DIY Life

Playing Santa is a huge privilege and a huge responsibility. Done well, you could make a child believe in magic and become part of their fondest memories. Done poorly, you could shatter a childhood, and scare them for life.

If you've been invited to play Santa, there are some important tricks of the trade. This clever video from the ministry of fun gives you a schooling in Santa impersonation. Here are the 7 skills to master.

• Jolly demeanor, quick thinking, Spirit
• HO HO HO
  
• Work with your eyes
• Be welcoming
• Don't disappoint
• Field difficult questions
• Do your research
• Know what's hip
  

While Santa is busy with his Christmas preparations at the North Pole, he'll need competent helpers. If you are one of the lucky ones doing the job this year, spend some time mastering that HO HO HO, expressing with your eyes and learning about the trendy toys. You'll bring magic to the children and have a great time too!

Home improvement shows always seem to make every project look like a breeze -- if they didn't, the average person wouldn't feel inclined to get up off the couch, fetch a drill, and start improving their home. For many of us the reality of these efforts is more akin to the video above than the after pictures from many of the shows. I love the way this duo continues to valiantly staple away at the ceiling until the very last moment when the water becomes too heavy and the sky literally rains down upon them. This is often the sort of a result I get when attempting anything bigger than the most basic of repairs.

Editor's Note: You might want to turn your speakers down, because some of their language is NSFW!

This Halloween trick is sure to terrify your friends and have you go down in history with the best prank of the year. Elaborate makeup with fake wounds and oozing blood are staples of gruesome Halloween costumes, but what about blood that appears without any wound at all? Imagine that you saw somebody get cut with a knife, and blood starts seeping from where the fresh wound. You'd be pretty freaked out, just like your friends will be when you pull this one on them.

This video shows you how to create the two solutions necessary for this trick. The first solution, a Potassium thiocyante formula gets poured onto your body in the place where you want the blood to appear. You then dip the knife in the second solution, a Ferric Nitrate formula. Use the blunt end of the knife (or better yet, get a prop knife to avoid any mistakes) and pretend to slice on the same spot that you applied the Potassium. The result: a stream of realistic looking blood as the knife is pulled down the skin. Check out the video, you'll be shocked at how convincing this one is.

Stock market investing is a very hot topic these days. It seems that almost everyone that has a couple hundred dollars of available savings money wants to take a run at getting rich in the markets. I have my own opinions about the stock markets, how they perform and what their future may hold overall.

I won't go on record here as making a suggestion one way or the other about if you should invest in stocks or not. I just want to tell you about one aspect of the stock markets which can and does often offer great rewards. That aspect is called an IPO.

IPO stands for Initial Public Offering, which in regular guy language means the first time a company is offering stock shares for sale. An IPO is your ground level opportunity to buy stock in a company.

IPO's can be very financially dangerous but they can also offer astronomical returns on investment. When a company goes public, they are asking you to place your money into their hands so they can build and grow. Your single most important assignment when buying into an initial public offering is to determine if the companies you choose to invest in will actually grow and flourish down the road.