Author: Ben

These are the show notes and errata for episode 12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“, featuring guest Jackie Tang, discussing the 1991 Discworld novel Witches Abroad.

• “Voodoo” is a popular culture distillation of several religions, but especially Haitian and Louisiana Vodun, themselves derived from West African Vodun and influenced by many other traditions, including Christianity. Some rituals involve summoning spirits known as lwa or loa, intermediaries between the physical world and the creator deity (Bondye, Mawu or others depending on the tradition). Famous loa include Baron Samedi, a loa of the dead, and Papa Legba, who exists at the crossroads between the material and spiritual worlds. 
• Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a 19th century Russian writer. His works are social commentary, mostly in the form of farce and satire. The Government Inspector is his best known novel, but he is mostly remembered for his many short stories including Diary of a Madman, The Nose, The Overcoat and The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich. (His name is pronounced GO-gl, which is more or less the only way we don’t try to say Mrs Gogol’s name during the podcast.)
• Of the Discworld books we’ve covered so far, Wyrd Sisters, Sourcery and Moving Pictures all begin with a death. Pyramids, Men at Arms and Reaper Man all have deaths close to the beginning that are vital (if you’ll excuse the term) to their plots.
• The prose poem Desiderata was written by American writer Max Ehrman in 1927, though it didn’t become widely known until the early 1970s. You’ve almost certainly read or heard at least one of the verses. The poem’s copyright status has been a matter of contention over the years, in part because it was printed unattributed in a church leaflet accompanied by the church’s founding date, leading some to believe it was much older and therefore in the public domain. As a result the Annotated Pratchett File has a copyright notice asserting Erhman’s authorship rather than any quotes, but by contrast you can read the whole thing on Wikipedia. The word “Desiderata” is Latin, the plural form of “desideratum”: a thing wished for, or – you guessed it – desirable. It is indeed the source of the English word “desire”.
• We ruined our browser history so you wouldn’t have to: Echidna penises are indeed unusual. They are very long for their body size, and with not three but four prongs, more like those seen in reptiles than other mammals. They only use two of the prongs at a time, though. (Hedgehog penises are less weird, but also quite long for their tiny size.)
• Shrek (2001) is a DreamWorks animated film, loosely based on the 1990 picture book by William Steig. The title character is an ugly green ogre who sets out to rescue Princess Fiona from a dragon for Lord Farquaad, so that he will stop exiling fairytale creatures from the kingdom of Duloc in Shrek’s swamp. A bit like Lily, Farquaad is obsessed with making his kingdom “the fairest of them all”, but he has a hatred for fairytale creatures (the reasons for which are explored in the Broadway musical adaptation of the film). Shrek was massively popular and has spawned three sequels, a spin-off, numerous short films and two television series. A fourth sequel is in development. 
• Lawrence Sterne, 18th century English novelist and clergyman, is best known as the author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. His other novel is the travelogue mentioned by Jackie, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
• Ravenloft is a gothic horror themed plane of existence known as “the Demiplane of Dread”, consisting of various separate “Domains of Dread”, each ruled by a “Dreadlord” (okay, we get it, it’s full of dread) and inspired by different horror stories. The Dracula inspired one is Barovia, a village in an isolated valley. It shares much of its DNA with Überwald and the village visited by the witches in Witches Abroad. The domains are influenced by the mysterious, unseen “Dark Powers”.
• Nanny’s “die flabberghast” is a reference to Die Fledermaus (“the bat”), a famous operetta by Austrian composer Johann Strauss. The opera relates the story of a Viennese man, Gabriel von Eisenstein, who is persuaded to avoid a minor prison sentence for a day to attend a masked ball. This is a plot by Gabriel’s friend Falke, who has also secretly invited Gabriel’s maid, his wife, and the governor of the prison where Eisenstein should be. Falke wants to pay Gabriel back for a prank in which, after a previous ball, he left a drunk Falke in the middle of town in his bat costume, causing him much ridicule – hence the title of the operetta, which is sometimes called The Revenge of the Bat in English. Die Fledermaus is also a character in the animated TV version of superhero parody The Tick; a parody of Batman, Fledermaus has a similar costume (except with a more realistic, ghost bat inspired face – weird nose, huge ears etc) and no superpowers, but is supremely vain and cowardly.
