as one does.

It's Christmas Eve, so naturally we spent it, variously:

• Working at REI.
• Taking the dog to the groomer.
• Retrieving the dog from the groomer.
• Playing Cthulhu Wars.
• Bringing the home network back after a power blip.
• Making and eating empanadas.
• Watching Moana (or a big chunk of it).

This sounds much smoother than it was, since the boy was pretty broken today, lots of moods and crabbiness and melodrama. It's been a rough school year for him, with a pretty much non-stop headache of varying intensity and migraine-ness; though he may also just have been hungry.

The power blip was weird. It was in that sweet spot where it was long enough to make equipment stop working, but not quite long enough for it to power down all the way, leaving it in some weird half-on state. A couple years ago I got fed up enough to put some money into Ubiquiti UniFi gear for the house--a good investment considering we use the Internet more or less every waking hour--and its display showed one of the wireless access points (WAP or AP) as disconnected, which was weird since it was on. I power-cycled it, but noticed some other wireless devices still weren't working. It turned out I had to power-cycle the network switch first, then the AP. The switch's only active data is a Major Arcanum called the Address Resolution Protocol, which mostly Just Works™, but if it's corrupted somehow, nothing works, and it will not-work in irritating, obscure ways.

J was being a jerk while I was trying to fix it, but I was reflecting later how impossible it is for him to fathom the gap between his technical knowledge and mine. Some of it is the decades of experience; some of it is that biodad is more likely to get angry at things than learn how to fix them. It's just that there's no catalog of the stuff I know, and if there were, it would be SO, SO BORING. So why shouldn't he say "have you tried turning the Chromebook off and on again?" while I'm telling him the Chromebook and Chromecast need to be on the same wireless network? The Chromecast says "maybe your wireless router is messed up! maybe you should power-cycle it?" and it was more than he could do just then to listen when I said I did that already.

Work is closed until January 3rd, so I decided to spend some of the time learning more fiddle tunes, feeling like I can learn them now without making my technique too much worse. It's a lot of Irish/Scottish/(bluegrass/old-time/Canadian) tunes, which all sound very similar and take a lot of repetition to differentiate, though it's easier to remember them when learning them to play them:

• Whiskey Before Breakfast
• The Red-Haired Boy
• Drowsy Maggie (not sure yet if I'm up to this one)
• The Humours of Glendart
• The Kid On The Mountain
• Polska efter Pelle Fors (which I couldn't play 3 months ago! go, me!)

Scandinavian music is (a) harder, and (b) mostly named descriptive things like "Wedding Polska" and it's just hard to get a handle on. As regards (a), my favorite is a Swedish fiddler saying "Yes, that dance is in 3/4, but the second beat comes faster."

The dog is really soft now, though.

easier than it used to be.

I had a go at the first 4 bars of Bach's Cello Suite #1, and while my teacher was very kind, suggested that I save it for later on down the road.

Duolingo has been fun for Swedish, so I decided to start in on French as well--only half-jokingly as prep for our eventual emigration to Canada. I'm developing a theory that if you've got a knack for languages, they get easier to learn as you know more of them. Anna, for example, studied Arabic and can often make some sense out of Hebrew (both Semitic languages, though not every speaker is ready to hear that). She's an absurdly gifted language learner--she can have conversations in Arabic, Russian, and Turkish, and describes Arabic as "not that hard"--but even the rest of us can learn to see and hear the connections.

In high school it took a single French class to decide that with my solid Spanish, I would find French classes boring for the first long while. After "Enchantée" I figured I could just learn it whenever I needed it. And indeed French is not wildly different from Spanish, as these things go.

(Growing up, I learned that "the Romance languages" were Spanish, French, Italian, and then Romanian. There are dozens! They're not even all defunct, by a long shot.)

Swedish is getting real now. The thing to know about Duolingo is that there's a lot of different kinds of repetition, and also it is partly auto-generated, leading to some not-quite-sensible sentences. I unlocked Duolingo's Animals vocabulary section, which gave me:

• Det är en älg. - "It is a moose."
• Hon har en björn. - "She has a bear."

Both of which pretty much made my day.

"Älg" is pronounced suspiciously like "elk," which was a fun project:

• Why is it translated as "moose"?
• Are there even moose in Europe?
• What do they call the thing that I call an "elk"?

It's a pretty straightforward case of early Europeans going "hey, that looks vaguely like something I know, I'll just call it that." (Moose: established on every sub-Arctic continent. Elk/wapiti: North America and...Northeast Asia?)

Unlike when I was on a boat tour in Chile and the guide said there was a coipú swimming nearby. My dictionary was no help, but I watched it and thought "pretty sure that's a nutria." The Spanish borrowed the native Mapuche word, because... nutria in Spanish already meant "otter."

Shit like this is why Latin scientific names were immediately so important.

there's an idea.

Yo-Yo Ma did this great NPR Tiny Desk Concert where he plays the first movement of Bach's Cello Suites, and explains that was the first thing he learned on the cello.

"Well," I think. "That's interesting."

I've been learning Swedish using the Duolingo iPhone app.

(Why Swedish, when I'm a quarter Norwegian? It was a Swedish neo-folk song that sent me off learning the violin. Norwegian music has too much accordion. Also, the food is better.)

It's goofy to learn a language without practicing conversation, but for what it is, it seems to be decent. It has you translate stuff back and forth in different ways, and ramps up to listening and vocabulary-building. It's an incremental process. I guess I'll start in on French, to help us emigrate to Canada when the time comes.

(Swedish is awesome, by the way. It helps that I know enough about languages to understand what I'm looking at: instead of a definite article, like English "the" or Spanish la, the noun inflects, so en kvinna is "a woman," but kvinnan is "the woman." Old hat to you poor sods who took Latin, of course, which does this in spades.)

It got me thinking, though, that if 4-year old Yo-Yo Ma could learn Cello Suite #1 a measure at a time, maybe I could too. Bach has always been a favorite of transcriptionists everywhere, and it's not like transposing across the violin family is at all difficult. And those first few lines, if you take some deep breaths, aren't super hard.

One measure at a time.

musicking.

I just passed my 1-year mark on the violin! No signs of stopping, and I'm pleased with where I'm at, considering. I don't practice as much as I might, for a couple reasons:

1. The violin feels, and may be, loud, and playing quietly is this whole side project.
2. The violin sound is (for the poor devils like myself who didn't start at age 5) heavily dependent on good posture and full attention.
3. The mandolin is familiar, easy to play quietly, and tolerates being played while slouched on the couch.

