Rudolph is a girl!

[CalMeacham]

I’d copy more, but for some reason, my computer won’t let me, and I’m too lazy to type it:

Are Santa's Reindeer All Female?

[chrisk]

@CalMeacham

I’d copy more, but for some reason, my computer won’t let me, and I’m too lazy to type it:

Are Santa's Reindeer All Female? | Snopes.com

Sidetrack: I think that snopes uses some web trickery to make copying from their pages very hard. And the reason why?

So people will link to their site instead! (See how well it works?)

[Max_Torque]

I reckon a reindeer named “Vixen” is either female or a crossdresser…

[Hi_Neighbor]

Here’s the excerpt:

Male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually until after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, according to every historical rendition depicting Santa’s reindeer, every single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen … had to be a girl.

So let me get this straight. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is attempting to take a scientific approach to explain that the reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh were female?

What about the freakin’ part where they can FLY? If these particular reindeer can go airborne, I don’t think it would be too far fetched if somehow the males could retain their antlers in months when normal, “grounded” reindeer lose them.

[Santo_Rugger]

@chrisk

Sidetrack: I think that snopes uses some web trickery to make copying from their pages very hard. And the reason why?

So people will link to their site instead! (See how well it works?)

You can get around it quite easily by using Ctrl-A or viewing the source. I’d check these statements for veracity, but I don’t know how to view Snopes at all at work.

[interface2x]

Rudolph is a girl?

Well, duh. I thought the voice was a pretty obvious giveaway.

[Stealth_Potato]

@chrisk

Sidetrack: I think that snopes uses some web trickery to make copying from their pages very hard.

Argh, this little “feature” annoyed me to no end. I am a compulsive highlighter – when reading long documents, I habitually select small bits of text here and there, usually as a sort of visual place marker. That stupid little script on Snopes thwarted me, and it made reading Snopes very ergonomically frustrating for me.

Then I discovered the YesScript Firefox addon, which provides a very handy JavaScript blacklist. (The NoScript addon only allows a whitelist, which makes it too annoying for my tastes.) This is a much easier way of getting around Snopes’s silly paranoid selection blocker - just blacklist www.snopes.com (or click the little page icon in the bottom right corner when you’re browsing Snopes), and then you can select text normally.

Honestly, that clever piece of anti-user scripting ranks right up there with those little “No right-clicking allowed!” message boxes among all those cute little JavaScript tricks that the World Wide Web outgrew sometime around, oh, I dunno, 1997. Honestly, this kind of crap is a relic best left firmly behind in the era of Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape. Intelligent web designers abandoned such conceits more than a decade ago, along with the <blink> and <marquee> tags. What next, Snopes, a pair a googly eyes that follow the mouse cursor around the page?! This is not the 90’s, Snopes. The World Wide Web has evolved beyond such stupidity. Work with your users, not against them.

Grrr. Sorry for the rant. Bad web design just pisses me off. :mad:
Oh, and Hi, Neighbor!, I’m deeply intrigued by your excerpt (bolding mine):

Male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually until after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, according to every historical rendition depicting Santa’s reindeer, every single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen … had to be a girl.

Something about that line strikes me as just a little bit peculiar. I mean, I’ll admit that I’m no expert reindeerologist. Maybe male reindeer do give birth in the spring. Miracle of life and all that. :dubious:

I mean, I had always heard that male reindeer give birth in the winter.

[Hi_Neighbor]

@Stealth_Potato

Oh, and Hi, Neighbor!, I’m deeply intrigued by your excerpt <snip>

Oh, right. My eyes were playing tricks on me; I completely missed an entire line of text. The correct excerpt reads as follows, with the addition in bold:

Male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December. Female reindeer retain their antlers until after they give birth in the spring. Therefore, according to every historical rendition depicting Santa’s reindeer, every single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen . . . had to be a girl.

[CalMeacham]

Hi, neighbor! writes:

What about the freakin’ part where they can FLY? If these particular reindeer can go airborne, I don’t think it would be too far fetched if somehow the males could retain their antlers in months when normal, “grounded” reindeer lose them.

Read the attached Snopes article. Alaska Fish and Game makes precisely that point. And you thought they didn’t have enough spare time on their hands…

chrisk – in my case, it doesn’t matter. I both quote and link, so all they lost in my case was the free advertising of an attention-whetter.

[Johnny_L.A]

@CalMeacham

I’d copy more, but for some reason, my computer won’t let me, and I’m too lazy to type it:

You can view the source and copy from there. But you have to remove all of the HTML.

[CaerieD]

@Stealth_Potato

Argh, this little “feature” annoyed me to no end. I am a compulsive highlighter – when reading long documents, I habitually select small bits of text here and there, usually as a sort of visual place marker. That stupid little script on Snopes thwarted me, and it made reading Snopes very ergonomically frustrating for me.

I’m not alone! I have the same habit and this is one of the things that drives me absolutely crazy about Snopes. It’s completely compulsive, too. Sometimes I’ll be reading the Dope and just idly highlighting posts as I go through, with no intention of copying any of them.