Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Go on, take a butcher’s at The Fair Dinkum, Ridgy Didge, Dinky die, True Blue, Dyed-in-the-wool, Let’s Talk Strine SAO Quiz.

And, after you finish, you’ll understand “take a butcher’s” and many other useful expressions from Down Under.

Disclosure: I myself have an unfair advantage because, at Ookles, I work with Mike Air, who lives in Sydney, and claims he rides to work on a kangaroo. Although, thanks to this quiz, I now suspect he may have been bunging me on…

Now appearing in this photoset on Flickr.

Sorry no more now–hope there will be a bit more time and connectivity once we get to Cambridge, some time tomorrow.

Thanks to the University of Liverpool, Alon, Tim, Julia, Ian, and more for hospitality that was both brilliant and fab. Er, not one of these people really has a Scouse accent (translation: sounds like Ringo), but I met lots and lots of others who do.

David Weinberger says maybe CSI, West Wing, etc., are your soul’s remedy against uncertainty:

When we are facing an enemy with massive power, it’s good to believe that a single individual can make the difference, especially if he’s played by Sylvester Stallone. When the enemy is the pulling apart of everything we know, it’s good to believe that we can form teams that cannot be pulled apart.

“…or I should say, numerous friends who have had bot flies. They don’t all have them now.”

Our biologist daughter Amity aka Mickey aka Micks has numerous friends who live exciting biologist kinds of lifestyles. She just came home from a party where one of the guests had returned from Peru with a bot fly larva growing inside his foot.

“There are lots of ways to get rid of a bot fly larva. For instance, you can tape a piece of meat to your foot. The larva comes out to eat the meat, and you whip it away very fast. Or you can enclose the body part in a bag, and fill it with smoke…”

Amity and her husband Colin, also a biologist, are headed off tomorrow to New Zealand for three weeks, tourguiding (part of the time) for the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I expect them to come home with lots of new friends, and lots of new stories.

But no bot fly larvae, at least, I very much hope not.

Wow, 5 p.m. and the sky isn’t even dark yet!

Not only that, the days are already getting longer….

My daughters get tired of my Christmas music choices, which tend to oscillate between classical choirs and an old Dolly Parton tape that makes me smile.

So, for my December birthday, I got a present of “a Christmas mix we won’t complain about.”

Not exactly traditional, but I’m enjoying it too…

The Swedish tradition of “Sankta Lucia” fights back against midwinter blues.

My dad used to play and sing for us “Santa Lucia” — his English translation of the Italian original was full of “balmy breezes” and Neapolitan sailors. The Swedish carol is sung to the same tune but with much, much more midwinter-appropriate words, I discovered from Sweden’s English news service:

The night goes with heavy steps around farm and cottage; round the earth the sun has forsaken, the shadows are brooding. There in our darkened house, stands with lighted candles Saint Lucia, Saint Lucia. The night passes, large and mute now one hears wings in every silent room whispers as if from wings. See, on our threshold stands white-clad with candles in her hair Saint Lucia, Saint Lucia. The darkness shall soon depart from the earth’s valleys then she speaks a wonderful word to us. The day shall be born anew Rising from the rosy sky. Saint Lucia, Saint Lucia.

p.s. Santa Lucia arrives on December 13, but I’m just getting around to blogging her in anticipation of December 21, when the year’s weakest sunshine arrives at 1:35 p.m.

Whew–what a party last night! At least this time, I got to taste what I was eating….

You see, the NYC Swedish consulate celebrates Nobel’s birthday (December 10) by serving the entire official dinner from the previous year’s Nobel feast.

Last December 10, what with the distraction of Frank’s new gold medal, Mozart’s music, and HRH Prince Carl Philip, I hardly noticed the actual dinner at all.

This year was much calmer–not even white tie, “merely” black tie. Such is my ongoing double life that I’ll bet I was the only person in Wikimania’s IRC planning meeting who was struggling into a full-length taffeta skirt and silver shoes in between typing remarks about opensource software.

Then again, maybe I was not the only one. Who was it who said, “The world is not only stranger than we know, it is stranger than we can know”?

A remark that surely goes double for Wikipedia and the Web…