Ben – Pratchat

#Pratchat48 Notes and Errata

08/10/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“, featuring guest Benjamin Riley, discussing the 26th Discworld novel: 2001’s Thief of Time.

(To avoid any confusion, in these notes we’ve referred to our guest this episode as “Guest Ben”, and our co-host as “our Ben”, which has the delightful side effect of making it sound like he’s part of the Ogg clan.)

The episode title is a riff on the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, featured on their 1967 concept album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. While long rumoured to be about hallucinations brought on by the use of psychotropic drugs – urban legend often pointed to the fact that the acronym LSD is in there – it was actually inspired by an illustration made by John’s young son, Julian Lennon.
Guest Ben and Liz used to have “Time Travel Wednesdays” when they worked together, but our Ben’s brain immediately time travels to Tuesdays, presumably for the sake of alliteration. We apologise for any confusion caused.
Craig Hildebrand-Burke was indeed our guest when we discussed Jingo back in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“. (This is one we’d like to revisit with a bit more sensitivity to some things in our blindspot last time.)
Guest Ben’s favourite Discworld period (which he points out is the same as previous guest Craig’s) runs from Jingo (the twenty-first Discworld novel, published in November 1997; see #Pratchat27) to Thud (the thirty-fourth, published in September 2005; probably coming in 2022). This period also includes the first three Science of Discworld books, the first three younger readers books (The Amazing Maurice and the first two Tiffany Achings), and the introduction of Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal. It’s also notable that Pratchett didn’t publish any non-Discworld books during this period. (Our Ben feels that thematically and tonally this run begins slightly earlier, with either Maskerade or Feet of Clay, meaning it also includes Hogfather.)
Cigars are most associated with His Grace Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Watch and Duke of Ankh, though in Guards! Guards!, when he was still just the low-paid Captain of the disregarded Night Watch, he rolls his own cigarettes. By Men at Arms he has moved on to “cheap” cigars, and in Feet of Clay “thin” ones which he carries in a case (or at least he did until Nobby stole the case). He sometimes lights them using swamp dragons, a habit which annoys Sybil. He’s not the only cigar smoker; Nobby is plied with cigars in Feet of Clay, and Nanny Ogg also indulges, though this is only seen briefly in Wyrd Sisters when she’s also drinking in the pub.
“That X-Men movie that fixes that crap X-Men movie” is X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014; dir. Bryan Singer), a film adaptation of the epic comic book time travel story which turned the intended reboot film X-Men: First Class (2011; dir. Matthew Vaughn) into a prequel of the original X-Men movie trilogy. The film opens in a future in which mutants are have been hunted nearly to extinction, so Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is psychically sent back in time to prevent a murder which sent history down that leg of the trousers of time. He is successful, and when he returns to the present, the timeline resembles that of the original trilogy – except that the events of near-universally hated X-Men: The Last Stand (2006, dir. Brett Ratner) haven’t happened.
The idea of the white face and the red nose – named after two styles of clown makeup, and expounded upon in Eric Idle’s sci-fi novel The Road to Mars – is a characterisation of comedic duos in which one, the “white face”, is serious and has (or assumes) a higher level or importance than the other, the buffoon or “red nose”. As well as the obvious surface level, comedy is often derived from the red nose puncturing the white face’s pompous attitude. Colon and Nobby are the archetypal Discworld example, but there are many others. In theatre terms, the white face is said to be a “high status” character, while the red nose is “low status”.
There are two kinds of big wheel that circus performers roll around in, but the one our Ben is thinking of is a German wheel: two big metal hoops connected by metal struts with stirrups and handholds. They were invented for – and are still used in – gymnastics. (The other kind of circus wheel is a single metal hoop called a Cyr wheel.)
Wallace and Gromit are the stop-motion animated stars several short and feature films, created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. Wallace (voiced primarily by Peter Sallis) is a well-meaning, eccentric and talented inventor with a passion for cheese, while Gromit is his supremely competent and loyal dog. The success of their first film, 1989’s A Grand Day Out, led to several sequels and spin-offs, including the television and film series Shaun the Sheep.
We’re afraid you’ll have to get used to the term “timey-wimey” in this book, since it just feels so apt for a book with little in the way of time travel, but much in the way of time-related weirdness. It’s origin is Doctor Who, specifically the Tenth Doctor’s explanation of causality in the third season episode “Blink”; we gave the full quote in our notes for #Pratchat35, but here we’ll add that in the fiftieth anniversary special The Day of the Doctor, when the Eleventh Doctor uses it and the War Doctor (an earlier, grumpier incarnation) finds it preposterous, the Tenth Doctor pretends he’s never heard the phrase.
Jeremy Clarkson started out as a journalist, but is best known now as a television personality. He was one of many hosts of the original version of Top Gear, the BBC Two motoring show which ran from 1977 to 2001, and after it was cancelled devised a new format for the show which debuted in 2002 – the year after Thief of Time was published, so he was considerably less famous then (though still pretty well-known in the UK). He was one of its original hosts, alongside Richard Hammond; they were joined by James May from the second series and remained the main hosting team for over a decade. Even before the new Top Gear, Clarkson attracted criticism for making bigoted remarks, but these only increased as he grew in fame, with a series of controversies over comments on- and off-air that ran the gamut of anti-environmentalism, sexism, homophobia, ableism and racism. (There’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to controversies on Top Gear, most of them involving Clarkson.) Clarkson generally dismisses these criticisms, but also seems to court controversy deliberately to increase his fame, stating on multiple occasions that he may not believe all the things he says. By 2014, however, he was on a “final warning” from the BBC, and in 2015, after he verbally abused and then assaulted one of the show’s producers while on location (ostensibly because he wasn’t served the meal he wanted), the BBC cut the show’s season short and declined to renew Clarkson’s contract, despite a petition from fans with a million signatures. Hammond and May left the show with him, which continued with various new presenters, including Friends and Episodes star Matt leBlanc. Clarkson’s new show with Hammond and May, The Grand Tour, was basically Top Gear in all but name, and began on Amazon Prime in 2016, where he now also hosts Clarkson’s Farm, s show about the farm he owns in The Cotswolds, not far from Pratchett’s home in Wiltshire. He is still very famous in the UK, where he has hosted their version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? since 2018 and makes various other television appearances, though not on the BBC.
Lobsang is a favourite name of Pratchett’s, used most prominently here and as the name of a major character in The Long Earth books, though it crops up many times in the novels – the first time seems to be near the end of Guards! Guards! (See also the note below about knowledge coming from a long way away.) It is a fairly specific reference to “Dr Tuesday Lobsang Rampa“, author of several books about the spiritual and paranormal, most famously The Third Eye in 1956. He was later revealed to be Cyril Henry Hoskin, a plumber from Devon. For more on his weird story, listen to our discussion of The Long Earth in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, or look him up yourself; you’ll be amazed.
The tick of the Universe more or less exists in the real world in the concept of Planck time, the “briefest physically meaningful span of time”, which is about 5.39×10⁻⁴⁴ seconds. According to an article from 2020, the briefest time so far measured is 247 zeptoseconds (or 10^-21 seconds), so even the most accurate atomic clocks can’t duplicate Jeremy’s feat.
Susan Sto-Helit is the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Sto-Helit – Death’s adopted daughter, Ysabel, and his one-time apprentice, Mort. Their story is told in the fourth Discworld novel, Mort (see #Pratchat2), while Susan first appeared as a teenager in Soul Music (#Pratchat19) before returning at more-or-less the same age she is here in Hogfather (#Pratchat26). In the animated Soul Music she was voiced by Debra J Gillet (who also provided the voice of Grimma in the stop-motion version of Truckers), and in the live-action adaptation of Hogfather, she was played by Michelle Dockery (now best known for her starring role as Lady Mary Crawley on Downton Abbey).
Montessori and Steiner schools are alternative models for educating children and young people. Montessori education, developed by Italian doctor and educator Maria Montessori (1870-1952) around the turn of the twentieth century, focuses on self-directed learning based on natural human development. Its basis is that children naturally want to learn, but formal education prevents them from doing so in the way that’s best for them; Montessori schools are usually primary schools and allow students to pursue the activities and subjects they find most interesting, usually through playful means. Many aspects of Montessori’s work have been adopted into mainstream teaching as well. Steiner education, also known as Waldorf education, is based on the work of Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925), an Austrian philosopher (among many other things). Steiner’s “anthroposophy” teaches that humans can better understand the spiritual world through personal development, though the spiritual aspects of the philosophy are not always emphasised in Steiner education. Its main focus is holistic teaching, believing that students will do best if they develop their intellectual skills alongside artistic and practical ones. Steiner schools use a developmental model that runs from infancy through to secondary education, and have become increasingly popular; they are now the largest independent educational movement in the world, with forty-five schools across Australia.
Professor Valerie Felicity Frizzle, PhD, originally known as Ms Frizzle or “the Frizz”, is the teacher in The Magic School Bus books by Joanna Cole, later developed into television series and videogames. The titular bus could travel safely to just about anywhere in time and space, allowing Ms Frizzle to teach her students about various scientific concepts. Cole died in 2020, the year a Netflix continuation, The Magic School Bus Rides Again, debuted. In the sequel, the original Ms Frizzle gets her doctorate and passes the school bus on to her younger sister, Miss Fiona Felicity Frizzle. In both the television and Netflix series, Valerie Frizzle is played by Lily Tomlin; Fiona was played by Kate McKinnon (of Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters fame).
Lu-Tze and the History Monks first appear in 1992’s Small Gods (discussed in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“). They are described as the caretakers of history, keepers of the “the books from which history is derived”. Lu-Tze is sent by the 493rd Abbot – the same one recently reincarnated in this book – to Omnia, where “things must be…carefully observed“. Lu-Tze mentions he hasn’t been to Omnia in seven hundred years, which almost agrees with his age of eight hundred in this book, set about a century later. By the end of the book he has “patched up” history such that Brutha does not die, prompting a century of terrible warfare, but instead lives for most of that century and reforms Omnianism. This suggests Lu-Tze’s mission to Omnia was one of the things that needed fixing as a result of the first glass clock; Igors are long-lived enough that this Igor’s grandfather could certainly have built the previous clock a century earlier, or indeed the History Monks may be able to leave their valley at just about any point in history they choose. Lu-Tze will return in Night Watch.
Lu-Tze’s name is derived from Loazi (老子), author of the Tao Te Ching and founder of Taoism, who lived in the 6th century BCE. Loazi – also romanised as Lao Tze or Loa Tzu – is actually an honorific title meaning “venerable master”, and there is some debate about who he was, or even if such a single person truly existed, or was just a pen name for the multiple authors of the Tao Te Ching. Listener Felix let us known that Lu-Tze might be an intentional bilingual pun, as Lǔ is a Mandarin word meaning “foolish” or “crude”, making Lu-Tze a “Foolish/Crude Master”.
While we may not have been able to spot many references to specific kung fu movies, there’s at least one clear reference to the 1972 American TV series Kung Fu. When Lu-Tze takes on Lobsang as an apprentice, he tells him: ‘Word One is, you don’t call me “master” and I don’t name you after some damn insect.’ In Kung Fu, the main character Caine – played by white American actor David Carradine, who was cast over a host of potential Asian American actors, including Bruce Lee – is a Shaolin monk wandering the Old West looking for his brother. In flashbacks to his training, he refers to he teacher as “Master”, who calls Caine “Grasshopper”.
We previously talked about The Karate Kid (1984, dir. John G Avildsen) in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. Mr Miyagi is the elderly Japanese neighbour of Danny LaRusso, who asks him to teach him karate so he can protect himself from the bullies at his new school; he sets him chores which are revealed to have taught him some basic movements essential to karate.
We’ve not yet nailed down which kung fu movie with the famous moving shot Liz is thinking about; suffice to say it’s not called The Tenth Dojo. If you know the one, please get in touch!
If you want to get a handle on the history of martial arts films, The Conversation recently published a great article by Joyleen Christensen: “From Bruce Lee to Shang-Chi: a short history of the Kung Fu film in cinema“.
Speaking of kung fu cinema, one of the many things that inspired George Lucas’ Star Wars was the Master-Apprentice relationship in such films. Thus Jedi ideally begin training at a young age, and when they reach the rank of “Padawan” they are apprenticed to a Jedi Master, travelling with them and learning from them until the Jedi Council deems them worthy of the rank of Jedi Knight, at which point they have finished their apprenticeship.
The previous joke about people thinking wisdom has to come from far away appears in Witches Abroad (see #Pratchat12), where Magrat is reading “The Path of the Scorpion”, a book of which she is suspicious partly because the author – “Grand Master Lobsang Dibbler” – has an address in Ankh-Morpork. (The author is clearly CMOT Dibbler, leading us to wonder why the name “Lobsang” is apparently well-known on the Disc – and why Newgate Ludd ends up with it…) The full quote of the joke appears below (though see also the following note):

It’s a strange thing about determined seekers-after-wisdom that, no matter where they happen to be, they’ll always seek wisdom which is a long way off. Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.*
Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (1991)

Mrs Marietta Cosmopolite appears in Moving Pictures, where she is a “little old lady” seamstress in Ankh-Morpork who becomes a costume designer in Holy Wood for Century of the Fruitbat Moving Pictures. She is also mentioned in the footnote to the quote above from Witches Abroad, which contains the first appearance of The Way of Mrs Cosmopolite, in which monks travel from the Hub mountains to hear her wisdom, though they can’t understand her. It would seem Lu-Tze was the first of these monks, since by the time others came to visit her she is hitting them with a broom and telling them to push off, rather than taking them in as lodgers. Her address is consistently given in all the books as 3 Quirm Street, an unusually specific bit of continuity that leads us to wonder if she is an obscure reference of some sort? (Despite that attention to detail, her surname is spelt “Cosmopolite” in all the books except Thief of Time, where its spelt “Cosmopilite”; the reasons for this are a mystery.)
Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war novel, in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck in time”, and thus experiences his life somewhat out of order. We previously discussed it in #Pratchat26.
Monstrous Regiment is the thirty-first Discworld novel, published in 2003. We’ll cover it in a future episode, but listener Steavie urged Ben (and the rest of us) to listen to Pratchett’s interview for the Wheeler Centre in 2014, which we previously linked to in #Pratchat26 (that episode’s guest Michael Williams was the interviewer). He talks (from around 31:30) about researching the history of women fighting and living as men at “a nice little place in London run by ladies who like other ladies very much indeed”. (In The Magic of Terry Pratchett, Marc Burrows identifies this research as taking place in “queer-focussed bookshops”, though no specific ones are named.) This seems a pretty good indication that he knew what he was writing.
The gay character in Unseen Academicals, Pepe the dwarf fashion designer, was quite definitely intended by Pratchett to be gay; in the same interview linked above, Pratchett describes him being “as gay as a tree full of monkeys”.
Of course there’s no way for us to know if Pratchett had many out gay friends, but he certainly met a great number of queer and trans fans, many of whom have shared stories via social media that show him to have always been kind and empathetic.
Many of the stories from the note above were reported in response to the “gender critical” incident, which we won’t give too much oxygen. (If you need some background on what “trans” means, guest Fury gives a little 101 in #Pratchat29.) The short version is that a couple of vocal anti-trans commentators, angry that Maragret Atwood had identified herself as a trans ally, got fed up with Neil Gaiman also being clearly pro-trans. So they suggested on Twitter that Terry Pratchett was more “acquainted with reality” than Gaiman and that the Witches books showed Pratchett knew “what female is and means in the world”. Twitter’s considerable number of Terry fans – including his daughter Rhianna – of course found this absurd, given the way he writes about gender roles in books like Equal Rites, Feet of Clay, The Fifth Elephant and Monstrous Regiment. That didn’t stop commentators claiming that we “couldn’t know” what he thinks as he wasn’t around to ask…though we reckon his closest friends and family might have a pretty good idea?
The idea of consensual reality is that the universe conforms to people’s beliefs. Wikiality is sort of the opposite idea – that people have a common idea of what’s true that might not align with objective reality. The word was coined by Stephen Colbert on the July 6, 2006 episode of his satirical show The Colbert Report; his right-wing persona, in his “The Wørd” segment, praised Wikipedia for being editable, meaning that it could be changed to reflect “truthiness”, Colbert’s parody of terms used by conservative politicians to deny facts they found inconvenient. He defined the word “wikiality” to mean “truth by consensus”, and encouraged his viewers to edit Wikipedia to change “facts”, making people believe things that weren’t true. This resulted in whole thing where people edited multiple articles on Wikipedia to suggest the world’s elephant population had tripled…
We’ve previously mentioned alt.fan.pratchett, the newsgroup from the 1990s where Pratchett occasionally answered fan questions; see the notes for #Pratchat42 for more information.
Despite it being generally accepted that he did, Terry did not cover nuclear reactors as a journalist; a case of wikiality in action! As Marc Burrows clarifies in his biography The Magic of Terry Pratchett, Terry quit journalism in 1979 (before he sold his first big novel) and took a job – mostly for the money – in public relations, specifically for the South-West office of the Central Electricity Generating Board (or CEGB). The job wasn’t meant to revolve around nuclear power, but the infamous partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in the US – causing the evacuation of 140,000 people – happened three weeks before he started in the job, and the region covered by his office of the CEGB included three of Britains nuclear power plants.
Lifetimers, mentioned only in passing in this book, are the hourglass-like devices which Death uses to determine when people on the Disc will die. Everyone has one, even the gods and – in Reaper Man – Death himself. While Death doesn’t always seem to need one – they’re not often referred to in his cameos to collect souls – Mort is taught to take the lifetimes of those he needs to visit with him in Mort, so our speculation that they’re required might be correct. (Death clearly has somewhere in his robe where he can hide them…)
Q – with the help of his department, Q Branch – is the boffin responsible for James Bond’s famous gadgets, like the car that could turn into a submarine, the watch with a powerful electromagnet, and a toy rocket launcher disguised as a cigarette (no really) – plus of course dozens of different things that could explode. The character’s codename is short for “Quartermaster”, a military term which in the army refers to a senior soldier who is in charge of equipment and supplies. Q is mentioned but never appears in the original novels; the closest equivalent is Major Boothroyd, an armourer who appears in Dr. No, the sixth novel. Desmond Llewellyn appeared as Boothroyd in the film version of Dr. No, and the producers decided to keep him on as Q in subsequent films. Llewellyn’s Q appears in seventeen of the Bond films, in scenes where he would show off gadgets to Bond and often have to remark “Oh do pay attention, 007”. He announced his plans to retire in 1999’s The World is Not Enough, which also introduced his assistant “R”, played by John Cleese, who took over as Q in the following film, 2002’s Die Another Day. The Daniel Craig Bond films feature a new younger Q, played by Ben Wishaw, who appears in Skyfall, Spectre and No Time to Die.
Desmond Llewellyn died in a car accident in December 1999, a few weeks after the release of The World is Not Enough, while on his way to a book signing. Thief of Time was published about eighteen months later, in May 2001, so Pratchett may have been writing it while Llewellyn was still alive. Terry’s quote on the matter from the Annotated Pratchett File is: “”As I wrote it I could [hear Llewellyn’s voice], too. Qu will be back — unlike, alas, Desmond Llewellyn.” (Qu did come back, in Night Watch.)
The boffin with the exploding gadgets in Night Terrace – the time travel radio comedy co-produced, co-written and co-starring Ben – is Horatio Gray (played by The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen). He appears primarily in the second season episode “The Retirement of Horatio Gray”. (You can find out more at nightterrace.com.)
Guest Ben’s summary of the theory of relativity is pretty much spot on: special relativity was Einstein’s explanation for the speed of light, which had been observed in experiments to always the same, even under conditions where you’d expect it to be different. The theory tells us that time and distance are not fixed, they they are relative, in the same we already though of motion as being relative. “History” – in this case, our personal perception of time – has to “give” to keep the speed of light constant in those circumstances. (General relativity, which came later, explained how special relativity interacted with gravity by combining space and time into a single set of dimensions we now know as “spacetime”, and gravity as a curving of spacetime near massive objects.) Of note is that the idea of time and distance being relative had already been worked out mathematically by Hendrik Lorentz, a Dutch physicist, ten years before Einstein, but he thought this was an abstract mathematical model, not a description of the way the physical universe worked. (This is why the equations involved in translating time and location information between frames of reference – between you on the surface of the Earth and a satellite in orbit, for example – are called Lorentz transformations.)
We’ve previously talked about Pratchett’s love of videogames in #Pratchat28 (about Only You Can Save Mankind) and #Pratchat36 (about Carpe Jugulum, which includes a pretty blatant reference to Tomb Raider). Of note: he was a big fan of roleplaying games too; his special favourite for a long time was The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, largely because of the modding community of fans who create “mods” (modifications) that add in extra stuff, like being able to make a living from crafting, more realistic weather, even rainbows. You can read an out-take from a radio interview where he talked about this stuff on The Author Hour in 2009.
“Man not of woman born” is a reference to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which Lord Macbeth is given a prophecy by three witches that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth”. It later turns out that Macduff was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” – ie. born via Caesarean section – which apparently doesn’t count as being “woman born”. Bit of a long bow, if you ask us. Probably a closer analogue to what we were talking about was the prophecy in The Lord of the Rings, in which it is said of the mighty Witch-king, the Lord of the Nazgūl (the Ring-wraiths who work for Sauron), that “not by the hand of man shall he fall”. He ends up being killed instead by a hobbit and human woman in the Battle of Pelennor Fields (the big fight between the orc armies and the city of Minas Tirith, which appears in the third book and film, The Return of the King).
Reservoir Dogs (1992) was the first feature film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. In the film, six men participating in a bank heist refer to each other only by the pseudonyms Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange and Mr. Pink. In the scene where they get their aliases, they argue about the allocation of names, which are given out by the organiser. (Content warning for the clip: it’s not gentle language, and the crims are casually homophobic.)
Guest Ben talks about Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who, likening the incarnated Auditors to monsters from his era (perhaps the Whispermen from The Name of the Doctor), and the time in the museum to the the end of Matt Smith’s first season – The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang.
Was Pratchett a Doctor Who fan? Not really…though he did enjoy the show. Writing for SFX magazine in 2010, he complained that it “breaks most of the laws of narrative”, and he derided the modern show as being powered by “makeitupasyougalongeum”, a sentiment he repeated when writing the introduction to Behind the Sofa, a 2012 collection of celebrity reminiscences about the program published to raise money for Alzheimers research. (It was updated and expanded in 2013.) He did confess, in the SFX article, that despite his misgivings he continued to watch: “After all, when you’ve had your moan you have to admit that it is very, very entertaining, with its heart in the right place, even if its head is often in orbit around Jupiter.” (You can find some excerpts from the SFX article in this piece at The Guardian; Behind the Sofa is still available as an eBook.)
Both Death and the Doctor having a granddaughter named Susan is likely a deliberate decision on Pratchett’s part, given that in the introduction to Behind the Sofa he starts by saying “I was there in the beginning,” and refers to “that strange grandchild and rare teachers who took everything in their stride”: Susan, and her teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, the first humans to travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS.
The Horsemen of Good Omens are much more closely based on the Biblical account, inasmuch as that’s possible – Revelations doesn’t actually have that much to say about them, beyond the signature items that identify each of them, and the colours of their horses. Notably in these global pandemic times, the Pestilence of Good Omens quit the position in 1936, “muttering about penicillin”, though in the same paragraph his successor Pollution seems to think that was premature: “If only the old boy had known what opportunities the future had held…” (For more on all this, see #Pratchat15.)
The Horsemen of the Apocralypse previously rode out – or at least tried to – in Sourcery, when the magic unleashed by Coin, the Disc’s first sourcerer in millennia, released the ice giants from their prison and they rode towards Dunmanifestin to end the world, in a cataclysm more inspired by Norse mythology than the Bible. On that occasion, a certain amateur hairdresser, her barbarian sidekick, and the Seriph of Al Khali stole War, Pestilence and Famine’s horses, rather putting the kibosh on the whole thing. (See #Pratchat3 for more on Sourcery.)
There are still many thousands of deaths in hospitals caused by lack of hand washing. As recently as 2018 the World Health Organisation put the figure at up to 30,000 women and 400,000 babies every year from preventable infections, such as puerperal sepsis, though those numbers also include deaths due to lack of sanitation or clean water. It’s easy to forget that in the majority world (i.e. most of it outside the relatively affluent nations in places like North America, Western Europe and Oceania), those things aren’t guaranteed even in hospital facilities, and even health workers without consistent access to clean water and soap need to work and getting into the habit. Cleanliness in general was championed by many before the germ model of disease was accepted, including Florence Nightingale (though she apparently fudged her numbers). The generally accepted pioneer of hand-washing in particular, though, was Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, who in 1846 briefly convinced doctors working with pregnant women to wash their hands after conducting autopsies. It didn’t last…and his story has a sad ending. But you can learn more about the history of hand washing via this episode of NPR’s Shortwave podcast.
When our Ben mentions Dirk Gently, he is referring to the protagonist of Douglas Adams’ novels Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Dirk claims to solve mysteries via the “fundamental interconnectedness of all things”, one manifestation of which is that when he doesn’t know where to go, he follows someone who looks like they know where they’re going. Through this method he claims that, while he might not end up where he wanted to go, he frequently ended up somewhere he needed to be.
100 Story Building is a creative writing centre for young people based in Footscray in Melbourne. Ben has been one of their workshop facilitators since 2016. They primarily work with schools; you can find out more at 100storybuilding.org.au.
The Matrix: Resurrections is the upcoming 2021 sequel to the original Matrix trilogy, written and directed by half of the original Matrix creative duo, Lana Wachowski, with Lily’s blessing. In the first teaser trailer, there’s a shot of Keanu Reeves in the bath with a rubber duck on his head – and dedicated listener A’Tuin Sneezed beat our Ben to the punch with this tweet:

