Dear Dr. Boli: It is nearly midnight on January 1 in my time zone, and I have not yet come up with any New Year’s resolutions. Do you think you could help me out? —Sincerely, Unresolved.

Dear Sir or Madam: With pleasure.

You resolve not to place any televisions in public places where they cannot be avoided.

You resolve not to double-park in front of the pizza joint and pretend you can’t hear the clang-clang-clang of the streetcar trying to get by—a streetcar that may in fact be carrying a desperate passenger downtown on a vital tea run.

You resolve not to stage a dramatic breakup with your boyfriend or girlfriend via cell phone while you are riding on the streetcar.

You resolve to learn Lithuanian, because it is a fascinating language that preserves many primitive features that have been lost in other modern members of the Indo-European family.

If you happen to be running a tea dealership, you resolve to keep a larger stock of Yunnan on hand at all times, so that there will be no shortage in case of emergency.

You resolve to read this Magazine every day and await the coded instructions that will tell you where you should be and what you must do when the revolution begins.

“Everybody else is doing it” is an excuse seldom accepted by elementary-school teachers or parents of six-year-olds. In the publishing business, however, it is not merely an excuse, but rather has the force of a commandment. Thus, as everyone else is doing on this last day of the year, we pause to take a short look backward at the year that is passing.

In January, we remembered the famous Peace Conference at Pleasant Springs, in which Chief Green Hat rejected the proposal of the United States government to remove his tribe westward. We also heard another installment of the exciting Captain Pleonasm radio serial—an episode in which Captain Pleonasm meets Pipefinger.

In February, the passing of James Windbreaker Klunk, the noted futurologist, brought forth an interesting obituary. We also presented Dr. Boli’s Infallible Weather Indicator as a gift for the amateur meteorologists among our readers.

In March we had a collection of slogans for fortune cookies, a form of literature very popular among some readers. For the education of the young, we presented Science Experiments You Can Do at Home. Many of those young readers, though perhaps not all, survived into April.

In April, we explained how the Internet works. We also explained why the days get longer in the spring. We were on a bit of a bender.

Dire Predictions made us a bit nervous in May, but we were prepared to protect ourselves by watching alertly for suspicious activity.

In June, we debunked a spurious Hawthorne quotation, which was hard work, but now that the work is done the last bit of false information has been eliminated from the Internet. We then turned our attention to the matter of world peace, which we secured through confusingly similar flags.

We learned how to be a cat in July, We also ran an exclusive report on the White House’s controversial regulation of Orthodox theology.

In August, we sorted out the causes of the Civil War. Our Brief Glossary of Common Terms in Academic Literary Criticism was praised by a number of readers who were not academic literary critics.

In September, Dr. Boli acquired First Things magazine, which he is frankly still trying to figure out what to do with. We also learned how to tell the temperature from a cricket’s chirping,

In October, we met some remarkable cats. We ended the month with A Frightening Story for Halloween Night.

In November, we learned the proper etiquette for televisions in public places. November was also the month in which The Crimes of Galahad was published, an event that marks the maturity of the American novel as an art form.

In December we were given an exclusive extract from Irving Vanderbolck-Wheedle’s romance Hypericum, which may remind certain readers of Longfellow, or may not. Finally, December was the month in which we looked back at the rest of the year 2012, and no one is happier than Dr. Boli to have that out of the way.

Dear Dr. Boli: I am confused. The National Rifle Association, forced due to the failed Mayan Apocalypse to make a statement about the latest school shooting, recommended as a solution more guns in schools and a national registry of the mentally ill. Am I mistaken? I thought such a list already exists—the membership list of the NRA. —Signed, Listless and gunless in Pittsburgh.

Dear Sir or Madam: As Mr. Wayne LaPierre, the chief executive of the Association, points out, many political figures use national tragedies for selfish political gain. Fortunately Mr. LaPierre’s organization is above such pettiness. A calm and rational examination of the facts proves that, as Mr. LaPierre points out, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Furthermore, the only thing that stops a good guy with a gun is a bad guy with a bigger gun, and you can see that there is no theoretical end to this cycle. Not only will all citizens need to arm themselves, but Mr. LaPierre’s inescapable logic will force them to replace their inadequate weapons frequently with arms that can respond to the latest threats posed by the bad guys, or by the good guys, in the case of those citizens who choose to play on the other side of the game. American companies that make and sell the weapons will prosper and grow into even greater powers in both the economic and the political arenas, at least until there are no Americans left. It is the NRA’s calm consideration of the incalculable economic benefit to be derived from a climate of constant fear and hatred that distinguishes its statements from the irrational appeals to mawkish sentimentality we hear from other quarters.

Nor should we accept any of the specious arguments from those on the other side who point out that other countries with much stricter controls on guns have much less gun violence. As any good patriot can explain, this has nothing to do with the laws. America has more gun crime only because Americans are much worse than people in other countries. Only our guns preserve us from our brutal and degraded American nature. If we had stricter controls on guns, the violence in this country would be apocalyptic.

As for the proposal that every citizen who has ever exhibited any signs of mental illness should be registered in a national database that would keep track of his movements, exclude him from a wide range of workplaces and neighborhoods, and be available to law-enforcement agencies, employers, school administrators, insurers, credit-reporting services, real-estate agents, and malicious hackers, you must remember that Mr. LaPierre makes this proposal because the NRA’s first priority has always been your freedom.