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Discworld

#PratchatPlaysThud Notes and Errata

8 November 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus Pratchat episode “The Troll’s Gambit“, discussing the first Discworld boardgame, Thud by Trevor Truran, with guest Dr Melissa Rogerson.

Iconographic Evidence

A board of black and white squares sits on a green patterned matt on a wooden table. On the board are dark-coloured playing pieces, some large in a rough humanoid shape holding up clubs, and some smaller, stylised bullet-shaped pieces with bearded faces. In the centre is a tall pointy piece representing a stone. Behind the board is the box for this game, with "Terry Pratchett" in white above "THUD" in large red letters, and an illustration of a man in leather armour holding a torch while standing on a giant version of the game board. Behind the table are some shelves full of board games.
The 2005 “Koom Valley” edition of Thud, with the pieces in the “King’s Game” positions (more about that next episode). You can see some of Ben’s board game collection in the background.
A square board with an octagonal arrangement of black and white squares sits on a green patterned matt on a wooden table. On the board are dark-coloured playing pieces, some large, humanoid shaped ones holding up clubs, and some smaller, stylised bullet-shaped pieces with bearded faces. There are many of the smaller pieces on squares around the outside edge, while the larger ones are all near the centre. Eight of the smaller pieces are off the board, on the matt closer to the camera.
Near the start of the first match, with Ben as the trolls
A square board with an octagonal arrangement of black and white squares sits on a green patterned matt on a wooden table. On the board are dark-coloured playing pieces, some large, humanoid shaped ones holding up clubs, and some smaller, stylised bullet-shaped pieces with bearded faces. The smaller pieces are in a group on the bottom edge of the board, while the larger ones are on the left and top right of the board. Eight of the smaller pieces are off the board, on the matt closer to the camera. About two-thirds of the smaller pieces are off the board at the bottom, close to the camera, while three of the larger pieces are off the board at the top.
Here you can see Melissa’s dwarfs in a block or phalanx, ready to capture more trolls
A square board with an octagonal arrangement of black and white squares sits on a green patterned matt on a wooden table. On the board are four large, dark-coloured playing pieces, humanoid-shaped and holding clubs. There's also a pointy piece in the centre of the board. Four more of these pieces are off the board at the top, while 32 smaller pieces with points are clustered in groups of four off the board at the bottom, near the camera.
The end of the first match, in which Ben captured all the dwarfs, but lost half his trolls
A large black playing piece of roughly humanoid shape sits on a black square on a board that resembles a chess board, with some other smaller pieces behind it. The humanoid one faces away from the camera and you can see its butt. It's a troll's butt.
The “troll butt” mentioned by Melissa
Some photos from Ben’s game of Thud with Melissa, mostly from the first match where Melissa was the dwarfs and Ben the trolls.
Turns out one of Ben’s educational videos about Vikings is available on YouTube! This was filmed in 2014 in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title refers to the 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit by American author Walter Tevis. The book gained new attention in 2020 when it was adapted as a mini-series for Netflix by American writer/director Scott Frank, and starring Anna Taylor-Joy as Bath Harmon, an orphaned chess prodigy in 1950s America. The series and novel, in turn, take their name from the classic chess opening “the Queen’s gambit“. In a Queen’s gambit, the white player moves the pawn in front of their Queen forward two spaces; then the black player moves their matching pawn (in front of their Queen) forward two spaces; then the white player moves the pawn in front of their Bishop on the Queen’s side forward two spaces. This sets up a situation where one of the players will take the others’ pawn, possibly leading to an opening for the white Queen…and likely a lot more besides, if you’re knowledgable about chess.
  • We never get around to mentioning the scores of Ben and Melissa’s game in the episode, so for the curious:
    • In the first round Melissa scored 0 (as the dwarfs) and Ben 16 (as the trolls).
    • In the second round Melissa scored 20 (as the trolls) and Ben 2 (as the dwarfs).
    • The final score was 20 to 18, in Melissa’s favour.
  • There are three editions of Thud, and you can find details of them all on BoardGameGeek. (The specific editions below are also linked to their pages on BGG, but you’ll find most of the details on the main page.)
    • The original 2002 edition, which has the title and a rune-like symbol on the cover of the box.
    • The 2005 “Koom Valley” edition, released to tie-in with the novel Thud! It uses a similar box, board and pieces, though the cover and rulebook art is replaced with Paul Kidby’s art for the novel (though it’s reversed from the book), and the rulebook includes an additional Koom Valley variant with very different rules, and a setup for the “King’s Game” that features in the novel.
    • The 2009 edition comes in a printed cloth bag with a cloth board, and several smaller booklets for the rules. It uses new versions of the pieces: the trolls hold their clubs down, and the dwarfs have a bigger beards. This is the edition shown at Essenspiel, the big German games convention held each year in the city of Essen, with the fancy wooden octagonal board we mention later in the episode.