@PratchatPodcast @McKenzie_Ben @ElizabethFlux Keanu out here auditioning for Duck Man when the beggars get a spin off 🦆 https://t.co/954q18vG6u
— A’tuin Sneezed (@damethelog) September 10, 2021

When Liz says “For Star Wars reasons we’re sending you to different places“, she’s referring to the end of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, in which twins Luke and Leia are sent into “hiding” from their father, Darth Vader, by putting Luke on Tattooine (his father’s home planet) in the care of his Uncle and Aunt through marriage (on his mother’s side), and Leia on Alderaan, adopted by Bail Organa, a galactic Senator well-known to Vader’s master, the Emperor, and leader of the Rebellion. I mean, where else would you send them? Somewhere together that had no connection to the people trying to protect them or their actual parents?
There are several “fifth Beatles“, but the best known is drummer Pete Best. He was indeed the fifth member of the band then called “the Silver Beatles” (though there had been others in John’s previous band, The Quarrymen). Pete joined John, Paul, George and Stuart (Sutcliffe), four guitarists in need of a drummer, in 1960. After Sutcliffe left, Best remained with the group until he was fired and replaced by Ringo Starr (whom, we’d like to point out, is never referred to as “the sixth Beatle”, which seems a little unfair). We previously talked about Pete in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“. Ronnie, having left under his own steam over “creative differences”, seems to have had the better treatment.
The fifth horseman doesn’t appear in a previous footnote, but there are a number of other groups of “four horsemen” of lesser disasters listed in Interesting Times, and Good Omens features “the Other Horsemen” – a bunch of bikies who ride out with the real four, arguing with each other over what their names should be.
There are many angels in the book of Revelations of the Christian Bible, though the one most resembling the angel mentioned in Thief of Time is probably the one from chapter 10, in an interlude between the sixth and seventh trumpets. This angel appears to John of Patmos carrying “a little scroll”, and cries out with a lion’s roar; in response, seven thunders utter mysteries to John which he is not allowed to write down (and given what he is allowed to write down, must be pretty wild). The angel then gives the scroll to John and has him eat it, leading to a further vision in chapter 11 before the final trumpet sounds. Note that this is well after the four horsemen, who are introduced upon the opening of the first four of the seven seals, which is before the first trumpet. Revelations is a lot.
We’ve previously talked about the cosmic battle of Law versus Chaos in the work of Michael Moorcock in #Pratchat14, #Pratchat29, #Pratchat44 and #Pratchat45. While we don’t know if Pratchett ever corresponded with Moorcock, Moorcock was the editor who published Pratchett’s first professionally published story. See the notes for #Pratchat45 for more info.
In the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, alignment is a declaration of where a character stands in the opposition of the forces of good and evil, and law and chaos. It was much more significant and restrictive in older editions, where it was expected to dictate (or at least match) your character’s behaviour, and where magic could detect what your alignment was: Paladins – holy warriors who had to be on the side of lawful good to be granted their powers – could cast detect evil and determine straight up if someone was evil or not. In modern editions, it’s been described more as a guideline for actions, and the ability to detect alignments has been removed from the game; for example the equivalent spell is now detect evil and good, and it detects only beings that are intrinsically linked to forces of positive and negative energy, like angels, demons and the undead.
The Thunderdome – clear inspiration for the Iron Dome dojo in Oi Dong – is the gladiatorial arena featured in the film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985, dir. George Miller). It is used in the post-apocalyptic settlement of Bartertown to settle disagreements via a battle to the death – “two men enter, one man leaves”, as the crowd chants.
Albert is Death’s manservant, a major character in Mort and Hogfather, and a supporting character in Reaper Man and Soul Music, but who is mentioned exactly once in this book. Following the events of Soul Music, Albert has very little real life left to him, so while it’s not surprising he doesn’t take part in Thief of Time, it’s weird not to at least see him briefly in the opening scenes set in Death’s Domain.
Ysabell is Susan’s mother, a sixteen-year-old girl rescued and adopted by Death for reasons that are never fully explained. She appears in Mort, and briefly – during scenes set in the past – Soul Music.
The other characters we mention towards the end of the podcast are:
- Angua von Überwald, werewolf member of the watch introduced in Men at Arms (#Pratchat1) and a major supporting character in most subsequent Watch books, especially The Fifth Elephant (#Pratchat40);
- Agnes Nitt, a younger witch who first appears in Lords and Ladies (#Pratchat17) but is a major character in Maskerade (#Pratchat23) and Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36); and
- Adorabelle Dearheart, who runs the Golem Trust in Ankh-Morpork, a major character in the Moist von Lipwig books starting with Going Postal (#Pratchat38).
The concept of “substition” also appears in Jingo (see #Pratchat27). Pratchett writes of 71-Hour Ahmed: “He didn’t believe in the things everyone believed in but which nevertheless were untrue. He believed instead in the things that were true in which no one else believed.” Rather appropriately for Thief of Time, among the examples of substations he gives in Jingo is “It’ll get better if you don’t pick at it”.
The Doctor’s “pull the trigger, end my life” speech to the sniper occurs in part 2 of the 1988 story The Happiness Patrol. You can find the scene on YouTube.
In The Matrix films, “the machines” have enslaved humanity in a simulated reality – a 1999 megacity which forms the titular Matrix. Agents are the machines’ troubleshooting programs which hunt down humans who are resisting the Matrix program; they look like men in black and are stronger and faster than humans. Agent Smith is the main antagonist of the first film; during the sequels he becomes a virus-like entity who threatens to destroy the Matrix itself, something neither machines or humans want. The films also feature other “rogue programs“, intelligent bits of software who escape the machines’ mainframe and live in the Matrix, where they take on the forms of humans or human-like creatures.
You can find out more about the OverLondon Project (not to be confused with London Above, London Below or Fallen London) at overlondon.net.
The software toy Mountain was developed by Irish artist David OReilly and published by Double Fine Productions, the games company founded by Tim Schafer of LucasArts and Monkey Island fame. Originally released in 2014, it received a major 2.0 update in 2018 (at no additional cost). It’s still available on Steam (for Windows and Mac) and for smartphones and tablets. (This discussion has prompted our Ben to reinstall it and have another play with it; while working on these notes, a brain and a bomb embedded themselves in the side of his mountain! Let us know if you check it out too.) The 2017 follow up was Everything, which simulates an entire universe – a bit like Roundworld Project!
The main staff of The Ankh-Morpork Times are William de Word, Sacharissa Cripslock and Otto von Schriek, all introduced in The Truth (#Pratchat42). Sacharissa and Otto especially appear in cameo roles in several later books.
Pteppic is the protagonist of Pyramids (see #Pratchat5).
The 2019 TV show Pennyworth tells the story of how ex-British special forces officer Alfred Pennyworth ends up working for the wealthy Wayne family in America, and is set in an alternate universe in which the Nazis won World War II. (Sigh…there are other alternate universes, right?) Two seasons have been made for the US cable channel ePix, and there’s talk of a third, perhaps for HBO Max. Reports are that it’s…okay, actually?
The fates of Greek mythology are the Moirai, last mentioned in #Pratchat36. The version in which they number three is best known; those three are Clotho (spinner in ancient Greek), who spins new threads; Lachesis (alotter), who measures the threads; and Atropos (inevitable), who cuts the threads. Our Ben’s idea of a recycler might be named Nostos, which is Ancient Greek for “returner”.
While the cat doesn’t appear in the Chinese “zodiac”, it does appear as the fourth sign in the Vietnamese equivalent, replacing the Chinese rabbit. There are multiple versions of the story Liz mentions; several involve Cat being tricked by Rat, or even Rat just not waking Cat up as requested, explaining their modern day relationship.

#Pratchat47 Notes and Errata

08/09/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 47, “A Finite Number of Shakespeares“, featuring guest Alanta Colley, discussing the second collaboration between Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen: 2002’s The Science of Discworld II: The Globe.

The episode title is a reversal of the “infinite monkey theorem”, which states that an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters will “almost surely” eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. In this book, a single Shakespeare eventually (after much tampering with history) produces a species descended from monkeys that can invent and use typewriters – modern, storytelling humans.
The most recent Sci Fight, “Should we upload our brains into the cloud?”, was held online on Thursday, 12 August 2021. The debate is available on YouTube, and was part of Melbourne Science Gallery‘s exhibition “MENTAL“.
You can find out more about Alanta’s comedy shows, including Parasites Lost, at alantacolley.com.
Melbourne’s six lockdowns began with two in 2020 – March 29 to May 12 and the big one, from July 9 to October 26. There have been four in 2021: from February 12 to 17; May 28 until June 10; July 16 to 27; and the current one, which began on August 5 and is not expected to end until the Victorian population reaches an 80% vaccination rate, estimated to happen by December.
We covered The Science of Discworld a year ago in #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“, with guest Anna Ahveninen.
Alanta makes the reasonable assumption we’ve had “forty-six prior guests” – but, thanks to a few repeat offenders and some double-guest episodes, the actual count to date is forty (including Tansy Rayner Roberts in our first live bonus episode).
Douglas Adams’ famous love of long baths was a trait he passed on to the Captain, a character who appears at the end of most versions of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, commanding his starship from the bath. You can read about his bath habit – er, Adams’, not the Captain’s – in this great piece by his friend Jon Cranter for The Guardian.
The photo of Pratchett with Jack and Ian was taken at Warwick University – where Jack and Ian were both researchers – on July 14, 1999, just after he made them honorary wizards of Unseen University, and the University made him a Honorary Doctor of Letters. (The photo from the book is different, but you can see another one in this article from the time on the Warwick University website.) This was the first of Pratchett’s ten honorary degrees, which we listed in the notes for #Pratchat27.
The History and Philosophy of Science is a distinct humanities discipline, combining the study of both…er…the history and the philosophy of science. It arose from the fact that the philosophy of science has been primarily studied from an historicist perspective: deducing what it is and how it works by studying the history of its development.
Mustrum Ridcully famously has no time for meetings or long explanations; in Reaper Man it is explained this way:

…it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place.
Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man (1991)

On another look, Ben isn’t really sure why he was confused about how the wizards end up on Roundworld; Ridcully explains to Ponder in Chapter 5 that the elves passed through Discworld to get into Roundworld, and he and the faculty were caught up in the “trans-dimensional flux” (Ponder’s words, obviously). They landed in London because Dee had made a magic circle – Hex further explaining that while magic doesn’t work in Roundworld, it can create “passive receptors” for outside magic to connect to, as with the crystal ball he uses to communicate.
The other Discworld element (or substance, at least) Ben couldn’t remember the name of is “deitygen“, which Ridcully says is known to be produced by intelligent beings. While Narrativium is the most important element on Discworld, the world itself is said in The Truth to be composed of Air, Earth, Fire and Water – though there is also an important fifth element: Surprise.
Mind-body dualism is the idea that the mind is a non-physical substance, i.e. that mind and matter are not the same kind of thing. There are several different flavours of this philosophy. Cartesian dualism, more generally known as substance dualism, is the one discussed in the book; others are subtly different, suggesting that while there are the mind is distinct, it is not a different type of substance to ordinary matter. (Note that when we say “substance” here, we mean it in the philosophical sense that encompasses all things.)
Spontaneous Human Combustion is the idea that sometimes humans just burst into flames without any apparent external cause. It’s not taken very seriously these days, and critics and researchers – most notably science investigator Joe Nickell and forensic analyst John F. Fischer – have found that in most cases there were likely sources of flames near victims which were overlooked and not reported in popular accounts.
The bit in the book about humans being unable to imagine being a dog or a bat is in Chapter 26, “Lies to Chimpanzees”.
Liz read about the babbling baby bats in this article from the New York Times, though many new outlets picked up on this research about greater sac-winged bats (Saccopteryx bilineata), published in Science by Dr Ahana Fernandez and her team. This video from Science magazine gives you the short version.
That birds learn songs from their parents was first observed (in scientific terms at least) in the 1950s, when British ethologist Peter Marler noticed that chaffinches sang different songs in different parts of the country. His work showed that some birds are innate singers, while others learn their songs from their parents, creating regional differences or dialects. This has since been observed in many bird species.
Jack and Ian have written many other books, separately and in collaboration. Ben mentioned What Does a Martian Look Like? (aka Evolving the Alien) in #Pratchat35. On a related note, Ben spotted that in his first edition of The Science of Discworld II, in chapter 10, the authors introduce the idea of an elf visiting Earth in the distant past and observing our ancestors; this visitor is mistakenly referred to as a Martian several times afterwards, leading Ben to wonder if this was text originally written for the other book…
Ben previously mentioned Flatland and Ian Stewart’s sequel, Flatterland, in #Pratchat35. The science that Ben thought Ian did a particularly good job of explaining was string theory – the branch of physics that seeks to explain discrepancies between classic and quantum physics by saying that fundamental particles are not actually tiny points, but strings which exist in higher dimensions, and we only see the point that pokes into our three. (That’s a lie-to-Pratchat-listeners, but it’s on the right track; see chapter 16 of Flatterland, “No-Branes and P-Branes”.)
Dr Randolph M. Nesse is currently a Research Professor of Life Sciences at The Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, and Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan. You can read a summary of his views on altruism and social selection – another kind of “group selection” in biology, where social groups who may not be closely related work together to survive – on his website here, with links to his articles on the subject, though he does not include the 1999 Science and Spirit piece cited in chapter 20 of The Science of Discworld II, “Small Gods”. He also wrote a book about commitment (as discussed the book), Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, in 2001. Notably, though, he seems to have concluded that commitment offers only “a limited explanation for some special kinds of altruism … it did not offer the more general kind of explanation I wanted.” He refers to the work of Mary Jane West-Eberhard, who has studied altruism in animals, when discussing where his own work is heading.
Evolutionary medicine (including evolutionary psychiatry) is the scientific use of evolutionary biology to understand and treat diseases. It complements the standard “proximate” approach of looking for problems in an individual by looking at evolutionary explanations for why all humans have the potential to develop certain diseases. Randolph Nesse is a recognised leader in this field; his books on the subject include Why We Get Sick and Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Evolutionary psychology is a similar approach to psychology, but while the idea behind it is sound, it suffers many of the testability and ethnocentric problems as regular psychology. Shallow interpretations of evolutionary psychology have also been used to prop up many harmful ideas, especially in terms of gender roles. Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and political activist, thinks evolutionary psychologists often ignore evidence that doesn’t support the political status quo.
The “Galaxy Song” – not “Universe Song”, though to be fair the name of the song is only mentioned in album liner notes – was originally written by Eric Idle and John du Prez for the 1983 film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. In the film, a medic (John Cleese) trying to convince a woman (Terry Jones) to donate her liver for a “live organ transplant” opens a door and a man (Eric Idle) steps out to accompany her through the universe while singing the song, making her feel small and insignificant enough that she agrees to the transplant. An updated version (“The Galaxy DNA Song“) was used for astrophysicist Brian Cox’s TV series Wonders of Life in 2012, and in 2016 another updated version appeared in the two-hour television program The Entire Universe Show, also hosted by Cox. It wasn’t included in any of the Python stage musicals, but an updated version did appear in the stage show Monty Python Live (Mostly) in 2014, including a video cameo by – you guessed it – Brian Cox, but also…someone else whose appearance we won’t spoil. The original is actually pretty good for the time – if you assume facts are rounded to the nearest singable number, then it gets several figures pretty close to correct. Liz may have quoted the speed of light to her teacher: the song gives this as “twelve million miles a minute” – not far off an accurate figure of 11.16 million miles per minute, though scientists would normally express it in round numbers as a bit under 300 million metres per second (299,792,458 m/s, to be more precise).
We’ve previously mentioned the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption many times. The most significant discussions of it appear in #Pratchat14 and #Pratchat28, but we most recently talked about it in #Pratchat38 – so Ben is way off when he says we haven’t talked about it for “about 30 episodes”. (Though, given how long the last year or two has felt, we’ll give him a pass on this one.)
The history of the idea that storytelling makes humans unique goes back to at least the 1967, when the name Homo narrans was coined by German ethologist Kurt Ranke. American communications scholar Walter R Fischer used it in his later work, in which he also codified the “narrative paradigm” – the idea that all significant communication occurs through storytelling. (Pan narrans seems to be a unique contribution from Jack and Ian.)
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was first performed in 1993 at the Royal National Theatre in London, with a cast that included Rufus Sewell, Felicity Kendall, Bill Nighy and Emma Fielding. It is set in an English manor house belonging to the Coverly family, and happens in two time periods: in the present, two rival academics are researching the mysterious history of the house’s previous inhabitants at cross purposes, while one of the Coverly siblings is doing biology research. In the past of 1809, young lady of the house Thomasina Coverly has some advanced ideas about science and mathematics, while her tutor is caught up in drama with the house’s visiting poets. (Ben played the modern-day scientist, Valentine Coverly.)
The book Ben read about chaos theory was Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. It should also be clarified that it was the play that was about complexity not chaos; the book is definitely about chaos.
The Luggage’s legs were the subject of much discussion in previous episodes; way back in #Pratchat14, when we discussed its debut in The Colour of Magic, we wondered if anyone had tried drawing it with non-human legs. It is described in the first two books only as having “little legs”, without any reference to them being human-like, or their colour, leading us to make a callout for fan art depicting them as…well, anything else! Josh Kirby has always drawn them as human-like, and made them white-person flesh coloured, despite the fact that the Luggage’s wood is a darker colour. We suspect this influenced Pratchett’s own image of the Luggage, and its next appearance in Sourcery is the first time it has “little pink legs”.
Hobbits, also known as halflings, are a kind of people found in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. They look like humans, but grow only to about three feet tall (hence the name), with slightly pointed ears. Aside from their size, their main difference from humans is their feet: they have extremely tough soles, and the ends of their legs from their ankles down, as well as the tops of their feet, are covered in thick curly hair to keep them warm. As a result, hobbits do not wear shoes. Clearly these sort of feet would suit the Luggage well!
John Dee (1527 – 1609) was, as described in the book, a real historical figure. An English mathematician, occultist, astronomer and astrologer (the two being far more closely linked back then), he advised Queen Elizabeth I, and is – unfortunately – credited with coining the term “British Empire”. He had one of the biggest libraries in England in his day, giving the wizards a handy portal into L-Space. In his later life, he found public opinion turning against sorcery, and while he was abroad much of his library and possessions were stolen, destroyed or burned. Once Elizabeth was dead, her successor James I had no interest in helping Dee, and he died in poverty in 1608 or 1609 at his home in Mortlake. He has been a popular character in works of fiction, though Ben is mistaken to think he has often been a villain; he’s perhaps confusing him with Doctor Destiny, a supervillain who appears in the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman, and whose real name is John Dee, but is not meant to be the same person.
Stephen Pinker – a long-time defender of evolutionary psychology, it turns out – published The Language Instinct in 1994, well before The Science of Discworld II. The book not only argues that language is an innate trait possessed by humans, but also tries to debunk many commonly-held beliefs about language. It has been criticised for presenting too strong a view about how much of human behaviour can be explained by innate, biologically evolved instinct.
Swedish supergroup Abba reunited for performances in 2016, in the wake of the smash hit Mama Mia, a stage and film jukebox musical featuring their songs. They announced that year that they were working on new music, and a new “digital entertainment experience” featuring “ABBAtars” of the band – digital avatars of the group which would look like their 1970s selves, and which would somehow appear in concert. Two announced singles, and the ABBAtar experience, were delayed multiple times, but in August 2021 they announced Voyage, their first new album since 1981’s The Visitors. The album was released on September 2, 2021, and pictures of the band in motion capture suits – the lycra numbers with little ping-pong balls attached – accompanied many articles and made the rounds on Twitter. (Here’s the BBC one.)
Ponder and Ridcully argue about evolution in The Last Continent and The Science of Discworld, and to be fair, evolution only seems to work on the Disc on one island in its distant past, where is it the work of the God of Evolution. (See #Pratchat29 for our discussion of that!)
When Liz says “We’ve gotta Back to the Future this“, she is specifically speaking of the scenario in Back to the Future: Part II, where Marty’s carelessness allows villain Biff Tannen to go back in time and give his young self a book containing future sports results, allowing him to take over the town and run a hugely successful (and, it’s implied, criminal) business empire out of a casino. Marty and Doc have to go back in time and set history on its proper course.
Thief of Time (to be discussed in #Pratchat48) was published on the 1st of May, 2001 – a year and a day before The Science of Discworld II! It wasn’t the most recent Discworld book at the time of the latter’s release: in between, Pratchett published The Last Hero (a large-format illustrated book, published in October 2001) and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (the first younger readers Discworld novel, published in November 2001; see #Pratchat33). But Thief of Time was the most recent “regular Discworld novel for adults”, and in fact its first paperback edition was published one year after the original hardcover – the day before The Science of Discworld II.
Night Watch is the twenty-ninth Discworld book, and the sixth of the eight City Watch books. It remains one of the most popular of the entire series. Our current plan is to discuss it for #Pratchat50 – unless you have a better idea!
Liz’s speech referencing free will (or the lack of it) was given at the last Sci-Fight she participated in, on the 20th of May, 2021. The topic was “Scientists Go to Heaven”, and Liz was (perhaps surprisingly) on the affirmative team.
Liz has said “Time is a flat circle” on a number of occasions, beginning way back in #Pratchat5; this is Ben’s first time. It refers to the idea of “eternal return” – i.e. that time repeats itself – and is specifically a reference to the first season of the television series True Detective.
Loki is a Disney+ series and part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the series, a version of the trickster god Loki – as seen in the films Thor, The Avengers and others – is lifted from existence when he becomes a “variant” – a version of someone who strays from the single set of events enforced as the “sacred timeline” by a mysterious organisation known as the Time Variance Authority.
“A Bathing Ape” – or BAPE for short – is a fashion brand from Japan founded in 1993, now owned by Hong Kong fashion conglomerate I.T Group. You can see the kind of stuff they sell on their website.
The aquatic ape hypothesis is, at best, highly controversial among anthropologists. It was first suggested by marine biologist Alistair Hardy in 1960, though he described it as a “rough guess” rather than a serious theory, and according to some accounts was mortified at the sensational media attention it received at the time. It was popularised in part by Welsh television writer Elaine Morgan in her 1972 book The Descent of Woman, which challenged the highly gendered stories of human evolution – in particular the focus since the 1950s on early humans hunting and gathering, excluding the previously thought just as important activity of fishing. After receiving general acclaim for the book but criticism for the aquatic ape portion, she later published an entire book devoted to the idea, 1982’s The Aquatic Ape. The theory has been defended by many, including philosopher Daniel C Dennett (who has also suggested that both Morgan and her opponents go too far) and David Attenborough. The later seafood theory of human brains, espoused by Michael Crawford and David Marsh in their 1989 book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and The Future (as mentioned in Chapter 8, “Planet of the Apes”), was not taken especially seriously either. All that said, there’s always room to challenge the status quo, especially if the dominant stories it supports seem to suspiciously uphold modern ideas about gender roles. So far, though, the fossil record doesn’t support the idea that early humans spent most of their time on the beach, so at best, the jury is still out.
It’s worth noting that the updated 2002 edition of the first The Science of Discworld also talks about the aquatic ape hypothesis and the importance of seafood in brain development – and goes another step further. In chapter 42, “Anthill Inside”, they mention that the savanna hypothesis is also in trouble from evidence that some areas where early human fossils are found weren’t savanna back when those humans died – they were woodlands. This is an ongoing question, and the savanna hypothesis – while still the dominant idea in the public consciousness – is described as controversial by some palaeoanthropologists and palaeobotanists, with interpretation of the habitat at that time seemingly still a bit in question.
The so-called “paleo diet” – short for palaeolithic diet – is, like most diets, a fad, in this case supposedly emulating the diet of our palaeolithic ancestors. Though versions of the idea go back at least as far as 1890s, gastroenterologist Walter L. Voegtlin really made it popular with his 1975 book The Stone Age Diet, which claimed humans ate very little other than meat up until 10,000 years ago and recommended modern humans do the same. It saw a revival at the start of the 21st century – when The Science of Discworld II was published – and the new name was seized by health scientist Loren Cordain with her 2002 book The Paleo Diet. (She also owns the copyright on that name.) While some of the recommendations of the diet probably are good for you, there’s not much in the way of proper research into the amazing health benefits Cordain and other proponents claim – and, for that matter, there’s not that much detail available about what our ancestors actually ate, either.
Neanderthals were a sister species to (or perhaps a subspecies of) modern humans; they are given the name Homo neanderthalis (or Homo sapiens neanderthalis if you think of us as Homo sapiens sapiens). They are named after the Neandertal valley in Germany, where their first fossils were found, and lived mostly in Europe until around 40,000 years ago. In the last few years, evidence has been found in Spain that Neanderthals – who lived there before modern humans – made forms of cave art, suggesting they may have been more sophisticated than the unflattering ideas given of them via the “Ugs” in Science of Discworld II.
Tool use in animals has been observed in many species, including monkeys, dolphins, birds (especially crows), and yes, octopuses. There’s some debate about what counts as a “tool”, but some animals do modify objects they find in the environment to suit their purposes; this includes crows and octopuses.
Octopuses can indeed get out of jars, as evidenced by this viral video from 2010 which did another round of the Internet in 2014. Though it should be noted that while the octopus does unscrew the lid from inside the jar, she seems perfectly happy to stay inside it.
We haven’t yet found a good source for the idea of fish returning to the location of their ancestors every four generations, but don’t confuse it with the four-generation cycle of history, which is another name for Strauss–Howe generational theory.
Robust and gracile are terms mostly used to describe two broad groups of species of our ancestor genus Australopithecus. While the concept does appear more broadly in biology, it seems much less common.
The three kinds of elephant are the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant (referred to in the book as the Indian elephant). Genetic analysis suggests that the two African elephant species diverged more than 2.5 million years ago – the same kind of timeframe as the divergence between woolly mammoths and Asian elephants.
Let’s talk about that claim about the huge number of illegitimate children. In chapter 12, “Edge People”, Jack and Ian say “In English society, about one child in seven” are in the position that their “legal and biological parentage differ”. This is based on Elliott Philipp’s analysis of blood groups in the late 1960s, published in 1973. Blood typing was the standard form of paternity testing before DNA fingerprinting techniques were refined in 1980s, and it is pretty good at determining that someone can’t be someone’s parent – you have to get the genes for your blood type from your parents, after all. Unfortunately we have no way of checking these numbers because we can’t find the study, or any writing about it (or similar ones in the United States, for that matter). It doesn’t instil us with confidence that the book’s authors seem to have misspelled the author of the study’s name – they name “Elliott Philipp”, who we think is probably Elliot Elias Philipp (1915 – 2010), a gynaecologist and obstetrician from Stoke Newington in London, though his official biography doesn’t mention this study. In any case, the figure of “one in ten” is popularly accepted, and was the result of the surveys they cite, but they correct for the fact that an unknown father has a reasonable chance of having the same blood type as the supposed father, leading to their figure of 13-17%, or roughly one in seven. There are other figures; while there’s not as much literature about this as you might expect – or at least not any that’s easily accessible to a lay researcher – we found that a study by University of Leicester in 2009 using a survey of genetic markers in nearly 1,700 British men suggested the real figure is probably closer to one in twenty-five. Here’s a BBC article from the time – note that the Leicester researchers don’t seem to be aware (or at least, don’t mention) Philipp’s study as a possible source of the one-in-ten assumption.
Mitochondria are the “organelles” responsible for most of the generation of Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the main source of chemical energy in cells. They are found in most cells of eukaryotic lifeforms on Earth. (An organelle is a distinct sub-structure that fulfils a specific function – so the cellular equivalent of an organ in the body.) The dominant theory is that they were once separate single-celled organisms that were absorbed and incorporated into the body of our single-celled ancestors millions of years ago. Supporting this is the fact that mitochondria have their own DNA. It’s been long thought that children only inherit the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of their mothers, hence the idea of “mitochondrial Eve” – the woman from whom all modern humans inherited their mitochondria. As the book points out, this doesn’t mean there was only one woman, only the others alive at the time do not have any surviving direct female-line descendants (they could have direct descendants, but if they or their following generations only had male children, then they would have inherited another line’s mtDNA). And, as modern lines end – i.e. as women now live and have no daughters – the specific woman in question would change. More recent genetic studies from 2013 have suggested the most recent mitochondrial Eve would have lived around 155,000 years ago, about twice as far back as the estimate current at the time of The Science of Discworld II. Of note is that since at least 2018, researchers have discovered that humans can inherit some of their mtDNA from their fathers, though this seems very rare and doesn’t seem to have left a significant mark on the human genetic map.
The Richard Dawkins book Ben mentions is The River Out of Africa, which uses the metaphor of a river to represent the flow of humans – or at least human DNA – out of Africa and across the world.
The Biblical story discussed in the book, in which the Israelites agree to let the Hivites join their tribe if they get circumcised but then murder them all, is the story of Dinah and Schechem, from the book of Genesis, chapter 34.
The early version of “Sleeping Beauty” to which Liz alludes is known from its earliest written version, “Sun, Moon, and Talia”, by Italian author Giambattista Basile in his 1634 book, the Pentamerone. Rather than being waken by a handsome Prince, the magically cursed princess Talia is discovered by a king, who…look, we’ll let you look it up. It’s not okay.
Cinderella’s slippers might be described as being made of “fur” in earlier versions, but this doesn’t seem to be an allusion to what Jack and Ian are talking about. Rather “squirrel fur” was one of a number of luxury materials that a common would never be able to afford or allowed by the conventions of status to wear. Many sources we found about this debunk the idea that it’s a mistranslation of an earlier version. The famous source of the modern version, Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre” (“Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper”) uses the unambiguous phrase “pantoufles de verre” (“glass slippers”) many times. We will also note that Ben is wrong about the story always being about shoes – sometimes the item that helps identify the mystery woman is a ring. The earliest written version, in Chinese, does feature gold shoes.
The name Rumpelstiltskin actually derives from the German name Rumpelstilzchen. As Ben mentions, this is the name of a type of goblin – a noisy one who walks with a limp, in fact – and loosely translates as “little rattle stilt”. It seems to come from the old German children’s game, Rumpele stilt oder der Poppart, which one source described as “like duck-duck-goose except instead of a goose there’s a goblin, and instead of a duck there’s a man with a limp”. The goblin player would rattle and bang on things. (Sadly it seems others also think there’s a phallic interpretation for the story, though it doesn’t seem to be an explicit part of the tale in any version we can find.)
Ilona and Peter Opie published many books; the ones relevant to this discussion are 1959’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, and 1974’s The Classic Fairy Tales, which contained twenty-four stories as they first appeared in English, with a literary history.
We’ve mentioned the various folk tale indices in our show notes on previous occasions; the big one Ben usually refers to is the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index), though there are others. Like the Dewey Decimal System, the idea is that stories with closer numbers are more similar, or at least share significant traits. Both Rumpelstlitskin and Cinderella are in the 500s, the grouping known as “Supernatural helpers”. Rumpelstiltskin is the main example of ATU type 500, and Cinderella is the “persecuted heroine” subtype of 510A, “Cinderella and Cap o’ Rushes”.
The high school physics experiment Ben mentions is still done in high schools today. It uses a “ticker timer”, which is basically an electromagnet which, when attached to an AC power supply, turns on and off, causing a metal strip with a point on it to vibrate up and down at a fixed speed. It has a bit of carbon paper under the metal strip, so when the strip moves down it will make a mark with the carbon on paper underneath. In the experiment, you feed a strip of ticker tape through some guiding holes under the metal strip; by attaching one end of the tape to a block of wood with wheels on it, it can be dragged through, and by measuring the distance between the dots on the tape you can measure the speed at which the truck is moving. Ben was happy to discover that searching for “ticker timer” on YouTube brought up a number of high school physics teachers (many of them in Australia) explaining the demonstration to their students – some of them even from the Before Times!
The horse galloping photography experiment was to determine whether a horse always has one foot on the ground when trotting. It was undertaken by famous American photographer Eadweard Muybridge for Leland Stanford, former Governor of California, as mentioned in the book in chapter twenty-two, “The New Narrativium”. While the story of this settling a substantial bet is popular, some historians say there’s no evidence it’s true. The two men later had a falling out when Stanford published a book about horse movement containing illustrations based on Muybridge’s photographs but giving him no credit, costing Muybridge some research funding.
Rincewind’s deep love (or indeed lust) for potatoes was first explored while he was marooned on an island at the beginning of Interesting Times.
We’ve previously mentioned Jasper Fforde in #Pratchat25 (Equal Rites), #Pratchat31 (The Long Earth) and #Pratchat35 (The Science of Discworld), as well as the second episode of our subscriber bonus podcast, Ook Club. Thursday Next is the star of his most famous series of novels, beginning with The Eyre Affair; she works for the Special Operations Network department 27 ((or SpecOps, or specifically SO-27, for short), the Literary Detectives or “LiteraTecs”. Not only is literature incredibly important in her alternate history 1985 – “WillSpeak” machines are common coin-operated vending machines which recite lines from his plays and poems – but the lines between fiction and reality are very thin, allowing her to pass into the “BookWorld” and enter the plots of well-known novels. Her father has long since disappeared, but he worked for SO-12, the ChronoGuard, tasked with protecting the timeline from paradoxes and other tampering. As a result, Shakespeare and time travel are at least minor elements (an often much more significant ones) in most of the Thursday Next novels.
Liz claims no-one knows when Shakespeare was born, or what his life was like, or who he was…some of which is true. We don’t know when he was born, but we do know he was baptised on the 26th of April, 1564; his birthday is usually celebrated on April 23, which is also the date on which he died in 1616, aged 52. We also known he was married to Anne Hathaway on the 27th of November 1582, but there’s little detail recorded of his life until he begins to make his mark on the theatre scene in 1592, when he was roasted in print by rival playwright Robert Greene. As to his identity, while no end of scholars have made themselves famous with alternative theories about his identity and very existence, at least half of the Pratchat team subscribes to the simplest theory: that he was just one guy, named William Shakespeare.
Doctor Who featured Shakespeare in the 2007 episode “The Shakespeare Code”, when the Tenth Doctor and his companion Martha Jones visit the Globe to see an original Shakespeare production and discover alien witches are influencing both Shakespeare’s play and the Globe theatre for their own ends. Doctor Who had mentioned Shakespeare several times in the classic series, implying (but never showing) that the Doctor had met him on more than one occasion.
Ben makes an unintentional pun when he says that “Shakespeare is kind of your biggest Touchstone” – Touchstone is the name of a fool, one of the major characters in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It.
The author who suggested Western-style science requires monotheism, which is why it didn’t develop in China was British biochemist, historian and sinologist Joseph Needham (1900-1995). A noted scholar of Chinese history and philosophy of science, he wrote many books, but Jack and Ian specifically mention “his truly gigantic History of Science in China“. His work was so influential that in history circles, the question of why China had been overtaken by the West in scientific terms, despite being centuries ahead with many of the most important inventions, is known as “the Needham Question”. Needham has been criticised for being perhaps biased in China’s favour, however, and there are many other hypotheses that have been put forward to answer the Needham Question.
We hope you enjoy the seeming non-sequitur when Liz says “On the space elevator, on the way to the banana planet“; this is a result of a previous bit where Ben gave an entirely incorrect (and thus cut) account of how banana plants move up hills, and Liz deciding that when they get to the top they build a space elevator and leave the planet.
The Milgram experiment, conducted by Yale University psychologist Dr Stanley Milgram in 1961 and published in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology as “Behavioural study of obedience” in 1963, remains one of the most famous psychology experiments of all time. As the subjects were filmed – and that footage used by Milgram to capitalise on his fame by using it in a 1974 film titled Obedience – it has been shown to students of psychology and the history and philosophy of science for decades. But like many similar experiments from the time, it has since come under a great deal of scrutiny. In 2013, Australian psychologist Gina Perry published Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments; with access to all Milgram’s original papers and documentation, she felt that his methodology and the the quality of the experiment was highly questionable. Even those who think the experiment holds up – and it has, despite ethical objections, been repeated in various forms, even as recently as 2007 – many others question the conclusions that have been drawn from the results. This great piece by Cari Romm for The Atlantic from 2015 is a great primer on the legacy of the experiment, and more recent criticism.
As Ben mentions, if you’re a subscriber, keep an eye out for the next episode of the Ook Club bonus podcast – he has a few more things to say about this book!
The expression Bojack Horseman has ruined for Liz is “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Many sources trace its origin back to a version found in The Court and Character of King James, written by Anthony Weldon in 1650, though some suggest a similar sentiment appears in “The Embassy to Achilles” in Homer’s The Iliad – or at least its English translation by Alexander Pope, published between 1715 and 1720. (Having had a look, that latter attribution seems a bit of a long bow.) Bojack Horseman is a Netflix original animated series about depressed and self-hating anthropomorphic horse actor Bojack Horseman. In the first season’s fourth episode, a number of characters are unable to recall the expression correctly. This echoes former US President George W Bush, famous for his “Bushisms”, who also mangled it; here’s a little collection of his gaffes that includes that one, from a speech given on September 17, 2002 in Nashville.

