He also tells stories in dialect, though not the kind George Ade is self-conscious about. The evening before the eclipse, conversation turned to Weirdos I Have Known, mind you as a point of reference that the people making this judgment are spending two weeks in the middle of the Sahara Desert to see the sun to go out for 4 minutes. Steve told of Antarctic pilots who do jigsaw puzzles with the pieces upside down in between playing hopscotch with Death, many examples given; Ellen described eclipse chasers even more autistic than the run of the mill; and Richard held forth on Trainspotting. The real kind, not the pop movie. Richard had sat across from two trainspotters on a train in the UK. His particular brilliance is that he was able to recount at least five minutes of their conversation in full dialect, with full trainspotting lingo, whether verbatim or improv obviously I can't know, but I do remember enough about trains from my youth to recognize that it wasn't gibberish purely. Either he has a photographic memory or he's enough of a trainspotter himself to riff with the jargon.