  • Agricola is a “eurogame” (see below) by veteran German game designer Uwe Rosenberg. First published in 2007, and still popular today, Agricola has won many awards, including a coveted Spiel de Jahres (Essenspiel’s “Game of the Year”) in 2008, and had many expansions. A revised version of Agricola released in 2016 uses some refinements developed for the 2013 spin-off Caverna: The Cave Farmers, which is basically Agricola but with dwarfs! In either game, each player is a family of farmers who grow crops, breed animals, gather resources and build improvements to get the highest score at the game’s end. It’s a “worker placement” game, in which you have have to place your limited number of worker pieces on specific spaces to take actions each turn – the well to gather water, the mine to get stones etc – but most actions can only be picked by one worker, so you can’t always do what you most want to be doing. A key feature of Agricola and Caverna is that you can use resources to have children who grow up to become additional workers, but you have to grow enough food to feed everyone… Ben prefers Caverna, because you can also send your dwarfs on underground adventures to seek their fortune, but they’re both great.
  • Eurogames are a style of board game popular in Germany and across Europe. There’s not a precise definition, but they usually feature components in abstract shapes like cubes, often made of wood; themes grounded in the real world and/or history (farming, trains and city building are all popular); and rules which involve the interaction of many systems, but not necessarily much direct interaction between players, making most of them a race to get the most points. While it’s now used as a general descriptor, there used to be quite a “rivalry” between those who loved euros (as they’re called for short), and those who preferred what was derisively named”Ameritrash” – a style of deeply thematic games which feature detailed plastic components and high degrees of player vs player interaction. That term has fallen out of use as the designs of such games has become more sophisticated.
  • Asymmetric games are games in which players do not have the same pieces, roles or rules. For example, chess is a symmetric game, because both players have the same set of pieces and follow the same rules; Thud is asymmetric, since one player has dwarf pieces and the other has trolls. Many modern games fall between the two with what is sometimes called an “exception-based” design: the players all follow the same general rules, but each has a specific role (or, sometimes, acquires special items or powers) which grant exceptions to the rules (or adding new ones) just for that player.
  • Melissa mentioned Schachnovelle (literally “Chess Novella”), a 1941 novella by Austrian author Stefan Zweig (1881-1942). It’s been published in English as Chess Story and The Royal Game, sometimes collected with other short stories by Zweig. Among many other things it was notable for its use of algebraic notation to describe chess moves, which was common in Germany at the time but not widely adopted among English-speaking chess players for another few decades. Zweig fled the Nazi rise in power in 1934, first to England and then America and Brazil.
  • We’ve mentioned the other Discworld board games before, back in #Pratchat30; here’s a reminder:
    • Watch Out: Discworld Board Game (2004) was the other Discworld game designed by Trevor Truran. Like Thud, it was an asymmetrical game with chess-like pieces, but the board was made of square cards representing Ankh-Morpork locations, and one player controlled eight thieves while the other controlled eight Watchmen. As mentioned, it was never published, though you can find some pictures of it on BoardGameGeek via the link.
    • Discworld: Ankh-Morpork (2011), designed by Martin Wallace, has the players secretly take on the roles of various Ankh-Morpork characters as factions vie for control of the city in the wake of Lord Vetinari’s disappearance. Published by Wallace’s Treefrog Games, it’s generally regarded as the best of the Discworld games, but is no longer in print. As mentioned, Wallace re-used the rules in 2019 to make Nanty Narking, which is set in Victorian London with characters from period fiction. We’ll try and play that as well when we get to discussing this game!
    • Guards! Guards! A Discworld Boardgame (2011) was designed by Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw for BackSpindle Games. Players are new recruits in the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, sent to infiltrate one of the city’s guilds to retrieve the Eight Great Spells of the Octavo, which have been stolen from Unseen University.
    • The Witches: A Discworld Game (2012) is Martin Wallace’s second Discworld game. Players are trainee witches in Lancre dealing with the everyday problems of the local folk. It can be played competitively, cooperatively and even solo.
    • Clacks: A Discworld Boardgame (2015) is the second Discworld game from Leonard Boyd and David Brashaw for BackSpindle Games, and aside from Thud is the only one still in print. Players are Clacks operators for the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, trying to win the race against Moist von Lipwig’s newly revitalised postal service, as depicted in Going Postal (see #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal“). It also has rules for competitive and cooperative play. It’s popular enough that BackSpindle released a new “Collector’s Edition” in 2021 with a fancier board and components.
  • Ben will add some more detail when he has time, but for now, here’s a list of the other modern boardgames we mentioned in this episode:
    • Firefly: The Board Game
    • Battlestar Galactica – now out of print, but re-implemented as the H P Lovecraft themed Unfathomable
    • Igloo Pop
    • The Illimat
    • Calico
    • Pandemic and its later versions Pandemic Legacy: Season One, Pandemic Legacy: Season Two and Pandemic: Fall of Rome.
    • The Exit series of escape room games
    • Thunderbirds: The Board Game, Forbidden Desert (and its cousins Forbidden Island and Forbidden Skies), and Daybreak

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, board game, Discworld, Dr Melissa Rogerson, games, Thud

#Pratchat29 Notes and Errata

8 March 2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 29, “Great Rimward Land“, featuring guest Fury, discussing the 1998 Discworld novel The Last Continent.

