It’s more than a sideline, featuring Raiderette Jen

Dave, Midwest Correspondent | Dec 8, 2013

Raiderette Jen is in her second season

Today, photos of Jen of the Oakland Raiderettes, with a few fun facts, designed to delight and amaze:

1. Jen is in her second season with the Raiderettes
2. Jen is from Santa Cruz
3. Santa cruises on Christmas Eve guided by flying reindeer
4. L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, a 1902 children’s book, further popularized Santa Claus. Much of Santa Claus’s mythos was not set in stone at the time, leaving Baum to include ten reindeer—who could not fly, but leapt in enormous, flight-like bounds. Flossie and Glossie are Santa’s principal reindeer in Baum’s story. Claus gathers eight more reindeer, named in rhyming pairs: Racer, Pacer, Fearless, Peerless, Ready, Steady, Feckless, and Speckless. L. Frank Baum knew his Oz, but he was a bit off on his reindeer! Come on L. Frank!
5. Jen flies through the air snowboarding in Tahoe and Vail
6. Jen met her husband eight years ago
7. The 1956 popular song by George Melachrino, “Mrs. Santa Claus”, and the 1963 children’s book How Mrs. Santa Claus Saved Christmas, by Phyllis McGinley, helped standardize and establish the character and role of Mrs. Claus in the popular imagination.
8. Last December, Jen and fellow Raiderettes Ashley, Bess, and Jalina visited China, and Jen blogged from Shanghai
9. Shanghai Surprise is a 1986 British adventure comedy film starring then-newlyweds Sean Penn and Madonna.
10. The movie was panned by critics and failed at the box office. It was nominated for five Golden Raspberry Awards, “winning” one of them, Worst Actress for Madonna.
11. According to Google Translate, Football’s Fabulous Females in simplified Chinese is 足球的美妙女性
12. Jen and her husband love the outdoors and extreme sports
13. In fact, Jen hurt herself dirt biking in Hollister before her first Raiderette tryouts
14. Napoleon Dynamite’s grandmother broke her coccyx in a quad-bike accident and asked Uncle Rico to look after Napoleon and Kip while she recovered.
15. Uncle Rico said, “Back in ’82, I used to be able to throw a pigskin a quarter mile.”
16. 1982 was the first year the Raiders played in LA and the year they drafted Marcus Allen