Douglas Adams on Australia:
Feb. 20th, 2003 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
honeymonsterEvery country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent adolescent boy, Canada is like an intelligent thirty-five-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner. In fact it's not so much a country as such, more sort of a thin crust of semi-demented civilisation caked around the edge of a vast, raw wilderness, full of heat and dust and hopping things.
Tell most Australians that you like their country and they will give a dry laugh and say, "Well, it's the last place left now, isn't it?" which is the sort of worrying thing that Australians say. You don't quite know what they mean, but it worries you in case they're right.
[Later in the same article]
It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.
--From The Salmon of Doubt
current words: guess.
Tell most Australians that you like their country and they will give a dry laugh and say, "Well, it's the last place left now, isn't it?" which is the sort of worrying thing that Australians say. You don't quite know what they mean, but it worries you in case they're right.
[Later in the same article]
It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.
--From The Salmon of Doubt
current words: guess.