• Maverick is a 1994 film, based on a 1950s television series, starring Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick, a con man participating in a high-stakes poker game aboard a riverboat. It also starred James Garner (who played the title role in the original series), Jodie Foster and Alfred Molina, and was the second-last film for famous B-movie star Doug McClure, who appeared alongside many other old school Western actors.
• Mahjong is a Chinese game, usually for four players, which uses a set of 144 or more tiles. Most of the tiles are “simples”, numbered 1 to 9 in three suits: dots (or circles), bamboo, and characters (or wan). There are also a smaller number of “honours” tiles – winds and dragons – and eight unique bonus tiles, the flowers and/or seasons. The tiles begin the game organised into face-down stacks, and based on a dice roll players begin with thirteen randomly selected tiles. During the game, players take turns to discard a tile they do not want and draw one from a wall. To win, a player must collect and declare (by calling “Mahjong”) a named sets of tiles which meets a minimum number of points, decided by the players in advance. Players can also steal a discarded tile to form a smaller set which allows them to take their turn early, possibly forcing one or more other players to lose a turn. The winner’s points are tallied over multiple games, usually sixteen for four players, and the player with the highest score at the end of the games wins.
• For more about the practice of painting lawns green – and the politics of lawn management in places like Los Angeles – we recommend Lawn Order, an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written by L Frank Baum in 1900. It was a massive success and Baum went on to write thirteen sequels, the last one being Glinda of Oz in 1920. As Liz mentions, in the first book visitors are made to wear green-tinted glasses – only the external walls are actually green. Later books however describe the city as green without any mention of the glasses.
• The television series Once Upon A Time (2011-2018) and comic book series Fables (2002-2015) are both based on the premise that fairytale characters and creatures are stranded in the real world. In Once Upon A Time, the characters are exiled to the American town of Storybrooke as part of a plot by the evil queen Regina, aided by Rumpelstiltskin. The town’s residents cannot remember who they are, or notice that they have lived unchanging lives without aging for nearly three decades, but the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming escaped the curse and may be able to undo it. In Fables, the characters flee their home realms to a burrough of New York they nickname Fabletown to escape a mysterious and powerful evil force known as “the Adversary”. Those who can pose as humans, while those who cannot – talking animals and monsters – are forced to live on a remote farm in upstate New York, protected by magic. Rivalries and politics have not been left behind, however, and must often be solved by sheriff “Bigby” Wolf and deputy mayor Snow White.
• Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) is best remembered for writing nearly four thousand fairytales (!), including The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling and loads more you have definitely heard. He was also famously played by Danny Kaye in the not-at-all biographical musical film, Hans Christian Andersen, in 1952.
• “Moistened bint” is how Dennis, the anarcho-communist peasant, refers to the Lady in the Lake, aka one of the “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords”, in the 1975 comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (We’ve mentioned it before, and probably will again.) Also, in case you haven’t seen it: 8-year-old Saga Vanacek recently pulled a 1,500 year old sword out of a lake. Like the rest of the Internet, we hope she will be our new King now.
• The late Anthony Bourdain was a beloved American celebrity chef, author and documentarian, well known for his various television shows in which he travelled the world sampling all kinds of local cuisines. He frequently spotlighted foods and cooks ignored by other such programs, including immigrants and street food vendors, so we’re confident he would have ignored the banquet halls of Lily’s palace and headed straight for Mrs Pleasant’s kitchen or the market where Mrs Gogol’s tent was pitched.
• “When I say run” is an oft-repeated line of the Doctor across most of their incarnations. The earliest version is perhaps from the Second Doctor’s first story, 1966’s The Power of the Daleks, in which he says to his companion Ben Jackson: “When I say run, run like a rabbit…RUN!” We found a YouTube compilation of every instance of the Doctor telling people to run, but be warned – it runs for twenty minutes!
• A “bodice ripper” is a romance novel with sex scenes, set in an historical period. It’s a much-beloved genre which continues to enjoy great success, and not just with famous pulp romance publishing house Mills & Boon. If you’re keen to investigate further, we suggest hitting up the web site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books for reviews. SBTB uses a comprehensive system of tags, and Greebo-as-sexy-corsair fans might enjoy the “Fantasy/Fairytale Romance” genre, “Pirate” archetype and/or “Were/Shifter” theme.
• Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s 1981 musical Cats was adapted from T. S. Elliot’s 1939 poetry collection, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. No, we don’t know why he did that either. In the musical, a tribe of cats called the Jellicles meet for their annual Ball, at which their leader, Old Deuteronomy, will name one of them to ascend to the heaven like “Heaviside layer” and be reborn. He is briefly kidnapped, but otherwise the entire musical consists of the cats breaking the fourth wall to explain their ways to the humans watching. It’s as weird as it sounds, but it’s also the fourth-longest running musical ever to appear on Broadway and the sixth-longest in the West End, and continues to be produced around the world.
• Red Dwarf is a British sit-com created by Doug Naylor and Rob Grant which premiered on the BBC in 1988. It follows the adventures of David Lister (played by Craig Charles), a 22nd century slob working in the lowest-ranking job aboard the mining spaceship Red Dwarf. When he brings a cat on board against regulations, he is placed in stasis as punishment, and is thus the only survivor of a major radiation leak. He is awakened three million years later by the ship’s computer to discover an entire humanoid civilisation had evolved from his cat, leaving behind a single survivor known only as “Cat”: a vain creature obsessed with fashion, sleep and sex. Cat, played by Danny John-Jules, is one of only two characters to appear in every episode of the show, which after a long hiatus returned in 2009 on UK digital channel Dave. A thirteenth series is coming in 2019.
• There are videos of cats eating sushi, but really, you should definitely look at pictures of cats dressed up as if they are sushi.
• In the French folktale “Bluebeard” (not “Bluebeard’s Bride”, though see below) a young woman is married to a wealthy widowed nobleman and given free run of his enormous mansion – except for one room which she must never enter. She eventually does look in the room while Bluebeard is away, only to discover he had murdered his previous wives. Bluebeard knows thanks to a magical key and returns, but the bride is saved by her brothers who show up and kill him, leaving her to inherit his fortune. The story lends its name to the ATU 312 classification of folk tales, described as “the brother rescues his sister”. Bluebeard also appears as a major character in the comic Fables, where he is depicted as a pirate. The roleplaying game Bluebeard’s Bride from Magpie Games explores the tale further by having the players collectively play the bride, wandering through Bluebeard’s house alone.
• The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a popular though heavily criticised personality test based largely on Carl Jung’s ideas of dominant psychological functions. It uses a series of questions to sort a person into one of sixteen personality types organised along four axes: extroversion/introversion, thinking/feeling, sensing/intuition and judging/perceiving. The test was created during World War II by mother and daughter Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, self-taught psychometrists who initially used it to help place women in appropriate jobs as they entered the wartime workforce. After several earlier versions, the first “MBTI Manual” was published in 1962 and became heavily used in the corporate world, though it is not widely accepted in psychological circles. It’s enduring legacy is that we all have that one friend obsessed with sorting everyone they know into their Myers-Briggs type.
• The name Lily takes in Genua is “Lady Lilith de Tempscire”, taken from the French temps, weather, and scire, beeswax or candlewax. In the course of looking this up, we discovered that the French use a different word for the kind of wax you use on skis: fart. It’s probably just as well that modern skis are made from materials that do not generally require waxing to achieve good speed on snow.
• Remus Lupin is the third of the ill-fated Defence Against the Dark Arts tutors at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to appear in the Harry Potter books and films. His name is something of a spoiler: Remus is one of the two twins of Roman myth who were raised by wolves, the other being Romulus, the founder of Rome (from whom it supposedly takes its name). Lupin is another form of the Latin word lupine, which as we’ve previously discussed means wolf. You’ll never guess what dark secret Remus Lupin is hiding…though as far as we can tell, he’s always had that name, despite not being born with his…affliction.  
• For more on Hyacinth Bucket, see the show notes for #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“, about Reaper Man.
• We talk more about the time-skip in Lancre when discussing Wyrd Sisters in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“.
• Let Them Eat Cake was a 1999 BBC sit-com starring Jennifer Saunders as Colombine, the Comtesse de Vache, a scheming noblewoman in pre-revolutionary France, and Dawn French as her loyal and nymphomaniacal servant, Lisette. It ran for one series of six episodes, and is rare in being a series which starred Saunders and French, but was not created or written by them.
• Ares, Greek god of war, was one of the most prominent antagonists featured in the television Xenaverse of Xena: Warrior Princess and its predecessor, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. He was played by New Zealand actor Kevin Smith, who sadly passed away in 2002. Google him in his usual Ares gear and we think you’ll agree he’s a perfect for for Greebo, though makeup and costume would need to give him some scars and scuff up his leather.