Iconographic Evidence

Feast your eyes on Fury’s glorious illustration of Trunkie!

Notes and Errata

  • This episode’s title puns on the Icehouse song “Great Southern Land“, a big hit in Australia which also featured on the soundtrack of Yahoo Serious’ 1988 Australian comedy film Young Einstein. In retrospect both the song and the film might have been expected to show up parodied in The Last Continent – especially the song, since Pratchett listed it as one of his tracks when he appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1997. (Thanks to Al of Desert Island Discworld for this fact!)
  • Our pre-show disclaimer uses the phrase “going off like a frog in a sock”. “Going off” on its own means to put a lot of energy or excitement into something, sometimes in anger, but in the frog idiom always in a fun way. Unusually for Australian slang, this isn’t ironic, just a straight-up metaphor; imagine you’ve caught a frog in a sock and it’s trying to get out, and you’ll get the idea. (And no, Australians don’t actually catch frogs in socks, this is strictly a thought experiment.)
  • The Kiwi-Aussie portmanteau is spelled “Kaussie“, whereas the slang for swimwear is “cossie“; it’s short for “swimming costume”.
  • The South Australian television personality who keeps getting in fights on the Internet is Cosi, host of South Aussie with Cosi, a travel show produced by Channel 9. (Not to be confused with Cosi, the play by Australian playwright Louis Nowra, previously discussed in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.)
  • “Swimming togs” comes from the British slang word “togs”, which just meant clothes. It’s one of a number of slang terms now archaic in the UK which have survived in some form in Australia.
  • Helen Zaltzmann is host of The Allusionist, a podcast about language, and one of Ben’s favourites. We’re sure she’d be the first to tell you that not every word – slang or otherwise – has a satisfying true origin story.
  • Stephen Briggs was a frequent collaborator with Terry, beginning with the original map of Ankh-Morpork. He also contributed to the diaries, The Discworld Companion and many other books outside the main novels. He adapted many of the books into plays, some of which have been published, and has read the audiobook versions of more than 30 of Terry’s novels. (Stephen Fry reads the UK editions of the Harry Potter audiobooks; if you’ve heard the US versions, those are read by Jim Dale.)
  • Mike Schur’s afterlife sitcom The Good Place set much of its third season in Australia, and copped much criticism from actual Australians for the quality of the accents. You couldn’t fault the jokes, though – or the punny names of the restaurants, shops and incidental characters in those episodes.
  • Pretty Little Liars is a teen mystery TV series based on the books by American YA author Sara Shepard. The UK accented character is antagonist Alex Drake, who shows up in season 7. We’d tell you more, but…spoilers.
  • The extreme Australian wizard slang originated in a reply to a tumblr post from about JK Rowling’s the introduction of the American term for muggle, “no-maj”; you can find the original here, but just in case it vanishes from Tumblr forever, we’ll immortalise the words of user edenwolfie here (and a quick warning – we haven’t censored the print version). We’d also like to point out that Australian wizards and witches would most likely spell it “muggo”.

I can just imagine the Australian word being some awful slang that’s derived from muggle, such as “mugo”.

Ah, I can imagine it now, wizards in thongs, drinking butter-VB yelling “You’re such a fucking mugo, you wandless cunt!”

