Laugh, Kookaburra - David Sedaris

1. "but we wouldn’t have seen anything were it not for a woman named Pat, who was born in Melbourne and has lived there for most of her life. We’d met her a few years earlier, in Paris, where she’d come to spend a mid-July vacation. Over drinks in our living room, her face dewed with sweat, she taught us the term “shout,” as in “I’m shouting lunch.” This means that you’re treating, and that you don’t want any lip about it. “You can also say, ‘It’s my shout,’ or, ‘I’ll shout the next round,’ ” she told us."

2. " I crept back upstairs to join Amy for another twenty rounds. “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, merry merry king of the bush is he—”
It didn’t take long for our father to rally. “Did I not tell you to go to your room?”
What would strike me afterward was the innocence of it. If I had children and they stayed up late, singing a song about a bird, I believe I would find it charming. “I knew I had those two for a reason,” I think I’d say to myself. I might go so far as to secretly record them, and submit the tape in a My Kids Are Cuter Than Yours competition. My dad, by contrast, clearly didn’t see it that way, which was strange to me. It’s not like we were ruining his TV reception. He couldn’t even hear us from that distance, so what did he have to complain about? “All right, sonny, I’m giving you ten seconds. One. Two . . .”
I guess what he resented was being dismissed. Had our mother told us to shut up, we’d probably have done it. He, on the other hand, sitting around in his underpants—it just didn’t seem that important. "

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/24/090824fa_fact_sedaris?currentPage=all