I have limited emotional bandwidth, and the mandolin really wants to help you make music, while the violin is the opposite of that.

I've been working on the same two violin pieces for many months, on the theory that as I've still been learning a lot of skills that strike me as basic, like "playing in tune" and "playing from one string to the next without producing a mysterious dissonant harmonic a couple octaves higher," I might as well learn those things on music I'm already familiar with. "Learning lots of songs" is a necessary step, though, and I'm about there.

I did return this week to a song listed in The Nordic Fiddler as "Swan Polska," which even six months ago was just a bit too hard. I applied a tool I picked up from my teacher a month or two ago:

"...and this note is held just a bit longer."
"This is where we discover I have no innate sense of rhythm."
"...?"
"I just fake it everywhere, that's why I'm not playing notes for the same duration every time."
"Oh! ...do you know about subdivision?"
"Nope, never heard of it."
"Ah ha! It will solve your rhythm problem. In fact it's the only thing that will solve your rhythm problem."

 I'm not sure why nobody ever told me this, but subdivision is just identifying the note duration that you're going to count: quarter note or eighth note or whatever. This came up for this song:

My trouble was (is) tracking the beat during all those offbeat ties and that half note, so one helpful way to count this is to count or tap eighth notes, and behold, immediate improvement. I took this back to the troublesome song, which is actually called "Polska efter Pelle Fors"...

...yes, much like Irish folk songs, which are often named things like "Garrett Barry's Jig" in the pattern of "[person]'s [dance type]," Swedish folk songs are often named "[dance type] after/in the style of [musician]." And, no, they're not unique.

...which I'm too lazy to scan the music for, but take my word that I'm counting the sixteenth notes and now I can practice it. Very slowly.

escalation.

Europe: "I made a violin!".

Norway: "I will see your violin, and raise you an alternate tuning, five sympathetic understrings, and enough gratuitous inlay to make Liberace envious."



Sweden: [pounds a shot of akvavit] "Call."
 

Iceland? Denmark? Finland? No?

a fine addition to the family.

On Friday I picked up the mandolin from Gryphon Strings, and wow, it's a peach of an instrument. They did a bunch of stuff that good luthiers can do:

• Add buttons for a shoulder strap.
• Lower the string height ("action"), at both the nut and the bridge.
• File down the edges of the frets so they're smooth with the side of the neck/fingerboard.
• Fix the intonation--essentially the ability to play in tune along the entire length of the string--by not only moving the bridge (and marking its place so I can put it back myself), but also by doing some fancy filing of the saddle grooves in the bridge.
• (In a regular mandolin, this function is handled by a "compensated" saddle, like the zig-zag below.)

Instead of a mandolin's standard G-D-A-E tuning, I have it in G-D-A-D, a common tuning for both the octave mandolin and its longer sibling, the Irish bouzouki. I'm finding it's more fun to play that way, and enables the kind of sound and feel that drew me in the first place to this family of "paired strings, but neither a regular mandolin nor a 12-string guitar" instruments.

When I emailed the maker (Stan Pope) to tell him it had made its way to me, and to ask about some pricing not on his website, he wrote back:

Chris - That is a "blast from the past" 

The main changes I have made, are Truss rods in all steel string
instruments, Cross Bracing top and back, brass tailpiece that accepts
ball end strings.

My assessment of my mandolin, which the Gryphon guys agreed with, was that it was an early piece by someone who could go on to do truly great things. Evidently Stan thinks so too.

(In addition to design and mechanics, he's clearly put in the time mastering ornamentation and wood finish.)

Particularly in the harmonic-rich G-D-A-D tuning, it just...sings. Like it wants to help you make music, even if you don't know how. Pretty much the opposite of a good violin, which will help you make music, but only if you know how to play, and it can't be bothered with you otherwise.

Stan's instruments appear to be wildly under-priced. We'll see how much I play the one I have, whether it makes any sense to have him build me one, and if that happens before he retires. Those are problems for another day. Just now, I have to go practice.

a world of musical ambiguity

I have already brought home a hand-crafted...thing. It belongs to an odd family of instruments, which the "mandolin" family. They have paired strings, called "courses," and each course can be unison or an octave apart, and the paired strings give them a full, more multi-dimensional sound with more higher-pitched overtones. Which may not be what you want: 6-string and 12-string guitars are both wonderful, but not, for most of us, interchangeable.

As mentioned previously, some Swedes developed a 5-course instrument that they call a cittern, for no discernible reason. I have discovered that you can actually buy one off the rack, though the Internet's opinion of the Ashbury brand is that it's kind of okay, but if you're halfway serious, it's worth having a luthier build you one. I don't really want to pay $900 for a mediocre instrument, nor do I want to pay $4,000 for a nice one. So much for that.

(Note that Ashbury calls it an "Irish" cittern, again sort of nonsensically because while Swedish musicians do love them some Irish traditional music, I've only seen one or two people play a 5-course instrument who wasn't Swedish.)

So I kept poking around on Craigslist, and this thing shows up, labeled an "Irish cittern."

 

The maker is a real person, using a different shop name now. It's "chunky," in a sense: the neck is square-ish and heavy, the string height farther down the fingerboard is really high, and it feels like the ends of the frets should be rounded off with a file. And it sings, with sustain and harmonics for days. It's clearly a solid early piece by an artist who could go on to make truly great things. Totally worth $140.

Here's what I've learned about these instruments:

• A "mandolin" is very well defined.
• The following instruments have no solid distinctions between them:
• "octave mandolin"
• "mandola"
• "mandocello"
• "cittern"
• "Irish Bouzouki"

People tune them differently, using different weight strings based on the tension the instrument was built to withstand: it's common, especially on longer-scale instruments like the Irish bouzouki or the Swedish cittern, to see people lower their preferred tuning to fits the instrument's strength, then only ever play with a capo that moves the instrument's range above what they could safely crank the strings to. For example, they could tune an instrument to GDAD, but always play with a capo that pitched the strings to DAEA, when trying to tune that high directly would be likely to break strings or damage the instrument.

I will call it an "octave mandolin," because that's what people thought it was when I wandered into the shop with it.

Wikipedia has caught up:

Amongst many luthiers and musicians the Irish bouzouki is considered to be part of the mandolin family, but for others this new family of instruments is a separate development. In actuality, the mandolin and lute families are related and the bouzouki is a part of that. At any rate, since the genesis of the Irish bouzouki in the late 1960s, luthiers have incorporated so many aspects of mandolin construction, particularly when building archtop Irish bouzoukis, that for most it is a moot point.