#Pratchat46 Notes and Errata

08/08/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society“, featuring guest Deanne Sheldon-Collins, discussing the second instalment in The Long Earth series written by Pratchett and Stephen Baxter: 2013’s The Long War.

The episode title references the Kinks song “The Village Green Preservation Society“, and our own love for and defence of Helen Green (now Valienté). We previously mentioned the song – and Ben’s favourite cover version, by Kate Rusby – in our episode on Johnny and the Dead, #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“. (See below for more on the album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.)
We’ve covered all of the Discworld books Deanne mentions:
- The Colour of Magic in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“
- The Light Fantastic in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“
- Equal Rites in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“
- Mort in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“
- Going Postal in #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal“
We link to Speculate in the episode’s podcast post, but it’s worth mentioning that both of your Pratchat hosts have appeared as panellists at both of the Speculate events held so far, in 2018 and 2019. Speculate co-director Joel Martin has also been a Pratchat guest three times, including for #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, our episode on The Long Earth.
As discussed in #Pratchat31, Stephen Baxter is best known for his Xelee Sequence of space opera novels, and for writing the official sequel to H G Wells’ The Time Machine, The Time Ships. See the episode notes for #Pratchat31 for more information.
The next two books in the series are The Long Mars and The Long Utopia, not The Long Cosmos as Ben says; that’s the final book in the series.
There’s some hints as to how the Long Earth series was planned in Chapter 18 of Marc Burrows’ The Magic of Terry Pratchett. Pratchett and Baxter planned out the series as a five-book arc when they first decided to write it together; no specific date is given, but this seems to have been around 2010 or 2011. It was a true collaboration, each contributing writing and editing the others, and complete drafts of the final three novels were completed in 2013. Baxter did the final polishing and tweaking of those books while Terry worked on his final solo projects.
Monica “Spooky” Jansson disappears for about 160 pages in Ben’s paperback edition. After Chapter 1, she’s not seen again until Chapter 23.
Given the rough timeline available from The Magic of Terry Pratchett, it seems likely that The Long War was indeed being written in 2011 and 2012.
We don’t think we ended up coming back to it, but there is a hint that there might be another direction in which to step. In Chapter 54 Bill recounts a story to Joshua about a comber who, on a bet, spent the night drunk and naked on “the Cue Ball”, a Joker Earth whose surface is incredible featureless and smooth. Spooked by a sound the next morning, he tried to step while hungover and claims he stepped not East or West, but in some other direction… No doubt this will either be never heard of again, or form the entire basis of one of the sequels…
Leukaemia – originally Leukämie in German, from the Greek words leukos (λευκός), “white”, and haima (αἷμα), “blood” – is the collective name for a number of forms of blood cancer. It usually begins in bone marrow, where blood cells are manufactured, and the risk of contracting the disease does increase with exposure to radiation. There are four main types of leukaemia, with many sub-classifications, but Spooky’s specific diagnosis is not specifically mentioned – indeed, the word “leukaemia” is only mentioned once in the entire book, in Chapter 23.
The first book starts with Step Day in 2015, but most of the action – including all of “The Journey” – takes place in 2030, with flashbacks to various events in the fifteen years between.
For the record: Helen is 18 in 2031 when she marries Joshua, who is 29. Liz and her maths are right when she says they met the year before, a meeting which occurs in chapter 50 of The Long Earth.
The American War of Independence, aka the American Revolutionary War, was fought by citizens of the then thirteen British colonies in America between 1775 and 1783. The Declaration of Independence was signed by representatives from the colonies, who gathered in a “Continental Congress”. We could go on, but there is a lot written about this stuff on the Internet, so we’ll let you do your own research. Ben does mention the Boston Tea Party, which was a protest by a group called the Sons of Liberty against laws which allowed the East India Company to sell tea in America without paying the same taxes levied on citizens of the colonies. A whole shipment of tea was thrown into Boston harbour, and while the Sons of Liberty had a good point, it still stings to know all that good tea went to waste…
“Old Faithful” is one of several geysers in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. A geyser is formed when an underground reservoir of water is close to a volcanically active area; the water is heated by magma, turning into steam, enough pressure forms to force the cooler water on top out of a vent at the surface. Old Faithful erupts every 44 minutes to two hours, but even that amount of variation is unusually predictable – a result of it being relatively separate to the other geysers and geothermal systems in Yellowstone. It’s been recorded erupting more than a million times, but like all geysers it is not a permanent feature. The Yellowstone Caldera is the most active volcanic system in the United States, and is thought to have had three major eruptions occurring 2.08 million, 1.3 million and 631,000 years ago. Its most recent eruption was much more minor: a lava flow that happened 70,000 years ago. Geologists seem to be of the opinion that a “super-eruption” like the one 1.3 million years ago is very unlikely, though it will erupt again at some time in the future.
When Ben says “your brain’s not fully cooked” until you’re 25, he is quoting Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, the Australian science communicator. Dr Karl – not to be confused with the other Dr Karl, the fictional medical doctor from Neighbours – has been broadcasting mostly via ABC radio since 1981, and has written 47 books, mostly collections of short articles about popular science. He often talks about the fact that human brains are still developing well past the teenage years, though he more recently has given the age of 20-23 for when the brain is “fully cooked” – ie when cognitive development is thought to have completed. You can find Dr Karl’s various books, podcasts and more on his website.
Joshua and Helen meet in Chapter 50 of The Long Earth. Unlike most of Helen’s story in that book, it’s not written from the perspective of her diary, though something we didn’t mention was that Joshua is already famous well before setting off on “The Journey”, as he saved dozens of kids on Step Day who got lost on a stepwise Earth. Upon meeting him, Helen exclaims “The Joshua Valienté…” and starts to blush. To be fair, they’ve heard of her, too: her diary is actually a blog, and is read by many folks. Joshua thinks that she is “kinda cute”, and also likes the look of Reboot, considering it the kind of place he could live.
Sally makes it clear to Joshua that they will only be friends in Chapter 43 of The Long Earth, where she says: “Joshua, you are fun to know, and a good companion, reliable and all that, even if you are a little bit weird. Someday we might be friends. But please don’t make comments about my legs. You’ve seen very little of my legs since most of the time they are inside premium grade thorn-proof battledress. And it’s naughty to guess, OK?”
The thing about Ghostbusters not being comedy came about in the wake of the latest trailer for the upcoming sequel, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which at first had many fans asking where the comedy was! In response, many younger fans came out to declare surprise that anyone would think the original was a comedy, and so a Twitter trend was born.
Tim Ferguson is the source of Ben’s figure that comedy requires four laughs per minute, on average – but you won’t find this specific pearl of wisdom in his book The Cheeky Monkey. Ben actually picked it up in one of Tim’s online sitcom writing workshops, which he runs semi-regularly.
Our previous episode was #Pratchat45, “Hogswatch in Grune“, and discussed Pratchett’s short story “Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting”.
The Snowpiercer television series, released on Netflix in May 2020, is based on the 2013 South Korean-Czech film Snowpiercer directed by Bong Joon-Ho, of The Host and Parasite fame. The “Snowpiercer” is a high-speed train that circumnavigates the globe, now covered in snow after an attempt to alter the atmosphere and reverse climate change went wrong and plunged the world into a new ice age. The train is segregated, with poor workers stuck in the rear carriages while the wealthy elite enjoy luxury in the forward cars. The film stars Chris Evans as a leader of a revolt by members of the tail section, and also features Tilda Swinton, Song Kang-Ho, Jamie Bell, John Hurt and Ed Harris. The series is a retelling, not a sequel, and stars Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connelly as analogous characters to Swinton and Evans, respectively. The series and the film are both adapted from the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige; the first volume was published in 1982 by writer Jacques Lob and artist Jean-Marc Rochette, with later volumes by Rochette and Benjamin Legrand in 1999, 2000 and 2015.
All jokes aside, helium really is a precious resource – liquid helium is an important coolant used in industry and scientific work, and indeed party balloons account for only 10% of the world’s helium use. Or at least they did, before the pandemic. Helium demand has lessened in other industries, where fears of running out had led to caps and rationing, but while availability has improved in the last year, prices are still at an all-time high. Accordingly, plans are underfoot to try and recycle and reuse helium, and stop it from being lost to the upper atmosphere.
“Bosun Higgs” is a reference to the Higgs boson, a fundamental particle very important to the Standard Model of physics. Bosons are particles which carry forces, and differ in many ways from fermions, the particles that make up mass. Other bosons include photons (electromagnetic force), gluons (the strong force which holds quarks together) and gravitons (the still-theoretical particles which propagate gravity). Higgs bosons are produced by the Higgs field, which gives other particles mass. The Higgs boson is the subject of Leon Lederman’s 1993 book The God Particle, though It was proposed as an explanation for mass by Peter Higgs and his team in 1964, but remained theoretical as while it is massive compared to other bosons, it is also highly unstable and quickly decays. Its existence was confirmed in 2013 by scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider, and Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on the boson in 2013.29|00:56:31|NOTE: It is indeed 25 years after Step Day. (Probably covered by earlier note.)
While the September 11 terror attacks certainly had a big impact on air travel restrictions, these were really a tightening of security measures brought about in the 1970s because of the frequency of aeroplane hijacking in the 1960s. These were extraordinarily common in the wake of the Cuban revolution, and especially so between 1968 and 1972. This started in 1969 with profiling of passengers, asking individuals to submit to questioning and personal metal detector tests. The first metal detectors for everyone were introduced in 1970 in Louisiana; this became a nation-wide practice in the US in 1973, with X-ray screening of baggage added in 1974. These measures spread to the rest of the world during the 1970s by agreement of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, which establishes internationally agreed rules for civilian air travel. Since 2001, additional security measures have included “random” chemical tests of passenger clothing and baggage for explosives, the requested removal of shoes, coats and hats during security screening, and the use of full-body scanners, though these have been controversial.
For many years Australia has had incredibly harsh policies regarding the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, especially those who arrive by sea. As well as indefinite detention – mostly offshore – a particular claim of the last few (conservative) Liberal-National coalition governments has been that they “stopped the boats“, a phrase particularly loved by cabinet minister Peter Dutton, previous Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and current PM Scott Morrison – who infamously has a trophy in the shape of boat, gifted by a supporter, bearing the legend “I stopped these”, from his time as Immigration Minister. The government frequently claims that the inhumane treatment they meet out to asylum seekers is meant to deter any more from coming, and thus stop the predatory people smugglers who charge them outrageous sums of money to make the dangerous journey. They’ve claimed now for many years that the boats have stopped, when the truth is that they have not – they are merely being intercepted at sea by “Operation Sovereign Borders” and so not reported as “arrivals”. The pressures in nearby countries forcing desperate, persecuted people to try and reach safety by any means have not gone away, and those are the main factors. And yet cruel policies of long, indefinite detention, lack of support, denial of long-term visas and vilification in the media continue, as a way to court the votes of those who approve of strong border protection. It’s a source of shame for many of us in Australia; if you’d like to support the plight of asylum seekers in Australia, please consider supporting a couple of our favourite charities: the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and RISE.
Brexit – the removal Great Britain from the European Union – really started becoming a thing in the early 2010s, though the first floating of a public referendum on the topic wasn’t until early 2013. It was a promise of Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron that he would bring about such a referendum if he won the 2015 general election, so while the idea was around when The Long War was being written, it seems unlikely it was a major influence on the novel.
We discussed Terry’s own favourite of his books, Nation, in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“.
For more on Pratchett’s first use of “Jokers“, see our episode on The Dark Side of the Sun – #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“.
The kobold Finn McCool is named after one of the great heroes of Irish mythology, Fionn mac Cumhaill. His adventures form the Fenian Cycle (an Fhiannaíocht in Irish), and also feature his people, a band of warriors known as the Fianna. His adventures are too numerous to go into, but form a cycle of stories as vibrant and exciting as those of King Arthur or Hercules. Ben recommends having a read.
“Kink-shaming” is pointing out someone’s kinks (specific sexual interests) with the intention of embarrassing them, or suggesting they are not a good person. This is not a new practice, but has in recent years been highlighted for the damage it does: it makes people ashamed of their kinks, and thus less likely to embrace the things that will satisfy them; it reinforces the idea that only regular “vanilla” sex is acceptable; and it conflates harmless (when consensual) kinks and fetishes with actually harmful behaviours, derailing serious conversations we need to be having. It’s more or less the opposite of the sex-positive movement, which seeks to reinforce a healthy embrace of positive sexual communication and behaviour.
The Kinks were a English rock band formed in Muswell Hill by brothers Ray and Dave Davies in 1963. The original line-up featured Ray, Dave, Pete Quaife and Mick Avory; Quaife left in early 1969, but the other three remained members throughout the group’s subsequent history and several alternate line-ups, including talk in the last few years of a reunion album. Their last public performance was in 1996. The bands’ biggest hits include “You Really Got Me” in 1963 from their first album Kinks, the dingle “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” in 1966, “Waterloo Sunset” from 1967’s Something Else, and “Lola” from 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman and the Money Underground, Part One. The album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society was a passion project of Ray Davies, a concept album released on the 22nd of November 1968 – the same day as The Beatles, aka The White Album. It was the last album on which bass player Pete Quaife played. Its production was quite long, and late in the process Ray Davies asked for the release to be postponed so it could be expanded into a double-album, but only got permission from their record label to add three more tracks. The “twelve-track mono version released in Europe” mentioned by Bill in the novel was the original shorter version, released in France, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand and Italy, but never in the UK, making it a bit of a rarity, with a different line-up of songs and some alternate, earlier mixes.
Local examples of the kind of “Instagram experience places” Ben is thinking of include Sugar Republic (giant candy props) and ArtVo (large-scale perspective art you can photograph yourself in).
Bounce, the “trampoline place” mentioned by Deanne, is one of many indoor trampoline parks around Melbourne and indeed the world. Their website says they’re part of a “global freestyle movement”, though we struggled to find out where this idea comes from. Basically it’s like BMX or skateboard stunts but without a vehicle, performed while jumping on a trampoline, jumping off and running up walls and so on. Bounce has several outlets, but there are also other businesses offering similar experiences.
That cat you can hear meowing in the background is the fabled third Pratcat, Kaos, who has lived with Ben since late December 2020. Despite what he would have you believe, he is fed five or six times every day, and not once a century when the Moon is in the Eighth House…
We discussed The Fifth Elephant – where Vimes is hunted by the von Überwald werewolf clan – in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“.
Ben is probably wrong to say that English is not the majority language of the world – depending on how you count it. According to stats published by the language reference journal Ethnologue, Mandarin Chinese has about 921 million native speakers, Spanish 471 million, and English 370 million. But if you include folks who speak it as an additional language, English edges into first place with 1.348 billion speakers, compared to Mandarin’s 1.21 billion and Hindi’s 600 million (with Spanish having a total of 542 million speakers worldwide).
The Beagle matriarch, Granddaughter Petra, is presumably named after Petra, the first pet featured on long-running British children’s program Blue Peter. Petra, a dog of indeterminate breed, joined the show in 1962; when Peter Purves (previously of Doctor Who fame) became a presenter in 1967, he also became Petra’s permanent handler to help her be more comfortable in the studio, and she lived with him when not filming – an arrangement used with presenters and crew for all subsequent Blue Peter dogs. She died in 1977, and was commemorated by a bust at BBC Television Centre (later moved to MediaCityUK). She was followed by the most famous Blue Peter dog, Shep, a border collie who stayed with the show from 1971 to 1978 and was famously attached to presenter John Noakes, who often had to tell him to calm down while trying to present. The current Blue Peter dog is a beagle/basset hound cross named Henry, and the programme has also had cats, tortoises and parrots as pets.
Ben briefly mentioned the Kromaggs, antagonists from the 1995 US parallel universe TV series Sliders, in our episode on The Long Earth. They are also non-human ape-descendants, though presumably their ancestor was Cro-magnon man, giving rise to the name. Their society is technologically advanced and militaristic; they have flying craft that can “slide” between parallel worlds, and when first encountered they have conquered around 150 Earths, stripping them for resources and enslaving their human populations. It is revealed in later seasons that they originally came from a world where they lived alongside humans, but when they grew violent they were exiled using sliding technology and prevented from returning. This becomes part of the back story of the protagonist Quinn Mallory, though by the later seasons multiple cast changes and shifts in tone and focus had lost a lot of early fans. (Ben dropped off around the end of season three.)
The “love languages” are a popular way of describing the ways in which humans express and receive love, as popularised by Baptist pastor and radio host Gary Chapman in his 1992 book The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate. We mention “Acts of Service” (doing things for your partner) and “Words of Affirmation” (telling them you love them or giving them verbal praise); the other three are “Quality Time”, “Receiving Gifts” and “Physical Touch”. The original book has sold more than 11 million copies and the concept of the love languages has become deeply entrenched in popular culture discussions of love and affection. Chapman has since written ten other books about similar subjects.
Tintin is the fictional young Belgian journalist who is the protagonist of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of French-language comic albums written by Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi (1907-1983), better known by his pen name, Hergé. Tintin first appeared in a newspaper supplement in 1929, but became hugely popular, starring in 24 full-length albums between 1929 and 1986 and selling millions of copies. Tintin is accompanied by his faithful dog Snowy, a small white fox terrier, and often aided by his best friend, merchant sailor Captain Archibald Haddock. While the books are largely great adventurous fun, it should be noted that it makes use of many racist caricatures and stereotypes of the first half of the twentieth century, though some of the albums hold up better than others. Its cultural influence is huge, though; 1980s new wave/pop group The Thompson Twins is named after Thomson and Thompson, a pair of bumbling moustachioed detectives (who are not related, but look near-identical) from the series, and no lesser a team than Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish banded together to make a CGI film adaptation in 2011, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.
The Australian Aboriginal concept of connection to Country is hugely important; rather than have us tell you about it, we encourage you to learn about it from First Nations sources, for example Common Ground.
The hugely popular sci-fi franchise Stargate, which began with the 1994 feature film, is just the most famous expression of the “ancient astronauts” idea, popularised in the 1960s by Swiss author Erich von Däniken in his scientifically panned but bestselling 1968 book, Chariots of the Gods? It’s notable that in the work of von Däniken and others, it only ever seems to be non-Abrahamic gods who are said to be aliens. (Star Trek at least had an alien claiming to be the one true God, though that was in the generally hated film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.) If you want to learn more about the harm done by such racist theories, this article by Sarah Bond for Hyperallergic is a great overview.
The “Bury Your Gays” trope has a sadly long history; you can find some further explanation and a long list of examples at TV Tropes.
Frank Woods is not mentioned in The Long Earth – he’s a totally new character, making Ben’s annoyance about his role at the end of book many times greater. Ben may have been thinking of “the boy genius” Franklin Tallyman, who signs up with Jack Green’s company as a blacksmith and is instrumental in the founding of Reboot. He also repairs the Mark Twain when Joshua and Sally come through Reboot on their way back to Datum Madison.
An “OTP“, short for “One True Pairing”, is a fan or fan group’s favourite couple in a show, book series or other work of fiction. “Shipping” is itself short for “relationshipping”, and is used as a verb for actively wanting two (or more) characters to get together, regardless of what a show or book’s writers will actually have them do. Non-romantic versions are sometimes called “BroTPs” or FrOTPs.
“The ‘In’ Crowd” was originally recorded by American singer Dobie Gray in 1964; it featured on his album Dobie Gray Sings for “In” Crowders That Go “Go-Go”, and also on Dick Clark’s popular radio documentary program Rock, Roll and Remember. There have been a few influential covers since, most notably UK English singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry, who released it as a successful single and on his 1974 album Another Time, Another Place. (Ben is also partial to the Mike Flowers Pops version from their 1996 album “A groovy place.”, though the original is yet to be surpassed.) The chorus and verses feature the refrain “I’m in with the ‘in’ crowd”, and so it’s the most likely reference for Lobsang’s line “I’m in with the Oort Cloud”. The Oort Cloud, by the way, is the theoretical cloud of icy “planetismals” (essentially, very small planet-like objects, much smaller than true or dwarf planets) which forming the the boundary of our solar system, beyond the orbit of Pluto. It’s named for Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who revived this old theory in 1950 as a way of explaining the origin of comets with very long periods. The Oort Cloud is a looooong way from the Sun, with its objects lying between 0.03 to 3.2 light years away. Voyager 1, the Earth craft furthest from Earth, won’t reach it for another 300 years, though it will no longer have power left to send images back to Earth by then.
Joshua’s lost limb getting “Star Wars’d into a new hand” references the fact that multiple characters in the Star Wars franchise lose their hand (or other limbs), only to get prosthetics that are so lifelike and functional as to make the loss effectively meaningless in a dramatic sense. The first to do so (in terms of real world chronology at least) was Luke Skywalker, whose right hand is cut off by Darth Vader during their duel in The Empire Strikes Back; he gets a new hand before the credits even roll. (For the nerds: it’s an L-hand 980, produced by Antilles BioGen.) Vader himself lost his right arm from the elbow in a duel with Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones, and gets a cybernetic replacement that’s stronger than his natural arm – again within ten minutes of screen time! Anakin later loses it, along with all his other limbs, in Ben’s most hated part of Star Wars – Anakin’s duel with Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith – paving the way for him to become “more machine now than man”. He eventually loses one of his cybernetic hands again in his final duel with Luke in Return of the Jedi, but he dies soon after so no-one bothers to replace it.
In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent makes his own Scrabble tiles when trapped on prehistoric Earth. In the story, the Earth is a hugely complicated computer built by a species from another dimension to determine the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything, after their previous computer, Deep Thought, calculated that the Answer to the (unknown) Question was “42”. Without knowing the actual Question, the Answer makes no sense, and so Deep Thought designed the Earth to find out. Arthur and his friend Ford discovered this, then ended up travelling back in time and crashing on Earth in the early days of human beings. Arthur has the early humans pull letters at random out of the bag as a way of testing how the planetary computer’s program to calculate the Ultimate Question is going; the results are not encouraging. This happens near the end of the Primary Phase of the original radio series (in Fit the Sixth), in the final episode of the original television series, and at the end of the second novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
As we mentioned in our The Long Earth episode, The Gap is an American clothing store established in 1969. They’ve been involved in several controversies, but we’re particularly displeased with what they’ve been up to since #Pratchat31: in particular forcing Australian social enterprise Clothing the Gap to change their name to Clothing the Gaps, costing them a great deal of money and energy. Clothing the Gaps is majority Aboriginal owned and run by health professionals as a way to support the “closing the gap” movement, which isn’t about shutting down the US brand (tough that’s something we’d like to do now), but rather about addressing the massive gap between health outcomes like life expectancy and the prevalence of many preventable diseases, between Aboriginal Australians and the general Australian population. Their stuff is great and we recommend you check them out at clothingthegaps.com.au.
Robur is the “science tyrant” antagonist of Jules Verne’s novels Robur-le-Conquérant (Robur the Conquerer) and Maître du monde (Master of the World), as mentioned in #Pratchat31. His craft, the Terror, is ten metres long and can travel on land, on or under the sea, and through the air at incredible speeds, but it is struck by lightning and destroyed. Robur’s body is never found, though his captive, Inspector John Strock, survives the crash…so you never know.
The train-based war game based on Deadlands was Deadlands: The Great Rail Wars, released in 1997. Unfortunately there were no train miniatures – players fielded teams of humans (and maybe other creatures) who fought in standard Wild West terrain, though they did use steampunk gatling pistols and magic.
There is indeed such a thing as a train that lays its own track; the real world kind are used to lay new track for the passenger and freight trains that will follow. Here’s an example from China, featured on trainfanatics.com. Ben was thinking of something more fictional, though he hasn’t been able to track it down (no pun intended); listener Graham Kidd suggested the 1974 science fiction novel Inverted World by British author Christopher Priest, which features a city travelling north on train tracks, which cannibalises the tracks already used to build more tracks ahead. It sounds great but isn’t the one Ben’s thinking of!
We’ve found some claims that Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones were also good friends, though we’ve not found any evidence of that; we have found proof that they met, though, in the form of this Institute of Contemporary Arts talk, “Whose Fantasy?”, from 1988, chaired by Neil Gaiman, and featuring both Pratchett and Wynne Jones, along with John Harrison and Geoff Ryman. It sounds like a bootleg recorded from the audience, but it’s quite a good listen!

