Time to make New Year’s resolutions! And what could be better than to resolve to be punctual? Getting up on time is very important for those who want to start the day out right. But for so many of us, even an alarm clock is not enough to do the trick.

I was thinking about this when I saw a Facebook post forwarded by my first cousin, Mindy, about “Clocky,” the alarm clock. Here’s what the post had to say:

“Clocky — he gets you up. He will let you snooze, but only once. He leaps and runs. He is very loud. He hides. You wake up on time. You will never oversleep again.”

How irritating Clocky must be! I saw pictures of Clocky on Amazon though, and he is quite cute, with a small oblong body framed by a large plastic wheel on either side. Clocky has two little round eyes, and inside his mouth the time is digitally displayed. He comes in several colors.

You may be asking, “What makes you say that Clocky is a he, or that Clocky has any gender at all, seeing as how Clocky is a clock?”

I can just tell, OK?

Would a cat chase Clocky? I think Clocky suddenly diving off the bedside table and rolling away, beeping loudly, would terrify my cat Jupiter. In Jupiter’s kittenhood Clocky might have triggered his predatory instincts.

In her post, my cousin Mindy suggested that, while she herself doesn’t need an alarm clock, there might be some people who would want to smash Clocky once they had located him. I feel she is right.

Also on Facebook, I read a post from someone stating that not only does Denmark refuse to sell Greenland at Trump’s request, but Denmark has offered to buy the U.S. in its entirety, except for its government.

I fact-checked this and learned from a “Newsweek” update that Andy Borowitz had made the story up out of whole cloth, as usual. Also, there is no truth to the rumor that Denmark refused to sell Greenland to the U.S. for beads and trinkets, even though Trump offered to sweeten the deal by throwing in a Trump Bible. Borowitz might just change recorded history if “Snopes” and “Newsweek” start slacking off.

What is this I hear about “Midwest nice?”

Over the years people have told me, usually to justify their own bad behavior — and let’s hope they resolve to do better in the new year — “Oh, you’re nice, that’s because you’re from Minnesota.”

I tell them no, I’m from Michigan, but they think Minnesota and Michigan are basically the same state, or as good as.

“Midwest nice,” they say as if that settles it and explains why they don’t necessarily have to be nice back, seeing as how they are not from the Midwest. Because who could blame a person from, say, New Jersey for not being Midwest nice?

People from New Jersey and New York are not known for their niceness, in fact the opposite, but I consider that assessment unfair.

The Midwest is composed of Nebraska, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin. I don’t know anyone from most of those states, and maybe nobody else does either, and that’s why the myth persists that we’re so nice.

I don’t believe in Midwest nice. In Michigan, in the Metro Detroit area where I grew up, people generally were not that nice. Not to speak of. Even my family when I was growing up were not all that nice. They were fine and all, but not what you would call Midwest nice.

I lived out west for about nine years, and at first I thought people who lived in the great Southwest were extremely optimistic and encouraging, cheering a person on to do their thing. “Go for it!” a perfect stranger would urge, like some lifestyle guru. After a while though I found that was as far as it went.

Then again, some of my favorite people in the whole world are from Colorado and Texas, and my grandchildren are California natives. So there you go.

Many of us from Michigan’s Lower Peninsula have a dark sense of humor. We have a dark sense of everything, which makes us not all that nice. Maybe people from Wisconsin are Midwest nice. But I doubt it. Iowa? Not in my experience. Maybe South Dakota.

Happy New Year!