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A nice Christmas season story. A woman was jogging in Virginia a few days ago when all of a sudden a deer flew towards her out of the sky and ran her over. You have to wonder if just for a moment that lady was like, "Wow. It's all true. Santa's reindeer are totally real and I must be on the really naughty list." Now, the unfortunate truth is that some dude hit the deer on the parkway and the deer flew off the dude's bumper onto the lady. But just for one second you'd have to think that girl...

A new high-speed railway in northern Sweden has already claimed the lives of 200 reindeer since it opened three months ago, forcing the farm owner to move to safer pastures. The train line, which runs between Umeå and Lycksele, has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of reindeer over the last three months, when the unfortunate animals have wandered onto the tracks. Finding a dead reindeer or one that is injured and needs to be euthanized is a daily occurrence for reindeer owner, Per-Mikael Jonsson, who is forced to put down many injured reindeer fearing that their internal damages...

A new high-speed railway in northern Sweden has already claimed the lives of 200 reindeer since it opened three months ago, forcing the farm owner to move to safer pastures. The train line, which runs between Umeå and Lycksele, has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of reindeer over the last three months, when the unfortunate animals have wandered onto the tracks. Finding a dead reindeer or one that is injured and needs to be euthanized is a daily occurrence for reindeer owner, Per-Mikael Jonsson, who is forced to put down many injured reindeer fearing that their internal damages...

A 13-year-old British girl shocked her mother by asking Santa Claus for a bunch of presents — including "the real-life Justin Bieber" — and threatening to kill Santa if he refuses to deliver. Metro UK reported this week that the girl, Mekeeda Austin, who lives in Brickhill in Bedford, also threatened to "hunt down" Santa's reindeer so she could "cook them and serve their meat to homeless people on Xmas day." The girl said she was mostly joking.

At first I thought his complaint might have something to do with the scene that you can only see in the director’s cut where the Abominable Snow Monster took Hermey’s dental school lunch money and gave him an atomic wedgie while Yukon Cornelius laughed until icicles came out his nose, but instead, the apparent problem is with Santa himself. As it turns out, St. Nick is no saint: Santa Claus doesn’t just drop off presents for kids — he also encourages the soul-crushing of generation after generation of Christmas-reveling children. Or says one author, at least. Appearing on Fox News,...

A BBSRC-funded team at UCL has published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology that shows that this remarkable visual ability is part of the reindeer's unique adaptation to the extreme arctic environment where they live. It allows them to take in live-saving information in conditions where normal mammalian vision would make them vulnerable to starvation, predators and territorial conflict. It also raises the question of how reindeer protect their eyes from being damaged by UV, which is thought to be harmful to human vision. Lead researcher Glen Jeffery said, "We discovered that reindeer can not only see...

Scientists have found that our cousins the Neanderthal employed sophisticated hunting strategies similar to the tactics used much later by modern humans. The new findings come from the analysis of subtle chemical variations in reindeer teeth.Reindeer and caribou are nowadays restricted to the northernmost regions of Eurasia and America. But many thousands of years ago, large reindeer herds roamed throughout Europe and were hunted by the Neanderthal people. Kate Britton, an archaeologist now at the University of Aberdeen, and her colleagues were part of a team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, that studied the Jonzac Neanderthal...

You've no doubt heard the commercial "What would you do for a Klondike Bar?". Well, Dairy Queen is asking you what would you do for a free Blizzard on Christmas Eve. The chain is offering the frozen treat Dec. 24 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., but there's a catch. To get the free Reindeer Bites Blizzard, you have to bring a real, living, breathing reindeer to participating Dairy Queen or DQ Grill & Chill restaurant. There are several locations across Connecticut. "We've put out the call for fans to stop by with their reindeer to fuel up before the...

United States District Judge Donald Molloy's August 5 decision to restore full endangered species protection to the Canadian gray wolf in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming virtually guarantees that more people will fall victim to the proliferating and increasingly brazen predators. In addition, elk populations as well as populations of other wild ungulates (moose, deer, goats, sheep, bison) may be driven to near extinction levels in many parts of the Rocky Mountain Northwest due to wolf predation. Ranchers also have experienced a sharp increase in wolf killings of cattle and sheep, enough so that some cattlemen and sheepmen have been driven...

See if you have the smarts to follow this: global warming is going to cause "thick ice layers on top of [the] snow" in Norway, which will make "it harder for reindeer to reach the lichen that they feed on beneath." More global warming means more ice and less lichen. OK so far? Now, you're an ordinary, compassionate sort of fellow (or fellowette) are you not? You'd hate to see Santa forced to cancel Christmas because his heard of sleigh-pullers crapped out for the lack of lichen, isn't that so? What would you do? Well, if you were an intellectually...