#PratchatNALC Notes and Errata

25/07/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the notes and errata for our bonus live episode “Twice as Alive“, revisiting #Pratchat1 and the 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms.

The episode title is a reference to the teaser at the start of #Pratchat1, in which both guest Cal Wilson and Liz declared that they didn’t think of werewolves as undead, but rather “twice as alive”.
The Lost Con was intended “as an 8 hour taster for the non-virtual convention in Sydney next year” – the Australian Discworld convention, Nullus Anxietas 7a (NA7a). The Lost Con was free to all members of the 2022 convention, whether full or supporting, and ran from 4 PM to midnight on Saturday, July 3rd – the original weekend planned for NA7a, which was last year postponed from 2021 to 2022. The move was prudent – Sydney is currently experiencing a serious outbreak of the Delta strain of COVID-19 and has been in lockdown since 26 June, with several stages of local restrictions imposed before that. This is the first major lockdown experienced by Sydney since the nation-wide lockdown in early 2020. From your hosts in Melbourne – we really hope you can get out of it faster than we did last year. Our thoughts are with you all.
The theme of Nullus Anxietas 7a will be “Ankh-Morpork: Citie of One Thousand Surprises”. (The theme of NA7 was “Going Postal”.)
We discussed the vote for the first book preview episode in #Pratchat0, “And the Winner is…“, and in Liz’s blog post “Let’s Start From The Very Beginning (but not actually)“.
#Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“, was released on the 7Ath of November, 2017 – three years and eight months ago in real time, or 237 years ago in COVID time, at release of this podcast.
Members of The Lost Con Zoom chat were split over whose pronunciations they preferred. The folks from Discworld Monthly informed us that according to Stephen Briggs, there were definitely disagreements over pronunciation for the audiobooks. You can find his guides for some pronunciation in the front of some of his play adaptations; for example in Jingo he specifies that Angua’s name should be pronounced with a hard “g”, but either “Angwa” or “Ang-you-ah” is listed as acceptable.
One of the perils of not actually having time to re-read the book (or even re-listen to the entire previous episode) is that we forget little details. Like the fact that Carrot does indeed pick up the gonne, and after a brief look smashes it against a wall, destroying it. As he says when Vimes warns him not to touch it: “Why not? It’s only a device.” Of note: he leaves the broken bits in the clocktower of the Assassin’s Guild.
The western roleplaying videogame with the spittoons that Ben mentions is West of Loathing, a spin-off from the online game Kingdom of Loathing.
You can read more about the Yarra river in the episode notes for #Pratchat1.
Liz’s Detritus pun, which Ben didn’t pick up on at the time, was “inflammation of the d’être“, as in raison d’être, a French term meaning “reason to be”. It’s commonly used by English speakers as an alternate way of referring to something so important if gives them a reason to be alive. Note that in French it’s not really pronounced in such a way that makes the pun work, but English speakers often say it that way.
Detritus’ brain-cooling helmet makes later appearances in Jingo (where it breaks down trying to keep his brain cool in the desert) and The Truth, where he switches it on in order to think clearly about how to deal with William de Worde asking journalistic questions.
The two-player roleplaying game Ben is discussing is Tin Star Games’ Partners, released in digital form in 2021 following a successful Kickstarter campaign.
We discussed Feet of Clay in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“, released in October 2019.
We discussed Jingo in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“, released in January 2020.
Hitchcock and Scully are the two rusted-on detectives who serve in the 99th precinct of the New York Police Department on the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, portrayed by Dirk Blocker and Joel McKinnon Miller respectively. They are notoriously incompetent, unhealthy and lazy, concerned primarily with snacks and other food. Originally supporting characters, they became a staple of the show and feature in the opening credits as of season six, the second episode of which (titled “Hitchcock & Scully”) explored their backstory as hotshot detectives in the 1980s.
The Ankh-Morpork Archives, Vol. 2 was published on the 29th of October, 2020, collecting material from the Discworld’s Ankh-Morpork City Watch Diary 1999, the Discworld Fools’ Guild Yearbook and Diary 2001, the Discworld (Reformed) Vampyres’ Diary 2003 and Lu-Tze’s Yearbook of Enlightenment 2008. Ben is right that the City Watch diary, published in September 1998, came out after Jingo (November 1997) and before The Fifth Elephant (November 1999).
We discussed The Fifth Elephant in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“, released in February 2021.
Asimov is one of Liz’s cats, who along with her other cat Huxley and Ben’s cat Kaos are collectively known as the “Pratcats”. Huxley and Kaos are relative newcomers, but Asimov has been around since the beginning; as well as hearing his bell jingling in the background of many episodes, he was featured as a guest on #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“.
The cult in Guards! Guards! are the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night (not to be mistaken for the Illuminated and Ancient Brethren of Ee). We discussed their similarity with incels and other “alt-right” groups in #Pratchat7A (see the next point).
We discussed Guards! Guards! in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“, released in June 2018 and The Truth in #Pratchat42, “The Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“, released in April 2021. The other book in which there’s a plot to dispose Vetinari is Feet of Clay, which as mentioned above was discussed in #Pratchat24.
As per the excerpt from #Pratchat1, our original suggestion was that Vetinari become a vampire, but we have previously discussed the idea of a zombie Vetinari…though we’re not entirely sure when! Possibly it was in #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, which is also where we first discussed the possibility of Moist Von Lipwig being groomed as the next Patrician (as suggested by listener Luke Jimenez).
The “critical Black Mass” joke in The Light Fantastic, as discussed in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, refers to a collection of “books that leak magic”.
Ben and Liz both discuss their Pratchett origin stories in #Pratchat9, “And the Winner is…“. Liz realised her first was not in fact The Fifth Elephant just after recording #Pratchat7A, as discussed near the start of #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“.
We discussed the Johnny Maxwell books in 2020: Only You Can Save Mankind in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“, released in February; Johnny and the Dead in Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“, released in August; and Johnny and the Bomb in Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“, released in November.
Early versions of “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” go back to as early as 1913, in press releases in various American magazines from a lobby group aligned with gun manufacturer Colt. These were designed to counter growing public concern about the availability of cheap mass-produced firearms, especially pistols, and the resulting escalation in deaths by shooting, which even back then were leading to calls for more regulation and control of guns. While earlier versions included things like “it’s not the gun, it’s the man behind the gun”, the current version is the most recognisable, and seems to have first arisen in the 1950s or 1960s. It’s nonsense, of course; no-one ever suggested that a gun could kill someone on its own. The point of the phrase is to make guns themselves seem neutral, neither good nor evil, but also to paint the perpetrators of gun deaths as obsessed murderers: killers who will use any means necessary, whether they have a gun or not. This ignores the fact that guns are deadlier than other weapons, and indeed the fact that guns even are weapons, i.e. devices designed only to harm living creatures. If you want to know more, the phrase is also the title of a very useful 2016 book on the subject: “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People” and Other Myths About Guns and Gun Control, by Dennis A. Henigan.
The gonne influences Vimes by telling him that All that you hate, all that is wrong, I can put right, and Vimes finds it difficult to resist. He also remembers it pulling its trigger by itself, dragging his finger along with it, and only ends up putting it down and not shooting the villain because Carrot orders him to attention.

#Pratchat45 Notes and Errata

08/07/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 45, “Hogswatch in Grune“, featuring guest Penelope Love, discussing Pratchett’s 1987 short story, Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting.

The episode title – and our choice of short story – is inspired by tradition of “Christmas in July“, Hogswatch being the Discworld equivalent of Christmas (see our Hogfather episode, #Pratchat26) and Grune being the Discworld month that comes after June. In Australia, and the rest of the Southern hemisphere, December 25 occurs during Summer, and so workplaces and friendship groups here and in New Zealand sometimes celebrate a gathering during the Winter, when the colder weather makes it feel a little closer to a traditional European Christmas (and makes it more palatable to eat enormous Christmas dinners). Much to our surprise, this tradition turns out to have begun rather more ironically in America in the 1930s or 40s, though mostly as a marketing ploy rather than an actual gathering of loved ones.
Call of Cthulhu by Sandy Petersen is a horror roleplaying game, and one of the oldest RPGs still in print: the first edition was published by Chaosium in 1981. The current 7th edition was first published in 2014. The world of the game is based on the “Cthulhu Mythos”, drawn from the stories of horror writer (and, sadly, infamous racist) H P Lovecraft and his contemporaries and successors, including Frank Belknap Long, Robert E Howard and August Derleth. It’s theme is “cosmic horror” – as Penny says, the players generally discover they live in a universe where immensely powerful and ancient beings could easily destroy our world – and the characters’ grip on reality. The game uses a version of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying System, modified to track each character’s “sanity” – which they lose as they glimpse the awful truths of the universe – alongside their skills and abilities. The default setting for the game is 1930s America, where Lovecraft’s stories are set, but play in many other eras and locations is also supported – including, via one of the books Penny worked on, Australia.
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, aka P G Wodehouse (1881 – 1975) was an English author best known for his humorous novels, especially those chronicling hapless toff Bertie Wooster and his hyper-capable valet Jeeves, whose name has become synonymous with the image of the unflappable English manservant. He also wrote Broadway musicals, and worked for a time in Hollywood, though he felt his own talent and that of many others was being wasted there, and said so publicly. He moved to France to avoid paying taxes in the UK, and as a result was captured by the Germans; he was later released and made speeches over German radio, leading to outcry in the UK and effectively sending him into exile, living out the last decades of his life in the US.
Wodehouse is pronounced “Woodhouse”; Ben is getting it wrong, and Penny knows what she is talking about. This is a pattern for much of the episode.
The Code of the Woosters (1938) is the third full-length novel to feature Jeeves and his employer, Bertie Wooster. It’s a sequel to 1934’s What Ho, Jeeves and as well as returning character Gussie Fink-Nottle, it also introduces Roderick Spode, a broad parody of British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Pratchett’s very first professionally published story was actually “The Hades Business”, originally published in Science Fantasy vol. 20, no. 60 in August 1963. That story is collected in Once More* * With Footnotes, A Blink of the Screen and a few other anthologies. The serious story Ben is thinking of is his third published story, “Night Dweller”, which was published in New Worlds volume 49, #156 in November 1965 – at the time edited by Michael Moorcock (more about him in a bit). You can find a digital facsimile of the original magazine at the Internet Archive. We previous talked about both stories in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” (Note that we are not counting the stories Pratchett had published in his school newspaper, the Technical Cygnet, but also note that he was fifteen years old when he had this incredibly competent and actually pretty creepy space-based horror story published in a professional magazine!)
There have been several “facsimile” editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan-Doyle, which were published between 1887 and 1927 in The Strand Magazine. The Strand featured short fiction – either complete stories, or short serialised novels – and general interest articles, and was published monthly in London for sixty years, from 1890 to 1950. It was also published in the US from 1891 until 1916. In London it had a circulation of around half a million readers. The name comes from the major London street the Strand, which was near the offices of the magazine on Burleigh Street and later Southampton Street. Conan Doyle was a frequent contributor, and published 121 short stories in the magazine, as well as nine novels (including the Sherlock Holmes ones), 70 non-fiction articles, two interviews and one poem!
We’ve previously mentioned Pratchett’s love of “gl” words; he writes about this in both The Wee Free Men (see #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“) and
The epistolary novel – one presented as a series of documents, most often letters or diary entries – has a long tradition, with famous examples of the style including Les Liaisons dangereuses, The Screwtape Letters, The Color Purple, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, The Martian, Bridget Jones’ Diary, World War Z and the Illuminae trilogy by Jay Kristoff and previous Pratchat guest, Amie Kaufman. Bram Stoker’s Dracula features letters, diary entries and even transcripts of wax cylinder recordings, but it was popular for horror novels too – in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the doctor’s story is relayed by Captain Robert Walton (who finds him in arctic waters) to his sister in a series of letters.
Lovecraft used the epistolary style in several stories, most notably The Whisperer in Darkness (1931) and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941). Some of his other stories, including The Call of Cthulhu (1928), also include newspaper excerpts or other documents without being told entirely in that style.
Verisimilitude in fiction is the believability of the work, or its contents, either in comparison to reality (“cultural verisimilitude”) or the work’s genre (“generic verisimilitude”). Victorian horror stories often strive for believability in terms of how the characters react to the bizarre and horrifying beings and situations they encounter, whereas modern horror – especially in films – often has the characters behave in unbelievably stupid ways to further the plot.
We mentioned Michael Moorcock just last month, when guest Joel Martin brought up his novel-length essay “Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy”. As well as publishing one of Pratchett’s first stories (see above), Moorcock is best known for his fantasy novels, many of which depict a cosmic battle between the forces of Law and Chaos. These often feature an incarnation of “the Eternal Champion”, whom we compared to Rincewind’s “Eternal Coward” role in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“, and discussed Elric of Melniboné, one of those incarnations, in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“.
While best known for Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote science fiction and horror. Such works include the novels and stories starring scientist Professor Challenger, most famously The Lost World, and many short stories such as “The Case of Lady Sannox”, “The Leather Funnel” and “The Horror of the Heights”.
Creepy collections of Victorian Christmas cards did the rounds on social media in 2015, resulting in multiple articles like this one at the BBC and this one in online magazine Hyperallergenic. Both contain excellent examples of the grotesque, bizarre and just not-quite-right illustrations which just don’t quite say “Merry Christmas”. The frogs on display there aren’t musical, but are doing a murder on each other; the one Ben discusses is actually American, but from the same era. You can find it (if you dare!) in this American Antiquarian article.
We discussed Pratchett’s Dickens homage/pastiche Dodger in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“.
To explain Ben’s “nerdy roleplaying game reference“, the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons features a city, Sigil, which is located on the inside of a torus (basically a ring) floating at the top of an infinite spire (don’t think about it too hard). Known as the City of Doors, it allows travel to and from the other planes of existence, and is ruled by a mysterious supernatural figure known as the Lady of Pain. She is generally permissive, but suffers the worship of no gods in her city; doing so, or otherwise invoking her ire, often leads to being “mazed” – placed inside a unique labyrinth-like pocket universe, which can only be escaped by traversing the maze. A lot of her victims die in the attempt.
We discussed Pratchett’s more sexual explicit writing in our previous episode, #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, in the context of some comments about Rincewind’s sexual experiences – solo and otherwise.
The tradition of the “saucy seaside postcard” (sold throughout the UK) was largely the work of one artist, the prolific Donald McGill (1875-1962). He produced more than twelve thousand postcard designs over his career, from 1905 through to his death in 1962. During World War I, he produced anti-German propaganda designs, but his most famous postcards feature cartoons of men and women making suggestive double entendres, not only at the seaside but in many other situations. He ran afoul of the “war on smut” in the 1950s, put on trial in 1954, but later helped to revise the Obscene Publications Act 1857. His most famous postcard, featuring the joke “Do you like Kipling?”; “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!”, reportedly holds the record for the world’s best-selling postcard, with claims it had sold over 6 million copies. A museum was opened in 2010 in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, celebrating his work, but has since shut down.
Penny comments that the Oxford scholar’s end was “very Pickwickian“, a delightful adjective described by the Oxford Dictionary as meaning “Of or like Mr Pickwick in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837), especially in being jovial, plump, or generous.” It is used in the novel itself to describe a word or phrase that is misused or misunderstood, which is said to be using such a phrase in “the Pickwickian sense”.
L’Île mystérieuse (Mysterious Island) is an 1875 novel written by Jules Verne; it is a sequel not only to Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), but also his 1867 novel Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (In Search of the Castaways). In the story, a group of prisoners of the South in the American Civil War stage a daring escape via hot air balloon, but are blown out to sea and crash on an island. They encounter many dangers and adventures, including rescuing a castaway from a smaller island nearby (a character from In Search of the Castaways), but are mysteriously helped by an unseen force, who saves them on multiple occasions. This turns out to be none other than Captain Nemo, who survived the maelstrom at the end of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – though this makes no chronological sense since 20,000 Leagues is set after the Civil War had ended. This book reveals his origin story as an Indian Prince, something not alluded to at all in the first novel. The book doesn’t contain any giant animals, but the 1961 film – starring Herbert Lom as a distinctly non-Indian Nemo – features a giant crab, flightless bird, bees, plants and octopus, all explained to be the results of Nemo’s genetic experiments. The creatures were stop-motion animated by Ray Harryhausen.
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, originally published in 1936. In the story, the narrator tells of his investigation into the port town of Innsmouth some years previously. He discovers much superstition and mystery surrounding the town, where its founding father Obed March started a cult, and many of the inhabitants have “the Innsmouth Look” – unusually flat noses, bulging eyes and narrow heads. It’s eventually revealed that they are hybrids, born of humans cross-breeding with the “Deep Ones”, fish people who live in an underwater city and worship the foul god Dagon.
Penny’s Lovecraft quote “things he cannot and must not recall” is from the 1925 story “The Festival”:

They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Festival”; Weird Tales vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1925): 169–174.

