I am so up for Down Under.
I'm having such a swell time watching the Australian Olympics, it doesn't matter that they may have already held the Games and gone home, for all we know, by the time we see the athletes' heroic deeds on TV.
I'm still so worked up I can hardly tie me kangaroo down, sport.
Part of that's national pride — as much as a guy can have who never set foot in the place and wouldn't know Canberra from a cranberry.
I come by my Ozzi-fication naturally.
My late grandma, Lavina Nebbins, was born Down Under, at Nambucca Heads. She came to America when she was 17 and told of a place with forests and lakes and waterfalls and killer ocean vistas, 60 miles north of Sydney.
That means, of course, back in the family tree, we sprouted a horse thief or so who needed transporting from England to Botany Bay on the noted convict ship, the "Endeavor."
For people who know me, an "ah-ha" lightbulb may be going on just now.
Anyway, I've been stone in love with Australia ever since and always longed to go there. I've covered Olympics in Los Angeles, Calgary and Barcelona, and haven't thought I needed to see another one.
But watching Sydney strut its stuff makes me greener than our famous Jell-O with envy that I'm not watching this one up close and personal.
To compensate, our family has been by the telly every minute of the Games (from the ratings, I guess we're the only ones), and reading "Sunburned Country" by a hoot of a writer, Bill Bryson.
If you're looking for a tasty tome to whet your appetite for Oly on the barbie, Bill's your boy.
As Bryson points out, Australia is a land of extremes and contradictions.
It is at once the emptiest of countries, averaging 6 people per square mile (compared, say, to Britain, 632, the U.S. 76, and global average, 117), while being so urban that 82 percent of its citizens clog modern cities.
It is a place where a town named Nyngan was inundated by floods in 1989, '90, '92, '95, '96 and '98 while the town of Cobar, just 80 miles to the west, recorded nary a drop in five of those years.
Australia is home to the coolest animals on the planet: numbats, bettongs, quolls, potoroos, bandicoots, platypuses and, as anyone who saw them at Hogle knows, the only known beast who could double for Karl Malden, koalas.
While it boasts such cuddlies, it also hosts the most hostile creatures anywhere. Of Earth's 10 most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five Ozzie critters are the most lethal of their types: funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, stonefish.
That's one reason Ozzies are correctly characterized as a hardy breed. Yet they're self-conscious enough to make sure you know that tinny thingy atop Parliament House is "the largest aluminum structure in the Southern Hemisphere."
The kaiser, so to speak, of shiny domes. The Ozzie hemisphere of my chest swells with pride.
Finally Australia is, almost inconceivably, even more sports-bonkers than we Americans and harbors more successful Olympians, viewed a certain way.
In Atlanta in '96, Ozzies took more medals than all but four countries, though it's the 52nd-largest nation. It earned 3.78 medals per million population, 2 1/2 times better than next-best Germany and five times more than the U.S.
Now it's running neck and neck with us on its home turf, while sporting its trademark cheeriness to visitors and foes alike.
On the other hand, there was that time when their winning swimming relay team "air-guitared" us just because one of our guys said we'd "crush them like guitars."
Hey, you may be the most beautiful, contrary, happy-go-lucky, toughest place on our blue marble, and I may, admittedly pleasingly, bleed some outstanding Ozzie scoundrel blood.
But, sorry, grandma, we gotta kicks those guys in the place where they sit down under.
E-mail: gtwyman@desnews.com