than $70,000 in fines, those inspectors did, and forced him to come up with a remediation plan approved by a court-appointed special master within 60 days. That sort of took the wind out of old Santa's sails, if you know what I mean. He was just getting over that when he was served with a certified, cease-and-desist letter from the lawyers at Mattel, accusing him of copyright infringement. Some of the trains the elves had been making looked too much like Mattel's Thomas the Tank Engine figure (at least so far as Mattel was concerned), and the company threatened to haul Santa into court for theft of intellectual property. He took it pretty hard, I must say. Still, he probably would have let it go eventually if it hadn't been for the incident with the fighter jets. One of Santa's little helpers had, rather unhelpfully, forgotten to file a flight plan with the Federal Aviation Administration. So when radar picked up something that looked like a sleigh being pulled across the sky by eight tiny reindeer, a couple of nervous Nellies at the Pentagon grew concerned. Reindeer and sleighs simply do not fly—that is official Defense Department doctrine, Virginia. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. The Pentagon's little minds grew even more jittery when they calculated that this "sleigh," which they figured was probably Russian or Chinese, was transecting the hemisphere at speeds of roughly 1,800 miles per second. That is more than 3,000 times faster than the maximum speed of the F-15 Strike Eagle, the fastest plane in the U.S. military. So they sent up an entire squadron of F-22 Raptors from Tyndall Air Force Base to inform Santa that he was violating U.S. air space and bring him down for a frank heart-to-heart. Well, Santa's droll little mouth drew down in a frown, and his knees shook, but not like a bowlful of jelly. More like a handful of maracas. Santa tried to explain that NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, was tracking him already https://www.noradsanta.org/ >, but they weren't buying it. Inter-service rivalry. You know how it is. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 2.
#2. To: Deckard (#0)
Well it is about time
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