{"id":201,"date":"2010-12-24T09:01:43","date_gmt":"2010-12-24T16:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/?p=201"},"modified":"2010-12-23T23:03:10","modified_gmt":"2010-12-24T06:03:10","slug":"on-this-date-dec-24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/on-this-date-dec-24\/","title":{"rendered":"On this date (Dec 24)&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/hohohosanta.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/hohohosanta.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"hohohosanta\" width=\"400\" height=\"300\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-202\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/hohohosanta.jpg 400w, https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/hohohosanta-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>On this date (Dec 24) in 1955, a <b>Colorado Springs<\/b> newspaper ran an ad for <b>Sears<\/b>, telling kids that they could call Santa&#8230; the ad included a phone number. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it clearly has the hots for serendipity&#8230; the phone number was misprinted in the ad. So instead of calling the local Sears holiday hotline, kids began calling <b>CONAD<\/b> (the Continental Air Defense Command Center). The duty officer that night &#8211; a Colonel Shoup &#8211; instructed his staff to give a &#8220;current location&#8221; for Santa Claus to any child that called. This tradition kept going when CONAD was replaced by <b>NORAD<\/b> (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) in 1958. <\/p>\n<p>What started as an act of wisdom and holiday spirit from a single colonel has turned into quite the enterprise. Santa&#8217;s gone hi-tech now &#8211; a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.noradsanta.org\/en\/index.html\" target=_\"blank\">website<\/a>, a partnership with Google, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and of course, there&#8217;s an app for that&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s a beautiful thing that <b>NORAD<\/b> takes time out of their usual vital work (which consists, at least partly, of maintaining readiness to contact <b>Will Smith<\/b> immediately upon any hint of extra-terrestrial invasion) to provide this wonderful service. Kids of all ages greatly appreciate the work that these volunteers and sponsors do to help spread the magic of Christmas. <\/p>\n<p>On a personal level, I am already all over this. We have the most sophisticated satellite imaging systems known to man &#8211; we can count how many hairs are out of place on <b>Justin Bieber&#8217;s<\/b> pointy little head&#8230; so I&#8217;m planning on getting some advance scoop on what ol&#8217; Saint Nick&#8217;s bringing me! <\/p>\n<p><i>C&#8217;mon flying car!!<\/i> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On this date (Dec 24) in 1955, a Colorado Springs newspaper ran an ad for Sears, telling kids that they could call Santa&#8230; the ad included a phone number. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it clearly has the hots<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[153,110,84,118,159,151,157,154,111,152,121,155,156,158],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mikeypedia","tag-children","tag-christmas","tag-history","tag-holiday","tag-justin-bieber","tag-norad","tag-radar","tag-reindeer","tag-santa-claus","tag-santa-tracker","tag-satellite","tag-sleigh","tag-st-nick","tag-will-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":221,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions\/221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikeycunningham.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}