The article Ben mentions about Dickens’ inventing modern time travel fiction may have been this BBC piece by Samira Ahmed in 2015, or this one, by Joshua Sargeant for SF Gate. (He’s not sure – it wasn’t as recent a read as he thought!) A Christmas Carol (1843) definitely pre-dates The Time Machine (1895), and is the first story we know of to depict someone seeing their own future and subsequently changing it. There are many earlier tales featuring a kind of time travel, including Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819), which set up the tradition of one-way travel into the future via magical sleep.
Dickens’ story “The Signal-Man” was first published in the 1866 Christmas edition of Dickens’ weekly magazine All the Year Round. He started the magazine in 1859 after he had a disagreement with the publishers of his previous magazine, Household Words, who he sued to win control of the name and then shut down, with a final issue announcing it would be merged with All the Year Round. His sub-editor was William Henry Wills, who also worked on the previous publication; they co-founded and co-owned the new magazine, but Dickens had much greater editorial control. All the Year Round kicked off with the first part of Dickens’ serialised novel A Tale of Two Cities and was an immediate success, with a first series of twenty 26-week long volumes running under Dickens’ control until 1868, though he wrote less in the magazine as he spent more time doing public readings of his work. He hired his own son, Charles Jr, as a subeditor on the “new series”, then bequeathed the magazine to him; Charles Jr edited it until at least the end of the second series in 1888, with a third series running until 1895.
“Obverse” isn’t actually a synonym for “reverse”, but it’s opposite, generally used only when referring to the faces of coins or other two-sided objects. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines it as “The side of a coin or medal that contains the principal device” – i.e. the “heads” side for traditional European-style coins. In the context of the story, though, it’s used to simply mean “the other side” – as the blank sides with the writing are said to be the “obverse side” of the “windows”, which are clearly the illustrated covers of the cards.
Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965) was an American horror and mystery writer, most famous for her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House (since adapted many times for the screen) and 1948 short story “The Lottery”, which was first published in The New Yorker (and is currently in development as a feature film). The story about being trapped in a painting is “The Story We Used to Tell”, which was potentially unpublished until 1996, when it appeared in the collection Just an Ordinary Day with other rare stories discovered by her children. It is currently in print as part of the collection Dark Tales, and you can also hear it read by LeVar Burton in the October 20, 2020 episode of his LeVar Burton Reads podcast.
There are no shortage of “creepy things kids say” articles on the Internet. We couldn’t find a definitive or best one, so we’ll leave you to google them for yourself…if you dare. Please share your favourites with us!
As Ben and Penny mention, the names of the three wise kings (or magi) are traditionally given as Melchior, a Persian scholar; Balthazar, an Arabian king; and Caspar (aka Kaspar or Gaspar), a King from India. The magi are only mentioned once in the Bible, in Matthew 2:1-12, without names or number; it just refers to “wise men from the East”. Most likely they are counted as three to match the number of named gifts: the famous gold, frankincense and myrrh. Their names are said to come from a Greek manuscript written around 500 CE. The magi also feature in Amahl and the Night Visitors, a one-act opera we discussed briefly back in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is a short horror story first published in the November 1846 issue of the American women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book. It’s one of many stories of the time to revolve around someone being buried alive.
Snoopy is the beagle who features in the comic strip Peanuts, written, drawn and coloured solo by American cartoonist Charles M. Schultz (1922-2000). Peanuts is considered the most popular comic strip in history, originally running from 1950 through to 2000 (around a month before Schultz’s death) in syndication in newspapers in the United States and across the world. Its popularity led to several animated television movies, most famously A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, the first full-length adaptation of the characters, which along with others themed after other holidays are indeed still shown on television every year in the States. The strip follows the adventures and social interactions of a group of children, with the two main characters being determined anxious failure Charlie Brown (whose closest thing to a catchphrase was his frequent utterance “good grief”), and his dog, Snoopy, who first appeared in the third strip on October 4, 1950. Snoopy doesn’t speak, but has human-like thoughts, written as thought balloons in the comic strip but communicated through non-verbal grunts in animation. Snoopy often retreats into his imagination and adopts various alter-egos, most famously a World War I flying ace who is always shot down by the Red Baron. During the 1970s, Snoopy’s increasing popularity led to a greater focus on him in the strip. Toys and other merchandise of the main characters, especially Snoopy, have been available since the late 50s, and by the 1980s Snoopy was ubiquitous.
Candy canes have been associated with Christmas since at least the nineteenth century. An unsubstantiated origin story in folklore traces the tradition back to 1670, in Cologne, Germany, where a choirmaster supposedly wanted to give “sugar sticks” to children to keep them quiet during a recreation of the nativity scene, and justified this by asking for them to be made in the shape of shepherd’s crooks. Gingerbread men are a form of confectionary popular in Europe since the sixteenth century. They are made and eaten at various festive occasions and holidays, and especially Christmas, when they are sometimes hung from Christmas trees as edible ornaments.
We previously discussed Garfield, the orange cat and star of Jim Davis’ comic strip Garfield, in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“. Garfield is one of the few comic strips to seriously rival Peanuts in popularity, the other main contender being Bill Waterstone’s Calvin & Hobbes.
The “Kitten of the Baskervilles” is a reference to The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan-Doyle’s third and most famous novel-length Sherlock Holmes adventure, which was serialised in The Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902.
“Kitten Kong” is the seventh episode of the second series of The Goodies, originally broadcast on November 12, 1971. The Goodies is a television comedy written by and starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie, using a hybrid sketch show and sitcom format in which the three “Goodies”, whose motto is “Anything, Anytime”, take on a variety of weird jobs and schemes. In “Kitten Kong”, they start a business looking after “loony animals” that leads to a number of misadventures, culminating in feeding too much growth formula to a kitten which grows enormous and threatens to destroy parts of London. A re-edited version of the episode with extra gags, “Kitten Kong: Montreux ’72 Edition”, won the Silver Rose at the 1972 Rose d’Or Festival, held in Montreux, Switzerland. (The Rose d’Or is a European television award, held annually since 1961.)
The original horror short story “The Birds” was written by Cornish author and playwright, Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE (1907-1989). It was first published in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree, so a bit later than Penny’s guess of the 20s or 30s (though du Maurier was definitely active then; her most famous novel, Rebecca, was published in 1938). As well as Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1963 film adaptation, it has also been adapted several times for radio and television, and even for the stage!
The Irregulars is a British mystery show created for Netflix by British screenwriter and playwright Tom Bidwell. It is very loosely based on the Sherlock Holmes stories, but centred on “the Irregulars” – four homeless youths who fulfil the role of the “Baker Street Irregulars” from the Conan Doyle stories. In the series they are not merely informants, but do all the detective work, contracted by Dr John Watson. The series has them investigating various mysteries with supernatural causes. The Irregulars was cancelled after its first eight-episode season.
Liz’s ghost story about person who haunts a vague acquaintance is “There in Spirit“, published in June 2020 in The Saturday Paper. (You’ll need a subscription to the paper to read it.)
Shaun of the Dead (2004) is a romantic zombie comedy film (or “rom-zom-com”) directed by Edgar Wright, written by Wright and Simon Pegg, and starring Pegg and Nick Frost, with Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Bill Nighy, and Penelope Wilton. Pegg stars as Shaun, a retail assistant whose life is already going nowhere when a zombie apocalypse comes. He tries to rescue his ex-girlfriend Liz, her flatmates and his parents with the help of his equally aimless friend Ed (Frost). It started life as an episode of Pegg and Wright’s sitcom Spaced, in which Pegg’s character Tim hallucinates a zombie apocalypse while taking drugs and playing videogames. It’s the first film in the “Three Colours Cornetto” trilogy of films, which while unrelated in plot share core cast and crew and couch a relationship comedy in the context of a genre film.
Grabbers (2012, dir. Jon Wright) is a horror comedy starring Moist von Lipwig himself, Richard Coyle, as an alcoholic Garda (Irish police officer). His new partner gets them assigned to a remote Irish island, which they soon discover is under attack from voracious tentacled aliens who need bood and water to survive. Like Shaun of the Dead, despite the comedy it doesn’t shirk the gore.
Tremors (1990, dir. Ron Underwood) is western/sci-fi/horror/comedy film starring Kevin Bacon in which the residents of a small desert town in Nevada are attacked by giant worm-like creatures that burrow through the ground and eat people. The film was a hit and spawned six sequels, as well as a short-lived television series, though Kevin Bacon isn’t in any of them. One of the characters from the basement scene Penny describes – Burt Gummer, played by Family Ties Dad Michael Gross – does return in all of them, including a prequel set in the Old West in which Gross plays his character’s ancestor.
Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette is a 2017 one-hour stand-up comedy show, which was filmed at the Sydney Opera House and released on Netflix in 2018. It deconstructs comedy and also tells some honest stories of Gadsby’s experiences growing up queer and gender non-conforming in conservative rural Tasmania.
Montague Rhodes James OM FBA (1862 – 1936), better known as M R James, was not an Oxford don; sorry Penny, but he went to “the other place”: he was a provost (a senior academic administrator) and later Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is best known for his work as an author, with a style so distinctive it has often been emulated and described as “Jamesian”. Penny specifically mentions his stories “Lost Hearts” (1895) and “O Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad” (1904).
Charles Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. At 3:13 PM on the 9th of June 1865, a train travelling to London on the South Eastern Main Line derailed when it crossed an aqueduct where part of the track had been removed for works. A worker was present to flag down trains, but was only about half as far from the missing section as required by regulations, and the train could not stop in time. Fifty people were injured, and ten of those died – some while being tended to by Dickens. He was hugely affected by the incident – his son said he never really recovered from it – and his story “The Signal-Man” was published a year after the accident, in the Christmas 1866 edition of All the Year Round. It may well have been influenced by the Staplehurst crash, though the train crash detailed in the story is more likely modelled after Clayton Tunnel crash of 1861. Perhaps not coincidentally died, Dickens died on June 9, 1870 – five years to the day after the accident.
The JibJab dancing elves Ben remembers is the company’s website Elf Yourself, which launched in 2007 and still exists.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale was released in 2010 and was written and directed by Jalmari Helander. It is based on two earlier short films, Rare Exports Inc and Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions. It’s not included in any streaming services but you can rent or buy it on Apple TV, YouTube, Fetch and several others.
The Krampus is a mythological figure from the Alpine region of Europe. The horned beast is said to accompany Saint Nicholas on his rounds, scaring children who have been badly behaved and, in some versions, punishing them by whipping them with birch rods or even kidnapping them and taking them to hell. His origins are unclear, but he might be inspired by pre-Christian beliefs, and he was outlawed in Austria for a time. The Krampus has more recently found international fame after featuring in the 2015 Christmas horror film Krampus, written and directed by Michael Dougherty and starring Adam Scott and Toni Collette as the parents of a boy who unwittingly summons the Krampus.
A great example of the “kids drawings made real” genre is thingsihavedrawn.com, the website where Photoshop artist Tom makes “real” versions of the drawings made by his kids Dom and Al.
The BBC has adapted several of M R James short stories for television as part of A Ghost Story for Christmas – and also Dickens “The Signal-Man”! This series of shorts originally ran at Christmas between 1971 and 1978, but was revisited in the 2000s with several new adaptations of M R James stories, including “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” in 2010 and “Mezzotint” in 2021.
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946, dir. Frank Capra) is based on the 1943 short story “The Greatest Gift” by American author Philip Van Doren Stern, itself inspired by A Christmas Carol. In the film, George Bailey, a selfless resident of the town of Bedford Falls, thinks of killing himself, but his guardian angel – on his first assignment to Earth – intervenes, showing him what life would have been like for the people of the town if he got his wish to have never been born.
The Bon Jovi song Liz refers to is “Livin’ on a Prayer”.

#Pratchat44 Notes and Errata

08/06/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, featuring guest Joel Martin, discussing the 2nd Discworld novel, 1986’s The Light Fantastic.

The episode title is references Joel’s comments that this book is the “primordial soup” of the Discworld books yet to come, the analogy of the “cosmic ocean” put forward by Carl Sagan in his book and television series Cosmos, and of course Great A’Tuin the World Turtle himself.
The term “hat-trick” does indeed originate with cricket, where it means taking three wickets (i.e. getting the batter out) on three consecutive deliveries (i.e. a single bowl of the ball). It has since spread to other sports and to mean more generally three successful attempts in a row. (In football, it specifically refers to a player scoring three goals in one game.) The term dates back to 1858, when English cricketer Heathfield Harman Stephenson performed the first recorded hat-trick; fans collected up money for him and used it to buy a hat, which they presented to him to commemorate the achievement. While this story seems well-documented, if Helen Zaltzman (see below) has taught Ben anything, it’s to be suspicious of neat etymological explanations…
The custom of throwing hats in the air to celebrate a victory or achievement is said by multiple sources to be a military tradition: cadets graduating to officer status would be given new hats, or at least no longer need to wear their old cadet ones, and they would symbolically throw them away. At least one story says this started specifically at the US Naval Academy with the class of 1912.
Helen Zaltzman is a comedian, writer and podcaster best known for the long-running comedy podcast Answer Me This? with fellow comedian Olly Mann, and her more recent show, The Allusionist, which explores language in as many different ways as possible. The Allusionist started out as part of the Radiotopia Network, but went fully independent in 2020 as part of Helen putting her money where her mouth was in backing diversity and inclusion in podcasting. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting The Allusionist via Patreon. Oh, and we nearly forgot: Helen also makes a Veronica Mars recap podcast called Veronica Mars Investigations! Helen is the best.
“Commitment to the bit” and “commit to the bit” is common phrase in comedy circles; it means to stick with a joke or comic premise all the way to the end, rather than shy away from it because it is doesn’t immediately work, or is impractical or (for comedians unconcerned with their own or their audience’s safety) uncomfortable. It’s obviously not always good advice; a recent example would be Iceland’s choice at Eurovision 2021 to employ actor Hannes Óli Ágústsson to relay their jury’s points for the contest in character as Olaf Yohansson, his character in the comedy film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. His character’s whole shtick is to awkwardly and angrily demand the title band play the only song he likes, “Ja Ja Ding Dong”; at the contest he tries to give Iceland’s 12 points to the song twice, causing a much-hated delay in giving out the real points.
The Colour of Magic was first published on the 24th of November, 1983 (one day after the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who!), and so its 25th anniversary was two weeks before #Pratchat14, published on December 8, 2018. It originally had art of Great A’Tuin swimming through space by Alan Smith; the Josh Kirby art first appeared on a second edition published in 1989. The Light Fantastic was first published on the 2nd of June, 1986, so we’re a bit closer to the anniversary this time around!
Liz’s “double book” is the combined edition of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic published in 2008, to tie in with The Mob’s two-part television adaptation The Colour of Magic, which combined both books. They had previously been collected as a single volume in 1999 as The First Discworld Novels.
Liz’s annoyance with the “cosmic turtle business” at the start of many of the earlier Discworld books is well documented in many previous episodes.
In The Colour of Magic, Krull’s spaceship the Potent Voyager is only vaguely described as being made of bronze and looking “like a great flying fish”. The graphic novel depicts it as fish shaped, but without the wing-fins of a flying fish.
The Rocket Clock is one of the two clocks used by the Australian version of Playschool in its early days to help tell the time, the other being the Flower Clock. As you might expect, it resembles a space rocket, with a clock on the top section, and a bottom section which rotates to reveal a small diorama connected to a theme of the episode. The original version of the clock, used from 1966 to at least the 1980s, is now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia.
Mr Squiggle was a long-running Australian children’s program starring puppet character Mr Squiggle, “the Man in the Moon”. It ran for forty years between 1959 and 1999. Mr Squiggle, who would arrive in “Rocket“, his smoke-belching impatient rocket ship, had a pencil for a nose. He would use it to turn “squiggles” – scribbles sent in by children – into pictures. Because he was a marionette, puppeteer Norman Heatherington was watching upside down from above, so a lot of his drawings were upside down. This led to him having to tell his assistant, who was holding the puppet’s hand to keep him still, that “Everything’s upside down, Miss Jane”.
In the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, players create characters whose power is measured in “levels”. As they accumulate experience, they gain levels of power and new abilities. In the current edition all characters can reach up to level 20, with wizards learning more and more powerful spells as they level up. Ben has mentioned Dungeons & Dragons many times, as far back as #Pratchat4; his article “What Even Is Dungeons & Dragons?” is a good primer for the novice, though note it’s a little sweary.
The Necrotelicomnicon is mentioned in several books, including The Colour of Magic, Sourcery and Moving Pictures. It’s a pun on the Necronomicon, a fictional book of evil magic written by the “Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” that appears in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft.
“Vancian magic” is the sort used in older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, in which a wizard must study their spell book and memorise a spell, fixing it in their mind, before they can cast it. Once cast, the spell leaves their mind entirely, and they must memorise it anew to cast it again. The name comes from the source that inspired this form of spellcasting, the “Dying Earth” books by American writer Jack Vance.
You can listen to the State Swim jingle right here:

The comic with several different Joker origin stories is probably 2020’s Three Jokers, by Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok, which revises the story to suggest there have been several Jokers over the years. But there have been many others; this article from Screen Rant runs through many of them.
In case the pun is lost on you, timber is wood that’s been prepared for building, usually by being sawn into planks. Timbre is the quality of tone of a sound, especially a voice or musical instrument. You can think of it as all the things that distinguish two sounds of the same frequency from each other.
The Tooth Fairy – well, one or two of them – plays a major part in Hogfather (#Pratchat24). Buggy Swires is a gnome exterminator living in Ankh-Morpork; he returns in several books, starting with Feet of Clay (#Pratchat24). The pictsies known as the Mac Nac Feegle first appear in Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36).
Toadstool houses are the traditional homes of Smurfs, small blue creatures invented in 1959 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo. We previously talked about them in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“, about Pratchett’s second tiny people book, Truckers; and in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“, about the book that introduced the Nac Mac Feegle, Carpe Jugulum. (There’s more detail about the Smurfs in the show notes for #Pratchat36.)
Lonely Planet is a prominent publisher of travel guides for tourists on a budget. In the pre-smartphone days every backpacker bought a Lonely Planet guide to the country where they were headed, but in recent years – especially since the global pandemic – their business has waned. The company was started in Australia by Maureen and Tony Wheeler in 1972, but was later sold to the BBC and is now owned by Red Media, the company behind CNET, Metacritic and GameSpot, among other prominent online media outlets.
Pratchett writes about tiny people many times, including in his first novel The Carpet People, the Bromeliad trilogy (Truckers, Diggers and Wings), and the various tiny denizens of the Discworld, most prominently gnomes and pictsies.
While houses made of food or confectionary date back further, the gingerbread cottage appears in the fairytale of “Hansel and Gretel”, collected and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. “Hansel and Gretel” is the archetypal story of Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 327A. Pratchett returns to the idea in the witches books, especially Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4). The witches refer to Aliss Demurrage, aka “Black Aliss”, as a witch who worked some of the greatest magic, but also as a cautionary tale: she built a gingerbread cottage, a sure sign she’d gone to the bad, and by the end was making poisoned apples before she was pushed into her own oven by children she was trying to eat. (Her cottage is also said to be in Skund, leading some Pratchett fans to suggest that Granny Whitlow was an alias she used to lure children.)
The Rite of AshkEnte is performed here, and also in Mort (when it summons Mort as well as Death), Reaper Man, and Soul Music (where it summons Susan). Death tends to show up without needing to be asked in later books.
We have a play with the famous “you have my sword” sequence from the film Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which doesn’t appear in the book. (Frodo does say “I will take the Ring to Mordor!” and then “Though I do not know the way” in the book, but Elrond decides who will accompany him after the council is over.) Here’s the dialogue from the movie:

Frodo: I will take it. I will take it. I will take the Ring to Mordor. Though… I do not know the way.
Gandalf: I will help you bear this burden, Frodo Baggins as long as it is yours to bear.
Aragorn: If by my life or death I can protect you I will. You have my sword.
Legolas: And you have my bow.
Gimli: And my axe!
The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001, dir. Peter Jackson)

You can find Fury’s drawing of the Luggage as Trunkie from The Last Continent in the notes for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“.
The Last Continent was published twelve years after The Light Fantastic, in 1998, so Liz was pretty close with her guess of ten years.
Liz suggests the Luggage might have “a chamber full of pigs?” in reference to the “having your enemies’ corpses eaten by pigs” method of getting away with murder. This features prominently in the television series Deadwood and Guy Richie’s film Snatch. You can find a list of uses as the “Fed to Pigs” trope on TV Tropes. Ben also mentions a bath full of (Hollywood style) acid, most famously used by Walter White in Breaking Bad.
Pratchett uses the Megalith pun in Lords and Ladies: “It was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one.” This is a pun on MegaHertz (MHz), the unit used to measure the clock speed or clock rate of computer processors – in simple terms, how many instructions they execute per second. In the 1980s, home computers used chips like Intel’s 386, which had speeds of between 16 and 40 MHz. While it was used heavily in marketing, clock speed was not a sure measure of computer performance.
Pratchett moved to Broad Chalke in Wiltshire in 1993, seven years after The Light Fantastic was published. Before that he lived in the village of Rowberrow, Somerset, about 67 kilometres (or about 42 miles) to the northwest. He was never very far from many sites of ancient interest, but Broad Chalke was only a stone’s throw (sorry) from Stonehenge.
There are several stone circles better than Stonehenge, depending on who you ask and how you define better, but the one at Avebury is about 30km to the north and much, much bigger. Tom Scott made this video about it.
The Small Faint Group of Boring Stars is mentioned again in The Last Continent; the wizards travel quite far back in time, to an age when the stars were much closer and less faint (though possibly not less boring).
The Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán is one of the 52 states of Mexico. There are several theories behind its name, and there are two versions of the “Your Finger You Fool” type: one involves the Mayan phrase Ma’anaatik ka t’ann, or “I do not understand you”, and the other uh yu ka t’ann, or “hear how they talk”. Another involves the casava plant, known locally as yuca (see #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl” for more on this plant) which was cultivated in the area, the name Yucatá meaning “land of yucas”. A third one suggests the name comes from the local Chontal Maya people, who call themselves the Yokot’anob or Yokot’an, meaning “the speakers of Yoko ochoco“.
Cohen is not in fact mentioned in The Colour of Magic; this is the first time we meet him.
The famous “What is best in life?” dialogue was made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, based on the Conan stories of Robert E Howard. The lines in full are below; they don’t appear in Robert E Howard’s stories, but are instead inspired by words attributed to Genghis Khan himself…