For many builders and players, the terms "bouzouki", "cittern", and "octave mandolin" are more or less synonymous. The name cittern is often applied to instruments of five courses (ten strings), especially those having a scale length between 20 and 22 inches (500mm and 550mm). They are also occasionally called "10 string bouzoukis" when having a longer scale length. The fifth course is usually either a lowest bass course tuned to C2 or D2 on an instrument with a long scale, or a highest treble course tuned to G4 or A4 on a shorter scale. Luthier Stefan Sobell, who coined the term "cittern" for his modern, mandolin-based instruments, originally used the term for short scale instruments irrespective of the number of their strings, but he now applies "cittern" to all 5 course instruments irrespective of scale length, and "octave mandolin" to all 4 course instruments, leaving out bouzouki entirely.

I'm sitting on our couch and I can see eight (8) stringed instruments, which is a fine number.

I could never dream of such nuance.

One of the many curious things you learn in calculus is that "infinity" is not exactly a single thing: that, yes, a set of things can be infinite, but infinite sets can have different "cardinalities," and with some straightforward (as these things go) math, in some calculus situations you can algebraically cancel out infinities the same way you might cancel out the n in 5n/n. In an ordinary everyday life, you'd never know the difference.

I have learned many subtleties in the world of boring bedtime literature. There are different ways to be boring! And they are not alike.

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

• Here we have sentences, actually quite pithy by later standards, but still of considerable length, which do the reader no favors as s/he tries to untangle where Gibbon has been superseded by actual archeology, where his observations are still illuminating, and where he (unaccountably to modern eyes) suffers as both a scholar and commentator from assuming the Bible is historically accurate and not presenting any good theories as to why the entire ancient world failed to notice the flood of miracles leading up and including the Crucifixion, which encourages in the modern reader the sense that, while our ways of understanding history are always improving, at the very least Gibbon deserved to be supplanted by the slavering hordes of archeology, geology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, textual criticism, physics, and chemistry.

Moby-Dick

• I hope you're interested in ships, whale biology, and ships that hunted and skinned whales, because there are very, very long and detailed interludes on all that, and more. And others less interesting. Although, there are no ships until 25% through the book. Before that, you're treated to a long-form essay about the pulpit in the Seamans' Chapel. (Not its symbolism or significance. Just the pulpit.)
• An over-indulgent pot-smoker whose rambling self-monologues every so often deliver an hour of genuine brilliance.

Paradise Lost

• It is 3 AM. You have been driving for 17 hours. Jamie wouldn't have called if it weren't a real emergency; you pray to gods you don't believe in that the trouble isn't the cartel again. 
• Hundreds of square miles of corn and soybeans, punctuated by the occasional farmhouse or rest stop.
• Your muscles twitch with accumulated coffee and Adderall, but you are lulled by the metronome thunking of the expansion joints in the pavement.
• Nebraska has come for you.

connections.

Here is the sort of thing that happens if you learn stuff for fun:

I finally started in on Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London excellent series of paranormal/urban fantasy police procedural novels. The protagonist is an African-British police constable, who among other things was training to be an architect, dropping out when he discovered he couldn't draw, but with a practiced eye, he guides the reader through the centuries of British buildings. The fourth book, Broken Homes, focuses on a failed modernist high-rise building built when architects thought they could build a better society by separating living space from retail or work space, raising people up, literally, by building upward.

(The astute reader will notice this is the exact opposite of the "mixed-use" standard we're currently working with, where homes and shops and businesses are all together; this is not an accident, as all of these projects failed in pretty much the same ways. Nobody bought into these ideas when they were introduced in the 1920s and 1930s; it was only World War II's destruction of Europe's housing that provided an opening.)

At the same time, I was reading J. G. Ballard's novel High-Rise, which takes place in a modernist skyscraper, and whose first paragraph hints at a dystopian narrative:

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension.

While that was all fresh in my mind, I suddenly had a yen to listen indiscriminately to episodes of the fabulous 99% Invisible podcast, which I'd previously dropped because a lack of commute also means a lack of podcast-listening time. And I just happened to hit a two-part episode about--wait for it--an enormous modernist tower project in the Netherlands, called the Bijlmermeer. You can guess what happened to it, although it has its own Dutch spin on things, like the role of Suriname, the project's pragmatic and seemingly effective redevelopment, and then there's the thing where a 747 crashed into it.

I actually found a podcast devoted to hunting down this kind of inter-relatedness, though mostly from the Renaissance and earlier: The Endless Knot, brought to us by a pair of delightfully nerdy history/language professors.

getting there!

After about 9 months of violin, much of the noise sounds like music!

It's still a ridiculous instrument, sensitive to the smallest misstep in timing, or barely-perceptible muscle tension. It's a lot like singing that way, where you get these odd tips that are often not physically possible--my favorite is "sing while opening more space between your upper and lower molars"--but using that image, you can get your body into the right position. "Relax your sternohyoid muscles" is not helpful feedback for most of us.

My new teacher told me about "leading tones," which may have been in that second semester of Music Theory that I dropped out of. In the violin context, it means that certain notes--predictably, thank heavens--get played at a slightly higher pitch than normal, which amounts to placing your finger a millimeter or two higher than you would normally. In science-y terms, if you would normally play a B at 493.88 Hz, unless the next note is C, in which case you might play it at 494.5 Hz. He said, "Our brains make it sound better that way," and it did explain some passages whose correct intonation has escaped me.

On the other hand, it is a tremendous sense of accomplishment to actually get better at playing the violin, because the violin does not help you in the slightest.

cures for insomnia

Paradise Lost is...slow. Not with Moby-Dicks's virtuosity, but in a run-of-the-mill way that you can expect when reading epic poetry as a 21st-century modern. My last study of poetry was half a lifetime ago, and even my private school knows better than to push their freshmen too far beyond Shakespeare, so to the extent I ever knew that blank verse is unrhymed (usually) iambic pentameter, I forgot. (I did not forget that Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, probably because I had a few years of studying theater before switching gears to computer science.) I may need to switch back to The Iliad, which offers some surprises, even though I know much of what there is to know (in English) about its background and storyline. Maybe because it's been so influential, Paradise Lost isn't promising anything interesting, when I have consumed many books and podcasts covering the poem, and its historicultural associates, from all kinds of angles.

It is a very refined turgidity, though. The scrupulously identical meter of each line, without no regard to sentence or speaker, is exhausting.

On the other hand, simply anticipating reading Milton, on the way to sleep, seems to help me sleep. So, hey. Mission accomplished.

