Some Australian cockroaches definitely fly but don’t seem to do it very often. They’re quite noisy when they fly—kind of like the propeller sound you make if you trill your tongue—and there’s nothing worse than hearing that sound suddenly stop very close to you. ‘Oh fuck! Have I got a cockroach on me?’ I hate them.

For the uninitiated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ9myHhpS9s

Still, the world’s most successful African American. /s

A Donkey Vote isn’t the same thing as an Informal Vote. A Donkey Vote means simply numbering the candidates in the order they appear on the ballot. In other words, a thoughtless vote that any donkey could do.

This is why there’s a benefit to appearing in the first spot and why the impartial and independent Australian Electoral Commission (another invaluable aspect of Australian democracy) randomly determines candidate order.

Weird that Americans want to go with Aluminum when there’s also Americium, Berkelium, and Californium. Not to mention Deuterium, Helium, Iridium, Lithium, etc…

Or we could go with train-port.

lazy and unprofessional

This is a key aspect of Trumpism: it’s all about the grift and that means the shortest path to money.

Yes, as a motorcyclist I’m always aghast at the speed cyclists can attain in relation to the protective clothing they don’t wear. I can understand why it’s not practical to wear abrasion-resistant clothing and a full-face helmet, but still.

Indeed. Apple always gets criticised for the 30% ‘Apple Tax’ but the console manufacturers get a free pass for the same thing. Bizarre.

Yes, additive colour theory is based on red, green and blue (RGB). These are the colours you see if you look at your TV screen very closely.

Subtractive colour theory uses cyan, magenta and yellow. In printing black, abbreviated ‘K’, is added for contrast—CMYK. These are the inks used to print the dots you see if you look closely at a magazine photo.

I think people are confused by this because they’re taught a bastardised version of subtractive colour theory, using red, blue and yellow, at a very early age.

I think the Easter Billy thing may have been a fund raiser for the Save the Bilby Fund, though I’m not sure. Did some work with them in Charleville some time back, as part of a student field trip looking at design concepts for what eventually became the Bilby Experience. Great people.

From what I can remember they’ve had good success in rebuilding the bilby population.

Good luck getting Optus, a communications company, to promptly and accurately communicate with its customers.

I could see this degeneration happing about 5 years back when our vice chancellor started calling herself ‘president’. They gave up on it after a few years but it’s very clear where their priorities lie.

It wanted to end its suffering. Blue jaunt.

Same. I’ve carried a Swiss Army Life pretty much every day of my adult life and I can’t remember ever stabbing anyone.

Yes, they’re good books. Ripping yarns. Their charm lies in seeing the underdog earthlings (humans and cetaceans) fight against the odds. There’s a strong vein of what you might call earthling exceptionalism running through the series.

I managed to get through the first book but it was embedded cultural mores like that that made it tough going for me. That’s probably a shortcoming in me more than any fault of the book—science fiction should take you to places that challenge you—but it wasn’t worth it for me personally.

Re: dickie for car boot (what Americans would call the ‘trunk’); some old two-seater cars had a third seat in the boot, known as a ‘dickie-seat’, at least in the UK, so perhaps it’s an old term that still survives in Indian English.

I wonder if doing the Moon Walk would get you burnt at the stake for witchcraft a few hundred years ago.

I’m not a coffee drinker but my partner is. She says she had two decent cups of coffee in Italy (two weeks in Rome, Bolzano, and Venice) but every day in Australia she has better. Australians are complete coffee snobs.