An Australian christmas

Ever since we moved, it has been hard to get in the Christmas spirit. Because of the difference of seasons and weather from the Northern hemisphere, Australians celebrate Christmas in a much different way from Americans.

As an example, these are the Australian lyrics for 'Jingle Bells'. There are notes below to explain some of the different lines. The lyrics also include some Australian words and terms.

Dashing through the bush
In a rusty Holden Ute
Kicking up the dust
Esky in the boot
Kelpie by my side
Singing Christmas songs
It's Summer time and I am in
My singlet, shorts and thongs

(chorus:)

Oh! Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells
Jingle all the way
Christmas in Australia
On a scorching summer's day
Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells
Christmas time is beaut
Oh what fun it is to ride
In a rusty Holden Ute.

Engine's getting hot
We dodge the kangaroos
The swaggie climbs aboard
He is welcome too
All the family's there
Sitting by the pool
Christmas day, the Aussie way
By the barbecue!

(chorus)

Come the afternoon
Grandpa has a doze
The kids and uncle Bruce
Are swimming in their clothes
The time comes round to go
We take the family snap
Pack the car and all shoot through
Before the washing up

(chorus) 

Rusty Holden ute

Verse 1
Line 1: Bush is Australian for forest or another type of wilderness.
Line 2: Holden is a popular Australian car company. A Ute is a Two Wheel Drive car with a cargo tray.
Line 4: An esky is a portable cooler. A boot is the trunk of a car.
Line 5: A Kelpie is a type of medium-sized dog bred in Australia for herding sheep.
Line 7: In Australia there are two seasons: Summer(More like the Wet season in tropical regions) is from October to March. Winter(the Dry season) is from April to September.

Chorus
Line 4: The Australian summer is literally scorching. In July, the ultraviolet index reaches 13 in Brisbane, but only 10 in eastern American cities like New York and Washington D.C. This is due to the thin ozone layer around the south pole.

Verse 2
Line 3: Swaggie is short for swagman.
Line 6: Many Australian residents have pools, because of the intense summer heat.
Line 7: Australians tend not to use words that are more than two syllables long or too difficult to pronounce. This leads to shortening words like university(uni), Australian(Aussie) and breakfast(brekkie).
Line 8: The 'Aussie' way to celebrate Christmas is to cook meat(sometimes kangaroo meat) on a barbecue.

A HUNDRED POSTS!!!

A hundred posts! This is a major achievement for all writers in Lyra's Letters.

To celebrate, we've made a list of the top 10%, or ten best, posts from the last twenty-one months, and reviewed them. We've also made links to those posts below, so you can read them!

Before we begin, let's add some extra information:

Of the 100 posts, no less than 54 were informational. Personal comes second at 15 posts. We also posted 7 notices for various reasons. The remaining 33 posts were poems, links, knowledgeable/personal, and other.

So, here are the top ten:

10. "Poem"
By Arwin G

Being the youngest author of the blog, Arwin deserved to have one of his posts on the list! The article, a poem as the name suggests, was one of the first ever published on Lyra's Letters. Note: Due to some technical difficulties, there isn't a "T" at the beginning of each line.
http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/poem.html

9. The North East
By Daniel G

The North East was a post about the author's travels in the rugged sandstone country of Queensland's central plains. It covers Carnarvon Gorge; the Bunya Mountains;  Cania Gorge; the Blackdown Tablelands. It is accurate and looked better than many "personal" posts. So it earned a place in the list.
http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/the-north-east.html

8. Explorations of the Solar System
By Wytse G

Explorations of the Solar System is primarily about planets, and highlights the new pictures of Pluto as well as covering a lot of history. It is informational only. It is also one of the best posts published this year.
http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/explorations-of-solar-system.html

7. Ascent of the South Side of Mount Barney
By Daniel G

This is perhaps the best post that is completely about personal experiences, and the only one about hiking and not vacations. It is the experience itself, and not the writing, which makes this post good. It was written about two kids and their father tackling the 1354m summit of Mount Barney. Interested? Click on the link below. . . .
http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/ascent-of-south-side-of-mount-barney.html