edenwolfie, Tumblr, 11 November 2015
  • Minotaur is Melbourne’s biggest independent pop culture and science fiction bookstore. Many of Terry’s early Melbourne signings occurred at its original location on Bourke Street, but it moved to Elizabeth Street in 2000.
  • PhanCon ’98 was a one-off fan science fiction convention held in Sydney in 1998. Information on it is in short supply, but guests included Terry Pratchett and British fantasy author David Gemmell.
  • Comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 broke up in 1992 and smashed into the planet Jupiter in 1994, to much excitement (on Earth at least). It was named for astronomers Carolyn Shoemaker, Eugene M. Shoemaker and David Levy, who discovered it after it had been captured by Jupiter’s gravity into a decaying orbit.
  • English scientists did indeed doubt the reality of the platypus, which not only has a unique and wonderful anatomy, but is one of just two surviving monotremes – a group of mammals that lay eggs. (The other one is the echidna.) As well as its distinctive bill, it has sharp ankle spurs which in the male can inject venom, and the ability to sense electric fields as a way of locating prey.
  • The Dreaming is a sophisticated concept in the stories of Aboriginal cultures. It has a complex relationship to space and time, existing both long ago and now, but despite the name – which was coined by Europeans – it has nothing to do with dreaming. An older term, “dreamtime”, is generally no longer considered appropriate. We recommend reading up on the topic; one good place to start is this article at Common Ground.
  • Boomerangs bought in stores and thrown to return are, indeed, toys. Hunting and war boomerangs were generally much larger, sharpened, and often had one wing longer than the other.
  • The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a 1994 Australian comedy film which was a surprise box office hit often considered hugely significant in the history of queer cinema. It follows two drag queens (Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce) and a trans woman (Terence Stamp) as they travel from Sydney through the outback to perform in Alice Springs. Though initially praised for its queer-positive message, the portrayal of Filipino character Cynthia attracted widespread criticism for relying on racist stereotypes of Asian women common in Australia. Original writer and director Stephan Elliott adapted the film into a stage musical, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, in 2006; the musical retains the characters and plot more or less unchanged, but hasn’t been criticised nearly as much for the character of Cynthia.
  • The opal fossils gallery at the South Australian Museum is still there, and you can see the skeleton Ben mentioned. The web site is sketchy on details, so we can’t confirm if it’s an Elasmosaurus or another species of plesiosaur, but we still recommend you check it out yourself!
  • The protagonist wizard (or at least wizarding student) in Moving Pictures was Victor Tugelbend. Other wizards not part of the regular faculty include Drum Billet, Archchancellor Cutangle, Simon and Esk (Equal Rites); Igneous Cutwell (Mort); Alberto Malich (Mort and most other Death novels); and Ipslore the Red (Sourcery).
  • Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is more-or-less a mashup of two of Douglas Adams’ Doctor Who scripts: the unfinished Shada, and City of Death, which contributed the storyline about time-travelling aliens who crash on Earth in the distant past and spark life on the planet. There are other elements in it which are wholly original, perhaps most notably the Electric Monk. This description applies to the original novel; the television adaptations, especially the US one, are very different.
  • Mot was indeed a French cartoon series about a purple monster who could travel through time and space, taking his young friend Leo on various adventures. It was based on the French children’s comics created by Alfonso Azpiri. It was aired on Australian television in the late 1990s.
  • Thanks to listener and supporter Molokov, who pointed out that Rincewind’s magical ability to find “bush tucker” might be a reference to retired army Major Les Hiddins, aka “the Bush Tucker Man“. Hiddins researched Australian native foods as part of his army career by working with Aboriginal peoples, mostly in northern Australia. He came to national fame through The Bush Tucker Man television series on the ABC in the late 80s and early 90s. In each episode Hiddins, wearing his trademark larger-than-usual Akubra hat, visited a part of Outback Australia and introduced viewers to the local edible plants and animals. Hiddins wrote several books, and then disappeared onto a remote retreat he created in the bush for retired army service people, before returning to the public eye in 2019 with a new website: bushtuckerman.com.au
  • We discussed Interesting Times back in episode 21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • Black Sheep was released in 2006, written and directed by Jonathan King with special effects by Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop. It seems the main way to watch it now is via the Amazon Prime Video streaming service, though it should also be available on DVD.
  • Terry has not always had kind things to say about Rincewind; he suggested the wizard’s job is “to meet more interesting people” than himself, lamented Rincewind’s lack of an inner monologue, and did indeed feel like he was running out of things to do with an eternally cowardly character. Agatha Christie’s negative feelings about Poirot are well-documented, from as early as 1930; in a notable quote from 1960 she describes him as a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. But she refused to kill him off because she felt she had a duty to keep writing about a character that was still so popular with the public.
  • Michael Moorcock was an English fantasy author who created a number of characters including Elric of Melnibone, one of several incarnations of “the Eternal Champion”, fated to be reborn through the ages and battle in the primeval war between the forces of Law and Chaos.
  • We discussed Only You Can Save Mankind in our previous episode, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
  • Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (aka Skippy) was an Australian family television series about an usually smart kangaroo who helped park ranger’s son Sonny have various adventures. It was very much in the mould of Lassie or Flipper. It ran from 1968 to 1970, and there was a brief sequel series in 1992 featuring Sonny as an adult. It was broadcast in most Commonwealth countries, as well as the US and many Spanish-speaking countries including Mexico, Cuba and Spain.
  • We’ve mentioned it before, but you can find the Annotated Pratchett File at the old L-Space Web site. Its successor is the L-Space Wiki.
  • The Moa is a large extinct flightless bird, similar to a Cassowary. Like many megafauna of Australia and New Zealand, they were hunted to extinction, in the Moa’s case by the Māori peoples.
  • “Jeremy Bearimy” is an explanation of how time works in the afterlife in the sitcom The Good Place. Rather than a straight line, the flow of time there resembles a curve which looks like a signature reading “Jeremy Bearimy”. The dot in the i (or tittle) is a weird separate bit of spacetime.
  • “Guzzaline” was the term used for petrol in Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth Mad Max movie, released in 2015. It stars Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, a driver for a despotic warlord in post-apocalyptic Australia. Tom Hardy appears as Max Rockatansky, the titular character, who was the protagonist of the previous three films, where he was played by Mel Gibson.
  • When Liz refers to Darwin, she means the city, which is the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. It was named for Charles Darwin by John Clements Wickham during a subsequent voyage of the ship Darwin took on his famous voyage, the HMS Beagle.
  • In Jurassic Park, palaeontologist Alan Grant claims to know that the Tyrannosaurus rex – portrayed in the films as a ferocious predator – has vision “based on movement”. This is one of many things that make no sense in the film. Have a few drinks with Ben, or your local friendly palaeontologist, and they’ll tell you about some others.
  • Richard Dawkins is now best known for heavy-handed criticism of religion and, most recently, feeling the need to confirm that whatever you think of it, eugenics works. But he initially found fame for his pretty good books on evolutionary biology. In The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976, he popularised the idea that the gene is the basic and most important unit of evolutionary information, and also coined the term “meme”, meaning the behavioural or cultural equivalent of a gene.
  • Historians, archaeologists and anthropologists frequently find evidence that revise the likely length of Aboriginal culture’s existence in Australia about every six months – usually making it older. Current estimates range from 50,000 to 125,000 years.
  • You can read about the Sydney baboon escape from late February 2020 in this article at The Guardian – written by previous Pratchat guest, Stephanie Convery! (Steph was a guest in #Pratchat2, and later returned for #Pratchat42.)
  • You certainly used to be able to get tea-towels and such that were supposedly from “Didjabringabeeralong, The Outback”, but these days we’d like to think we’re a bit more culturally sensitive. The unique names of many Australian towns and cities – like Wagga Wagga, Geelong and Nar Nar Goon – are drawn from local Aboriginal languages, many of which have been lost as those peoples were displaced or massacred by Europeans.
  • Tank Girl is a punk-inspired comic book series by created by British writer Jamie Hewlett and artist Alan Martin. Tank Girl is the main character, who lives in a tank in post-apocalyptic Australia. She’s accompanied on her adventures by her mutant kangaroo boyfriend, Booga. The comic was adapted into the 1995 film Tank Girl, directed by Rachel Talalay and starring Lori Petty as Tank Girl and Naomi Watts as her friend Jet Girl (who has a jetpack), with Malcolm McDowell as the antagonist. It has a cult following but was not a big success.
  • Listener Ian Banks in our Discord pointed out that another, probably more likely inspiration for the anthropomorphic animals is The Magic Pudding, a 1918 children’s book written and illustrated by famous Australian artist Norman Lindsay. The story’s main characters are Bunyip Bluegum (a koala person), human sailor Bill Barnacle, and Sam Sawnoff (a penguin person). The titular pudding, Albert, has a face, arms and legs, and regenerates, so he can supply an infinite amount of food. The story also features “pudding thieves” Patrick and Watkin, a possum and wombat respectively.
  • We want to make it clear that despite Liz’s hangups, marsupial pouches are not dirty; kangaroos lick theirs clean before their joeys enter them.
  • Barry McKenzie, a creation of Australian comedian Barry Humphries, began life as a comic strip character in the pages of UK comic magazine Private Eye in 1964. A parody of the Australian abroad, he is a hard-drinking, womanising, simple-but-forthright “larrikin” who gets himself into various scrapes. He was played by singer and actor Barry Crocker in two films in the 1970s, which also introduced Humphrie’s long-running character Dame Edna Everidge, who is Barry’s aunt. The films nearly killed director Bruce Beresford’s career, but he later went on to find fame and success, with such big films as Driving Miss Daisy and Mao’s Last Dancer.
  • “Squids” in the book is almost certainly a pun on “quid”, slang for a pound sterling in the UK and pre-decimal Australia. It’s still used occasionally as slang for money in Australia, usually in the phrase “a few quid”.
  • In case you missed it, the shearing competition in the book is clearly inspired by the Australian folk song “Click Go the Shears“.
  • We cut the discussion for time but “something for the weekend” reminded Ben of ska band Madness’s song “House of Fun”, which is about a teenager who has turned sixteen and is using various euphemisms to try and buy condoms at his local chemist.
  • In The Man From Snowy River, the actual description of the hero’s horse is “something like a racehorse undersized”.
  • As alluded to in the book, drop bears are a fictional cousin of the koala, a horrible killer animal which waits in treetops to drop on and eat children. Inventing dangerous creatures has been a long-running prank played on visitors to Australia, playing on their fears of the real deadly animals that live here. A recent incidence of the drop bear was this prank played on a UK reporter visiting to report on the bush fires.