Father's Day

We went to the Father's Day breakfast at the lake, and I ate a couple of pancakes and some orange juice, thus proving that age does not magically bestow wisdom. It's been a sleepy afternoon.

It's been a fine decade of parenting J, though of course he'll take some more time to grasp and accept the extent of my father-figure presence in his life. His biological father is a walking storm of issues--in his Magnanimous Mode, he said he could pick J up at the lake, allowing that I "might have some fatherly feelings" for the boy--who, like a toddler enforcing his ownership of a toy he doesn't actually like, guards his "father" place in J's world by assertion rather than by, I dunno, being a good father.

Fatherhood has granted me some priceless, heart-warming moments.

Around age 6ish, I was driving J somewhere by myself and he was angry I hadn't brought an iPad for him (or whatever), and he yelled "AAAAGH! YOU'RE THE WORST DAD, I MEAN STEPDAD, EVER!!".

But the all-time winner, even though it's second-hand:

One of J's birthday parties was at the place in Half Moon Bay where he took pony-riding lessons for a few years. His oldest friend, the son of Anna's oldest friend, met Bio-Dad, who introduced himself as J's father.

"I thought Chris was J's father."

And that's what happens when you don't show up.

shift.

I'm getting a new violin teacher, since the current one is moving to Austin for a 2-year residency with her string quartet. I had my first lesson with the new guy this weekend, and it looks like a good change: he's less dedicated to Classical Violin™, and I suspect has more experience teaching adults.

(Teaching adults is definitely a newer thing for the previous teacher, who compulsively tuned my violin at the start of every lesson--at the recital I discovered that this is normal, since of course most kids can't do it, especially for violin--and slipped uncontrollably into the "we" voice at times. She's Canadian, and very nice, and it doesn't bug me that much overall, so it hasn't been worth trying to change.)

Teacher #2 seems totally cool with my "close enough for rock 'n roll" tuning that one would expect from a guitar player (unlike many other instruments, the standard guitar tuning mathematically cannot be perfect, and then also my actual violin playing is the real tuning challenge, not whether my strings are in 100% perfect fifths), and his coaching feels more useful generally.

Evidently he also likes Nordic fiddle music! These guys, for example, who have a new album out:

And was interested to hear about a new band (Dreamers' Circus), as well as not one but two weird Swedish instruments which are not the nyckelharpa: the 5-course modern cittern, and the träskofiol, which of course is a large wooden shoe with violin fittings tacked on. So I'm feeling like he's better suited to help me reach my goal of playing folk music in bars.

hackspitcough

Leela seems to have developed kennel cough, roughly defined as "horrifying hacking noises with occasional small puddles of sputum." It was a little unnerving, but seems to be clearing up. I'm not sure a dog's anatomy really accommodates "spitting" vs. "vomiting" in the way we're used to. She has no trouble eating, sleeping, or being a pain in the ass, though, so I expect it will pass.

I've missed having some properly dull bedtime reading, ever since I finished Moby-Dick. I keep trying, but I'm 99.9% pure curiosity by weight, so I keep finding stuff interesting. Non-fiction doesn't work so well, although A Natural History of the Piano delivered a decent dose of turgidity with a subject I am at best indifferent about. No, I needed to look elsewhere.

I eventually get around to reading Dan Brown's novels (he of The Da Vinci Code), which are unchallenging as literature, but interesting as art history. The latter book takes much of its plot from the pseudo-nonfiction book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, material much better explored by the graphic novel Preacher (now a decent TV adaptation!). Angels & Demons was the Illuminati book, and The Lost Symbol was Masons. Secret societies make for fine paperback fodder, and you can save some time by reading The Illuminatus Trilogy, which literally has all of them, or save even more time by reading Everything Is Under Control by the same author, essentially a catalog of conspiracy theories and secret societies (real or imagined).

Ever get the sense that a ton of people did drugs in the 60s and in the end it did not do some of those people any favors?

Dan Brown also wrote Inferno, another escapade with his usual protagonist (a "symbologist," which is not a real thing but does provide endless excuses to be chased after by secret societies using secret symbols), but Inferno lacks any conspiracy theories. Instead, it's about...Dante Alighieri. And Florence. And Dante in Florence. It has no pretense to being anything more or less than the novelization of an art history course about Florence in the 1200-1700 C.E. period. At the end of the book, the heroes have not 100% saved the day, which is an unexpected dose of ambiguity from one of English's greatest hack authors.

I read the book a while ago, and was reminded of it because I watched the movie, which was terrible, in ways that were only surprising because usually a Dan Brown novel is not something you could make an enjoyable, let alone intelligent, movie out of, but no. They took a Dan Brown book and dumbed it down. Out of habit, maybe.

Well, hell. I've never read Dante. I don't like poetry. What translation should I use? Already more work than I want to put in. I'm near the end of the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean podcast, and the last section is about the origins and development of Satan. Our conception of Hell is Dante's, but our conception of Satan is Milton's (brought to modernity by Neil Gaiman's graphic novel Sandman, and Mike Carey's brilliant spinoff Lucifer). I've never read Paradise Lost, but it bypasses the translation problem, and it's pretty dull to read! (At least as of line 450 or so, the language is somewhat unaccountably easier to read than the roughly-contemporary Shakespeare. Maybe I'll learn why, some afternoon when I should be working.)

I leave you with what is surely the most famous English-language description of Milton's work:

a flash of lightning, passing.

We still refer to J as "the boy," and we will for a long time, even though he's now maybe an inch taller than Anna, which means 1.5 inches taller than me. It's weird for him to be taller than his parents, as though a body at 13 isn't already enough to contend with, so at his request we've stopped measuring for the time being.

He is a remarkable human by any measure, and further so as an autism-spectrum person, but he is more typically autistic in many respects, including a difficulty making friends. So we were blown away a few years ago when he made a friend on his own, a very sweet kid a couple years younger. We got to know his mother, and met his older sister occasionally. I don't think we met his father (though more on that in a moment). Years passed, and the friend decided to change his name from one masculine name to another, but also to start using they/them/their pronouns.

The dad has some typical abuse/control problems, and moved the family up to Oregon, away from the support network they'd built down here. It turns out I'd interviewed the friend's father for a job a long time ago, and further that the friend's parents had once brought a hailstorm of drama and heartbreak down on folks I met separately. I mean a crazy hailstorm, like "if they tried to get on Judge Judy, no one would believe it actually happened" kind of crazy. In the back of my mind, I knew the dad lived here in town, and it's not surprising that they should be at the same school (for quirky kids) together, but that they should independently befriend each other is pretty out there.

