Meerkat, probably referring to a post of mine:

...and I know it's like comparing Apples with Axe-Handles, but anyway.

Never had an Apple, but the OS and architecture of my old Axe-Handle 2000 were very advanced for their day...

No, but seriously, the Swedish saying, "How do you do" - "Axe-Handles!", in the sense of "WTF kind of a non sequitur is that?!", arose from an old humorous folk-tale; or, call it a fable, if you will. (I'm not sure which part is more important, the humour or the moral of the story.)

It goes -- and I apologize in advance for not remembering it well enough to be able to reproduce the humour I'm sure was there -- something like this... Hey, no, BTW! I know what I'll do... Thank you, Google! Here's my translation of a version I found on [link|http://www.solace.mh.se/~johna/jokes/diverse.htm|Jokes by John]:

An old man was sitting at a crossroads carving axe-handles out of wood. He was deaf, and everyone around knew he was, but he didn't much want to admit it. In the village there was a very beautiful 18th-century church, and tourists often went there. A tourist bus came along, stopped at the crossroads, and a lady stepped out and walked towards the old man. Now I have to think fast, he says to himself. What'll be the first thing she says? Ah, I'm sure she'll ask what it is I'm making, and that's axe-handles. Then she'll probably want to talk about the harvest, and that's coming along fine. And then of course she'll ask the way to the church, and that's to the right from here. So the lady comes up next to him, and says, "How do you do". "Axe-handles", he replies. "What?" - "Yes, the harvest is coming along fine". "Are you out of your mind, man???" - "Yes, just down the road to the right".

Now, this is not "the canonical" version; for one thing, it's an anachronistic mix of old and too-new elements. In the days of tourist buses, does anyone assume that the harvest prospects are the most natural conversation topic any more? What's more, does anyone carve their axe-handles out of wood, themselves, any more? No, I suspect that when this story -- the "correct" version of it, that is -- was new, 18th-century churches were nothing special... Except perhaps in the sense that none of them had yet been built!

The way I remember it, it was originally about a deaf (or hard-of-hearing) wood-carver (someone who did it for a living, that is) taking his axe-handles to market, and trying to predict the conversation with prospective customers. He planned, and said, more lines, including some haggling about the price; and I *think* it was even funnier, in that the actual conversation *almost* exactly matched what he'd planned, except for being "out of phase" by one line, again because he'd neglected to take into account that conversations between strangers usually start with a polite greeting. I just couldn't for the life of me remember that actual-and-planned conversation, and so this version -- the first I happened to find on the Web -- will have to do.

But never mind -- it's still pretty funny, and still at least approximately shows how "How do you do - Axe handles!" has come to mean "What the heck does that have to do with anything?" to Swedes. (The moral of the story, to the extent that there is one, is of course something about not assuming too much about the future course of events; personally, I don't see too much of an element of equating deafness with stupidity, as someone [a parlamentarian, IIRC] who came up in my Web search complained.)

John - he's completely hatstand!

This is something of the same kind, I assume?