I don’t know why, exactly, but for the second year in a row my Christmas-week column at Twinkie Town was a takeoff on Larry King’s old USA Today columns.

I did it last year because it seemed like fun. I did it this year because I couldn’t think of anything else.

I almost started this post writing about cricket. I get so self-absorbed, I forget that precisely 0% of the people reading the Weekend Links know about cricket or care to know more. Still worked it in at the end, though, just to stay true to myself. As always, these links appeared first at RandBall, where you cannot call someone “despotic” even if they are. (Stupid media standards.)

It looks like there’s a pretty high chance we’re going to have a warm, snowless Christmas this year. In the interest of making the most of this, I’d like to present my Top Three Sports To Play Outside On Christmas So You’ll Have A Story To Tell The Kids:

On with the links:

*Everybody involved with hockey in any way should read this column from former goaltender and Canadian MP Ken Dryden.

*Parker Hageman thinks Josh Willingham is perfect for Target Field. This is mostly because nobody except Jim Thome is strong enough to consistently hit the ball out of Target Field between the power alleys.

*Teemu Selanne is making his return to Winnipeg tonight, for the first time since the Jets ditched town for Phoenix. The hockey humorists at Down Goes Brown take a look back at his career.

That’ll do it for me, except to note this: I was pretty sure that USA cricket couldn’t get any more dysfunctional, what with the president canceling elections and such. Then, the national team captain got arrested for mortgage fraud, faces 20 years in prison, and can’t play in tournaments because the feds confiscated his passport. This is also the sport in which three famous international players went to jail for fixing games. Forget NBA or NFL labor disputes: cricket knows how to do dysfunction right.

Thursday, it was announced that former Portland guard Bonzi Wells would be signing with the Timberwolves. Wells hadn’t played in the NBA for more than three years and was a known hothead – he was a big part of the Jail Blazers era in Portland – so it was a curious decision.

Wells will likely remain a practice / camp player, a footnote in Timberwolves history. With that in mind, I put together the top ten reasons the Wolves signed Bonzi Wells.

Always taking on the big subjects here, aren’t I?

Early in the second period of Wednesday night’s Wild-Blackhawks game, tough guys Brad Staubitz and Daniel Carcillo dropped the gloves at center ice. Staubitz, representing Minnesota, got Carcillo’s helmet off, and late in the bout, he got inside Carcillo, got a good handful of jersey, and proceeded to pound Carcillo a few times before wrestling him to the ice.

I understand why this fight happened. The Wild, playing for the second time in two nights, had skated sleepily for the game’s first twenty-odd minutes, and Staubitz used his fists to get the team going. It worked, too, as Minnesota responded right away with its first good shift of the game. The Wild bench got fired up and the team seemed to wake up, and it was clear that Staubitz had done his job.

But here’s the part that gets me. Fighting in the NHL is supposed to be in defense of “the code,” where fighters defend the honor of skill players and police the other team’s bruisers by swinging fists. It’s treated as a respected, even honorable, part of the league. And I’m not going to try to argue that there aren’t situations in which a good brawl seems warranted – think of Brad May sucker-punching Kim Johnsson during the playoffs several years ago, or Chris Kunitz pulling Brent Burns’s hair during a pileup during that same Ducks-Wild series.

But it seems to me that most of today’s NHL fights don’t involve Dave Semenko looking out for Wayne Gretzky. Most of them seem to fall into one of two categories:

1. Tough guy from Team A, trying to fire up his team or set an example or otherwise prove a point, challenges tough guy from Team B and they duke it out, gladiators in the middle of the ice.
2. Player from Team A gets hit with a hard, but often legal, bodycheck. Another player from Team A rushes after the bodychecker from Team B and tries to immediately goad the checker into a fight.

The way fighting is supposed to work is that Team A is going after Team B for dangerous play – a hit to the head or a run at the goaltender, or something similarly designed to risk injury to an opposing player. But these situations don’t result in fights, they result in scrums and wrestling matches, as both teams pile in to the inevitable fray. The point of fighting – doling out eye-for-an-eye justice for headhunters and goons – is lost.

I get why fighting’s allowed in the NHL. And I agree that in some situations it may even be desirable. But legalizing these situations also means that sometimes one of the team’s guys has to fight just for playing physically, or even more stupidly, because somebody on the other team really, really wants to fight. And to me, the pointlessness of those fights may outweigh the occasional necessity of keeping fighting as a part of the game.

The Twins, who lost 99 games in 2011, spent the first portion of their offseason trying to reassemble that 2011 team for another run in 2012. It seemed like a good time to break out another Twinhua News Agency post.

Later on that Monday, rumors began to fly that Minnesota was looking to sign Oakland outfielder Josh Willingham and let Michael Cuddyer walk. Clearly, the satire found its mark at the highest levels. (Or something.)

*Today’s Weekend Links are the first written by someone who’s middle-aged. Do they seem grumpier? Than usual? Okay, let’s be honest – I probably couldn’t get a lot grumpier. As always, these appeared first at RandBall, your home for bacon enthusiasm. *

So, unless there’s some big news early today, Michael Cuddyer hasn’t yet accepted the Twins’ contract offer. That’s fine, and it’s his right. In some ways, he seems to be this year’s version of Carl Pavano – hoping for big things in free agency, but a little old and with enough question marks to scare other teams away from taking on a big contract and giving up a draft pick. So good luck to him on getting as much money as he can get.