(The father's ex-wife is re-married but still uses his last name; the friend's mother uses her maiden name, so I didn't see the connection until everyone was tagged in a Facebook photo.)

Last month, J's friend N committed suicide, at age 11. Powerless, un-heard, un-seen, un-accepted. Just...gone.

"It is impossible, when we're children, to acknowledge how vulnerable we are."

It could have been me. It almost was. Nothing in particular made it be otherwise. It's not like I knew things would get better with time. Just...luck.

still listening to this one.

Following up on my previous post, I actually did take the Bar Violin and tuned it from GDAE down to DDAD. Nothing magical happened, viz.

1. It sounds crappy. No surprise there: a string's size and composition vary depending on what pitch you want it to sound good at (and what your instrument will tolerate without breaking).
2. "Midnight On the Water" doesn't sound that much better (the low D in particular is just a drone), and I still can't play "Bonaparte's Retreat."

They can, though:

I can play backup on the slow one. It's a process.

frets are for chumps.

I'm still learning the violin! It's great. It's an absurd instrument, but as long as I'm willing to spend 10 minutes trying to get the same 6 notes right, gratification is near-instant. My teacher says that's the great thing about teaching adults: we understand that repetition is not exciting, but that's how you learn stuff.

(Years ago a guy taught a first-aid class at the dojo, and he had this defensive/defusing banter down about how we were all going to hate him by the end because of the repetition. I went up to him at the break and said, "I see why you need that elsewhere, but you should understand that you're teaching a roomful of people who have quite literally spent decades doing the same movements over and over, and we get it. You can relax a bit." Which he didn't, very much, but I tried.)

I have a 5-day work conference in San Diego in May, and I don't really want to go a week without playing, so I'll bring the violin along and hope the practice mute and the normal hotel soundproofing work well enough that I can practice without complaints.

I'm at the point in Volume 1 of the Suzuki Method where the music gets more interesting, because "It's by Bach, instead of Suzuki." In this case it's Minuet #1, and YouTube is full of people playing it who clearly had it under their belts quite some time ago, if you're interested. I just play it over and over, mostly in bits and pieces, doggedly trying again and again until I get it better.

My fingers have a memory of their own. I'll play a passage, make an identifiable new mistake, decide to fix it on the next run-through, only to have my fingers make the same mistake. This is where I hit a wall performing as a classical guitarist, not just that I didn't practice enough (which was certainly true) but that my fingers just...didn't do what I told them to do, and it was worse with performance nerves.

Some years back, Anna read or saw a story from someone with autism, who said that they would tell their body to do something, like "raise my right hand," and instead their body just came out with some randomized action. Anna asked J if he ever felt that way, and without looking up, said "Yeah. All the time."

So it happens that trying to play an actual instrument with fine motor control might be my only analogue to his physical experience. (I can definitely be sensorily overwhelmed, but not in quite the same way, and I can power through it if that's what's needed.)

Did I mention I actually went to physical therapy for my left thumb? My thumbs took some heavy hurting from aikido, and then I fell on my left hand a while back walking the dog, which didn't matter much until I tried keeping my left thumb from clamping onto the violin neck. One of many differences about the violin is that you are not using the left thumb to press on the neck to counteract the force of pushing your fingers down on the string. This is the opposite of the guitar, so I was trying to keep my thumb away from the neck, at the same time as these accumulated injuries pulled in the opposite direction, and then that really hurt. PT's been so helpful, I forgot to make more appointments.

I was doing some reading this weekend and learned that:

• Aaron Copland's Rodeo was actually a ballet score;
• he was kind of in a hurry, so "Hoe-Down" (known to earlier generations as "the music from 'Beef. It's What's For Dinner.'") is a pretty direct orchestration of a fiddle tune called "Bonaparte's Retreat";
• actually, it's an orchestration of the 1941ish transcription of a single 1937 recording of one guy's way of playing a song he called "Bonaparte's Retreat."
• (It kind of keeps going, but I'll spare you.)

I did eventually track down some sheet music for it, and it's...well beyond my level right now, even if I were willing to alter my violin tuning. For an exploration of the subject, I refer the reader to the Bluegrass Intelligencer article "Old-Time Music Permanently Revokes All Song Titles."

at least we have high-quality weed.

[Seriously. I thought I smelled skunks a couple nights out walking the dog, then realized it was surely just the mighty marijuana available here, now even closer to legality than before.]

The Bay Area is headed for a painful inflection point, which I call the Low-Wage Apocalypse.

Go through a normal week's errands and far too many businesses have HELP WANTED signs on them. Restaurants, coffee shops, stores are all trying to hire people for $12-$16 an hour to be dishwashers, line cooks, register clerks, baristas. Rents have skyrocketed, and people who don't work in tech often just can't afford to live here any more, no matter how clever they get. According to Zillow, our house--which no one else wanted (and now we know why)--is worth 225% what we paid 5 years ago. Zillow's numbers trend high around here, and the house is nicer now, but not quite that much nicer. We did get it re-assessed for real a couple years back, and that assessment was a mere 158% of the purchase price.

Now see that rents have increased by at least that much, and it's a wonder more people haven't left yet.

We're getting wound up for a market correction, but I've never heard of this happening and it's not obvious to me what it looks like. I've only got two scenarios:

1. Hourly wages rise to match housing prices.
2. Non-housing prices (goods and services) rise to pay for the higher wages.
3. Consumers (a) suck it up and pay $6 for a small coffee that the hourly-wage set still can't afford, or (b) consume less, which damages small businesses in the ways small businesses can be damaged.

or...

1. Something stops the fountain of money: either a hollowing-out of the tech industry, or a major earthquake.
2. Prices tank precipitously.

Anna's in the middle of a few grand plans for the house and yards, partly for now, partly because J will probably be at home for some number of years regardless of how the Low-Wage Apocalypse plays out. Looks a little grim.

the intellect returns.

I've had lots of good sleep recently, leading to all kinds of strange conditions, like not falling asleep during the day, and holding more context in my head at once. As Anna points out, these are not necessarily the first things I want to recover--most of me would prefer to be jogging or doing aikido again--but they're no less real for my stubborn ingratitude. She pointed out that I'm reading more books at once, on steadily more esoteric subjects: I've been chewing through all of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, which aren't challenging, only numerous (I think I've read about 20 out of 40something), but also Cixin Lu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, and the surprisingly erudite-yet-accessible The Chinese Typewriter: A History. For truly boring books, I slogged through A Natural History of the Piano, and after many, many months, I finished Cuisine and Empire: Cooking In World History, which isn't terribly obscure, but does contain a lot of detail I didn't just want to skim past.

