Australian possums are another matter, however. There is one that likes to sneak into the top floor of the Old Quad building at Melbourne Uni (where most of the philosophy offices are). Colin has seen it at least three times, and happened to have his camera once:
Cute, eh? For context:
Australians don't seem especially fond of them. They're invading pests in New Zealand and Kiwis (the people, not the birds... or maybe the birds too) loath them.
Speaking of animal names which don't mean quite the same thing here:
When we moved to Melbourne, one of our goals was to figure out how the game of cricket worked. We don't have it totally figured out, but we now have a slightly better idea. A couple friends who follow cricket invited us to a game of what we were told was fake cricket ('20/20', it's called). The fake-ness came out of the fact that it lasts only about 3 hours. Real cricket games last 5 days.
The first thing we learned is that the basic dynamic in cricket is pretty straightforward. There are two people in the center of the field. When they swap places, their team gets a point. A ball gets thrown at one of them (bouncing off the ground), and he hits it. While the ball is away, they can swap places. If the ball goes a long ways away, they get multiple points. If the ball is caught, or comes back before the place-swapping is done, one of the place-swappers is out. Outs are bad. There are more details, but those are the crucial bits.
All of that is the wrong terminology, for the sake of US audiences. But we're not so clear on the proper terminology yet.
The second thing we learned is that there is a surprising amount of fire in cricket... at least at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds.
Fire when the teams come onto the field:
Fire when someone is out:
And fire during halftime (fireworks, really). We didn't catch that, but here's the smoke:
In addition to fire, there was a camera on a Segway, and a pretty sunset:
Did you guys have nosebleed seats (I am looking at the last picture here)
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