• The Craft is a 1996 supernatural horror movie about four high school girls who form a coven, two of whom are played by Fairuza Balk (whose first film role was as Dorothy in Return to Oz) and Neve Campbell (best known for her starring role in the television drama Party of Five). They gain the ability to cast all manner of spells through the worship of a god named “Manon”, blending old-school Puritan ideas of Satanic witchcraft with more modern Wicca. Magrat clearly hasn’t seen the film, or she wouldn’t be so keen on using magic to fix all of her problems! A remake was announced in 2016, but has so far failed to materialise.
  

These are the show notes and errata for episode 11, “At Bill’s Door“, featuring guest Sarah Pearson, discussing the 1991 Discworld novel Reaper Man.

• Hard Quiz is an ABC game show, currently in its third series, in which contestants nominate a specialist topic and are grilled with exceptionally difficult questions by comedian Tom Gleeson. Contestants are eliminated each round, and the winner takes home a trophy known as the “Big Brass Mug”. (As is standard for quiz shows on the national broadcaster, there’s not a valuable prize.) Sarah appeared on the 17th episode of series two, up against horse expert Charles, French & Saunders expert Daniel and JFK expert Marc. (The ABC are currently alternating new and repeat episodes, so Sarah’s episode should reappear on iView a few months after this Pratchat!)
• Sarah mentions captioning the Australian versions of reality TV shows Survivor (in its third series) and The Bachelor (season six, starring former rugby union player Nick Cummins), both on Channel Ten.
• The previous Eurovision winner was Israel’s Netta with the song “Toy”, featuring some non-speech vocalisations which would make Cyril the rooster super envious. You can watch the official music video and the Eurovision grand final performance on YouTube. (Tellingly, neither video includes captions!)
• Morris Dancing is traditional British form of folk dance kept alive not just in the UK but wherever British immigrants and their descendants are found. A group who dances the Morris are known as a “side”, and in Australia they are loosely affiliated via the Australian Morris Ring. Ben would like to give a shout out to his local side, Brandragon Morris, which still boasts some of those “right kind of nerds” he knew at university as members.
• Monty Python’s “fish-slapping dance” sketch starring John Cleese and Michael Palin was originally produced as part of the 1971 pan-European May Day special Euroshow 71 before showing up in the following year’s series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The sketch only lasts for 20 seconds, but is cited by Michael Palin as one of his proudest moments; the story goes that the lock next to where they were performing was drained in between rehearsals and shooting, so the drop into the water was more than ten feet further than he was expecting!
• Petunia Dursley is Harry Potter’s aunt in the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. She later becomes a little more sympathetic, but in the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (known in the US as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) she is described like this: “Mrs Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbours.”
• A Nightmare on Elm Street is a hugely successful horror film franchise created by Wes Craven with the film of the same name in 1984. They feature dead child murderer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), who stalks and kills the teenagers of Springwood, Ohio through their dreams, particularly targeting Nancy Thompson, who lives on Elm Street. He returns in five sequels; in the last, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), he starts killing in a new town, claiming that “Every town has an Elm Street!” (It is a pretty common street name in the US.) The franchise also spawned an anthology horror TV series, Freddy’s Nightmares; Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) in which Freddy invades the real world; a 2010 remake of the original film; and Freddy vs Jason (2006), in which Freddy fights with Jason Vorhees from the Friday the 13th series of horror films.
• At the end of the tenth season of the modern Doctor Who, the Twelfth Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, regenerated into the Thirteenth Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker – the first woman to (officially) play the role in the show’s 55 year history. Among conservative and sexist fans there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, despite it being a change the show had been laying groundwork for many years.
• Most vertebrate animals have a spleen, and as well as being the elephant graveyard for blood (thanks Liz), it also synthesises antibodies and stores a reserve of monocytes, the largest kind of white blood cell, both of which are very important to the immune system. The “red pulp” of the spleen, where the monocytes are stored, is also known as “the cords of Billroth”, a name Ben has immediately stolen for his Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
• The “squiggly spooge” is an organ possessed by Irkan aliens, including the title character of classic Nickelodeon animated series Invader Zim, created by Jhonen Vasquez. It’s since passed into the online lexicon where it is used as a placeholder word for any unknown organ.