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good but what is best in life?
Mongol Soldier: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Conan the Barbarian (1982, dir. John Milius)

The people around the breakfast table in The Truth are Mr Windling and the other lodgers at Mars Arcanum’s guest house, where William de Worde lives. He doesn’t tell them he’s the editor of The Ankh-Morpork Times. (We covered The Truth in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
The cover art we’re talking about is the Josh Kirby art for the Corgi edition, still mostly in use today. You can find it on the official Josh Kirby website.
The “uncanny valley” describes the discomfort felt at seeing an artificial creature that is very like, but not mistakable for, the real thing. It can apply to anything living but is strongest – and most often used – to refer to the effect produced by androids and computer-generated representations of faces. There are many theories that try and account for why these things creep it out.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel, a pair of creepy twins appear as ghosts. The “Grady twins” are not twins in the book, but sisters aged 8 and 10, and are only mentioned, rather than appearing as ghosts. In the film, they appear to the young psychic Danny Torrance, dressed identically and speaking to him in unison saying “Come and play with us” – now a famous classic line of horror cinema. Though Kubrick denied it was intentional, many have pointed out that the look of the twins in the film resembles the photograph Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 by American photographer Diane Arbus.
Mort was published in November 1987, so about seventeen months after The Light Fantastic. Liz’s guess of seven months is spot on for the third Discworld book, though – Equal Rites was published in January 1987!
It was announced on April 28, 2020 that Narrativia had made an exclusive new deal with Motive Pictures and Endeavour Content to produce “definitive” and “absolutely faithful” Discworld adaptations for the screen. So far no actual productions have been announced, but the Narrativia website now has sections for all of the major Discworld screen projects of the last decade or so. The page about the new Discworld deal still lists only the initial agreement.
The extra space in Death’s House is described near the start of Soul Music, when Death watches Albert flit from the edge of his impossibly large office to the edge of the carpet around his desk:

Death gave up wondering how Albert covered the intervening space when it dawned on him that, to his servant, there was no intervening space…
Pratchett, Soul Music (1994)

By season three of The Good Place, the humans who are at the centre of the show have been exposed to a lot of the weirdness that exists beyond the material world. Near the end of the season, an accident in the “Interdimensional Hole of Pon-cakes” sends Chidi briefly to another realm, and when he returns he describes it like this:

Chidi Anagonye: I… I just saw a trillion different realities folding onto each other like thin sheets of metal forming… a single blade.
Michael: Yeah yeah, the Time-Knife. We’ve all seen it.
The Good Place, season 3 episode 12, “Chidi Sees the Time-Knife” (2019)

The Untempered Schism is “a gap in the fabric of reality from which can be seen the whole of the Vortex” of space and time. It’s introduced at the end of the third season of the revived Doctor Who in the penultimate episode, “The Sound of Drums”. The Doctor explains that it’s an initiation rite for young Gallifreyans, who at the age of eight must stare into it; according to him, “some would be inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad.” He says he ran away; the Master instead went mad, constantly hearing “the drumming”, though this is later revealed to be more than it seems.
The Doctor Who universe influencer jokes refer to the city of New New York, as introduced in the episode “New Earth”; the “EarPods” used by alternate universe Cybermen to control and convert humans, as seen in the two-part season two story “Rise of the Cyberman”/”The Age of Steel”; and the Adipose, a species of creatures whose cute babies could be incubated in a human body by accumulating fat tissue, under the guise of a diet pill, as seen in the season four opening episode “Partners in Crime”.
Icelandic names are subject to some fairly strict conventions, overseen by the Icelandic Naming Committee. There’s a list of around 4,000 traditional Icelandic names which can be used freely, but new names must be approved by the committee. In addition, by convention Icelandic people take either their father’s or mother’s name as a surname, appended with -son, –dottir or (since 2019) –bur for son, daughter or child, respectively. Episode 87 of The Allusionist podcast, “Name v. Law”, covers some of this in detail, though note it was released in 2018, before the change allowing non-gendered suffixes.
“That bit in The Hobbit” is Chapter II, “Roast Mutton”, when Bilbo is scouting ahead of the company of dwarves and comes upon three trolls named William, Bert and Tom. Bilbo is caught picking a troll’s pocket (Tolkien trolls wear trousers!), and he and the dwarves are caught. Gandalf manages to keep all three trolls arguing with each other, distracting them until the sun comes up and turns them to stone.
5G, short for fifth-generation, is the name given to the newest mobile communications network technology being rolled out around the world. 5G is capable of far greater data transfer speeds than its predecessor 4G, at least at short range. It has been the subject of many conspiracy theories that claim it causes health problems in humans, despite a lack of any evidence that this is true. These theories mutated during 2020 to suggest that 5G caused or spread COVID-19, and they were believed enough that 5G towers in several countries were vandalised.
Lackjaw does indeed describe himself as “of the dwarfish persuasion“.
The magic shop trope can be traced back as far as H. G. Wells’ stories The Crystal Egg (1897) and The Magic Shop (1903). TV Tropes lists it as “The Little Shop That Wasn’t There Yesterday” and has many other examples. Pratchett revisits it in a more traditional way in Soul Music (discussed by us in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got Rocks In”), where Buddy buys his guitar. It’s not the same shop, though – the proprietor is an old woman who seems quite happy with her lot, and she seems to sell only musical instruments.
We keep mentioning Howl’s Moving Castle, so it’s probably a good idea for us to do that Diana Wynne Jones episode we keep talking about. Previous episodes where this book have been mentioned include #Pratchat17, #Pratchat26, #Pratchat30 and #Pratchat43. In a nutshell: Howl is a wizard who lives as a recluse in a castle that not only can move from place to place, but has a magical front door that can open in one of several fixed locations.
Cane toads, Rhinella marina, are native to the Americas and were introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935 for purposes of pest control on sugar cane farms. We previously talked about them in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“, where we recommended in the episode notes the documentaries Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) and its sequel, Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010). You can indeed still get various souvenirs made from dead toads; you can see examples at the website Souvenirs Australia (though it’s not a pretty sight).
The ridiculous fight between Xander and cheerleader-turned-vampire Harmony, occurs in Buffy: the Vampire Slayer‘s fourth season, in the seventh episode “The Initiative”. But you can see it on YouTube:

The “critical Black Mass” pun is not about wizards or gods, but rather books of magic. It comes up in a description of the library as Trymon heads there to bribe the Librarian while the wizards are still speaking to Death.
Bethan is not mentioned in Interesting Times. Rincewind does mention in Sourcery that he was a guest at Cohen’s wedding to “a girl of about Conina’s age”, but Bethan isn’t mentioned by name and Rincewind gives no indication that he knows how the marriage went.
We looked up Echidna penises for #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“.
Rincewind will return in The Last Hero, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch and The Science of Discworld IV: Judgment Day. He’s also a minor character in Unseen Academicals, and mentioned briefly in Raising Steam.
Michael Moorcock’s “Wizardry and WIld Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy” is less an essay, and more of a book, first published in 1987. An expanded edition, now 206 pages long, was released in 2004.
Blades in the Dark is a tabletop roleplaying game written and designed by John Harper and published in 2015. It’s set in an “industrial-fantasy” world, and players form a company of criminals who try to stake a claim for themselves in the inescapable city of Duskvol, surrounded by horror and haunted by deadly ghosts. Among its distinctive features are a system of retroactively planning heists and packing gear, which gets you into the action quicker. If industrial-fantasy isn’t your thing the system has also been used to make several other games in other genres.
Campaign settings are the various fantasy worlds used for Dungeons & Dragons and other games which aren’t tied too much to a specific universe. D&D has a large number of these covering various sub-genres of fantasy, from the post-apocalyptic sword and sorcery of Dark Sun to the gothic horror of Ravenloft. There are too many to list them all, since aside from the dozens of official ones there are many more published independently. (Ben’s favourite is probably Planescape, which both ties together all the others in a weird multiverse, and introduces an interdimensional hub city on the inside of a ring in the theoretical centre of everything.)
Mage: The Ascension, first published in 1993, was the third game in the World of Darkness series of modern horror roleplaying games, following Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Mage is also effectively a sequel to the earlier game about medieval wizards, Ars Magicka, but in the modern world therise of science and rational thought means magic doesn’t work like it used to.
Cavaliers of Mars by Rose Bailey is the latest in a fine tradition of games that seek to emulate the “planetary romance” genre of fiction. These were science fiction or fantasy stories from around the turn of the twentieth century in which the fantastic adventures take place on other worlds – either in our own solar system as in A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (adapted as the hugely underrated film John Carter), or in other galaxies entirely – for example, James Herbert’s Dune is sometimes classified as a planetary romance.
The Old-School Renaissance or Revival – usually abbreviated to OSR – is a movement in roleplaying game communities which prefers the early versions of Dungeons & Dragons and similar games from the 1970s and 1980s. There are now many games that seek to recapture the feel of those games, either by re-implementing the original rules (a genre known as “retro-clones”) or writing games with more modern rules but the old-school philosophy in mind. Exactly what that philosophy is varies according to who you ask, but it usually means a smaller set of rules, and more reliance on both player skill (as opposed to rules which emulate the skill of the characters being played) and rulings by the Game Master (who OSR games often call the referee). Famous examples include Torchbearer, The Black Hack, Dungeon Crawl Classics and the Old School Reference and Index Compilation (OSRIC). Dungeon World isn’t usually counted as an OSR game, but it has many similarities. (It’s a translation of the now super popular “Powered by the Apocalypse” framework, created by Meguey & Vincent Baker for their post-apocalyptic RPG Apocalypse World, into a more D&D-like fantasy context.)
The six flavours of quarks are up, down, charmed, strange, top and bottom. “Flavour” is the name given to unique combinations of other characteristics like spin and charge; it’s sometimes also called “species”. Quarks form other particles, like neutrons and protons, when three of them are combined in different flavour combinations.
The World War II realtime Twitter account is @RealTimeWWII. It tweets “on this day” war events from the years 1939 to 1945, and is currently up to 1943 on its second time around.
In Chinese numerology, four – 四 (Anglicised as sì or sei) – is inauspicious because it sounds like the word for “death”, 死 (sǐ or séi). This causes as serious an aversion as Europeans traditionally have to the number thirteen, and just as some might have triskaidekaphobia, in China and other parts of East Asia, tetraphobia is common enough that buildings do not number floors using the digit 4.

#EeekClub2021 Notes and Errata

25/05/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus episode Eeek Club 2021, answering questions from our Eeek tier subscribers.

In Ankh-Morpork, the “Glorious 25th of May” is the date of the “Glorious Revolution”, commemorated only by a small number of people who were there. They wear lilac in memory of those who died. It is covered in much detail in Night Watch, which we’ll be reading for our December 2021 episode. On Roundworld, Pratchett fans have adopted the date as a celebration of Discworld and Terry Pratchett, often wearing lilac (the flower or the colour), and sometimes raising money for Alzheimer’s research. May 25th is also Towel Day, a celebration of Douglas Adams, which began two weeks after his death in 2001, and “Geek Pride Day”, which was started in Spain in 2006. That the Ankh-Morpork revolution shares a date with the former may not be a coincidence, since Night Watch was published in 2002.
We did indeed start offering subscriptions in January 2019; we announced them in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
Our big open slather questions episode was #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, released on the 8th of April, 2020.
James Spader provides the voice of robot protector-turned-exterminator Ultron in the 2015 Marvel superhero film, Avengers: Age of Ultron.
The lockdown-related Discworld questions in #Pratchat30 begin around 1 hour, 5 minutes and 41 seconds in.
The first lockdown in Melbourne – and the rest of Australia – began on March 29, 2020. Melbourne had subsequent lockdowns from July 9 to October 26 2020, February 12 to 17 2021, and from May 27 until – at the time of last update – at least June 10, 2021.
Dragon King of Arms appears in Feet of Clay, which we discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“.
We also discussed the difference between vaccination and variolation in the notes for #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
Ben says The Truth, but means The Times, as in The Ankh-Morpork Times, the first newspaper on the Discworld. It features in the novel The Truth, which we discussed in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
The Sto Plains – which occupy the area directly hubwards of Ankh-Morpork, on the opposite side to the Circle Sea – include many city-states, like the kingdom of Sto Lat (ruled by Queen Keli), the Duchy of Sto Helit (as in Duchess Susan Sto Helit), and the protectorate of Sto Kerrig. Sto Lat is probably closest, only about 20 miles from the Hubwards Gate of Ankh-Morpork. Their populations aren’t known, but it seems likely the plains’ residents don’t outnumber the million people who live in Ankh-Morpork. The various kingdoms and smaller towns and cities of the plains are all independent of the city, but most of them use Ankh-Morpork dollars as their currency, and certainly look to Ankh for guidance in matters of culture, technology and commerce.
The Trans-Tasman Bubble is the quarantine-free travel arrangement between Australia and New Zealand, countries with similarly low COVID-19 cases, separated by the Tasman Sea. It was announced as a possibility early on in the pandemic, but officially took affect on April 19, 2021. The day this episode was released (May 25, 2021), new cases were announced in Melbourne, leading to the reinstatement of some restrictions and a 72-hour pause on the bubble for travel from Melbourne.
“Young Igor” is our affectionate name for the Igor who joins the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in The Fifth Elephant; he is the nephew of the Igor who worked for the Morporkian embassy in Überwald. We last saw him in The Truth, where he was tending to the wounds suffered by the Patrician and his clerk, Drumknott.
Rincewind’s age isn’t definite, but a good guess is that he was 32 during the events of The Colour of Magic, and 57 by the time of The Last Hero, so Ben is probably right about him “pushing 60”.
Melbourne’s second lockdown lasted 112 days, from July 7 to October 28, 2020. During most of that time, residents were only allowed to leave their homes under very limited conditions, and restricted in how far they could travel from home. It’s probably stretching it a bit to say these were some of the harshest lockdown conditions in the world, but it was reported that way at the time.
Liz’s comment about “trips to Aspen” refers to multiple incidents from March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, when wealthy Australians returning from a skiing holiday in Apsen, Colorado tested positive for the virus but did not self-isolate, causing a cluster of new cases.
Though he does walk with a cane, the Patrician is not as old as he seems; clues from various books (primarily Night Watch) place him as somewhere between 50 and 55, but it seems the assassination attempts of Men at Arms, Feet of Clay and The Truth have taken their toll and he’s not as strong as he used to be. Or at least, that’s what he’d like his opponents to think…
The Bubonic plague is a disease caused by infection of the lymphatic system with the bacteria Yersinia pestis. Usually a human is infected by a flea bite; several flea species can carry the bacteria, and spread among human populations via rats. The plague is responsible for three major pandemics: the plague of Justinian in the 6th century, which killed around 25 million people; the Black Death of the 14th century, which may have killed as many as 200 million people in Europe – about a third of the population; and the plague of the mid-19th century, which caused the deaths of around 15 million people in mainland Asia. (For comparison, as of May 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has officially caused 3.6 million deaths, though the estimated total death toll is 7.7 million.) Untreated, Bubonic plague is very deadly, killing half or more of those infected. Thankfully it can be treated effectively with antibiotics, reducing its mortality rate to 15% or much lower. These days cases are very rare, though the disease has not been entirely eradicated.
Here are some links to the very excellent The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret head canon Twitter threads:
- The original Discworld lockdown thread: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1247840167819456515
- Mental health tips: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1260514179779383297
- Kinds of masks: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1303711942234836992
- Stockpiling habits: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1250387201986383872
- Quarantine hobbies: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1252918448793018371
- Ankh-Morpork businesses during lockdown: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1255429705458688000
- Post-Lockdown activities: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1257993303527735297
- Lockdown 2: https://twitter.com/MakeYeFretPod/status/1326545920415051783
Aunty Donna are an absurdist sketch comedy group based in Melbourne and formed in 2011. Their latest work is the Netflix series Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun. You can find out more about them at auntydonna.com.
Equal Rites is the third Discworld novel, and the first to feature Granny Weatherwax. It tells the story of Eskarina Smith, a girl based in (large) part on Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna, who becomes the Disc’s first female wizard. We discussed it in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. The subject of the gender split in magical society comes back in the later Tiffany Aching books.
Ben mentions “VCAL“, which is the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning. This is a more practical alternative to the standard Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE), a qualification which is more likely to lead to a university degree; VCAL is instead intended to prepare students for an apprenticeship, TAFE course or similar directly vocational training.
Most of the captains depicted in the various Star Trek television series go on “away missions“, i.e. missions in which they leave their ship (or equivalent). This is especially true of Captain James T Kirk of the original Star Trek, though its hinted that this practice is frowned upon by the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Captain Picard’s first officer, River, leads most of the away missions. Captains Janeway and Sisko go on plenty of missions too, though…
Speaking of Star Trek, the episode Ben is thinking of is indeed called “The Measure of a Man“. It’s the ninth episode of season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation, originally broadcast in February 1989. It’s frequently cited as one of the show’s early greats, even if the legal proceedings are a bit suspect. The book The Metaphysics of Star Trek, which uses Star Trek scenarios to illustrate various metaphysical concepts, was later republished as Is Data Human?, as one of the chapters of the book deals with the issue of “personhood”.
We discussed The Science of Discworld back in #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“.
Final Death is the term used in the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade (and its cousin, Vampire: The Requiem) for the ultimate destruction of a vampire, who is already undead. They are not nearly as impossible to kill as the vampires of the Discworld; see for example our discussion of Carpe Jugulum in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
The Sesame Street song about being alive – or at least the one Ben is thinking of – is “You’re Alive“, first broadcast in 1980. It’s not quite how Ben remembered it, but Sesame Street has tackled the topic several times, always using the measures of eating, breathing and growing.
Alan Alda, best known for his years playing trauma surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in the Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H, established the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science in 2009. The Flame Challenge launched in 2012, with the aim of answering the question “What is flame?” in a way that an 11-year-old could understand, as judged by actual 11-year-olds – all because Alda himself received an uninspiring answer from his sixth grade teacher when he was eleven. The winner was announced at the World Science Festival, and the competition was successful enough to inspire several more over the next few years, for new questions picked by 11-year-olds, including “What is time?” and “What is colour?” Sadly the websites for the challenge and the Alan Alda Center no longer exist, but you can find the winners on YouTube with a bit of effort.
We’ve previously talked about Beauty and the Beast villain Gaston and his fate, perhaps most significantly in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
The Beast’s age can be worked out from two bits of evidence. First, the enchanted rose, which will only bloom “until his 21st year”; this implies he is aging during his curse, and the rose is wilt during the events of the film. Second, Lumiere – the maître d’ of the house, transformed into a candelabra – who says that they’ve been waiting for “ten years” since being cursed. Why the curse affected the servants is not clear, but muddying the waters is the portrait Belle finds of the Beast, in which he looks exactly like his 21-year-old self. Regardless Chip’s birth remains a mystery.
The original Beauty and the Beast was written in 1740 by Parisian novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Her version is long, detailed and contains and many characters, including Belle being one of twelve children. Most later retellings are based on a greatly pared back version rewritten by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and first published in 1756. These originals draw on the story of Cupid and Psyche, and do not include an equivalent of Gaston, who was added in some later versions. Assuming the Disney version happens around the time the oldest stories were written, Liz is right that they would have lived to see the French Revolution in 1789.
Anti-racism is is active opposition to racism, and can take many forms. While the idea has gained more visibility in recent years, with books like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Anti-Racist and renewed momentum behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it’s certainly not a new idea.
The “Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness” appears in Men at Arms, which we discussed in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory”. We plan to revisit Men at Arms in our upcoming live appearance at The Lost Con; watch out for details in our next episode!
Diggers is the second of the three books of the Bromeliad, Pratchett’s books about the diminutive alien Nomes. We covered Truckers in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“, Diggers in #Pratchat13, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy” and Wings in #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings“.
We discussed The Long Earth and (briefly) The High Meggas in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the Left.”
Thanks to listener Steve Leahy, who pointed out that there is at least one alien on the Discworld: Tethys, the sea troll, who crash-landed there after falling off his own watery world of Bathys. He appears in The Colour of Magic, which we discussed in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation.” (We’re discussing the sequel, The Light Fantastic, next episode.)
“Literary fiction” is basically a synonym for “high brow”, “serious literature” or “worthy of awards”, and is used to distinguish supposedly more sophisticated and “important” writing from so-called “genre fiction”. As we discuss, it can get in the bin.
Ben tried and failed to find a source for the story of the student with the Terry Pratchett book who was dismissed by a lecturer, only to turn things around by revealing they’d written a thesis on his work. If you know where to find it, please let us know!
The “sort of neolithic spaceship” Potent Voyager was dropped off the Rim in Krull in The Colour of Magic; it is already falling, with Twoflower inside, when we encounter it at the start of The Light Fantastic.
Mutter’s Spiral is not a real world name for the the Milky Way; it’s the name given to it by the Time Lords in Doctor Who, as mentioned in the 1976 story The Deadly Assassin (yes, they really named it that). You are right to infer this means Ben has spent too much time thinking about Doctor Who.
We previously mentioned The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones in our discussion of The Long Earth in the afore-mentioned #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the Left.”
Ben maintains a list of Discworld podcasts on Podchaser. The ones he mentioned at the end of this episode are:
- The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret (Patreon here)
- Radio Morpork
- Desert Island Discworld (Patreon here)
- Who Watches the Watch (Patreon here)
- Unseen Academicals (Patreon here)

#Pratchat43 Notes and Errata

08/05/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“, featuring guest Dr Sally Evans, discussing the 32nd Discworld novel, and the second to feature Tiffany Aching, 2004’s A Hat Full of Sky.

