Only two more weekends until Christmas! Have you got your Christmas shopping finished? I’m definitely not finished.
I think ‘Bulo is not the only listaholic around here. I found this through Facebook: The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials Of All Time. Here’s my favorite:
Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)
In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”
What a genius parody. (It’s not real, folks.)
The News Journal does some good journalism sometimes. The NJ examined some claims by Reebok on their popular new EasyTone shoes. The claims came from a study by Associate Professor Todd Royer at the University of Delaware, but the study was on a very small sample, not enough to be statistically significant.
Reebok — a unit of Adidas — says in advertisements that EasyTones work women’s gluteal muscles 28 percent harder than regular walking shoes. It also says they work hamstrings and calves 11 percent harder.
But the data — based on results of a study performed last summer at the University of Delaware — may not be as definitive as it sounds.
Even the researcher who conducted the study said it wouldn’t be considered scientifically reliable because only five people were used to test the shoes.