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.

Have you seen Garfield Minus Garfield? The book has been out since October 2008, collected from the comics posted on Dan Walsh’s website. The gist is to remove the cat from the strip and discover a remarkably funny, albeit dark and usually depressing, comic strip.

Publishers Weekly says, “If Samuel Beckett had been a strip cartoonist, he might’ve produced something like this.” Here are a couple.

For a slightly different angle on this joke:

Allan Sherman was an entertainer from the days of my youth, who had no particular talent except for his ability to write clever parodies of popular songs. I was a great fan of his, and even tried to write parodies of my own. But I was never as good at it. The clip above is perhaps my favorite of his works, a take-off on the song, “You Gotta Have Heart,” from the musical D*mn Yankees (fifty years after the show opened on Broadway, I still can’t bring myself to spell out the title). It came to my mind today, heaven knows why.

I came up with a one-liner today that is, in my opinion, hilarious. It’s so good that I’m positive somebody else must have come up with it first.

“I’d give my right arm to be ambidextrous.”

Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week.

My big entertainment, over the weekend, was watching all three Man With No Name movies on Blu-ray. I’ve had a Blu-ray player for several months now, but I didn’t actually own a Blu-ray movie. Finally I noticed that Amazon was selling a set of all three Eastwood spaghettis for about twenty-five bucks, so I sent away for them.

Consumer report: I enjoyed the movies very much, as I always do. But I realized more than ever before – I suppose it’s inevitable as I grow older – that there is no moral value in them whatever. I first encountered the term “moral holiday” in a review of a James Bond movie when I was a teenager, and that conception applies just as well to Sergio Leone’s westerns. They’re works of art, and sometimes breathtaking. But they do not know good from evil.

They think they do. I’m sure director Leone thought he was teaching a moral lesson to the world with his works. He loved westerns – it’s apparent in every frame – but he did not love America. Part of the mystique of the spaghetti western was the suggestion that these movies were more honest than the older movies. The old movies had sugar-coated the hard truth, turning gunfighters into boy scouts. But now we could see the true motivations – hatred, revenge, and especially pure greed.

In fact this was no more realistic than the earlier westerns. If the traditional American oaters romanticized the cowboy and the shootist, the Italian westerns imposed on them a purely modern, amoral sensibility. You can see that in the frequency of violence against women in the Italian movies. In the real American west, violence against women (at least white women) was among the chief taboos. These were Victorians, after all, not members of the Manson family.

But Leone knew how to make a film, and he hired one of the greatest geniuses in film music, Ennio Morricone, to do the sound tracks. The result is pure entertainment, the kind of alteration of consciousness that only a master epic filmmaker can produce.

Just as Leone “tore the mask” off the American cowboy, I shall here tear the mask off the moviemaker – moviemakers are manipulators. They always stack the decks, for good or ill. Understand that and you’re free to have a good time.

Applies equally to novelists, come to think of it.