Q. Why are tennis balls fuzzy? Aerodynamics, baby.

The fuzzy felt that covers a tennis ball helps you control it when you bat it over the net. The bounce and spin you get with a fuzzy ball is lessened by the fuzz. You would notice a difference if you hit around a bald ball after practicing with a new, fuzzy ball. The bald ball would be a little wilder on the court.

Q. If blood is red, why do veins look blue?

This gets at the reason why anything has color. The light that reflects off an object gives it the color we see. Good light has all colors in it, even colors we don’t see (e.g. infrared and ultraviolet). For the blood in your veins, light must soak into your skin before coming back to your eye. Apparently, the light in the blue spectrum is most successful at this, so that’s what we see.

The label “blue blood” to refer to aristocrats comes from fair-skinned Spainish families who lived in the Land of Castles, Castile. They argued that they had the purest breeding in their country, which could be clearly seen from the blue veins on their skin. The truth is that their skin color made their veins more visible, not that their blood was bluer than the Moors or anyone else.

Q. Why are hot dogs sold in packs of 10 and buns in packs of 8?

Actually, the packaging incongruity happened for practical reasons, which we have since overcome. Buns were baked in sets of four, because that’s how large the pans were. See? Practical. And buns are not for hot dog use alone. You could cradle any sausage in a warm, whole-grain bun and shovel chili over it, so the question loses its power when the two aren’t connected.

As for why hot dogs came ten to a pack for so long, it’s because that’s the way they are found in the wild. Obviously. Berk Foods claims, “Americans enjoy seven billion hot dogs between Memorial Day and Labor Day,” which is the reason so many school children are marked “obese” on their school papers, which is important for school funding because larger kids get more federal dollars because it’s easier to leave large kids behind than small, non-hot-dog-eating kids, and as you know, no child will be left behind in American schools.

Thanks for asking.

I meditated the other day, in this space, on the question of whether Lutherans are boring. It’s a given, of course, that I’m boring personally, but what about the rest of my brethren? I tried to think of some notable Lutheran I could point to and say, “You call that boring? Ha!” But I couldn’t come up with any.

And then one of my Facebook friends posted this video.

Now I don’t know whether Egil Ronningsbakken, the performance artist here, is a Lutheran or not. Odds are he’s at least nominally Lutheran, since most Norwegians are, but more and more Norwegians are purely secular nowadays, without even going through the traditional pro formas of baptism and confirmation.

Still, he’s at least Lutheran by heritage. And whatever you may call whatever it is he’s doing, you can’t call it boring. Frankly, just watching the video is almost physically painful to me, afraid of heights as I am.

I might mention that Preikestolen, the cliff where he’s performing here, is the precise spot I had in mind in the big climactic scene in The Year of the Warrior where Erling and his men confront a warlock under the northern lights. I called it the High Seat in the book, not in order to protect the innocent, but just because I assumed that Preikestolen (The Pulpit) wouldn’t be a name the Vikings would have used. So I made one up.

Lutherans. Not boring. Just bug-eye crazy.

I’m not the Norway expert I thought I was. I hadn’t been aware that the Norwegian Olympic curling team is famous, not for winning matches, but for wearing silly pants.

I do not feel richer for the knowledge. It does make me feel better about my ancestors’ decision to emigrate, though.

Tip: “Scott” at Threedonia.

This is funny and a totally appropriate spoof on a recent movie you may have seen. If you haven’t seen it or read any criticism of it, then you will miss half the jokes.

Dude, was I right or what?

Below find my traditional list of achievable new year’s resolutions for 2014. Disclaimer: I am a professional. Do not try this at home.

I resolve to give up twerking.

I resolve to cut my caviar expenses by at least 50%.

I resolve to eat no komodo dragon meat.

I resolve to be gracious in my forgiveness, when the Minneapolis Star and Tribune finally apologizes for failing to meet my information needs, as inevitably it must.

I resolve to help Peter Jackson fix his last Hobbit script, if asked.

I resolve not to run if nominated, and not to serve if elected.

I resolve not to let the Balrog pass.

I resolve to read no books by Dan Brown.

I resolve not to wear knee-britches.

I resolve to permit my enemies one more year of life before I defeat them, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women.

Happy New Year!

Posting this video is probably an act of self-indulgence, but I keep remembering it around Christmas. And just today I discovered someone had put a video up on YouTube. Except that it’s not a video video, just a sound recording illustrated with a recurring loop of photos. The real visual image that should go with the poem is this one.

It’s a Scandinavian-dialect parody of “The Night Before Christmas,” which a Minneapolis kids’ TV personality named Clellan Card (in his character of Axel Torgerson, an eccentric immigrant who lived in a tree house with a dog and a cat) did every year around the holiday. For kids who grew up in southern Minnesota, this is a precious memory.

Clellan Card was a clever radio comedian who had something of a national reputation, but the accidental deaths of his two oldest sons in 1952 and 1953 impelled him to devote himself entirely to entertaining children. The best I can do to describe him is to say he was sort of a talking Harpo Marx – a five year old kid grown up in body but not in spirit. You can’t fake that attitude. Kids can smell a phony. Card was the real thing.

In 1966, he started being absent from his show more and more frequently, his sidekick “Carmen the Nurse” filling in for him. And on April 14, Carmen tearfully announced that Axel had died. We had a lot of local kids’ shows in those days, and some of them were pretty good. But nobody ever achieved the heights of nonsense that Axel did.

I figured it all out today. I was talking to a fellow in the library, and I got onto my little speech (which I’ve given in this space before) about the big difference between English and German.

German is famous for long, long words. But those words can be broken down into their constituent parts and analyzed by any moderately educated German speaker. This gives the language tremendous precision.

In English, our long words tend to be borrowed from Latin. And hardly any of us speak Latin anymore. So most of us don’t know what our long words mean.

This has contributed tremendously to the obfuscation of our discourse.

It makes it possible to sound very intelligent in English without making any sense whatever.

In other words, it has given us modernism.

So all we have to do to reclaim the culture is to start teaching Latin again.

There, I’ve figured it out. I leave it to you to work out the details.