Am I excited about heading back to Oz for a while?  Oh, slightly.

This mother and child are pademelons (pic found on this Swedish site), tiny little wallabies that look to my eyes like nothing so much as antipodean nesting pudus, no larger than your average plush toy.

At nightfall on Bruny Island (home of the giant demon bunny), they come out so thickly that you can barely drive down the street.

This is even nicer than it sounds.

If you haven’t seen it yet (I’m late blogging today, as I was off getting X-rays and stuff; it’s just too bad doctors don’t give frequent flier miles), the NYT story is here.

I agree with this post over at Kevin’s site.  The contempt for the law from this administration is palpable. 

What does it take for this guy to get impeached?  Do Bush and Cheney have to start going door to door, spitting on the Constitution in individual demonstrations?

Hannity and his ilk would just say the Constitution needed shining.

Another bald-faced, intentional, absolute lie.

Oz v South Africa first cricket test, day one: Makyaha Ntini,
first black man to play for South Africa, bowler with an eccentric
delivery but the persistence of stone, takes five Aussie wickets on the
first day.  (This is something akin to a baseball pitcher mowing down a
dozen or more batters.)

If the South Africans could actually catch a batted ball occasionally, he would have had more.

I’m cheering for Oz, but I could watch this guy all day.

Day two is about to start, with the underdog South Africans in command, holding what this statistician considers about a 3-to-1 chance of winning the test.  If you’re curious, you can follow the match here.

Blogging will be slow for a bit; must work on the book.  Still, something fun to share:

Psyched up for Oz’ first test against South Africa, which I’ll have on while working in a few hours.   Which reminds me:

I’ve been working my way through Pageant Of Cricket,
a 600-page tome on the game’s history filled with thousands of photos
of the games’ greatest players — all of whom seem to have died
tragically, usually after a long decline of addiction, mental problems,
and general dissolution.

Actual excerpts, chosen entirely at random from the last few pages (I’m up to the turn of the 20th century):

or

or

or

Yeesh.  Pretty damned dangerous sport, from the looks of it.

I’m not sure I’ve picked the right pastime after all.  And here after I’ve spent the last month learning to squeeze out a flipper.

How depressing.