A Sami (Lapp) family in Norway around 1900Photo: Library of CongressIn the freezing far northern reaches of Europe live an indigenous, semi-nomadic people of fishermen, fur trappers and reindeer herders. Like a thin but stubborn sheet of ice, these people have inhabited Sápmi, a large but sparsely populated area covering parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia’s Kola Peninsula for thousands of years. They remained closely tied to nature throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, as their clothes, dwellings and other trappings of culture bear witness – here beautifully frozen in film. These people are the Sámi.Sami family in...

There may be a perfectly good reason why Santa doesn't get lost on his annual Christmas globetrot: His flying reindeer just might be female and don't mind stopping for directions.The gender of Rudolph and his or her sleigh-hauling friends — the subject of goofy Internet chatter every year around this time — is now being pondered by renowned wildlife experts at Texas A&M University."Santa's reindeers were really females, most likely," said Alice Blue-McLendon, a veterinary medicine professor specializing in deer...

Remember this holiday card - that if memory serves won an award or two - last year?

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The Christmas ornaments for sale at the Miller Park Zoo's gift shop are partly manufactured by reindeer. Honest! Staffers make decorations out of droppings from the zoo's two reindeer, Ealu and Rika. The droppings are dried, then clear-coated and either painted or rolled in glitter.

Reindeer catastrophe overshadows Sami national day Published: 5 Feb 08 15:22 CET Online: http://www.thelocal.se/9886/ The Sami people of northern Sweden celebrate their national day on February 6th and Lappland is a hive of activity getting ready for the party of the year. Reindeer shoes are being made, handicrafts sculpted and party frocks designed and sewn up. Jokkmokk's yearly market sets the pulses racing among Sami youth and high schools and colleges get their traditional goods ready to sell to the hordes of brethren and tourists that will descend on the town from near and far. "For some it is a...

Reindeer: It's What Was For Dinner Jennifer Viegas, Discovery NewsOnce a Staple Dec. 20, 2007 -- Reindeer meat went from being an occasional treat to everyday fare among prehistoric cavemen who lived in Southwest France and what is now the Czech Republic, two new studies suggest. In fact, so many nibbled-on reindeer bones were present in their caves that possible calendars circa 26,000 years ago might have been carved on the leftover bones. They may have also been used as counting devices or for ornamentation. The first study, authored by J. Tyler Faith, analyzed bones found in limestone cave and...

MARIETTA, Ga. -- A coach faces charges after police said he led a group of students on a lewd Christmas prank in Marietta. Police said John Hayes, 46, loaded several middle schoolers into the back of his pickup truck, and drove them around after dark as they damaged Christmas displays. The group even made several homeowners’ displays X-rated, police said, including placing reindeer in sexual positions. A homeowner who did not want to be identified said he followed Hayes’ pickup truck and confronted him. “I said ‘Are you crazy?’ and he said, ‘It's just a bit of fun,’” the homeowner...

NOTE: as I have traditionally done, Christmas songs telling the news of the day will only be the secular songs. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2007 DFU CHRISTMAS PARODIES: OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODSIT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMASPARADE OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERSI SAW MOMMY KISSING SANTA CLAUS MIDI - GRANDMA GOT RUN OVER BY A REINDEER - 2nd version Hillary's run over by Obama...Iowa is now a battleground She is wondering how it could happen...'cause this development could be profound She is always in control...there is nothing left to chance She has some PI's watching Willie...they make sure that...

LOS ANGELES — A feud involving the man who sang "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" could wind up in court, just in time for Christmas. Elmo Shropshire was sued for breach of contract Monday by a company that claims he interfered in a $1 million-plus deal to sell musical trucks, bobblehead dolls, snow globes and cookie jars featuring characters from an animated show based on the novelty song. The tale about Santa mowing down a tipsy grandma with his sleigh was first heard in 1979 and has become a holiday favorite. It inspired a 2000 animated TV program...

Reindeer Change Their Eyes for Summer and Winter, Study Finds James Owen for National Geographic News March 13, 2007 Reindeer have a different set of eyes for summer and winter, a new study suggests. Scientists say the animals change their eye color and structure with the seasons in Arctic regions where permanent summer sunlight is replaced by 24-hour darkness in winter. The visual alterations appear to be an adaptation to deal with polar light extremes, according to the researchers from Norway and the U.K., who add that the phenomenon has never before been recorded in mammals. The researchers studied reindeer...