6. Medical uses of gold in the past
By Wytse G

This post was originally written to enter a contest in The Helix magazine. It was a winning article. It won the contest mainly because of the vocabulary used, and that it was short instead of taking up pages. For these reasons it was included in our list.
http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/medical-uses-of-gold-in-past.html

5. How a wooden stick started World War II
By Daniel G

So, how did it? How could a minor invention in the Middle East begin a world war countless generations later? That's what this article explains, by working back from 1939.
  http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/how-wooden-stick-started-world-war-ii.html

4. Childhoods of my grandparents
By Wytse G

This is undoubtedly one of the longest posts, but instead of dragging on a single topic it is filled with information. It is about the 1940's, when my grandparents were, at the most, my age. It is about a world seldom imagined or thought about except as being a time when TV was new.
 http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2015/11/the-childhoods-of-my-grandparents.html

3. The stars of the Earth
By Daniel G

This post is the one best purely informational post on the entire blog. It incorporates some history, but focuses mainly on whatever people mine. The best thing about this post is how well it incorporates many different sources of information in a compact article.
http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/the-stars-of-earth.html

2. My vacation in the Australian Outback
By Wytse G

This post focuses on a vacation all of us took, which traveled across the desert and under the shadow of Uluru. It was an exceptional piece of writing about an exceptional vacation. The post was the first of three about the vacation, so we made three links. Being a combined experience/informational post adds a twist.
http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/my-vacation-in-australian-outback.html
http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/my-vacation-in-australian-outback-2.html
http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2015/04/my-vacation-in-australian-outback-alice.html

1. How to get rid of an Australian land leech
By Daniel G

This post was not particularly well written, nor about a particularly interesting subject. It was one of the first posts ever written. The special thing about the post is how classic it is. When it first came out, it was quite popular and quickly received a large number of views and comments. In other words, it was an instant hit.
http://lyrasletters.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/how-to-get-rid-of-australian-land-leech.html

Advice corner

Arwin's advice corner!

I will answer all questions every week on sunday.

Ask questions in the 'comments' section below.

An Illusion

Here is a link to the video "The Monkey Business Illusion", one of the weirdest optical illusions I have ever seen. I encourage you to write in comments how much you saw!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY

The present we got on st. nicholas' day

The present we got on St. Nicholas' day,
We thought it was good so we bothered,
To run down the stairs but unto our dismay,
All that we found was our father.

It's Not All About Money

The movement of money, resources, and wants controls whatever is happening in the world. It created the Great Depression out of nothing, and similarly created money out of nothing. Our name for this powerful force is Economics, the subject of the article.

When asked what economics is, many people find it impossible to describe. Economics is not about money; it has nothing to do with money. Economics is whatever people need or want, lose or gain. It is driven by human wants and needs. The basic problem of economics is unlimited wants constantly battling limited resources. Some people may never admit they really want anything, but anybody, negating outside influences, would take the world if it was offered to them. Nobody escapes making economic choices every day, even if they lived in a cave and foraged for vegetables. Going to work/school on a given day is an economic decision; if you decided just to relax at home all day without telling the boss/teacher, you might get in trouble, but you would get enjoyment from a day off.

Economics is driven by producing, selling and buying. There are three basic economic models. The first one is controlled market economy, where the government owns all the businesses. Governments try to keep as many jobs as possible, and tend to be very inefficient. An open market economy is where there are no rules. Although that might sound good, open market businesses never go for things that will lose them money, so as a result hospitals would be crazily expensive and there would be virtually no public transport.

The problems with both of these models can be solved by making a mixed market economy, where the businesses are private and the government makes some rules. Some problems include excessive paperwork for companies and less competition compared to open market, but this system was historically the most efficient and most countries have it.

I recently watched a video about economic models explained with cows. You have two cows. If the State takes them and gives you some milk, you have a controlled economy. If you trade one for a bull, multiply your herd and retire with lots of money, that's capitalism or a mixed economy. If you trade one for vegetables and use milk from the other to "pay" your rent for housing, that's more like Marxism, a Utopian vision which has not gone much farther than being a generation-old dream and has never been tried out.  To find more examples, check the link below.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSl-_UVMXpc

The childhoods of my grandparents

This post is about the parents of my father. They were both born in 1939, and grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in the American Midwest. The purpose of this post is to explain what life was like for children and adults back then.

