There is a brilliant "Saturday Night Live" skit from the show's early years featuring the late John Belushi as a manic meteorologist, in which he claims that while Americans say that “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb,” each country has a different version of that metaphor.
In Norway, for example, March “comes in like a polar bear and goes out like a walrus.” My favorite is the country where “March hops in like a kangaroo, and then stays a kangaroo for a while, and then becomes a slightly smaller kangaroo, and then becomes a cross between a frilled lizard and a common house cat, and then changes back into a smaller kangaroo and then goes out like a wild dingo. And this is the best part — it’s not Australia.”
That skit came to mind after reading Charles Parton’s recent article in the Financial Times in which he professes to be a “drongo.” A drongo, he explained, is an Australian bird, “known for fearlessly defending its nests and young.”
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