It’s getting closer and closer to the holiday season, and everyone is starting to get ready.  For some people, that means shopping.  For others, that means cooking and getting out those once-a-year recipes.  However, if you’re a store in Auckland, New Zealand, you get Santa Claus a facelift.  A 66-foot-tall Santa Claus statue has gotten a nip and tuck in preparation for the holiday season.

Tis the seasons for Santas of all sort, be they mechanical or human, to get a little extra medical attention.  After all, this is the gifting season, so it’s only natural that Santa and his various helpers should want to be in tip-top shape.  For this particular Santa statue, that meant getting a droopy eye fixed and getting a mechanical finger replaced with a static digit.  Given that he was close to 50 years old, his winking eye and wagging finger weren’t what they used to be, so it was better to get both those mechanisms taken care of at once.

Even Santa falls victim to the cultural obsession with physical beauty and not being a creepy old broken-down robot!

Tags: New Zealand, Santa Claus gets 0000 facelift, plastic surgery, youth surgery, Santa’s facelift, Wellington, Santa statue gets facelift

It’s becoming more and more common.  For example, on February 12, 2010, Comcast will cease to be.  In its place will be Xfinity.  No, that’s not a typo; that’s the company’s new name.  In an attempt to escape years of bad publicity due to poor public relations, poor customer service, bad channel selection, and generally […]

Lord Howe Island is a beautiful tropical island some 370 miles off the coast of Australia.  It was declared a World Heritage Site back in 1982 thanks to its pristine beauty and the wide variety of rare animals found there.  However, Lord Howe Island has a bit of a rat problem.  In 1918, a freighter […]

It took 27 years, but something has finally knocked the finale of MASH off the top of the TV ratings pyramid.  When the show, starring Alan Alda as a war-weary, wisecracking doctor in the Korean War, went off the air in 1982, it was watched by 105 million people throughout the United States.  Despite population […]

The ongoing soap opera surrounding the world’s tallest building just continues to swell.  The building, as you might remember, opened a month ago to great fanfare, despite not being completely booked up with tenants and not actually being finished.   Now, with the first tenants scheduled to move in this month, the building’s only officially […]

Right now, it’s snowing outside.  All day yesterday, I listened to people who were planning on running out to the stores to pick up three things:  milk, eggs, and bread.  Any time bad weather hits, or threatens, or is even suspected, the first three things anyone picks up are milk, eggs, and bread, as if […]

If you’ve always wanted to own a relic of the Cold War, a one-of-a-kind item was recently auctioned off.  The town of Skrunda, in what is now Latvia, is not on any map.  During the Cold War, it was known as Skrunda-1, and was one of Russia’s secret cities, serving as a Soviet radar base […]

Taking a page from the playbook of one Sho Kosugi, when a disgruntled former graduate student had a score to settle, he didn’t go for a gun.  No sir or ma’am, firearms are for fools.   Kshitij Shrotri went for the more civilized implement of death, the sword.  Police say he went back to Georgia […]