• There were indeed two versions of the original Street Fighter arcade game, and one had large rubber punch and kick buttons which responded to how hard to whacked them. You can find out more about the forgotten precursor to Street Fighter II in this Kotaku article from 2011.
• In the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and several other former British colonies, Boxing Day is a public holiday celebrated the day after Christmas. There are few modern traditions attached to it, though in Australia at least it is the day many Summer blockbuster films are released.
• We struggled to find a good source for Romans making roads out of garbage, but one of our favourite podcasts, 99% Invisible, have done stories about the making of new streets above the old in Seattle (and in a similar story, the creation of new land in the early history of San Francisco).
• In Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), Uma Thurman’s protagonist “The Bride” is buried alive in a coffin, but uses elite martial arts techniques to break open the coffin and dig her way to the surface.
• Repo Man (1984) is a cult sci-fi comedy film written and directed by Adam Cox and starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton. Estevez plays a punk who takes a job working with Stanton as a repossession agent, and they go looking for a car which may have been involved in extraterrestrial activity. Pratchett confirmed in interviews that Reaper Man was a deliberate pun on the film’s title.
• “Rocket Man” is a 1972 single by Elton John with lyrics by Bernie Taupin, which appeared on the album Honky Château. It features the line “I miss the Earth so much, I miss my wife; it’s lonely out in space”. It was famously covered in 1991 by Kate Bush for the tribute album Two Rooms: The Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin.
• Professor Filius Flitwick is the part-goblin Charms Master and Head of Ravenclaw House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. (In the world of Harry Potter, that is, he’s sadly not real.) On screen he is played by Warwick Davis of Star Wars and Willow fame, albeit with a radical change in look between the earlier and later films.
• When Ben talks about “shot matching“, he means the cinematic technique known as the match cut, in which the end of one scene is visually or thematically matched with the beginning of the next. Two of the most famous examples are the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which visually matches a bone thrown into the air with a similarly shaped satellite, and this cut from David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), which uses vision and audio to thematically match Lawrence blowing out his match with the silent desert at dawn. The Lawrence cut was the work of English film editor Anne V Coates, recognised as one of the all-time greats; her assistant on Lawrence, Ray Lovejoy, was the editor for 2001.
• Blink is the tenth episode of the third series of the modern Doctor Who, in which Steven Moffat introduced the spooky “Weeping Angels” – creatures who look like statues and can’t move while being looked at. Blink, and they move lightning fast. The final shots of real statues all around London – suggesting to young impressionable viewers that the Angels might be lurking around every corner – caused an epidemic of nightmares.
• Police Constable Reg Hollis, played by Scottish actor Jeff Stewart, appeared in almost the entire 26-year run of ITV’s cops on the beat soap opera, The Bill. A fan of model trains and gardening who always had something to complain about in his softly-spoken, slightly boring way, Reg was nevertheless a dependable copper, though treated very poorly by most of his fellow officers. He resigned from the force in 2008, two years before the series ended, making Stewart the longest serving original cast member.
• There is indeed a podcast about The Bill, aptly named The Bill Podcast. It’s only been around since 2017, but consists of monthly in-depth interviews with members of the cast. You can find The Bill Podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes and Facebook.
• Keeping Up Appearances was a BBC One sit-com which ran from 1990 to 1995. It followed the farcical adventures of Hyacinth Bucket (Patricia Routledge) in her efforts to hide her lower-class origins – especially her family members – and exaggerate her accent, wealth and abilities to gain favour with those she perceives as her social superiors. Her long-suffering husband Richard Bucket was played by Clive Swift, whose family name of “Bucket” Hyacinth insists on pronouncing “Bouquet”.
• We’d like to give a shout-out to longtime listener and friend of the show Sally Evans, whose tweet sadly arrived too late for us to mention it in the episode:

• Meet Joe Black (1998), loosely based on the film Death Takes a Holiday (1934), stars Anthony Hopkins as a billionaire whom Death decides to visit because of the impassioned speech he gives his daughter (Claire Forlani) when it becomes clear she’s not all that keen on the man she’s about to marry. Father and daughter, by the way, are named Bill and Susan! The Brad Pitt body Death decides to inhabit rather inconsiderately belongs to a man with whom Susan was flirting, moments before he was violently hit and killed by two cars.
