they never had such a supper in their life.

I've been listening to this on repeat, so I share it with you.

The singer is the astonishing performer Chris Thile, who Garrison Keillor chose to take over the older-than-me radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Besides being several generations younger, Thile is a fantastic musician--arguably the world's best mandolin player--with a wide-ranging love of music in all its genres, neither of which describes Keillor. My parents love the show, so I grew up listening to it on most weekends, so I'm confident saying that Keillor's show never meaningfully changed over the decades.

(Minnesota Public Radio fired him with a vague explanation, but on investigation, it turned out he's a predatory harasser like so many men in charge. Keillor owns the trademark on "A Prairie Home Companion," and it appears Thile was diplomatically happy to suddenly change the show's name. And what an amazing change. One musical guest recently played a rocking-out techno-infused song, at the end of which Thile shouted, "Take that, public radio!". You can feel the joy.)

"The Fox" is not a complicated song: with a capo, you can use the G, C, and D chord shapes on the guitar, mainstays that are probably the first three chords anyone learns on the instrument. So I learned them over 35 years ago. I took lessons. I'm not a great player, but strumming basic chords is a thing I can do pretty fast, in complicated ways. I can't play it at speed, neither on the guitar nor on the octave mandolin. It's harder than it sounds like it should be.

I'm glad they can play it, though, so I get to listen to it.

De har flera elefanter.

"They have several elephants" is not an obviously useful sentence for Sweden, though it is chock-full of delicious cognates. Lest anyone say the Scandinavian cultures are too hard to tell apart, friends using Duolingo for Norwegian say it gives them sentences like "I am drinking on the floor," which I think we can all agree is in every way less appealing than "She has a bear." It certainly suits the flavor of Norwegian I'm descended from, though.

After years of Spanish, an occasional dalliance with French, and shaking my head from afar at German's die/das/der, I am really appreciating Swedish's lack of linguistic "gender." At some point--I gather pretty recently, as these things go--condensed from having a masculine/feminine/neuter like German, into just having the indefinite articles ("a/an" in English) ett and en: ett äpple, en elefant. That dictates how you form definites ("the"): äpplet, elefanten. And the word "it": det, den. (I don't know which "it" you use when you don't already know what the object is, but I'm sure it's something.)

However it got there, det is actually pronounced sort of like "day," but of course that's the natural pronunciation of de. So instead, de is pronounced..."domm."

Maybe "m" wasn't pulling its weight and they had to give it some extra work to do.

everyone has their story.

I've spent an abnormal amount of time at the Apple Store this past six weeks or so, dealing with both my personal and work laptops. The personal machine needed a new battery, which in modern MacBooks is a single piece with the keyboard and trackpad; this was actually pretty awesome because four years of constant use left both the keyboard and trackpad pretty beat up. The work laptop is limping along, and I can use it, but I've warned IT I will probably end up begging them for a less haunted machine.

The guy who helped me with the haunted work laptop, though. Nice guy, in his 20s, who besides working at the Apple Store, is not just in a band, he's a drummer, and has done some sound engineering.

(I'm sometimes not good at not having conversations, and I opened this up by being startled when the idiots running the sound system dropped the microphone a few times with the volume about double what it should have been, in a space that is fundamentally a 2-story tall empty concrete box. I mentioned compressors and limiters and we were off to the races.)

He loves model trains, and he's far and away the youngest officer of his model train club (association? I don't remember) in many, many decades.

He makes and sells various train parts, using a 3-D printer. He'd like to build a business around it, but needs to buy injection molds, which are expensive.

His uncle knows a Japanese angel investor who loves model trains, and might be excited to provide the capital. If I were that investor, I would be very, very happy for the all-too-rare opportunities to kickstart model-train-related startups.

I live in a very strange place.