Looking at my lists, I think the number of books I can usefully rotate through, approximated by how many books I can return to and pick up the thread of the text, is going up, as well as how many of those books live in the world outside undergraduate syllabi.

Learning stuff is fun. Not for any particular reason, except what the Nobel-laureate physicist(/chauvinist/womanizing asshole) Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out." I doubt I'll ever find a use for the contents of Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (a history of many-worlds/universes theories from antiquity until now), but more to the point, I'm not sure why it should have to be useful in order to be interesting.

better living through electronics

I'm reading the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Cixin Liu, translated from the Chinese. It's really good, on its own terms, but also in the same way Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon is good, which is that it's a non-Western example of a (largely) Western genre. Translation is a miserable set of tradeoffs, but the translators have written English that probably no native speaker would write, which combined with the Chinese names does keep it fresh.

I've been sick all week, starting right after I spent Thursday and Friday in the office last week. I mostly only go there when I have a new minion starting, and #10 started on Monday of last week. Monday is my big meeting day, so I pushed through that, then I was useless Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday I wore myself out with 90 minutes of hiring tasks.

As you might imagine, I handle the home IT tasks, which extends to the A/V gear. We've been running for a while on my Yamaha "PianoCraft" receiver that was already discontinued when I bought it in 2008. In addition to the companion DVD player dying (who plays DVDs any more?), it doesn't handle modern video cables (HDMI), and as is always the case with these kinds of setups, only the person who set it up can really remember that in order to use the PlayStation you have to set the receiver to TAPE/MD and use the HDMI Y-junction to select Input A, and the Windows gaming laptop is DVD/CD on the receiver and Input B on the HDMI. The speakers are nice enough, though.

I did the usual research on how to solve this problem, and the answer appears to be precisely the kind of Home Theater AVR (Audio/Video Receiver) that I've avoided as being too awkward and expensive, which was true until recently. They look like this:

Incredible as it seems, I have avoided them, as they are large, and used to be expensive. My late housemate J.D. bought one, a Harman-Kardon, and I'm not sure he ever got the full value from it. They're better now in pretty much every way, and the base models start at $180: not too shabby for something that will stay mostly up-to-date for a decade.

This being the Bay Area, people are always selling this caliber of stuff, so after some painstaking research to count HDMI ports and try to understand what I'd be able to do with it, I picked up an older sibling of the Denon shown above, for $75 from a very nice Irishman who moved into a smaller place. Maybe his new place was too small for 5.1 Surround Sound? Dunno.

The digital music devices I use, the now-Logitech Squeezeboxes, were originally made by/for audiophiles, so they have a digital optical output I've never used. But behold! a few minutes with the on-screen menu, and I've reassigned the OPT port to the DOCK source, rename DOCK to "Squeezebox" (because changing the name is a thing you can do), and it's done! BD (Blu-ray Disc) becomes "PS3," DVD becomes "Laptop," and then that's it. If we ever get the yen for more speakers, there's 3 more speaker outputs, and an automatic setup function using the included calibrating microphone, although I don't remember where it is.

In other respects, it's been an extraordinarily messy few weeks. But the stereo is easy to use now!

We do what we can.

HAPPY FUN INSTANT POT

At work we have a #talk-food chat channel, and several people evangelize the Instant Pot™, a many-functioned electric device which does:

• Sauté
• Slow Cook
• Pressure Cook
• Rice Cook
• Steam
• Yogurt(!)

(They say "7-in-1," but they may somehow be counting the various pressure and temperature levels. The models bigger than 3 quarts have a few more complex automated programs.)

Being as the small one is $80, I hadn't planned to get one; but the cute little one-button rice cooker I bought off a friend has a peeling nonstick coating, and burns a bottom layer of the morning quinoa. Anna wanted a rice cooker with a stainless steel insert, and at that point you're looking at programmable rice cookers in the $80 range anyway.

Apparently pressure cookers have been an Indian family favorite for decades, though I'm not sure how I only just learned that. Much Instant Pot™ evangelism starts with someone making a Butter Chicken just like their mother or grandmother. I tried a pressure cooker on the sailboat, where cruisers like it for its reduced fuel usage, but it was mysterious and awkward. You had to watch it, wait for it to reach pressure and tell you so via the rattling of Widget #1, turn the heat off after some number of minutes, then when Widget #2 un-clicks or something, then leave it alone for another number of minutes, then vent it. I knew at least a little about cooking by then, but--setting aside the constant monitoring--how did you know how long to apply which phase? How could you adapt random recipes?

The Instant Pot™ uses a tiny computer to handle most of this nonsense for you, and furthermore it appears that once said nonsense is taken out of your hands, pressure cooking is pretty forgiving. Anna has made a fantastic beef stew a couple times (taking maybe 1-2 hours instead of 6 or 7) and gave it her highest accolade: "I can get rid of my Crock-Pot now."

another addition to the household.

We had a remarkably un--relaxing day, starting with a trip to Urgent Care--I swear one of us is in there every 3 weeks lately--for a doctor to get a painful speck of something out of Anna's eye. (She's fine.) Then we had an appointment to buy a car, because one day the station wagon didn't start, thus calling attention to the frayed seat belts and other signs of wear and tear. So we bought a car.

I buy cars so rarely that I forget how many hours it takes, even without financing. I'm pretty sure even buying the house didn't involve 4 hours of sitting around.

The newest member of the family is a 2016 Dodge Grand Caravan SXT, named "Appa." He looks like this:

We did the test drive yesterday, and today we were just going to check out the fancier version (the R/T) to see if it was worthwhile. It's possible we could have tolerated the red-stitching-on-black-leather upholstery, but the deal-killer was that the leather meant the middle seats have a sizeable hard bump going right into the base of your neck. On the SXT's cloth seats, the bump is soft, so you don't notice it. The R/T also has a bunch of storage compartments running down the center, which lower the roof by an inch or two: clearly a downside with a child who's likely to top 6'2" before he graduates high school.

On reflection, the only thing we really liked about the R/T was the upgraded center console with the Bluetooth integration and digital temperature display, and that's usually the sort of thing added for less money than the R/T would have cost. Even if we can't get the OEM console installed, the Bay Area has a healthy culture of car modification, so there are a few dozen places to call about upgrades.