I do, however, have to say this. Part of the reason Joe Nathan left, according to the closer, was that he wanted to play for a winner. We’ve heard reports that Cuddyer also wants to play for a winner, which is part of the reason why he hasn’t already re-signed with the Twins. Now, I get that the Twins don’t seem close to being a winning team right now. But it feels semi-hypocritical that two guys who were on the team for all of 2011 can stand up and say, “This team doesn’t look like a winner, and I should know – I was a big part of that.” Give Matt Capps credit. I hated the Capps signing, but at least he stood up and said something along the lines of, “I was awful last year, and I want to help put it right.”

This week’s links:

*You’ll have to know a bit of background on the forthcoming National Collegiate Hockey Conference to find this funny. If you know the story so far, though, Chris at the Western College Hockey Blog has my favorite post of the week.

*Spencer Hall spends a few thousand words ranking this year’s college football bowl games from 1-35, from the culture clash of Oregon and Wisconsin at the top, to the factory of sad that is Illinois vs. UCLA at the bottom.

*FOX is going to air Manchester United vs. Arsenal live, the morning of the NFC Championship Game. If Terry Bradshaw tries to commentate on the highlights of the match during the pregame show, the world may collapse.

*In one of the weirdest stories you’ll ever read, a Dutch woman who won two medals in hand cycling at the Beijing Paralympic Games was training in Spain when another cyclist ran into her. While recovering from the accident, she regained use of her legs – and now is on track to compete in the 2016 Olympics.

That’ll do it for me this week. In closing, I’d like to offer a big welcome back to NBA fans.

I think making up an entirely fictional personality for Darko Milicic has been one of my favorite things to write.  I don’t know why I decided that Darko should think Swedes are idiots, or love French Toast, or try to nickname Wes Johnson “Kill Shark,” but it’s been fun.

In the beginning, Darko just wanted to stay in Minnesota – and later was thrilled to re-sign. Unfortunately, he then couldn’t shoot to save himself. And now, he’s back, and ready for the lockout to end and the 2011-12 season to begin, in a post titled “I, Darko, Am Ready For Basketballs.”

The Canis Hoopus commenters sometimes get on me for making fun of Milicic. I want to be clear that he is my favorite Timberwolf, and I hope he scores 30 points a game and his left-handed hook becomes famous as one of the great moves in NBA history. It’s just fun to poke fun at him until that happens.

Every year, baseball’s movers and shakers gather somewhere in the South to… well, I don’t know what the stated purpose of the Winter Meetings is. I do know that every general manager, free agent, and player representative in baseball is there, right now, making deals. It’s the pinnacle of the Hot Stove League, and for four days in December the media covers baseball offseason news like it’s Super Bowl week.

At Twinkie Town, we figure that if everybody else is going to cover things wall-to-wall, we might as well, too. I spent Monday writing updates – one the night before, one in the morning before work, one at lunch, and one after racing home from work – about baseball rumors that may never, ever come to fruition. It’s an entertaining time, not least because it’s a departure from what I usually do when writing about the Twins, which is to lay around thinking up new jokes with one of the same eight premises I’ve been using for four years.

Below are links to the updates, though they’re a day out of date by now. By the time you read this, they will seem pointless. But I take some shots at the team’s absurd re-signing of Matt Capps, and that’s always fun.

Early Morning
Morning (Mark Buehrle rumors and others)
Afternoon (Josh Willingham rumors)
Evening (Capps signs)

I liked today’s opening paragraph when I wrote it. Today I realize that it had no evidence and means nothing. I wish I was better at stuff. Anyway, this post appeared first at RandBall, your home for going to Orlando for Thanksgiving and pretending it was a hardship:

In my experience, one does not have to look far to find an online opinion that NBA fans are a dying breed. ESPN’s Bill Simmons used to write quite regularly that he was “one of 18 NBA fans left,” for example, and with the NBA lockout apparently over I’ve seen a couple more columns lamenting that nobody cares about the NBA. The problem with this is that by most measures the NBA is comfortably the third most-popular sports league in America, enjoyed and watched by millions. I understand this “woe is us” impulse – I am, after all, a non-Canadian hockey fan, and sometimes it seems like “Why doesn’t everybody understand how great hockey is?” is the only thing any of us can talk about. But, at least where the NBA is concerned, this impulse confuses me. NBA fans, worry not: there are many more like you and they’re everywhere.

We didn’t do the links over Thanksgiving, because RandBall decided that he had to go to Orlando instead, so we’ve got a number of them from the past two weeks:

*The Sports Economist blog notes that at least one pro-stadium group here in Minnesota seems to think that if you oppose the Vikings stadium, you’re too poor to have your opinion count anyway.

*I was thrilled to find out that John “Twins Geek” Bonnes, like me, wasn’t too happy about the way that Joe Nathan departed.

*Patrick Donnelly at VikesCentric compares Les Frazier to Les Steckel, to try to answer whether the former will get fired.

*A Wolf Among Wolves thinks that Michael Beasley may be on his way to the margins of the Wolves’ lineup.

*Parker Hageman shows us proof that Brian Duensing belongs in the bullpen, not the rotation.

*I enjoyed Shawn Fury’s story of the life of a young sports journalist.

*And finally, for those of you interested in college athletics, this post from the Sports Economist about college athletics and university governance structures is the link of the week. It’s a way of looking at things that I hadn’t considered.

That’ll do it for me. If you’re looking for some anger to sustain you this weekend, remember: this man is well-paid for his opinions.

Eagle-eyed readers will note that my latest post at Canis Hoopus, 13 Little-Known Provisions In The New CBA, bears a striking similarity to something I wrote last Monday for Twinkie Town. I can only say that it was unfortunate that baseball and basketball both put together new collective bargaining agreements so close to one another, thereby throwing into sharp relief the fact that I have pretty much one joke in my entire repertoire.