  • The bush ballad “Waltzing Matilda” is thought by academics to describe the Great Shearer’s Strike of 1891, in which shearer’s killed a number of sheep and one of their number, being chased by police, killed himself rather than be taken alive. A lot of the slang in the song is never heard anywhere else anymore – including “jumbuck”, a term for sheep thought to have been derived from an Aboriginal language. There are many versions of the lyrics, but the most famous one was adapted by the Billy tea company. In some, Liz’s question becomes moot, as the troopers ask “Whose that jolly jumbuck”, rather than “Where’s“.
  • If you’re confused by Liz’s “cat in a bag” antics, you can read about Schrodinger’s Cat and other feline behaviours in our discussion of Pratchett’s non-fiction humour book The Unadulterated Cat. You’ll find it in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“.
  • The Domestic Blindness sketch was indeed part of vintage 1980s Australian sketch comedy show The Comedy Company; you can find it on YouTube here.
  • Listener and previous guest Avril (who you might remember from #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“) points out that the god’s love of beetles is likely a reference to English geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane, perhaps most famous for writing about abiogenesis and the idea of “primordial soup”, among many other accomplishments. In response to being asked what his study of nature might reveal about the Creator, Haldane is perported to have said “that He is inordinately fond of beetles”, due to the phenomenal number and variety of beetle species. While this exact response might be apocryphal, he definitely said something equivalent many times, both in print and in speeches.
  • Gachnar the Fear Demon appears in the fourth season Halloween episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Fear, Itself”, from 1999.
  • Australian cockroaches are not actually Australian at all – they live all over the world, and probably originally come from somewhere in Africa.
  • White-tailed spiders are small spiders native to south-eastern Australia. They are not aggressive but might bite if disturbed, and like to hide among leaf litter. They were demonised in the media during the late twentieth century as their bite supposedly caused necrosis, but medical research in the early twenty-first century didn’t find evidence of any such symptoms. Instead, the spider’s venom caused only unpleasant but mild symptoms, especially by Australian standards.
  • The Stonefish is a real fish, one of the most venomous in the world. It disguises itself as a stone in order to catch smaller fish as prey, but has sharp spines on its back which deliver venom as a defence against predators. Four of the five species live outside Australian waters; their sting can be treated with hot water (which denatures the venom) and anti-venom.
  • Last Chance to See was a 1989 radio documentary following Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Cawardine as they travelled the world to visit nine different endangered species. Adams turned it into a book in 1990, and in 2009 Stephen Fry joined Cawardine for a sequel television series, accompanied by a new book.
  • Pauline Hanson is a right-wing populist politician from Queensland who rose to fame when she ran for federal parliament in 1995 as a member of the conservative Liberal Party. They dis-endorsed her after she made racist comments about Aboriginal Australians, and she formed her own party, One Nation, and won a seat. She was found to have committed electoral fraud and jailed, though the charges were subsequently overturned on appeal. She left her own party in 2002 over those charges, but remained a figure in the Australian media, aided by appearances on breakfast television and the reality show Dancing with the Stars. She returned to politics and One Nation in 2013, and was elected to the Australian Senate in 2016. She is famous mostly for various racist views that very much align with those of Fair Go Dibbler.
  • Lost is a TV series about a bunch of plane crash survivors who find themselves lost on a mysterious island. It famously makes no sense whatsoever and it’s generally considered that it’s creators, JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof, were making it up as they went along to stay ahead of the guesses of fans on the Internet about what was really going on.
  • The Galah (pronounced “ga-LAR”) is a large, loud pink and grey cockatoo (a type of parrot), common in many parts of Australia. “Galah” is also slang for a ridiculous or foolish person.
  • The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is a one of the largest pride parades in the world. It happens annually on the first Saturday in March, and started in 1978. It draws massive crowds from all over the world.
  • Intersex people are born with genetic and/or physical characteristics associated with both of the traditional genders. While the statistics are sometimes contested, it’s thought as many as 1.7% of people are born with some kind of intersex characteristics. The I in LGBTIAQ+ is for intersex.
  • The infamous Australian episode of The Simpsons, “Bart vs Australia”, is from the show’s sixth season in 1995.
  • The tough guy who appreciates art in Thief of Time is probably Newgate Ludd.
  • Damian Callinan’s The Merger started life as a one-man show, but was adapted in 2018 into a feature film. You can find it on the free streaming service Kanopy if you are a member of a library that subscribes to it, and its now on Netflix in many regions too.
  • The original Harry’s Cafe de Wheels started out in Woolloomooloo, a harbour-side inner suburb of Sydney, as a “caravan cafe” specialising in serving late night pies. It was founded by Harry “Tiger” Edwards in 1936. It’s been patronised by many international celebrities and there are now several Harry’s cafes around Sydney and New South Wales – though not, despite Ben’s later confusion, in Adelaide.
  • The word for the smell you get after it rains – specifically, the smell of earth after it rains – is “petrichor”. Hopefully it’s okay for us to use it as we’re not writing a poem.
  • Tropical areas – such as the northern part of Australia – are often described as having Wet seasons and Dry seasons. The Wet season is also known as monsoon season or the Rainy season in some parts of the world.