Hilariously, I learned to drive on a Dodge Grand Caravan. The family had gotten an original (not-Grand) Caravan, but my parents insisted on a manual transmission, back when that was both possible and not quite unreasonable: automatic transmissions were sold as a feature, but were often real shit-piles to drive. Of course, the manual only came on a V-4, which could have been okay if you weren't hauling stuff, but then why are you buying a minivan? And we were hauling stuff. Three boys, our friends, skis, bicycles, you name it, until our annual trip to Cape Cod saw this gasping little engine towing a 17-foot sailboat (probably pushing 1,200 pounds with the trailer) and everyone's bicycles at once, plus clothes and kitchen equipment, everything you needed to bring three children to the beach for three weeks, back in the days when books were paper and computers were large and expensive.

It sort of worked. Usually with the A/C turned off.

I don't remember if the Caravan died or just became intolerable, but the family's next car was...a Grand Caravan! with the coveted V-6, and the begrudged automatic transmission. That was what I drove, when I drove, and I was pretty good at it (as much as an 18-year old can be). I knew where its sides and corners were, what it would or wouldn't do.

The 2016 model drives exactly the same as I remember. Stronger engine, modern automatic transmission that doesn't suck, better tires and suspension etc., but fundamentally the same size with the same brick-on-wheels shape. You can lay flat a stack of 4'x8' sheets of plywood. You can carry 5 large teenagers and their swimming gear. You can tow 3,600 pounds (handy, since a trailer is how you'd take 5 large teenagers camping). Other features, besides the remarkably ugly front grille:

• The seats have this Super Stow 'N Go™ system, where there's 12 cubic feet of storage under the floor, which is also where the seats fold into, creating the 160 cubic feet for  plywood-stacking.
• I grew up helping to reconfigure minivan interiors by unlocking the seats and maneuvering them out the single sliding door, which is exactly as much fun as it sounds. (If you think about where you would store 2 bench seats when not in use, you'll probably find fewer than you were thinking.)
• En route to folding into the floor, the rear bench seat flips over to provide seats facing out the (presumably open at that point) tailgate.
• Not only is there a sliding door on both sides, they and the tailgate are motorized, openable from the keyfob, and you are specifically enjoined from opening or closing them by hand.
• By extension, I assume this doesn't have the "shit, we parked facing uphill and now it's hard to close the sliding door" problem.
• With less confidence, I assume there's some kind of safety mechanism to prevent the robotic doors from closing on people.
• It has a kind of "Eco" button which claims to extract higher gas mileage in exchange for reduced performance.
• The roof rack, which sucks up a few mpg on the current car, has tool-free (dis)assembly into slots in the roof.

Since Appa is replacing a 25-year old Corolla wagon ("Molly"), we had several years to research replacements. I was surprised to find that most SUVs won't hold as much total cargo+people as a minivan, and many SUV towing capacities are pretty weak. We were less surprised to find that our desires to travel SUV-required roads are transient enough that we can just rent one as needed.

Here's to never again cracking my head against the Toyota's anemic tailgate that doesn't raise up the final few inches unless you push it. Thanks for the years and years of service, Molly.

that makes sense.

Our dog has many mysteries, but the biggest has been her many cat-like behaviors. She grooms fastidiously, complete with licking her paw and cleaning her face. (It dawned on me at some point that if she takes her disgusting dog-breath and transfers it to her fur, that goes a long way to explaining the "Time To Wash The Dog" smell.) She head-butts into you as a form of affection. And she purrs, or at least has a solid go at it, with no help from her anatomy. It comes out as a very high-pitched whistling sound.

There are other mysteries, like how she could have been properly socialized as a puppy and then somehow abandoned without being microchipped, but our houseguest came up with the theory, based on her experience of mixed dog/cat households:

The dog was raised by cats.

When my niece was a baby, I watched her crawl around the floor saying "rarrr rarr rarrar rarr," which didn't make any sense until I saw her family's two Springer Spaniels making growly play noises around her, and of course they were the things down at her height, and she made her best approximation of friendly dog-noises.

There's a lesson in there about what we grow up with, versus what we grow up into.

I assume the dog was raised by particularly kind cats, since she's now very excited to go pull their tails off, because obviously they're giant rats. No animal does that who understands that cats are made of fast-acting, pointy pain.

blaaaaarg

The boy has just returned to school, after about a week and a half of being out with the flu. He had some vomiting, then congestion, and now he's doing a lot of wet coughing. I'm worried about him because I have lots of experience with wet coughing, and if you don't get that shit out of your lungs, bronchitis happens, and then possibly pneumonia (which happened to my brother). I used to get bronchitis every summer like clockwork, until I finally understood the warning signs, and started chugging guaifenesin-only (i.e. not psychoactive) cough syrup at the first sign of lung-phlegm.

I was nauseous on Tuesday, but not since, and it seems I've escaped the phlegm stage, being stuck only with the soreness and weakness that seem like the universal calling card of the flu. (I'm pretty sure I've never had the flu until now.) We could tell I was sick for sure because on Tuesday I had a fever! Which is not something my body does, post-childhood. My body temperature always comes in a little low, so a significant fever for me would be 99º.

By the usual measure, my flu shot was a week or two too late to have any effect. Maybe I got lucky, or maybe I will relapse, but I've been steadily getting better. Nothing at work seems to have missed me this week, which is both awesome, and also triggers my Impostor Syndrome. If nobody missed me, am I really useful?

I am, I think, but more on scales of weeks and months, rather than days. That's as it should be. If your teams can't work effectively without you, their manager, you may need to make some different choices.

Absent the energy or need for thought--J watched The Princess Bride without even smiling; as he said, "it's hard to be interested in things"--the days just cruise on past. Even the minimal routine of walking the dog hasn't been on the table.

Luckily I have a whole empty weekend ahead of me, with nothing on the calendar except my violin lesson.

correction/update.

I kept digging for information on that weird 5-course instrument, and I found a much more complete (and likely) origin, from the Scandinavians themselves:

https://silkwoodmusic.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/the-nordic-mandola-its-not-a-banjo/

Notes:

1. The part about calling it a cittern because the word was available: true enough.
2. Only being able to get one used or custom-built: still true.
3. Wait. Quarter-tone frets? What?
4. Single-string capo pegs that screw into the fingerboard?!
5. I'm 99% sure theorbed wasn't a word before this guy typed it, but what he means is having a second set of strings ending beyond the first set, thus with lower pitch, usually as drone strings. There's, uh, some variety in how this is done in a theorbo.

