Australia

Now have a vote for Oz's most lovable snake.

Excuse me, I have to keel over in a faint.
 
Rincewind said:
Doesn't look dangerous - so, how can it kill you?
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It dives at high subsonic speed, piercing its target then pecking its way out, usually through the chest cavity, before chirping loudly and beginning its next ascent to 7000 metres in preparation for its next attack.

If you're lucky enough to have an unexpurgated version of the Australian Book of Birds, there's more information there.

Most editions were confiscated in the late 40's to make Asutralia seem less dangerous to the post-war immigrants but through an administrative oversight they left the Cassowary in the subsequent abridged version.

(ETA for typos)
 
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Kid Eager said:
It dives at high subsonic speed, piercing its target then pecking its way out, usually through the chest cavity, before chirping loudly and beginning its next ascent to 7000 metres in preparation for its next attack.

If you're lucky enough to have an unexpurgated version of the Australian Book of Birds, there's more information there.

Most editions were confiscated in the late 40's to make Asutralia seem less dangerous to the post-war immigrants but through an administrative oversight they left the Cassowary in the subsequent abridged version.

(ETA for typos)
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You added some??
 
People! Don't eat wild mushrooms unless you know exactly what you are doing! Especially if you're in Canberra.

Three people in hospital after eating wild mushrooms, suspected to be death caps

Three people have presented to emergency departments in the ACT this week after eating wild mushrooms.

ACT Health authorities said they had not been able to confirm whether the trio had ingested death cap mushrooms — with investigations still underway.

Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said the deadly fungus had been spotted in parts of the Canberra region in recent weeks, including Yass and Goulburn.

"While this is not the normal time of year for death cap mushroom growth in the ACT, it is a timely reminder to people not to pick and eat wild mushrooms," she said.

"[It is] a reminder that death cap mushrooms can grow anywhere at any time."
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‘Really sad moment’: bogong moth among 124 Australian additions to endangered species list

Ecologists say numbers declined by about 99.5% three years ago, likely due to drought, pesticides and light pollution


They were once so common, swarms of Australian bogong moths almost seemed to “block out the moon” at certain times of the year.

Now, the bogong has been listed as endangered on the global red list of threatened species after crashes in its population in recent years.

The list, compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, was updated overnight with 124 new entries for Australian wildlife.

The addition of the bogong moth, famously seen in swarms at Parliament House in Canberra during its annual migration to the Australian alps, should be a wake-up call about declines in Australia’s invertebrates, the scientist Marissa Parrott said.
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:eek: :(
 
There's a Facebook group called Describing Things In Canberra. This was one of their first posts:

What is the Point of Canberra?

Canberra, as some of you might know, is called the Bush Capital. There are two schools of thought on this. One is that Canberra was intended to represent the interests of all the Australians who don't live in urban centres. (At the time of establishment, that meant Sydney and Melbourne. You could tell they were urban centres because Sydney had incredibly poor hygiene and Melbourne had reaped the profits of a mining boom in order to build grandiose buildings of state.) The other school of thought is that Canberra would be designed to look like it was in the bush.

This second school of thought has been much more fully realised than the first. You can stand on one of our hills (or, as we like to say, 'mountains'), look about yourself, and see only other hills and trees, and one or two distant buildings

Newcomers to Canberra have been known to drive around the wide and well-paved streets, weeping and exclaiming, but where are the shops and where do all the people live? Some outsiders believe that Canberrans dwell in the gumtrees lining our roads, but it is not true. We live in overpriced brick veneers, like all other Australians. If we did live in gumtrees, we might represent the interests of the bush rather more keenly, but there it is, clearly a massive planning failure on the part of our forebears.

Canberra is actually the political capital of Australia. It is not the financial capital (Sydney), the style capital (Melbourne), the our-wine-is-better-than-your-wine capital (Adelaide), the our-produce-is-better-than-your-produce capital (Hobart), the ex-mining-boom capital (Perth, but also Melbourne if you go back far enough), the we-knocked-down-your-old-stuff-to-build-your-new-stuff capital (Brisbane) or the capital-of-whatever-it-is-they-do-in-Darwin capital (Darwin, but potentially other places that we are not presently asking difficult questions about).

The national parliament sits here. They have a large building on top of a hill (not a mountain), which appears to be a cross between a well-ordered airport, a particularly nice four-star hotel and a massive corporate catering business.

Everyone is welcome to visit parliament and sit in the parliamentary chambers to see democracy at work. If the chamber is full, Australians and overseas visitors can wait in a queue in order to participate in democracy. Australians put a very high premium on waiting in queues to participate in democracy.

Canberra also has the public service who impartially support the government of the day. Recently, some public servants and parliamentarians have become confused between the meaning of the word 'impartially' and the word 'uncritically' but that's ok. Someone will probably find a dictionary soon, because Canberra has some outstanding bookshops and also this thing called the Internet.

Canberra is also the capital of a territory called the Australian Capital Territory. This territory has one large settlement in it, which is called Canberra. The legislative assembly of Canberra is responsible for all the useful things a national government is too busy to do, such as hospitals, education, roads and rubbish collection.

So there you have it. The point of Canberra is to be capital!

And it is.
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