I went to see the Pennsylvania Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker every year from the time I was four until I was in high school. And I spent hours with the Russian dance and the Waltz of the Flowers and the Sugar Plum Fairy playing on the phonograph in my bedroom while I improvised my own choreography to the entire Suite.

Nowadays, I’m more of a Hard Nut kinda gal, but I really am a sucker for all things Nutcracker. So it’s not surprising that I thrilled to this version of the Sugar Plum theme assembled entirely from samples of sounds produced by tweaking, banging and plucking various bicycle parts.

And yes, I know it’s an ad, but I still can’t resist. My only complaint: every Nutcracker nerd knows it’s a celesta, not a glockenspiel.

When I got home tonight, I logged on to AIM for a few minutes and ended up talking to my friend Marilyn — another of the Gävlebock’s fans. She wanted to know if I’d been checking the goat’s blog lately.

“No, not really. Has he been attacked yet?”

“He’s looking for a girlfriend.”

After the goat asked whether anyone knew any nice nanny goats, a helpful American, sent the him a link to Lucy, the Amazing Elephant Building in Margate, New Jersey.

I don’t want to stand in the way of true love, but after checking out Lucy, I really think she’d be a better match for Stoorn, the giant moose.

Yes, the Gävlebock is back, and he’s started posting on his blog.

Workers installed the goat at the Castle Square (Slottstorget) in Gävle today in preparation for the big opening-day ceremony on Sunday.

I’ve linked to the English version of the blog, but if you can you read Swedish, you might want to check out the Swedish version as well since there are some details that go missing in the translation — like the fact that the goats horns were a little mussed after his summer storage — or are contain amusing misspellings — such as the goat being “tiered” instead of “tired” after today’s intensive activities.

One of Mark Liberman’s recent language log posts has turned me on to my latest guilty YouTube pleasure: foreign language music videos subtitled with a phonetic transcription of the lyrics that makes some sort of weird sense in another language.

Here for example is the Russian (?) German [so much for my linguistic acuity] group Dschengis Dschinghis Kahn singing their song Moskau, Moskau with the lyrics transcribed into an English-language approximation with lines like “Moscow, Moscow, please respect the caviar!” The “Golden Horde goes to Vegas”-style costumes only add to the appeal.

Liberman’s post contains links to other examples of this emergent video genre, which his informant, Ben Ostrowsky, has christened “Autour-de-mondegreens.” A mondegreen is a misunderstanding of a spoken or sung text. One of the best-known example might be the mishearing of “’scuse me while I kiss the sky” as “’scuse me while I kiss this guy.” Note that some of the video links are definitely not work safe.

A pleasant surprise was finding that these sorts of videos have been popular in Sweden where they’re known as “Turkhits.” Swedish Wikipedia provides links to some of the these videos including the most famous, “Hatten är din” (“The Hat is Yours”), a Turkhits version of the Lebanese song “Meen ma Kenty/Habbaytek.”

My sister and I were IMing earlier today about French bulldog puppies and other paragons of cuteness. At some point in the conversation, I sent her a link to the lolsloth I had seen, which prompted her to send me a link to a picture of a sloth in a box. She also mentioned that there was a video of a sloth in a box lurking somewhere on the net.

Somehow this led to me spending what now seems like an inordinate amount of time viewing clips of sloths, both two-toed and three-toed, on YouTube. I found one baby sloth in a box, multiple baby sloths in boxes, and a raft of other baby sloth films; a sloth stranded on the ground; a sloth swimming; even an unfortunate sloth being picked off by a harpy eagle.

The pièce de résistance, though, was a clip of the inimitable David Attenborough explaining more than I ever thought I needed to know about the digestive habits of sloths.

And is it just me, or are sloths the Edward Scissorhands of the animal kingdom?

Welcome to NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) here at Omnivorous! The party formally gets started later today with my first official post of the month.

Last year, I managed to post every day from December 1 through 24 as part of my Swedish-inspired Julkalender project (sort of like an advent calendar, but digital), so this year I thought I’d up the ante by tacking on an additional month of posts.

If you’ve never visited before, feel free to look around and comment. I don’t really have many etiquette rules other than a standard “please play nicely with others.” But, then again, my blog marketing has thus far consisted of occasionally mailing or IMing a link to a friend who I think might be amused so it’s not like I have a hoarde of commenters.

Anyhow, if you like what you see, I hope you’ll stop back this month, and next to see what I’m up to.