THE LYRA'S LETTERS FIRST ANNIVERSARY!!!!

The Lyra's Letters first anniversary happened on  4:06 PM on the seventh of February, exactly a year after the first Lyra's Letters article, 'the Walkabout wildlife park', was released. That article was one of the few articles reused from the Lyra's Letters newsletter, which a few of you may have received. Since then, seventy posts have been written, and the most viewed post was the December post "The Six Foot Track" with 83 views. The most viewed unshared post was the April post "How to get rid of an Australian land leech" with 33 views.

The newsletter has had its first anniversary last August. After the fourth issue became long overdue, in January, the printing of the issue was canceled and the blog was started up. The newsletter contained some good articles that most of you have not seen, so we may recycle some of them in the coming months.

Lyra, our dog, had her third anniversary some time ago, in October. We had trouble deciding whether to name her Lyra (Lee-ra) or Lyra (Lie-ra), the current name. To learn more about her, see the May article "Dogs" or the July article "Lyra".

Lyra was named after a character in Phillip Pullman's book Northern Lights, the first book in the His Dark Materials award-winning series. Many of you may be familiar with it under its American title "The Golden Compass". The other two books in the trilogy are named The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. It is now about 20 years since the publishing of Northern Lights.

Between fifty and a hundred years ago, the little farming community of Lyra, Queensland, Australia sprang up along the New England Highway not far from the Queensland/New South Wales border. I and my family, on the way back from the Queensland capital Brisbane, stopped in Lyra Views Cafe, the only one in town.

The town of Lyra was named after the constellation (find out more in last year's post "seeing stars"). So was the book character. One of the constellations described by Ptolemy, its brightest star is not called Alpha Lyra, as one would expect. The brightest star in the constellation is called Vega, and the name came from the Arabic term for "swooping eagle" (It was named that because people used to look at the constellation as a swooping eagle holding a lyre in its beak).

More ancient still than the constellation was the lyre it was named after. Mythology has it that the first lyre was created by the young Greek god Hermes from a cowhide that came from the sun god Apollo's stolen cow. After Hermes told Apollo he was innocent for the disappearance of the cow, Apollo found out Hermes had lied when he found the musical instrument Hermes had made. Apollo called it the lyre, because the maker had lied to Apollo.

We hope to make a hundred posts sometime in the first half of this year.