Just wanted to mention that I'm gonna be out of town next week, I might be able to record a show on the road but I won't know until I'm there, so I'd planned to make it up with an extra one this week. Then I got a sinus infection, and I'm getting it treated, but I have no idea whether I can talk for an hour (or think for an hour, come to mention it), so I hope there can still be an extra episode in here somewhere. If not, apologies for missing next week, and I'll do the extra show when I get back home.
Some of you have probably read this on Twitter, but for the last month or so, the same wren – I think it's what they call a Northern House Wren – has alit upon every conceivable surface next to me and screamed at me continuously until the sun went down. He's here right now. He will not be denied. And the word "wren" comes from the proto-Germanic "wrenna" or "wranna," which is of unknown provenance, but context suggests that it was related to winter, specifically via the once-common epithet for wrens, wranna na konig, "little winter king," because wrens will live in caves or dig holes to escape cold weather. So back inna day, the wrens would all disappear when it got cold, and in spring, you'd see 400 of them pouring out of a cave mouth or mineshaft, and everyone said "I will be goddamned, for the wrens were all the time in this cave, where I never would suspect to find a hostelry of Birds." Everyone said that
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