The episode title is a parody of the popular Marvel Cinematic Universe film, Spider-Man: Far From Home, released in 2019. Tom Holland starred as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, who tries to leave his superhero life behind when he goes on a school trip to Europe. It…doesn’t work out.
Bonus episode note: Ben’s working title for this episode was “I’m Gonna Be the Big Man Who’s Hivering to You”, a reference to Scottish band The Proclaimers biggest hit, “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)“, from their 1988 album Sunshine on Leith. It was initially only a big hit in the UK, Australia and New Zealand (it reached number 1 in the charts down under), but had a second lease on life in the US when it was featured on the soundtrack to the 1996 film Benny & Joon. The second verse includes the lines “And if I haver/Then I know I’m gonna be/I’m gonna be the man who’s haverin’ to you”; Ben always thought “haver” was Scots slang for vomiting (the preceding lines are about getting drunk), but actually it means to speak nonsense, especially when flirting or complimenting someone. So also something you do when drunk.
Red Dwarf is a British science fiction sitcom, created Rob Grant and Doug Naylor for the BBC. It stars Craig Charles as David Lister, the lowest ranked crew member of the deep space mining ship Red Dwarf, who is placed in suspended animation for refusing to hand over a cat he smuggled on board. He wakes up to find that a radiation leak has killed the rest of the crew and that Holly, the ship’s now-senile computer (Norman Lovett and later Hattie Hayridge), kept him in stasis for three million years. He is joined by a descendant of his cat, evolved into humanoid lifeform known simply as Cat (Danny John-Jules); his hated bunkmate, Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), who died and is now a hologram computer-simulation; and later Kryten (Robert Llewellyn), a domestic service android. It originally ran for eight series on the BBC between 1988 and 1999, and was resureccted by UK digital channel Dave in 2009 for a mini-series, “Back to Earth”, and three more series and a telemovie between 2012 and 2020. In the early years of The BBC series, Grant and Naylor – under the pseudonym Grant Naylor – wrote two Red Dwarf novels, essentially a revised version of storylines from the first few series without the limitations of a television effects budget.
Ben Elton was a star of the 1980s alternative comedy scene, who later gained success as a television personality, sitcom writer (he joined Blackadder from the second series) and comic novelist. His science fiction novels include Stark (1989; also adapted for television in 1993), This Other Eden (1993) and Blind Faith (2007).
The Last Continent was first published in May 1998, and Jingo in November 1997, so Sally’s guess is right on the money. We discussed those books in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land” and #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés” respectively.
We’ve spoken before about Enid Blyton and Liz’s feelings on loving an author whose work we can now see contains a lot of problematic stuff. Her school story books included the “Naughtiest Girl” series, starring spoiled rich girl Elizabeth Allen, who is sent away to a progressive boarding school when her bad behaviour at home causes her governess to quit. They started with The Naughtiest Girl in the School in 1940, and followed by three more in the 1940s. Six more, beginning with The Naughtiest Girl Keeps a Secret, were written by Anne Digby between 1999 and 2001. She also wrote the “St Claire’s” books about twins Pat and Isabel O’Sullivan, who go to the titular boarding school. The original series consisted of five novels written between 1941 and 1945, beginning with The Twins at St. Claire’s. As with the Naughtiest Girl books, they were later continued by another author, with Pamela Cox writing two more books in 2000 and another in 2008.
The Baby-Sitter’s Club was a series of novels by Ann M. Martin (and later several ghostwriters) chronicling the adventures of four teenage girls – Kristy, Mary Anne, Claudia and Stacey – who run a babysitting service in their (fictional) home town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut, later joined by many other characters. The original series was published between 1986 and 1999, and included 131 books, of which the first 35 were written by Martin herself. There were also a huge number of specials and spin-offs, including the popular Baby-Sitter’s Club: Mysteries series. The main series was adapted for television in 1990, and ran for 13 episodes; a new series was released on Netflix in 2020, with a second season expected in 2021. There are quite a few Baby-Sitter’s Club podcasts re-reading the books; if you’ve listened to any, we’d love to hear which ones you rate!
The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories is a series of mystery novels starring fictional teenage detective Nancy Drew, beginning with the 1930 book The Secret of the Old Clock. Nancy herself was originally 16, headstrong, impulsive and sometimes violent, but in later books – and revisions of the earlier ones – she was changed to be nicer. The series was created by publisher Edward Stratemeyer and ghostwritten by various authors as “Carolyn Keene”, with around 175 books published between 1930 and 2003. This setup was the same strategy Stratemeyer used for his earlier Hardy Boys mystery books. There have been several screen adaptations, including several short “B-films” in the late 1930s, a 1970s The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries crossover series for television (considered by some the most faithful adaptation), a 1995 television series which updated Nancy as a 21-year-old criminology student, the 2007 feature film Nancy Drew, and most recently, the film Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase and the unrelated television series, a modern re-imagining titled Nancy Drew, in 2019. There’s still plenty of life in this investigator!
Tom Swift Jr was, it turns out, another series of ghostwritten children’s books created by Edward Stratemeyer! They were a continuation of the original Tom Swift series, in which the younger Tom’s father was the main character, though many supporting characters appear in both. The original series was written under the pseudonym Victor Appleton, and the Tom Swift Jr books under Victor Appleton II. In all there are over 100 Tom Swift books, beginning with the original series of forty books published between 1910 and 1941, and the 33 original Tom Swift Jr books, published between 1954 and 1971. (These are the ones Ben read as a kid.)
We previously discussed Just William and the William Brown books, and Pratchett’s love for them, way back in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh” (and especially in the notes for that episode). Written by Richmal Crompton between 1922 and 1969 (with the last one published after Crompton’s death in 1969), each book is a collection of short stories chronicling unruly schoolboy William’s various adventures. He is always eleven years old, but the stories are always set in the present day – i.e. the time at which they were written. So as well as scrumping for apples, William – along with his band of friends and accomplices, the “Outlaws” – also “Does His Bit” during the years of the Second World War, pretends to be on television and discovers the wonders of the National Health Service in the late 1950s, and get confused by a bunch of hippie spiritualists at the end of the 1960s.
Paul Jennings is an Australian author best known for his collections of short stories, often with fantasy elements and always containing a twist. His most famous books are the first nine volumes of these, published between 1985 and 1998, with titles like Unreal!, Uncanny!, Unbelievable! and Unmentionable! (Ben still has his copies of the first five or so.) He’s also written a large number of children’s chapter books, picture books and novels, some in collaboration with another famous Australian author, Morris Gleitzman. Based on the popularity of his short stories, the Australian Children’s Television Foundation created Round the Twist, a television show adapting stories from a variety of Jennings’ books. It revolved around the Twist family – widowed father and sculptor Tony, teenage twins Pete and Linda, and youngster Bronson – who move into an old lighthouse, where all kinds of weird stuff happens to them. It ran for four series between 1990 and 2001, moving from Channel 7 to the ABC, though with lots of cast changes as the child actors grew up. It was a massive hit in Australia and the UK, remembered for its theme song as much as the show itself.
Paul Jenning’s memoir is Untwisted, published in 2020. The title is a play on his most famous books, and the TV series they inspired.
Primary school happens at roughly the same age in most places, but the way the years are numbered are quite different. It’s not even consistent between Australian states! But it is common across Australia for children to enter year 1 (also galled grade 1, or first grade) in the year they will turn 6, usually after a year of pre-school that goes by various names (kindergarten, prep, reception etc). Most states consider high school to run from years 1 to 6 (when most children are 12 years old), and high school from years 7 to 12 (most students turning 18 in their final year). So in year 11, most Australian students would be in their second last year of primary school, year 5.
We’ve often talked about British author Diana Wynne-Jones; see #Pratchat17, #Pratchat26 and #Pratchat30 for more about Howl’s Moving Castle, plus #Pratchat22, #Pratchat31 and #Pratchat37, where we discuss her other books, especially the Chrestomanci series. In the original Howl novel, protagonist Sophie is the eldest of three sisters who all work in their father’s hat shop. Sophie, aware of the fairy tale conventions of the world she lives in, expects to live a boring life compared to that of her sisters. The middle child Lettie, the most beautiful, becomes an apprentice pastry chef, while the youngest and smartest, Martha, becomes apprentice to Mrs Fairfax, a witch who would probably get along very well with Nanny Ogg. They do indeed have some adventures of their own, but we won’t spoil those for you here.
Anges Nitt is a young witch who first appears in Lords and Ladies (see #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“) as a member of a goth-like “coven” who meddle in the powers of fairies. While a minor character in that book, she nonetheless catches the eye of Granny and Nanny as one with true talent. In Maskerade (#Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“), she has gone to Ankh-Morpork to become an opera singer, and the elder two witches just happen to be going there anyway, and of course they wouldn’t dream of telling her she should come home and take up witchcraft. By the time of Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“) Agnes is more-or-less the third witch in Granny and Nanny’s trio, though she doesn’t appear to be officially being taught or apprenticed by either of them. She has however taken over the cottage in Mad Groat which once belonged to Magrat and Magrat’s mentor, the research witch Goody Whimper.
Tiffany’s “see me” trick is described in Chapter 1 like this: “It felt as if she was stepping out of her body, but still had a sort of ghost body that could walk around.”
On “hiver” being a reference to acne or pimples, the closest word is probably “hives” – itchy, swollen and often red areas of skin, usually caused by an allergic reaction. They can indeed sometimes resemble acne, though they’re not often mistaken for each other.
Liz makes a reference to the horror film It Follows (2014, dir. David Robert Mitchell), in which college student Jaime (Maika Monroe) is pursued by a supernatural creature which wants to kill her – a curse passed on to her by a boy she sleeps with. A key unnerving thing about the creature is that it can appear as any person, but only the victim of the curse can see it.
Queen Elizabeth first met Prince Philip in 1939, when she was 13 and he was 18. They were engaged in 1947, at ages 21 and 26.
The Uffington White Horse, briefly mentioned by Pratchett in his author’s note, is the oldest such “hill figure” in Britain, dated as being around 2,500 to 3,300 years old. Though called a horse for around 1,000 years (the oldest written history of any hill figure in the UK), there’s some debate over whether it was originally meant to be a horse. It’s made of crushed chalk, laid in trenches dug into the hill, and needs to be regularly maintained or it becomes difficult to see. The Uffington White Horse inspired many other similar horse figures around the UK, though the others are all much newer; the oldest is the Westbury White Horse in Pratchett’s home county of Wiltshire, which can’t be reliably traced back before the late 18th century.
The “beetle” in Disney’s Mulan (1998, dir. Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook) is actually a lucky cricket named Cri-Kee, bought by Mulan’s grandmother to give her luck in her visit to see a Matchmaker. After that goes horribly, she tries to release him, but he sticks around, becoming a sidekick to her family’s guardian spirit, the dragon Mushu. You’ll be pleased to know he doesn’t explode during the film, but survives to feature in the direct-to-video sequel. He doesn’t appear in the 2020 live-action remake, but an archer character named Cricket does appear as a reference to him.
Anne Geddes is an Australian photographer who rose to fame in the 1980s and 1990s with her photographs of cherubic babies involving elaborate props and costumes. These were incredibly popular, and her photos sold millions of greeting cards, calendars and coffee table books. She lived in New Zealand for much of the height of her fame, and in 2004 was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit by the Queen for services to photography, though she also has a history of philanthropy. Since 2015, though, she’s made much less work – with social media all but killing the calendar and greeting card market, like many artists Geddes has turned to Patreon to continue making a living.
Mr Sheen is the tiny, bald-headed and bespectacled mascot of the Mr Sheen household cleaner, invented in Australia in the 1950s. It was the first aerosol-based cleaner to be sold in Australia, and continues to be popular in Australia and several other countries. His theme song was quite memorable, too, and remained largely unchanged for decades.
Black Books is a British sitcom created by and starring Irish comedian Dylan Moran. Moran plays Bernard Black, a misanthropic, drunk bookshop owner, who in the first episode hires an optimistic and naive assistant, Manny (played by one of Ben’s all-time favourite comedians, Bill Bailey). Together with their friend Fran (Tamsin Greig) they have various misadventures. The show won wide following and ran for three series between 2000 and 2004, broadcast on Channel 4. In the third episode, “Grapes of Wrath”, Kevin Eldon plays a distinctly creepy Cleaner hired by Manny to tidy up the shop. This YouTube clip of his first appearance will give you the idea…
The “hive mind of mushrooms” Liz mentions is known as a Mycorrhizal network. Some species of fungus grow large structures underground, connecting to other forms of plant life, transferring nutrients and water and possibly information of a sort between trees, leading to the nickname the “Wood Wide Web”. See this Science article from 2019 for more.
On Roundworld the Doctrine of Signatures dates back to ancient Greek and Roman physicians, but was popularised in the 15th to 17th centuries, especially via Jakob Böhme in his book The Signature of All Things. It’s perhaps most obvious in the common names of many (supposedly) medicinal plants, including eyebright, lungwort and birthwort (thought to resemble the uterus, and unfortunately a carcinogen). Modern thinking suggests that those medicines that do work were probably attributed a physical similarity after the fact. In any case you have to squint pretty hard to see the doctrine at work…
We’ve previously talked about shape-changing teenagers the Animorphs and their foes, the parasitic alien Yeerks, in #Pratchat19, #Pratchat25 and #Pratchat35. They are the stars of several related series of books written for teens by K. A. Applegate (a psuedonym for Katherine Applegate and her husband Michael Grant),and published by Scholastic between 1996 and 2001.
The Body Keeps the Score is an influential 2015 book written by Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, about the causes and possible treatments for trauma.
The “Cloak of Billowing” appears in the 2017 sourcebook Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Its only magical ability is to “billow dramatically” on command.
Tree of Life is an Australian chain of “boho fashion” stores cultivating a “carefree hippie ethos”. It began in the early 90s in Balmain, Sydney, and was started by John and Wendy Borthwick, followers of the Indian spiritual leader, Meher Baba. ISHKA is a similar store started by Michael Sklovsky in Melbourne in the early 1970s, initially selling both Michael’s own craft as well as items sourced from overseas. Both sell a variety of clothing, knick-knacks and accessories made in India, Nepal, Thailand and other countries in the Middle East and Asia. While both brands have statements on their websites outlining a strong ethical stance, it’s unclear how they maintain this, and they do not seem to use any standard FairTrade practices (e.g. labelling goods with details of their supply chains).
Sigmund Freud believed that the reason we don’t remember our births is that it was too traumatic (and sexual, because, you know, Freud). But while that’s been debunked, it is definitely true that humans have “infantile amnesia” – an inability to remember facts and personal events from our first few years of life. We still don’t have a definitive explanation, but it does seem likely to be related to the enhanced rate of brain development that goes on at that time.
While the experience of phantom limbs – the sensation of feeling from a limb one no longer has – is common in amputees (even non-human ones), it’s not a “syndrome”. Ben is using the word incorrectly.
In Equal Rites (discussed in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“) a wizard passes on his staff to the eighth son of an eighth son…who is actually a daughter. The child, Esk, is sent to apprentice with Granny Weatherwax, who eventually realises that regardless of gender, wizard magic and witch magic are not the same. Granny takes Esk to Ankh-Morpork to convince the Unseen University to take on their first co-educational pupil. Nonetheless, Annagramma – and Mrs Earwig herself – are perhaps exhibiting some internalised misogyny when they say that witchcraft should be done in the wizard manner to be “proper”, since the two traditions are still largely split along gender lines. (This is a theme that will be revisited in later Tiffany books.)
We previously mentioned the Country Women’s Association (CWA) while discussing the short story “The Sea and Little Fishes” in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?“
Ben is conflating two folk tales in his explanation of the third wish. The talking fish is from “The Fisherman and His (Greedy) Wife”, (catalogued in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index as type ATU 555), and importantly they don’t have a limited number of wishes, nor do they undo them with a final one; instead the fisherman is pushed to ask for grander and grander things until they go too far, and the wishes are undone with a crack of thunder and no explanation. The story with the sausage on the nose is “The Ridiculous Wishes” (ATU 705A), in which a poor woodcutter is given three wishes; his wife urges him to wait and think about the wishes, but while hungry that night he idly wishes for sausages. His wife is understandably upset, but when they argue he unthinkingly wishes the sausages were attached to her nose; in the end they must use the third wish to undo the second, leaving them only with the sausages.
While it’s clear that Granny has experience of the Black Desert, this book is the only time we see her actually go there. Her conversations with Death in Witches Abroad and Carpe Jugulum occur in the real world, and her metaphysical struggles in those books occur in the weird mirror dimension and inside her own mind.
Willow is a 1988 fantasy film produced by George Lucas, written by Bob Dolman and directed by Ron Howard. It stars Warwick Davis as Willow Ulfgood, a farmer and aspiring sorcerer of the Nelwyn people. He and his family find a Daikini (i.e. human) child set adrift on a river, which unknown to them is part of a prophecy that will dethrone the evil sorcerer-queen Bavmorda (played by Jean Marsh). Along the way Willow and his friends recruits the Daikini mercenary Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) and have various fantastic misadventures. While the film wasn’t a big box office success, it won a firm place in the heart of nerds everywhere. A television series returning to the world of the film is coming to Disney+ in 2022, with Davis reprising his role as Willow.
We previously explained the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen meme, in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“. It’s taken from the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019, dir. Quentin Tarantino), in which DiCaprio’s character, actor Rick Dalton, points at a movie screen when he sees himself.
Yes, we goofed: Tiffany does not keep Granny’s old hat; she keeps the one she bought from Zakzak Stronginthearm, though it is also temporary. Granny shows her the new hat she is constructing to make the point that witch’s hats aren’t permanent.
The Secret of Monkey Island is the classic 1990 graphic adventure videogame created for LucasArts by Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman. A comedy (and one of Ben’s favourite games), the player takes on the role of Guybrush Threepwood, a young man who wants to become a “mighty pirate” during the golden age of piracy. Pratchett was certainly playing videogames by this time and it was such an influential and popular game its hard to imagine he wouldn’t have played it. In the game, he meets the “Amazing, Adventurous, Acrobating, and Exceedingly Well-Known, Fabulous, Flying Fettucini Brothers”, Bill and Alfredo. While it’s clear some of their appearance is just an act, it’s not specified if they changed their names as Ben misremembers. In the 1992 sequel, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, there’s also a reference to the “Linguini Brothers”.
The Monster Book of Monsters, a magical school textbook for third year Care of Magical Creatures students, first appears in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, published in 1999. That’s five years earlier than the LIBER IMMANIS MONSTRORUM in this book, though surely bonus points are awarded for the Latin.
The historical John Snow (1813 – 1858) was an English doctor who is famous for his work in epidemiology and anaesthesia. In a time before germ theory was accepted and understood in Europe, he was skeptical of the prevailing “miasma theory”, and as well as disabling a pump to prevent further cholera infections, also mapped cases to help determine how they were spreading. His work was influential enough to inspire the John Snow Society, who hold an annual “Pumphandle Lecture” at which a pump handle is symbolically removed and replaced. His work also influenced the design and use of public drinking fountains, and you can hear more about that in episode 188 of the podcast 99% Invisible, “Fountain Drinks“.
Modern vaccines use a variety of methods to create an active agent which appears to the body to be a specific virus or bacteria. This allows the body to develop an effective immune response to the real thing, without having to actually contract the disease. The precursor to vaccination was variolation, which goes back at least 1,000 years when it was first used in China. This is deliberate infection with a small dose of the actual disease, originally smallpox, with hope of achieving immunity after a mild illness, and it was used up until the 18th century. Modern vaccine agents do not use a live sample of the actual disease, but instead an agent created in a number of ways. These methods include material from dead or irradiated pathogens (known as “ghosts”), modified or naturally occurring viruses which are very similar to the dangerous one but do not harm the host (as in the case of cowpox being used to in smallpox vaccines), or most recently RNA vaccines, which use messenger RNA to more directly help the body create appropriate proteins that can act as antibodies.
Wittgenstein’s Ladder was described by the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein () in 1921. In his own words (or at least, in an English translation of his own words): “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)”
You can see Prince Philip’s self-designed Land Rover hearse in this BBC article.
You probably already know we love The Mummy, the 1999 film starring Brendan Fraser as adventurer Rick O’Connell, and – most relevant to this discussion – Rachel Weisz as librarian and historian Evie Carnahan. We’ve previous talked about it in #Pratchat11, #Pratchat19, #PratchatNA7, #Pratchat21, #Pratchat23, #Pratchat36 and #Pratchat42. And yes, we are seriously considering a short spin-off series of podcasts discussing those films.
On the subject of Esk being based on Rhianna Pratchett, less than a week after this episode was released, Rhianna Pratchett replied to a tweet asking what her Dad’s favourite of his books was, and for her own favourite. She replied that the witches and Tiffany books were among her faves, as was Nation (Terry’s own choice), and further that Equal Rites was the first of his books that she read – probably why it was dedicated to her! She confirmed that Esk is based (in part) on her in reply to a follow up tweet, in which she said that there was “more than a little” of her in the character… We’ve included the relevant tweets below.

Dad thought Nation was his best book and it’s one of my favs too. I’m a huge fan of the Witches series in particular (Equal Rites was the first book of his I read) particularly Witches Abroad, Carpe Jugulum and the Tiffany Aching tales. https://t.co/jWdENxQLJt
— Rhianna Pratchett (@rhipratchett) May 12, 2021

More than a little 😉
— Rhianna Pratchett (@rhipratchett) May 12, 2021

#Pratchat42 Notes and Errata

08/04/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“, featuring guest Stephanie Convery, discussing the 25th Discworld novel, 2000’s The Truth.

The episode title is a riff on Douglas Adams’ most famous joke in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. When a race of “hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings” build a supercomputer to answer “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything“, it takes seven and a half million years to confidently announce the Answer is…42. A subsequent computer is built to work out what the question actually is so the answer can be understood.
As a side note, this episode marks the point at which there are more episodes of Pratchat than there are Discworld novels, a weird and bittersweet milestone. Thanks for sticking with us.
Stephanie was last a guest on #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“, discussing Mort. It was released on December 8th, 2017 – that’s three years and four months ago.
The book 42, subtitled “The wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams”, is edited by his friend and collaborator Kevin Jon Davies. It will feature facsimiles of Adams’ writing taken from the archive of his work donated to his old college after his death, with added notes for context and explanations. A publication date has yet to be confirmed but it has hit its crowdfunding goal on both Unbound and Kickstarter, and at the time of publication you still have a couple of weeks to get in on it. Later in the episode Ben mentions this extract published in the Guardian UK.
Nominative determinism is the idea that one’s name will subtly influence you to do things that match your name, the most famous example perhaps being Thomas Crapper, an English engineer and plumber who made several important refinements that became standard in modern toilet design. (This is contrary to popular belief, which suggests he is the reason “crapper” is a euphemism for toilet, but this seems to pretty clearly pre-date his…er… contributions.)
Movable type is mentioned in more than one earlier Discworld book, but tracking down which ones is proving tricky. We’ll list them here when we find them out!
The Watergate scandal ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon in 1974, after it became clear he both knew about and tried to cover up his administration’s involvement in a break-in at the Watergate Office Building in Washington. The break-in was part of illegal wire-tapping to gain intelligence on the Democratic party; the Democratic National Convention HQ was in the Watergate building. Key evidence against Nixon were recordings he had made of conversations in the Oval Office, especially one known as the “smoking gun” in which he agrees to the cover up plan. The story was uncovered by journalists, especially Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who aided by anonymous sources including one who called himself “Deep Throat” and met with them in a carpark… You can see the references piling up, can’t you? The Truth also references the 1976 film about the scandal, All the President’s Men, based on the 1974 book by Bernstein and Woodward.
Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 hit black comedy film which tells several crime stories set in Los Angeles. Two of the characters in the film are Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winfield (Samuel L Jackson), enforcers and hit-men working for a ruthless crime boss. Most of the references to the film are to their characters, who between them discuss what a Quarter Pounder burger is called in France, have a wallet with “Bad-Ass Motherfucker” written on it, extoll the virtues of dogs and declare they are going to “get medieval on yo ass”.
Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, “the Old Firm”, appear in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the story of unremarkable Scot Richard Mayhew, who, when he refuses to abandon a seemingly homeless girl on the pavement, discovers the invisible “other London” world of London Below. Neverwhere first saw life as a television series in 1996, in which Croup and Vandemar were played by Hywel Bennett and Clive Russell. It has since been a novel, a comic book, the basis of several stage productions and most recently a radio adaptation by the BBC starring James McAvoy, in which Croup was played by Pratchat favourite Anthony Head! Gaiman is currently writing a sequel. Terry himself grew tired of the frequent comparisons between the two Firms; as he says in the Annotated Pratchett File: “Fiction and movies are full of pairs of bad guys that pretty much equate to Pin and Tulip. They go back a long way. That’s why I used ’em, and probably why Neil did too.”
Yes, Stephanie – intertextuality is indeed a word! It refers to the way that works of art, especially literature, draw on and influence each other.
Ben makes a mistake here; the Watergate activities were the work of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which is mostly important to note because it was quickly shortened to CREEP once the scandal broke.
The Skulls (2000; dir. Rob Cohen) stars Joshua Jackson (of Dawson’s Creek and Fringe fame) as a poor law student who scores a rowing scholarship to Yale University, and is invited to join “the Skulls”, a secret society for the rich and powerful. It’s based on the real life student society called the Skull and Bones, which was founded in 1832 and is one of three major student organisations at Yale, the others being similarly ominously-named the Scroll and Key and the Wolf’s Head. The Skull and Bones have their own meeting hall called “the Tomb” and own a small island, once luxurious but now considered a dump, in the St Lawrence river in upstate New York. Plenty of conspiracy theories involve the Skull and Bones; their members, or “Bonesmen” (women have only been admitted since the 1990s) certainly include many powerful people like major league sports stars and Presidents.
We couldn’t turn up anything Terry might be referencing with the high-backed chairs and circle of candles; if you find something, let us know!
“Disruption” is a popular buzzword amongst entrepreneurs, especially in the tech sphere, where the idea is that they don’t invent a new product or service, but a new way to organise an old one – often with complete disregard for how this might affect the livelihood of people involved in the existing industry. Uber is the most-often cited example; their system allowed anyone with a car to operate as a taxi driver for rides booked through the app, undercutting existing taxi services and circumventing licensing rules in the process. In Australia and many other countries taxi drivers do not have a union, and so they were powerless to do much about it; the owners of taxi companies and cars eventually tried to act, but with little success.
There are two calendars used on the Discworld: the Imperial Ankh-Morpork calendar (AM), which counts full-years (a full revolution of the disc) since the founding of the city, and the University Calendar (UC), which counts half-years (one full set of seasons), and starts with the founding of Unseen University. The University calendar begins in AM 1282. The years given in The Truth use the University Calendar, which supplementary material tells us is preferred by most folk since it actually matches the seasons. As for the Centuries, it seems they might use the other calendar, since it is clearly the Century of the Anchovy by the time of Going Postal, but in Moving Pictures and it is still the Century of the Fruitbat, and based on a number of clues The Truth seems to happen in the late 1980s or possibly 1990, the first year of the Century of the Anchovy. (For more on how seasons and so on work on the Disc, see the show notes for #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation”.)
You can find out more about the State Library of Victoria’s newspaper collection on their website.
Trove is an online digital archive created by the National Library of Australia and other libraries around Australia. It really does have an amazing collection of stuff!
Liz refers to the “folly” at Werribee Mansion; a folly is an architectural feature or building constructed purely for decoration, especially one that is expensive and/or made to look like it serves a function, even though it doesn’t.
Otto’s surname may also be a reference to Max Schreck, the German actor who portrayed Count Orlok, the vampire in F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film classic Nosferatu. Nosferatu was an unauthorised adaptation of Dracula, and most of the prints were destroyed after legal actual by the Bram Stoker estate, but the surviving print turned it into a cult film.
Clippit – not Clippy, though that’s what everyone called it – was the default form of the Microsoft Office Assistant, an “intelligent assistant” introduced in Office 97. Clippit was an animated paperclip, and famously would pop up asking if you wanted help with a variety of common writing tasks based on the content of your current document. Most people did not want help, but also didn’t know how to turn Clippit off. While the assistant could have other forms, Clippit was the default and most recognisable. The assistant was based on research showing that people interacted with computers as if they were people, but the inclusion of a person-like assistant made things worse as it felt like one person too many! After widespread user dissatisfaction and industry mockery the assistant was turned off by default in Office XP in 2001 – accompanied by ads saying Clippit was out of a job! – and then removed entirely in Office 2007 (and Office 2008 for Mac).
The recent review of The Truth in the actual -ing Times is by Laura Freeman and published on March 26, 2021. Sadly it’s behind a paywall, but you might get to access it for free depending on when you visit; it’s Rereading The Truth – a comic novel that rivals Evelyn Waugh.
The accident-prone vampire who may or may not be Otto does indeed appear in Feet of Clay. He takes jobs as a holy water bottler, garlic stacker, pencil maker, picket fence builder and sunglasses tester.
Here’s the original version of the menboys tweet:

why do we call them cowboys when they're men. we should call them menboys
— Mr. FUCK (@Slammy_P) March 22, 2021