  • You can read about the six seasons described by the Kulin people of Melbourne on this web site.
  • To avoid any confusion: in Good Omens, it’s said that any cassette tape left in the glove box of a car transforms into Queen’s Greatest Hits. In Mort, it’s said that no matter what’s put into it during the day, a pantry raided in the middle of the night contains only some very specific and disappointing items.
  • “How to Make Gravy” is a 1996 song by Australian singer-songwriter (and national treasure) Paul Kelly. It was originally written and released as part of a Christmas charity album benefitting the Salvation Army, when Kelly found out the song he initially wanted to cover had already been picked by another band. In Kelly’s song the narrator, Joe, has been sent to prison; the lyrics are a letter he’s writing on December 21 (dubbed “Gravy Day” by some fans) lamenting that he won’t be home for Christmas, and giving his brother his gravy recipe, since that’s his usual contribution to the Christmas cooking. It became a surprise hit and was nominated for the APRA song of the year award in 1998. Below is the official video. (We’ll mention the song again in the Oggswatch Feast 2021 bonus Christmas episode.)
  • Captain Raymond Holt is the captain of police precinct 99 in the sitcom Brooklyn-99. He – like all the characters in the show – is wonderful.
  • Umami is the “fifth taste”, after the other basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty. The word comes from Japanese, and translates as “pleasant savoury taste”, being derived from the word umai, “delicious”. Other foods with an umami taste include various vegetables, mushrooms, shellfish, cured meats and green tea.
  • Barnaby Joyce is (as of March 2020) the current leader of the National Party, a conservative party popular in rural areas. They have a long-standing coalition with the Liberal Party; the Liberal-National coalition are currently in government. Tony Abbott is a former leader of the Liberal Party who was Prime Minister of Australia for a brief period, before being ousted in favour of the more moderate Malcolm Turnbull. He lost his seat at the last federal election. Both are pretty weird units, to use an Australian phrase, with their share of scandals, bizarre behaviour and controversy.
  • “Where the bloody hell are you?” was the key question asked by model Lara Bingle at the end of a largely ridiculed Australian tourism ad produced for the international market in 2006. It was controversially banned on release in the UK, despite costing 180 million Australian dollars, and despite its infamy was considered a failure. It was overseen by now Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who at the time was Managing Director of Tourism Australia; this led to some reprise of the question directed at him – including by Bingle herself on social media – when he was overseas on vacation during the beginning of the disastrous 2019-2020 bush fires. It was also part of the inspiration for his derisive nickname “Scotty from Marketing”. You can watch the original ad on YouTube here.
  • Paul Parker found internet fame after he angrily reacted to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s comments that members of Australia’s volunteer fire fighting organisations “want to be out there” fighting the unprecedentedly fierce bushfires that raged in late 2019 and early 2020. In a video that went viral, he leaned out of his firetruck and asked a Channel 7 news crew to tell the Prime Minister to “go and get fucked from Nelligen”. After there were (disputed) claims this got him sacked from the Rural Fire Service (a volunteer organisation), another video emerged of him saying that Pauline Hanson was the only politician who cared about Australia. The whole saga is covered by Jan Fran in her first “The Frant” video for The Guardian.
  • “I’m not here to fuck spiders” is a slang expression meaning “I’ve got serious work to do,” most often used in response to a question about one’s intentions. It is also used as a more emphatic version of “I’m not here for a haircut”, which is a sarcastic response to being asked if one has come to a place to do the obvious thing, like being asked in a car dealership if you want to buy a car. It’s been a matter of debate for some years whether “not here to fuck spiders” is a “real” expression, or if it was invented as a joke and since been embraced by Australians. Looking through Google’s trends tool, which goes back as far as 2004, the first and biggest spike in searches for the phrase is in November 2005; then there’s very little until it slowly increases in search popularity from 2010, with smaller spikes since 2018 where it has been mentioned by Australian celebrities. The only reference Ben could find from 2005 were a series of replies to a forum post asking about the phrase, many of which seemed to suggest straight up examples of having heard it years before that… It’s worth mentioning that one of the repliers had come to the thread because they heard it from an Australian comedian, which might mean it was made up as a joke, or it could just mean that was the first time people who didn’t get it were hearing it.
  • The Man From Snowy River television show is not actually related to the 1982 film starring Sigrid Thornton and Tom Burlinson. The TV series starred Andrew Clarke as Matt McGregor, the stockman from the poem, and is set 25 years after the events depicted in the poem. It ran from 1993 to 1996.
  • Bore water is water drawn from underground sources, usually by drilling a borehole into an artesian aquifer – a porous underground layer of the Earth’s crust in which water is stored or flows. In Australia, the source is most commonly the Great Artesian Basin, a huge artesian aquifer under large parts of Queensland and its neighbour states.
  • “Advance Australia Fair” has been the official Australian anthem since 1984, though it was written far earlier, in the late 1870s. It was chosen in a plebiscite attached to the 1977 referendum about voting and political reforms. It beat “Waltzing Matilda”, “The Song of Australia”, and the previous anthem “God Save the Queen”. (For more on this, see #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner“, in which we compare the Australian and Ankh-Morpork national anthems.)