There were no video games at that time, and TV was very new back then. My grandmother remembers one time when she was in Brownie Scouts(the young Girl Scouts), and her troop went to one girl's house because she was the only one in the troop that had a TV. When they turned it on, the screen just showed a test pattern, like the one on the right. The test pattern would be on in between programs(The old televisions only had about three channels, and not very many shows). The troop waited for a while, but no shows came on, so they left.

As you can see, TV wasn't all that great back then, so children entertained themselves by playing "make-believe" games like House, and other games like hide-and-seek. Plastic had not been invented yet, so toys were made of rubber, metal, and wood, like the Jacks set on the left. My grandparents also played board games and read books.


Computers were another change from back then. For example, people had to go to the library to look up things. There were also no good word processors, so they had to write something down first and then type it up on a typewriter. When you press a key on a typewriter, it would push some levers and a metal arm with a letter raised from it would go up and press on a ribbon. The ink on the other side of the ribbon then gets pressed on to a sheet of paper. The big difference in between writing with a typewriter and writing with a word processor is that if you wanted to correct a mistake or add another paragraph in a place where you had already written, you would have a lot of trouble going back and changing it!

Making copies of written things was also hard. It was done with carbon paper. Carbon paper is paper with loose ink or another pigment on one side, so if something, like the type on a typewriter, was pressed on the coloured side, then the black side would transfer its pigment to a sheet of paper below the carbon paper. In this way, it was possible to make copies while typing. For a short time before my grandmother went to college, she got a job as a clerk-typist at a clinic. Every day, she got a list of doctors that were out that day, and her job was to type up that list and, using eight sheets of carbon paper, make eight copies of the list to send to different departments.

                 

For art there were crayons and pencils, but no magic markers. The only pens were fountain pens. There were jars of ink and to fill up the pen you had to put its tip into the jar, and then pull a little lever to suck up the ink. In the 1950s, they had cartridges of ink that you could just put into the pen. One problem with fountain pens was that they work using a little channel that the ink runs through, so they would often leak and make blotches of ink on the paper.

The amount of polio cases in children and adults in the United States.

Another change that happened since the 1940s was polio vaccine. Polio was a very scary disease that mostly affected children. The poliovirus is a very simple virus that infects the gastrointestinal tract and usually causes minor symptoms such as fever and sore throat, but sometimes breaks into the central nervous system and causes paralysis, respiratory arrest and death. Parents, being scared of the disease, would not let their children go in to public places like swimming pools and movie theatres. Because poliovirus can only infect humans and cannot reproduce in nature, introduction of the polio vaccine has eliminated polio from most of the countries in the world and dropped the number of cases from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 52 in November 2015. This has caused a huge difference to the world, because all the worry that this disease has caused in countries like the United States is gone now.

Another thing that people were afraid about was World War II. When it started, the United States, facing unemployment and economic disaster due to the Great Depression, was reluctant to join, and only sent money and weapons to the Allies instead of soldiers. At December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed a naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii. The United States government finally spent more money to start up the economy and hire more soldiers to join the War, ending the Great Depression. You have probably heard of famous battles like the ones in Okinawa and Iwo Jima in the Pacific, and Omaha beach in Europe at D-Day. Other famous times included VE day(Victory in Europe), when Germany surrendered, and VP day(Victory in the Pacific), which was the surrender of Japan. How did all of that affect peoples' lives during the 1940s? For one thing, poor families lost fathers and older brothers, when they went to become soldiers in the War to support their families. Other people followed the news in theatres or with the newspaper. In American cities, there were air raid drills, when people covered up all of the windows with blankets or turned all the lights off, so that no light could be seen from outside, or above. This was probably because they were scared that enemy bombers could see the light and bomb the city, like they did in World War I.

The basic crowd opinion of everybody in the U.S. was that people on their side were "the good guys" and that the opposing countries were "the bad guys"(When they were young, my grandparents played games where they pretended to be heroic soldiers who were going around, killing the Japanese). This opinion has led to war many times, war strengthens that opinion, which leads to more wars, and so on. As population grows, resources decrease, and gases in the atmosphere cause climate change, the countries must learn to co-operate, and deal with these problems.