The "nineteen hundreds"

On NPR yesterday evening -- in rapid succession -- two separate commentators referred to the 20th Century as "the nineteen hundreds", once in tight concatenation with "the eighteen hundreds." This was the first time I had heard the century in which I spent the first two-thirds of my life referred to as something seemingly deep in the past, as opposed to relatively recent history. I felt old.

At home, however, we continued to enjoy our new Alexa speaker's ease of calling up things from its music catalog, but I stumped it by asking for the Swedish Chef's song, which seemed like a pretty simple request. Natalie was not familiar with this Muppet Show masterpiece. YouTube was more than happy to serve it up to us, and she caught the bug. We sat on the couch and watched about 15 minutes of Swedish Chef highlights, with her cackling enthusiastically: "it's so funny!" After about 12 minutes, the joke was getting a little old, but it is still quality.