Where Does Santa Get His Stamps?

Happy HumpDay!

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Zoology

The kidneys are two of the most important organs in the human body. They fulfil the vital role of cleaning blood, removing waste, and maintaining body fluids. Having high functioning kidneys is really important for a person’s health but having really really high functioning kidneys can turn someone into a superhero.

Drinking alcohol and sodas is bad for your kidneys since it requires them to work extra hard filtering out toxins and sugar (they are worth the risk!). Our puny human kidneys can barely handle a rum and coke but another species of animal has turbo charged kidneys that allows them to drink almost anything. What animal has the superpowered kidneys?... The lowly housecat.

Cats have incredibly strong kidneys that allow them to retain incredible amounts of water in their bodies. Cats can actually change the concentration of their urine in order to manage the amount of water they retain in their body to cover times of drought. The kidneys of cats are so strong that they can drink seawater and stay hydrated because their kidneys filter out all of the salt. If a human was to drink seawater they would die of dehydration, but cats can drink seawater all day and feel just fine.

Not sure why pirates always chose parrots to be their pets. If they had a cat onboard they could feed it seawater and fish and it would be perfectly happy.

Best Cat Costumes An Implantable Artificial Kidney

Holidays

Every year, over a million letters to Santa are written by children hoping to end up on the nice list and get on the big guy’s good side. Most letters contain stories about the good things that kids have done over the past year and requests for toys they hope to find under the tree. Unfortunately, the U.S. Postal Service doesn’t ship mail to the North Pole, so where does all that mail go?

Each year, all of the letters to Santa from around the U.S. are collected by the U.S. Postal service and delivered using first class mail to the same post office. The post office is located in Santa Claus, Indiana (one of four cities named Santa Claus) and contains a statue of Santa holding mail out in front of it. Inside of the post office, 200 “elves” spend the holiday season responding to nearly 20,000 letters on behalf of Santa. That is about 100 letters per elf but also means that only 2% of all letters receive a response from Santa.

Before the post office was established in 1775, children in America used to burn their letters to Santa in hopes that the ashes would float to him at the north pole. It would stink to be the elves that has to put all the burnt pieces of letters back together for Santa.

Santa Claus Post Office Five Things You Don’t Know About The North Pole

Sports

There are few American heroes like the “Splendid Splinter”, Theodore “Ted” Williams. He is not only a hall of fame baseball player but also a pilot and a two-time war veteran. His life and career are the epitome of the American dream and his legacy and heroics still live on today.

Ted Williams joined the MLB playing for the Boston Red Sox in 1939 at the age of 21. By 1941, he had one of the best seasons in Baseball history when he hit for a batting average over the nearly impossible .400 mark. On the very last day of that season, his team was scheduled to play a double header and Williams could have sat out to end the season with a .3996 batting average which would be rounded up to .400 but instead, Williams chose to play both games, going 6 for 8, bringing his average above the famed .400 line to .406.

After one of the best seasons in baseball history, Williams heard the call to serve his country and decided to leave his career behind to enlist in the Navy and fight in WWII. He was a navy pilot for three years and quickly rose through the ranks setting records with his flying and gunnery skills. After the war, he came back to play baseball for 6 more years before enlisting in the Navy again to fight in the Korean War.

During the Korean War, at the age of 33, Ted Williams flew 37 missions over enemy territory risking his life for his country. While flying a mission in Korea, his plane was shot down by enemy anti-aircraft fire and he was forced to crash land. He had an option to eject from the plane and parachute down but the explosion from the ejection seat would have shattered his knees and made him unable to play baseball again. He loved the game of baseball so much that he couldn’t risk ending his playing career, so he decided to crash with the plane. Luckily, he survived the crash and made it back home safely.

After the war, he came back to play baseball once again and continued to play until the age of 42. In true hero fashion, he didn’t just retire after a storied career, he went out in style. On September 28th, 1960, Ted Williams stepped up to the plate for the last time after more than 20 years playing the game. With one ball and one strike on the count, Ted Williams did what he did best and hit a homerun into the bullpens in right field of Fenway Park. The Boston sports media said that “Teddy Ballgame had bid adieu to the Boston Fans with one final homerun into Williamsburg” (the name of the right field bullpens where he hit most of his homeruns).

Ted Williams was an all-American hero. He was one of the greatest players in Baseball history, sacrificed his fame and fortune to serve his country TWICE, and ride off into the sunset in the coolest way possible by hitting a homerun on his final at bat.

Can’t wait for his head to be defrosted and cloned so baseball can return the its glory days.

This Week in History

On this day in 1773, a group of rowdy Massachusetts colonists, lead by Sam Adams, dressed as Mohawk Indians and stormed three British ships to steal shipments of tea and dump it into the Boston Harbor. The British had recently created new taxes created on the import of tea so the colonists decided to protest the new taxes by destroying the shipments of tea. The event was dubbed “The Boston Tea Party” and was a catalyst for the unrest that emerged in Boston and eventually lead to the American Revolution.

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