I don't really want to pay a few thousand dollars for a custom instrument; I expect violins will keep me busy for a long time. I've been watching people play these things, thinking about what I find appealing in them, and it's really that they look much easier to play. In the original video I saw, if you look at Ale Carr's left hand, he rarely has more than two fingers holding strings down, because the instrument is tuned to something close to an "open tuning," where strumming the strings without any fingers down (the "open" bit), plays something closer to a pleasant-sounding chord. Most ordinary tunings, for most instruments, are not chord-friendly, for various historical and music-theory reasons.

Then I started thinking that I have quite a nice guitar here, and partial capos, which don't cover all 6 strings, are totally a thing. This guy takes it to what is probably an extreme, but I'm pretty sure I can have a lot of the fun of these weird Nordic instruments, using just my guitar and some toys.

okay, but *technically*...

In Chile I lived with one of the Language Arts teachers--who was teaching Shakespeare in the original Spanish--and when I asked what she taught, she included the word ortografía. I could readily translate this into "orthography," which neatly illustrates the pitfalls of translation, because I didn't know what that meant. We eventually worked our way around to something like "making sure the word has the right letters," so I got to explain that it would be an unusual native English speaker--certainly the rarest kind of American--who would hear "orthography" and know what it meant.

The approximation we found was "spelling," but it actually means "the list of mistakes you pay your professional editor to tell you about." English is justly notorious for this (though there are far worse possibilities), but I finally noticed the lyrics to this Swedish Christmas song I keep listening to (only because I didn't grow up with it, can't understand the words, and the music is thoroughly European and yet also thoroughly unfamiliar).

(See here if you're wondering what instrument the lead singer is playing.)

1. I Österland, där en stjärna uppgick, ovanligen hon månde brinna. Tre vise män efter Guds allvisa skick Gud sände det barnet att finna. Från Midians land kom de löpare tre, Som ville den nyfödde kungen se. De offrade håvor och ära. De offrade rökelse mirham och guld. Det heliga barnet var oss så huld. Jesum, vår frälsare kära!

2. När konung Herodes fick höra det tal, att en konung var födder till världen, fick han i sitt hjärta bekymmer och kval och trakta därefter att mörda. Men Josef tog barnet och Marie hand Och flydde sen in i Egyptie land Ur fattigdom, köld och elände. De offrade håvor och ära. De offrade rökelse mirham och guld. Det heliga barnet var oss så huld. Jesum, vår frälsare kära!

You know if Anna, a gifted multi-linguist if ever there was one, raises her eyebrows, you're onto something good. It's okay up until the spot where skick is pronounced "fweek," and even the phrasing of ville den, but then kungen comes out as "kohni[n]gen" and De offrade håvor och ära is "dom offrwaduh hovor oh-waara" where that "rw" is a sort of French thing, and it can't really be healthy to stick that many consonants into your sinuses, can it?

There's a lot there to find familiar! You suspect that Österland is probably not Austria (Österreich). Just take Gud and guld on their face, since your friends don't know pre-Conquest Germanic any better than you do. Tre can be our trusty Indo-European "three," and if you watch enough BBC and squint hard enough, barnet looks like the Scottish bairn. I don't know the origin of the word, but it's a song about the Three Magi bringing gifts, and I know Bach wrote a suite called L'offrande Musicale (English "offer," Spanish oferta) so offrade seems clear enough. Okay, fine, just look at Google Translate.

What I really want is to pack a violin and spending a year learning folk songs in Scandinavia.

happy flu season.

We had a very exciting day today, as J has the flu, and this morning the thermometer reported 106°, so I had not gotten out of bed when the course of the day was set. Happily, since learning about the existence of "urgent care" clinics covered by my insurance, I've managed to avoid the ER. Most medical emergencies aren't actually emergencies, like my various foot or toe fractures, or that time my hand was infected the morning I was driving up to a campout party. Like, yes, having a throbbing infected wound on my hand was not great, but on the other hand, if I drove most of the way to the party, I could save myself at least 2 hours of time spent in traffic, and then I could find someplace to stop and get antibiotics. If I really have an issue that can't wait long enough for me to get a good night's sleep first, I'll know.

(Notable examples include "crippling gallstone attack" and "aikido accident where my lip gets chomped between my upper and lower teeth.")

California has been having an epically bad flu season, bad enough that I got a flu shot, and I've never gotten a flu shot (or, for that matter, the flu). I'll be pretty surprised if neither Anna nor I get it now, despite diligent hand-washing and surface-disinfecting.

Apparently there's also a somewhat lethal canine influenza epidemic that I need to call the vet about.

Life is fragile.

typologica musica.

[EDIT 1/Feb/2018: The Scandinavians have a different story about this instrument.]

I've been watching Scandinavian folk musicians on repeat for months now, so this singer's instrument, with 5 "courses" of 2 strings each, has been driving me batty.



(He sounds like Richard Thompson singing "The Times, They Are A-Changin'," but we'll run that down some other day. It is notable that this is a Swedish[?] Christmas song, the "Twelfth Night Carol," but since I first heard it yesterday, I don't care and I'm happy to play it on Repeat.)

The video description says Esbjörn Hazelius is playing the cittern, but then Ale Möller is on the mandola, so it's by process of elimination, and Google Chrome automatically translating Swedish Wikipedia tells us that yes, Mr. Hazelius is the singer. You might also, as I did a few months ago, say "What the hell is a cittern?", and then you could go to English Wikipedia and learn about something that is definitely not the instrument in that video.

This may be hard to appreciate if you didn't grow up with the state of the art being LexisNexis's infuriatingly odd query language, but one of the most important things about the post-Google era is that you can just type "difference between cittern and bouzouki and mandola" into a text box and get something really helpful.

The confusion is this:

1. The mandola and octave mandolin have the same relationship to the mandolin that the viola and cello respectively have to the violin: the cello is a full octave below the violin (G-D-A-E), and the viola (C-G-D-A) drops the high E and adds a lower C.
• The viola is usually described as "tuned a fourth below the violin," which is both more precise, and also, to my ear, more confusing.
2. Back in the 60s, some Irish guys introduced the four-course Greek bouzouki into Irish folk music, where it was sometimes custom-built with a flat rather than rounded back, just like the...flat-backed, four-course mandolin family.
3. English master luthier Stefan Sobell started custom-building mandolas/octave mandolins/Irish bouzoukis with five courses, and then he called that a "cittern" for some reason. He's been so influential that, with the original meaning of "cittern" having gone dormant, the name stuck. Sort of.

There's a bunch of stuff on that comparison site about instrument scale length and how that affects the gauge of strings you put on it to produce the kind of sound you want, but unless you play a stringed instrument, it's boring.

Best part: the Greek Greek bouzouki dates all the way back to...1900.