In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserablés – and its famous musical adaptation – protagonist Jean Valjean struggles to find work as an ex-convict and is taken in by the Bishop of Digne. In the middle of the night, Valjean decides he may as well live up to everyone’s expectations of him and steals the church’s silver, but he is caught and the next morning brought before the Bishop…who tells an astonished policeman that he gave the silver to Valjean – going so far as to hand over two silver candlesticks he claims Valjean forgot! He tells Valjean he must use the silver to become an honest man, as he has bought Valjean’s soul for God, convincing the bitter Valjean to change his life around. (As a side note, Ben is a big fan of the West End production of the musical, and in the not-as-great film, Hugh Jackman plays Valjean – and London cast Valjean, Colm Wilkinson, shows up as the Bishop of Digne!)
Before social media or web-based forums, there were Usenet newsgroups, the first internet equivalent to local bulletin board systems. Started in 1980, the Usenet system allowed for “threads” of messages posted by various users, organised into groups that were categorised in hierarchies similar to domain names. The “alt.fan” category became a popular meeting place for fans of all kinds of different media, discussing their favourite TV shows, comics and books, and posting documents – like the famous Annotated Pratchett File (APF) – that would later be hosted on websites or wikis instead. Pratchett himself was known to lurk on alt.fan.pratchett and occasionally answer questions, many of which are quoted in the APF.
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper originally founded in 1821, and notable as it is funded by a charitable trust which aims to preserve its independence. As well as the print paper in the UK, it has online publications there and in the US and Australia. The Saturday Paper is a similarly independent weekly paper produced in Australia by Schwartz Media since 2014, who also publish Quarterly Essay and The Monthly, which focus on long-form journalism and opinion, and the podcast 7am, a weekday podcast which tries to give a deeper look at a single story from the week.
Ben is remembering a story from design podcast 99% Invisible, but the streets under the streets aren’t in San Francisco, they’re in Seattle. It’s the last story in episode 290, “Mini-Stories: Volume 4“, from 2018.
The story of Darwin embracing Christianity on his deathbed is commonly told by anti-evolutionists, as it also claims he recanted his theory at the same time – but it was invented by a woman who hadn’t been there. This New Yorker article is a good account of the truth.
Pascal’s wager was the posthumously published argument by French philosopher Blaise Pascal in which he used ideas of probability theory, decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism to argue that all humans should try and believe in God, since the reward if He exists is infinite, and the loss if he does not is negligible.
The character of Benny in Pratchat favourite movie The Mummy (1999) first tries to ward off Imhotep the undead monster with a cross, but when that doesn’t work he reveals a collection of religious charms for which he knows accompanying prayers. (We think we last mentioned The Mummy in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“, but there are many earlier examples too. See also the next note.)
While there is a Scorpion King 4: The Quest for Power, and it was released on Netflix, that was in 2016. The one recently added to Netflix Australia was Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption. There’s also a fifth film, The Scorpion King: Book of Souls, a direct sequel to Scorpion King 4. (We previously mentioned the Scorpion King franchise in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.)
Stream Team is a series of Guardian articles about the hidden gems available via various streaming services. Liz did indeed eventually write an article about The Mummy films for Stream Team, in June 2021.
Hood ornaments on cars were originally invented because in early designs the radiator cap protruded from the front of the car. Instead of a boring functional cap, some manufacturers made small ornaments and used those as the cap; once they became a symbol of the brand, like the Jaguar jaguar and the Rolls Royce angel, they continued to be attached to the hood even once the radiator was relocated to entirely inside the hood. They disappeared in part due to changing tastes, but also because of pedestrian safety standards in Europe.
Mulder and Scully are the protagonists of the television series The X-Files, which we previously mentioned in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“. The pair are FBI agents who investigate cases which are supernatural or otherwise unexplained. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is a profiler and believer in aliens and conspiracies, while Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a doctor and a skeptic; the professional and later romantic and sexual tension between them was a popular part of the show. They eventually begin a relationship during the last few seasons of the show’s initial run, and they try to stay together through the subsequent films and revival seasons.
Stephanie is right: The Truth (2000) comes a few years and five Discworld novels before the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men (2003). We discussed the latter in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“.
Privilege comes from the Latin “privilegium”, which does indeed means private law; in many legal jurisdictions, a privilege is still defined as a “private law” that affords a particular entitlement or protection to a person or class of persons.
The one who thinks in italics is, as suggested by Liz, Edward d’Eath, the antagonist of Men at Arms. The book says of him: “He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.” (We discussed Men at Arms in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.)
The use of eyeglasses goes back to at least the 13th century, with the earliest records show them in Pisa, Northern Italy. There’s some contention about whether they may also have been invented around the same time or earlier in China or India, but unlike many other inventions which were clearly found in Asia first, the evidence for this isn’t clear.
Douglas Adams died in 2001 at the age of 49. He began writing professionally in around 1974, primarily in radio and television, and wrote ten books (including seven novels) between 1979 and 1992 (though it’s probably fairer to count it as nine, since The Deeper Meaning of Liff is really an extended version of The Meaning of Liff). The Salmon of Doubt was published after his death, containing a collection of fiction and non-fiction, some of which had not been published before.
While the form of “gazette” adopted into English does come via French, it ultimately derives from the Venetian phrase “gazeta dele novità“, or “a gazeta of news” – gazeta being the cost of the short paper, equivalent to a half-penny. It’s therefore not quite right to remove the -ette suffix, but we could offer “gaz” or even “megagaz” as the bigger equivalent?
Green Left, previously Green Left Weekly, is an Australian socialist newspaper founded in 1990. It is associated with the political party Socialist Alliance, though it is run independently by the Green Left Association.
The other Discworld podcasts we mention this episode are Who Watches the Watch? and The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.

#Pratchat41 Notes and Errata

08/03/2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“, featuring guest Dr Charlotte Pezaro, discussing 2008’s standalone young adult novel, Nation.

The episode title is riffing on the title of The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005, dir. Robert Rodriguez). It references Mau’s feeling of being like a hermit crab, looking for a bigger shell to live in, and Daphne’s status as a “trouserman”.
For listeners outside of Australia, some brief background on our opening acknowledgement: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples never ceded sovereignty of Australia to English colonisers in the 18th century. The English used the legal concept of terra nullius to claim the land belonged to no-one, and could be claimed for the Crown. Over two centuries later, in 1992, the High Court of Australia ruled in the case Mabo v Queensland (No 2) that indigenous peoples’ traditional ownership could be legally recognised, introducing the concept of “native title”. While this has not yet resulted in Australia or any of its states signing treaties with indigenous peoples, it has since become common practice for an “acknowledgment of country” or “acknowledgment of traditional owners” to be given at events, paying respect to and publicly naming (if they are known) the custodians of the land on which the event takes place. We’d like to thank Charlotte for providing wording to appropriately acknowledge the history of indigenous science.
Lost is a television drama created by by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams, and Damon Lindelof in 2004. It follows a large ensemble cast of plane crash survivors who are lost on an island in the South Pacific. They are threatened by weird creatures, supernatural occurrences, a mysterious organisation and other inhabitants of the at first seemingly empty island. It was famous for its ongoing supernatural mystery with complex storylines; use of flashbacks and flash-forwards; and, ultimately, for failing to provide a satisfying conclusion to the mystery after six years of buildup.
Terry said Nation was his favourite of his books in many interviews, but perhaps most famously in the acceptance speech for the 2009 Boston Globe-Horn Award, which Nation won. As Ben reads out in a footnote, he said “I believe Nation is the best book I have ever written or will ever write”, and doesn’t appear to have changed his mind afterwards. The entire speech appears in his non-fiction collection A Slip of the Keyboard. (This is a also a good source for his comments about feeling the need to write Nation.)
In nautical terms, a schooner is a ship with two or more masts with “fore-and-aft” rigged sails; to avoid more nautical jargon, this means the edges of the sails point at the front and back of the ship, rather than sticking out over the sides as in square-rigged ships. Interestingly this is the sort of rigging used by Austronesian sailors thousands of years ago – including the “lobster-claw” sails mentioned in the book (presumably a relative of the crab claw sails of our world).
In beer terms, a schooner is…certainly a size of beer glass used in Australia. The sizes of beer glasses and their names are notoriously varied across Australia’s states and territories, though “schooner” is almost universally used for a glass which holds 425 millilitres (or 15 fluid ounces), though they’re not commonly served in some states, including Victoria. We say “almost universally” because in South Australia the 425ml glass is called a “pint” (even though every other state uses a standard 570ml glass for pints), and they use “schooner” to mean the common smaller sized glass of 285ml. In Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane this is called a “pot”, while in Sydney and Canberra (where standard schooners are more common) it’s a “middy”. Learning to work in a bar in Australia is quite an education.
We’ve so far covered a few of Terry’s standalone novels, most of which came at the start and end of his career. They include the early sci-fi novels The Dark Side of the Sun (see #Pratchat18) and Strata, his first novel The Carpet People, Good Omens with Neil Gaiman (see #Pratchat15), Nation and Dodger (see #Pratchat6).
Fight Club began life as a short story by author Chuck Palahniuk before being expanded into a novel published in 1996, and adapted into a film in 1999 by David Fincher starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. The story follows an unnamed insomniac protagonist who is tired of his normal, numb existence. When his home is destroyed, he moves in with soap salesman Tyler Durden and the pair start “Fight Club”, an underground group in which men physically fight each other in order to feel something. Famously, both the first and second rules of Fight Club are “Do not talk about Fight Club.”
There are many creation stories found in the Pacific Islands; Ben is taking some time to research them for signs of inspiration for those of the Nation. The idea of human souls becoming dolphins, though, is not a Polynesian one; dolphins are considered lucky and to be respected in many sailing traditions, though, and feature in many stories of Greek mythology, where it was taboo to kill them.
The Russian flu is a name sometimes used for the flu pandemic of 1889-1890, also known at the time as the “Asiatic flu”, though neither name is used in literature now. It killed around 1 million people worldwide, but what caused it isn’t known for sure. The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was much worse, killing between 17 and 100 million people; it was caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus, which was also responsible for the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic.
12 Monkeys is a 1995 time travel film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt. Inspired by the French short film La Jetée, it follows James Cole, a prisoner in the virus-ravaged future of 2035, where humanity is forced to live underground. A group of scientists select Cole as a test subject to be sent back in time to stop the release of the virus, which they think was engineered by a terrorist organisation known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. The film was later adapted into a television series which ran for four seasons from 2015 to 2018.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) made his famous voyage on the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, and by the time of his return to England was already well-known in scientific circles. The Origin of Species was first published in 1859. All of this marries well with the idea that the book takes place in the 1860s, though there’s plenty of room to move.
Disinfectant in the nineteenth century was still pretty new, since germ theory was still catching on. We don’t know what the dripping red substance was, though it probably smelled much worse than crushed up roses.
A tsunami is a series of huge waves caused by displacement of large amounts of water in a sea, ocean or other large body of water. They are primarily caused by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Pratchett was initially inspired by the aftermath of the Krakatoa eruption, but not long after he had the idea for Nation there was a tsunami in the Indian ocean which killed more than 20,000 people on Boxing Day, 2004. He postponed work on the story. The name tsunami is Japanese, and means “harbour wave”. It is the preferred scientific term, rather than the older term “tidal wave”, since tsunamis are not caused by tides.
Daphne’s father, Henry Fanshaw (later King Henry IX), is Governor of Port Mercia in the Rogation Sunday Islands.
Survivor guilt – the feeling that one has done something wrong by surviving when others have died – is a common expression of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Tattersalls Club Charlotte mentions is a private gentlemen’s club founded in Brisbane in 1865 by, in their own words, “a group of gentlemen who were prominent in both business and in the thoroughbred horse racing industry”. In December 2018, after some public protest that they still only allowed men as members, a vote was held which passed by a margin of only about 1% to allow women to join, but a group of members were so against this they appealed to the Brisbane supreme court, asking for a recount thanks to some rules technicalities. Their appeal was denied in February 2019, and the club now accepts women as members.
In case you’ve been living in one, an “echo chamber” refers to any situation in which a group of people only listens to others who agree with their own views, amplifying their believe that they are right and shielding them from criticism or debate. It is especially applied to social media, where one’s curated list of who you follow can create a “bubble” of only like-minded opinions.
To answer Liz’s question, no, Terry didn’t draw the illustrations for Nation. They are by children’s book illustrator and author Jonny Duddle, who is credited as the sole illustrator for the UK edition of the book. Duddle drew everything, including the maps, the chapter illustrations and the in-character drawings by Mau and Daphne. (He also did extra endpaper designs featuring a hermit crab for the “Special Numbered Collectors’ Edition”.) As far as we can tell he also illustrated the original cover, though his art was not used in the US edition, which has a cover by Bill Mayer. We’re not sure if the US edition has any of Duddle’s art – not even the bits that seem important to the plot! The current UK edition of the book has a new cover by Laura Ellen Anderson, but we think it still has Duddle’s art inside. We don’t have access to those editions, so we’d love to hear from you with details if you do!
It is indeed true that right up until the 19th century most sailors did not know how to swim. This was both because there was little chance a ship could turn around fast enough to get them if they fell overboard, even if the captain chose to try, and because very few of them were professionals anyway – they were temporary hires, or drafted or press-ganged into service. Also, in the time before fast travel and public swimming pools, only people who lived by the sea or a lake would swim recreationally, so it wasn’t a common skill.
The history of bathing suits goes back to the 16th century, when they were actually used for bathing in public baths, but even when they started to be used for swimming their initial purpose was to hide women’s bodies. By the time more form-fitting styles were desired, the only material that could really be used was wool, since synthetic materials hadn’t yet been invented and everything else sagged or became too heavy in water. This article at Swim Swam covers the history of wool swimsuits in great detail.
Sweary parrots turn up in lots of places, including Tintin, the film Deep Blue Sea, the videogame Neverwinter Nights 2 and, indeed, real life – including – and we checked this with a few sources – US President Andrew Jackson’s pet parrot, Poll, who had to be removed from Jackson’s funeral because it was swearing too much.
Pratchett not only had the comedy parrot in Eric, but in Moving Pictures the directors abandon using parrots to add sound to their clicks because the dialogue always ended up naughty. We covered Eric in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies“, and Moving Pictures in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
Bridgerton is Netflix’s wildly successful 2021 series about the Regency-era Bridgerton family and their daughters’ quests for love and marriage. The series is an adaptation of the Bridgerton novels by American author Julia Quinn, which begin with 2000’s The Duke and I. The series contains a great deal more sex than anything written by Jane Austen; none of the Bridgerton sisters are likely to vaporise in their rooms…well, probably not while alone, and certainly not quietly.
Spoiler alert: Ben is talking about the character Mrs Landingham, who dies in the penultimate episode of The West Wing‘s second season, “18th and Potomac”. The scene Ben recalls with President Jed Bartlett in the church is in the following season finale episode, “Two Cathedrals”. Both aired in 2001.
We’ve previously mentioned 1970s Swedish pop sensations ABBA back in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation”, which came out the same month as the band’s reunion single “I Still Have Faith in You”. The song “Waterloo” was their winning entry for the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, and the start of their rise to international fame. “Nina, Pretty Ballerina” was from their pre-Eurovision first album Ring Ring, released in 1973 under the name Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid (or, in Austria, Björn & Benny, Anna & Frida).
Studies in 2017 and 2020 concluded that regardless of culture or language, babies recognise and prefer baby talk (or “Infant Directed Language”) to regular speech.
In Mort the two prominent female characters are Death’s adopted daughter Ysabell, and Queen Keli of Sto Helit. Mort is instantly infatuated with Keli, but eventually marries Ysabell, with whom he has bickered for the entire book. You can hear our thoughts about all this in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“.
The Wee Free Men (discussed in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“) was published in 2003, five years before Nation. The later Tiffany Aching book Wintersmith, published a couple of years before Nation in 2006, has the now 13-year-old Tiffany deal with her first real boy trouble.
We know you’re wracking your brain to think of it too, but the “motorcycle dominos” appear in so many films and television series that they are a trope. Ben probably saw it in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985, dir. Tim Burton), but you’ll also find it in the Clint Eastwood movie Every Which Way But Loose, 80s slasher film Friday the 13th Part III, and even an episode of Scrubs.
How long has the Nation existed? Daphne counts 102 dead Grandfathers in the cave by the time they can no longer see the entrance, and later loses count after “hundreds”; the prose mentions “hundreds and thousands” – possibly a thought of Daphne’s – but that’s inconclusive. But even assuming there are only 1,000 of them, and that a handful of Grandfathers are put in the cave per generation, using the general estimate of one generation per 25 years tells us the Nation’s history goes four or five thousand years, if not tens of thousands. Not at all far-fetched when we consider that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures stretch back at least 50,000 years, and that they were likely the first peoples to ever cross an ocean.
Ben is using the term “cargo cult” a little loosely. It comes from World War II, when Japanese and then Allied forces visited places in Melanesia – the nations and islands of the southwest Pacific Ocean, northeast of Australia, many of which had had little contact with other peoples. The soldiers brought with them goods and technology that had never been seen by the locals before, sometimes trading with them, but left after the war ended. In the hopes that the visitors and their cargo might return, some local peoples developed rituals in which they imitated the soldiers, integrating stories of their visitation into their existing beliefs. Many earlier examples have been found, and some still persist today.
Despite that fact that only Charlotte can remember its title, Liz and Ben discussed The Fifth Elephant only a month earlier, in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“.
Ben refers to the “Battle of Wits” between the Man in Black (Cary Elwes) and Sicilian kidnapper Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) in the 1987 film The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner and adapted by William Goldman from his 1973 novel. In the scene, Vizzini has Princess Buttercup at knifepoint, but cannot resist when challenged to a battle of wits to the death. After Vizzini pours two glasses of wine, the Man in Black pours a deadly poison, “iocane powder”, into one of the glasses; Vizzini will decide which one, and then they will both drink. The scene is the basis for one of Ben’s favourite party boardgames, one of several games based on the film published by Game Salute. We previously mentioned The Princess Bride in #Pratchat17 and #Pratchat36.
Atlantis is a fictional island nation invented by Plato for his books Timaeus and Critias. The Atlantean civilisation was described as powerful, and the Atlanteans themselves as “half gods”, but they grew too proud and the gods sunk their island beneath the sea in the space of a single day. The myth has proven popular for centuries, with versions since the twentieth century often imagining Atlantis as possessing advanced technologies – and perhaps causing their own demise, rather than it being a punishment of the gods.
We didn’t end up coming back to the map, but of note is Terry’s decision to split Australia in half, as Nearer Australia and Further Australia. It’s not mentioned in the novel, so we’ll have to decide for ourselves whether this is accurate and thus representative of some unknown alternate universe calamity, or is a reference to the fact that early European maps of Australia were often very incomplete, since they rarely sailed around the entire continent. (None split it in two, but many leave a big gap in the middle where South Australia is as if to say “who knows?”)
The Mythbusters did indeed test what happens when shooting into water, in episode 34, “Bulletproof Water“. They listed the muth as “partly confirmed” – high velocity sniper rifle rounds disintegrated in less than a metre of water, but bullets from smaller guns needed more water to slow down enough to be safe; the Mythbusters said at least 8 feet. Firing at an angle into the water means the target doesn’t need to be as deep to be safe, though, so Mau being safe stands up until Cox is right on top of him at the end.
Mutant superhero Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, has epic super-speed sequences in the films X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), both written and directed by Bryan Singer. Quicksilver moves so fast that everything else appears to him to be in slow motion, so he easily redirects bullets fired at his allies so that they miss. Charlotte was miming the famous sequence from the original The Matrix (1999, dir. the Wachowskis) in which protagonist Neo, now aware he is inside a complex computer simulation, breaks the rules of physics and dodges bullets. The technique used to film this, now known as “bullet time”, involved still cameras being activated in sequence, allowing a slow-motion sequence in which the point of view moved around.
We’ve previously explained the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is quite something considering we’re a book club podcast. Check out the show notes for #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“.
“A shrubbery!” is the first of many ludicrous demands made by the imposing Knights Who Say “Ni” as tribute, in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Mau’s list of demands is very reasonable by comparison.
The tree-climbing octopus may have been inspired by the sadly fictitious “Pacific Northwest tree octopus”, an Internet hoax dating back to 1998. It was said to live in the Olympic National Forest in Washington State, right in the northwest corner of the USA, and that its main natural predator was the sasquatch. The original spoof site Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, created by “Lyle Zapato”, has been used to teach children Internet literacy.
Sadly it seems that no octopuses have learned to count. If you want to see the adorable and very smart things they do learn, Ben recommends you check out OctoNation, the world’s biggest octopus fan club.
The character with the coffin in Moby Dick is Queequeg, who is the son of a Polynesian chief. After he becomes friends with the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, Queequeg joins him on Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, where he becomes a harpooner under the First Mate, Starbuck. When a casting of runes predicts his death, he has a coffin made for himself and refuses to eat or drink. When the whal Moby Dick sinks the Pequod, Queequeg goes down with the ship, but Ishmael survives by clinging to the floating coffin until he is picked up by another ship. It seems pretty clear Cookie’s previous shipmate is a nod to the character in Herman Melville’s book.
The Pratchett interview excerpt about fantasy that’s lately been doing the rounds is from an interview he did with The Onion in 1995. This is before The Onion went online, of course, but a few months after Pratchett’s death in 2015, fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss transcribed it on his blog as part of his tribute to Terry.
Liz and Ben’s differing opinions on Lord of the Flies go all the way back to #Pratchat7A and #Pratchat9.
Heart of Darkness is a 1899 novella by Joseph Conrad. Protagonist Charles Marlow becomes a steamboat captain for an ivory trading company and travels up the Congo river, where he becomes obsessed with another employee of the company, Kurtz. Kurtz, now sick and close to death, is revered as a success, but his habits and methods are extreme. It was most famously adapted by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now, with the setting relocated to the Vietnam war and the US Army replacing the ivory company.
The Blue Lagoon (1980, dir. Randal Kleiser, of Grease fame) is an adaptation of the 1908 romance novel written by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. In the story, two young American cousins – Richard (Dicky in the novel) and Emmeline (you’ll see in a moment why Daphne rejects the name) – are marooned on a South Pacific Island island with the ship’s cook. The cook dies, and the two grow up on the island alone, eventually “falling in love” and having a child together before being rescued. The movie, which starred Brooke Shields as Emmeline, was critically panned but did very well at the box office. There were two previous film adaptations in 1923 and 1949, and once since in 2012, as well as a 1991 sequel to the 1980 film, Return to the Blue Lagoon, starring Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause; it’s basically a retelling of the original story, with the twist that Krause plays the son of Richard and Emmeline, and he and Jovovich’s character decide to stay on the island after they encounter a crew of sailors.
Is mother of beer a real thing? Sort of! Listeners Felix and Elizabeth both contacted us about masato, a drink made in the Amazonian basin from the yuca plant, also known as cassava or manioc root. In traditional preparation, the yuca is peeled and soaked or boiled in water, then chewed by women who spit the juice into a bowl. Their saliva converts the starch in the juice into sugar, and wild yeast or bacteria ferments the sugar into alcohol. Raw yuca is poisonous, but it’s not the spit that makes it safe to drink – the soaking or boiling does that. Masato is basically a form of chicha, a drink made through similar means throughout Latin America from less poisonous vegetables, most often corn.
Beer is made from cereal grains, most often barley which has been malted (soaked in water to make it germinate, then dried out with heat to stop it growing, and usually mashed into a powder). The malt is mixed with warm water, and usually hops (the flowers of the hop plant) to add bitterness and flavour, before yeast is added. The yeast ferments the sugars in the malt into alcohol. Beer is one of the oldest documented foods, and has been made by humans for around 13,000 years or more.
To put Charlotte’s comment that “where humans exist, grains are” in context, evidence found in the last decade or so makes it pretty clear that grains have been part of the human diet for probably at least 100,000 years.
Kava is a plant that grows in the pacific islands; its root is made into a drink with a sedative effect. It’s hugely important in many places, drunk for medicinal, religious, political, cultural and social reasons. It’s effect is described as very different to that of alcohol, caffeine or nicotine.
It was guest Myfanwy Coghill who said anyone can learn the skill of singing; you can hear this and many other amazing insights from her in our Maskerade episode, #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
You can find Pratchat on Podchaser, and also a list of Discworld read-through podcasts which Ben tries to keep up to date. Let him know if you find one that’s missing!
Our Llamedos Holiday Camp on the Clacks panel, “Podcasting Discworld”, was held online at 3 PM UK time on Sunday, March 7 (which was 2 AM Monday the 7Ath, Australian Eastern Daylight Time). As well as Liz and Ben, the panel featured Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Colm Kearns of Radio Morpork, and Al Kennedy of Desert Island Discworld.
The Answer, in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, is shorthand for “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”. It is revealed by hyper advanced supercomputer Deep Thought to be…42. This doesn’t make sense, but Deep Thought also solves that problem: no-one actually knows what the Question is. Hence he builds another computer to figure it out, and causing no end of trouble for one Arthur Dent.

More notes coming soon!