spiders

I am not afraid of spiders; they just make me cranky when I walk into a web. The spiders at our place are quite small and I think they could survive a nuclear holocaust. I spray them with flyspray and residual insecticide to no avail. This morning I walked into a single thread stretching across maybe three meters. If they would stop setting these traps I would promise to supply them with free flies from my fly trap.

Yesterday I read a posting on the West Australian Mac Users' Group from a mature age Indonesian Uni student here in Perth. His 'signature' on the bottom of his posting contained a familiar word...binatang, which in Pidgin English means insect. I copied the signature and popped it into a free translation program named Toggle Text.

The result.....'The High Season, Nectarine, Peach and.. the Fly!
The fly ought to become the national Australian animal!'

Pidgin is a quite wonderful language that has become the Lingua Franca of Papua New Guinea. There are some 800 pure languages in PNG and English is the official language. Tok Pisin, which is pidgin for Pidgin English, has spread to even remote villages. The structure of Tok Pisin is similar to English. For example, husat I stap? means 'who stops there?'
Or ' Wanaim as bilong trabel hia' translates as....'What is at the bottom of this trouble?'

Inap. Taim bilong kai kai. Mi hangri tumas!