Windy Friday

Mutterings continued.

Another week has gone by – scary how quickly the time goes. This morning was spent at the launch of the 7th edition of the Code of Practice for the Use of Animal in Research by the National Health and Medical Research Council. Sounds dry but was very interesting. No, really.

We had a lovely drop of rain last night (so yah boo sucks! to you, Gary). And tonight is looking promising on the weather front. Windy, but.

For overseas readers, a treatise on the peculiarly Australian (mis)use of the word “but”. From The Age newspaper:
“Ending a sentence with the word "but" has been hailed as a distinctive Australian linguistic trait. Not that you'll find it in the grammar books, but.
The "final but" phenomenon, as linguists call it, has flourished informally here for many years, primarily in Queensland and northern NSW. "It is quite a distinctive marker of Australian-English, and it seems to be spreading into different age groups," says Jean Mulder, a linguistics professor at Melbourne University. "So it's quite likely it will stick around."

Professor Mulder says: "Part of being Australian is having this unique way of using language. If a 'final but' develops as a marker for Australian-English, well that's what happens, and it is kind of nice."

I don’t use it in my normal conversation, however when I do, I use it to indicate “however”. This isn’t a correct definition of the word “but”, but.

I’ll stop now.

My old DVD player has eaten a brand new Cadfael disk. I put it in, the player started up, ground to a halt and then refused to open its trap and my brand new, unplayed St Peter’s Fair is stuck in there. Rob.....!!!

I saw an interesting doco on the History Channel last night about the Gemini and Apollo missions from the point of view of Mission Control. It was sad seeing MC deserted and riveting watching actual footage of the Apollo 13 earth re-entry. They had calculated 13’s coming back on line after black out to the second and watching the faces on the guys in MC as the minutes kept clicking up and no response from Apollo 13.

I can’t remember which mission it was but on Xmas Eve the astronauts took footage of the earth rising over the moon while reading from Genesis. Moving stuff, especially watching the tough as nails MC guys reduced to tears.