• By contrast, Mighty Joe Young (1998), a remake of Mighty Joe Young (1939), stars Charlize Theron as a woman who has raised the titular gorilla, both of whom were orphaned by the same poacher when they were young. Joe is no longer accepted by others of his kind, probably because he is inexplicably three times the normal size for a gorilla. The plot revolves around Theron and Bill Paxton trying to protect Joe from the poacher who wants revenge as Joe bit off two of his hands in their original encounter. It’s…well, it’s no Meet Joe Black, that’s for sure.
• The episode of 99% Invisible about the history of shopping malls is “The Gruen Effect“. While looking up the link for that one, we also found this great article about the birth of the shopping trolley: “Shopping Around: How Folding Basket Carriers Became Modern Nesting Carts“.
• Ben mixes up his Sylvester Stallone characters during the discussion of the Dean; the one who ties a strip of cloth around his forehead is not Rocky Balboa from Rocky (1976) and its many sequels, but John Rambo, from First Blood (1982) and its sequels.
• In Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), the suprisingly non-bogus sequel to the surprisingly excellent time travel slacker comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), teenage rocker wannabes and future saviours of the world Bill S. Preston esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are killed by future despot Chuck D Nomolos (Joss Ackland) before they can fulfil their destiny. They first “Melvin” Death and end up in Hell, but then challenge Death, beating him in games of Clue, Twister and Battleship until he finally agrees to help them return to life, eventually joining their band Wyld Stallyns as a bass player (shades of Soul Music there!). Joss Ackland later played Mustrum Ridcully in the TV adaptation of Hogfather, and reportedly regretted appearing in Bogus Journey, claiming he only did so because he was a workaholic. One more Bogus Journey connection with this novel: both feature characters named Rufus who are significant to the protagonist’s backstory and future!
• ZZ Top play the “band at the party” in Back to the Future Part III (1990), performing a “hillbilly version” of their song “Doubleback” from their 1990 album Recycler. The version we remember is probably the orchestrated one played – repeatedly – during the town festival, and the album version plays over the credits. The music video uses footage from the film. While we may have forgotten the single, it was in fact a pretty big hit in the US at the time, reaching #1 in the rock charts for five weeks. 
• Once and For All is currently on hiatus, but you can find all five released episodes at the link. Ben appears not only in episode five, “Death Vs Death”, but the very first episode, “Indiana O’Connell and The Kingdom of the Mummy’s Skull”, in which he goes to bat for Brendan Fraser’s character from The Mummy, Rick O’Connell, in a battle against Indiana Jones.
• In the Sandman comics created by Neil Gaiman, Death is one of the Endless, seven beings who personify fundamental metaphysical concepts: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Delirium and Despair. While they are immortal in some circumstances they can die, though they are then replaced in their role by someone else. Dream is the titular Sandman of the original comics, but Death has also proven popular enough to have her own separate stories, notably Death: The High Cost of Living and Death: The Time of Your Life.
• It should be noted that Azrael appears not just in Islamic lore, or The Smurfs, but in other Abrahamic traditions, including Hebrew mysticism, though he is rarely mentioned in Christian writing. The version of Azrael with millions of eyes is only one of many varying depictions.
• You can see the full range of currently in print Collector’s Library editions of Discworld novels at the Discworld Emporium. We note that since our last visit, the Emporium now also stocks new printings of early editions of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic…
• You can see Paul Kidby’s “Lancre Gothic” in this BBC article collecting some of the best Discworld illustrations. Kidby’s “Death with Kitten II”, a newer version of the illustration from The Last Hero, can be found in the gallery on his web site and on his Instagram. “The Imaginarium of Professor Pratchett”, originally drawn for the cover of the “Discworld Imaginarium” book, is in Kidby’s online store, and you can also see Ben’s favourite version of this concept – from the cover of the HisWorld exhibition book – on Instragram. (You’ll need to get your hands on a copy of The Last Hero to check who A’Tuin is looking at.)
• The Pratchett Armorial Bearings (the formal name for this kind of heraldry), which can indeed be seen on Pratchett’s Wikipedia page, are formally described thus:
  Blazoned:
  Arms – Sable an ankh between four Roundels in saltire each issuing Argent.
  Crest – Upon a Helm with a Wreath Argent and Sable On Water Barry wavy Sable Argent and Sable an Owl affronty wings displayed and inverted Or supporting thereby two closed Books erect Gules.
  Motto – “noli timere messorem”
  The motto is rather more accurate Latin for “Don’t fear the Reaper” compared to Mort’s Latatian “non timetis messor”.