 

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Death, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Fourecks, Fury, Librarian, Ponder Stibbons, Rincewind, The Luggage, Unseen University, Wizards

#Pratchat11 Notes and Errata

8 September 2018 by Ben 2 Comments

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:

Lupine Wonse, shame on you. Lupine Twice, shame on me.

— Darude's Sandworm (@SalacticaActual) August 17, 2018
  • 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”.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, CMOT Dibbler, Death, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Mustrum Ridcully, Reaper Man, Reg Shoe, Sarah Pearson, Windle Poons, Wizards

#Pratchat40 Notes and Errata

8 February 2021 by Ben 2 Comments

These are the show notes and errata for episode 40, “The King and the Hole of the King“, featuring guest Richard McKenzie, discussing the twenty-fourth Discworld novel, 1999’s The Fifth Elephant.

  • The episode title is a play on the repeated phrase from the book, “the thing and the whole of the thing”, used to refer to the Scone of Stone. While “the thing and the whole of the thing” sounds like it’s a reference to or riff on something, it originates with Pratchett as far as we can tell.
  • Magic: The Gathering is the world’s first and still most popular trading card game, designed by Richard Garfield in 1993. Each player collects the cards for the game in randomised (or themed) packs, and creates their own deck. Each card represents a creature, spell, source of power (known as “mana”) or other part of the game’s multiverse, and contains rules text that explains its effect when played. There are now more than 200,000 different cards, and so the number of possible decks – and strategies – is massive.
  • Scrabble – the classic word game in which players place letter tiles that form interlocking words to score points – was originally invented in 1938 by American architect Alfred Mosher Butts. There are thousands of dedicated Scrabble clubs, and in serious competition things can get fierce. Knowing the two-letter words helps because it lets you lay two words parallel by connecting them with shorter words – letting you score all those connecting letters twice. But as Liz points out (and which we elaborate on in a longer discussion which might end up in a future Ook Club episode), this makes you a “Scrabble dickhead”, since it also makes it quite hard for your opponent to find space for longer words.
  • We previous talked about the dinosaur-killing comet of the KT extinction event in our The Science of Discworld episode, #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“.
  • Raising Steam, the fortieth and second-last Discworld novel, does indeed introduce steam trains to Ankh-Morpork and the region of the Circle Sea, completing the Disc’s journey into steampunk. We’ll probably be discussing it in another year or two.
  • The most obvious inclusion of the “treacle mine” joke in the Discworld is the name of the street on which the old Watch-house sits: Treacle Mine Road! The building even used to house an entrance to the mine, which accessed deep deposits of treacle below the city. The Fifth Elephant mentions deposits of treacle as well, formed from ancient compressed sugarcane.
  • We discussed the previous Watch book, Jingo, in #Pratchat27, “Leshp Miserablés“, a little over a year ago.
  • For more about the Clacks, see our Going Postal episode, #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal“.
  • Police boxes were basically small blue sheds of various sizes used by police officers throughout the UK in the 1950s and 60s. Some housed a telephone which the public could use to summon aid, but they also served as a dry place for officers on duty to wait out the rain, contains various useful equipment, and some could even be used to temporarily hold an arrested suspect. They are no longer in use, but their memory is kept alive by Doctor Who, whose title character’s miraculous vehicle is disguised as one. (Ben somehow resisted the urge to mention this when Liz brought it up, which maybe means he gets to take a drink?)
  • WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and iMessage are instant messaging apps which offer end-to-end encryption – meaning that no-one, not even the company who makes the app, can see what you’re writing. There’s some variation in their levels of security, but even on WhatsApp – owned by Facebook since 2014 – you can be sure Facebook isn’t collecting keywords in order to advertise to you. (At least, not as of when this was written in February 2021…)
  • On the subject of dwarfs vs dwarves in Tolkien and Pratchett, it seems Pratchett might have been correcting an error – though Tolkien used “dwarves”, he admitted it should have been “dwarfs”. In his defence he noted that the really old archaic plural of dwarf was “dwarrow”, and used the same word in an in-universe explanation for the use of “dwarves”. You can go down the rabbit hole (dwarf mine?) on this one via this great question and answer on the Sci-Fi StackExchange.
  • Llamedos is the Disc’s equivalent of Wales, located immediately turn wise of the Sto Plains, the area surrounding Ankh-Morpork. While none of the stories are set there, it is the home of Imp “Buddy” Y Celyn, musical protagonist of Soul Music. We talked about that book in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • There are a lot of different types of fat; here are a few we mention or which appear in the book:
    • Rendered fat is any meat fat turned to liquid by being cooked slowly over a low heat. (Faster, hotter cooking makes it crispy instead.) It’s also known as dripping, since it drips off the meat.
    • Lard is rendered pork fat; it is usually clarified, a process in which the liquid fat is strained, then boiled and allowed to cool (via numerous different methods), resulting in greater consistency and fewer impurities (BCBs?). The equivalent made from the meat of cattle or sheep is called tallow.
    • Ghee is a form of clarified butter which has been made in India for centuries. It is sometimes flavoured with spices.
    • Suet is the raw, hard fat from around the loins and kidneys of cattle and sheep.
  • As promised, here is Liz’s vegan recipe that tastes like bacon – which, it turns out, is a recipe for vegan bacon, aka facon! (Ben has tried it, and can confirm it’s delicious.)

Ingredients:

  • firm tofu
  • soy sauce
  • smoked paprika

Method:

  1. Slice the tofu quite thinly then dab as much moisture away as possible with paper towels
  2. Marinate slices in soy sauce
  3. Sprinkle smoked paprika on both sides, rub into the soy sauce
  4. Fry until a little crisp
  5. There it is – facon!
  • The Scone vs Scone debate has been going on for decades, alongside the newer debate over whether you should put the jam or cream on first. We won’t wade into the second one, but as mentioned in the footnote, the split in pronunciation is geographical. You can see a great map of where people say what in the UK, created by Reddit user bezzleford based on data from Cambridge university. As noted in the accompanying description, Australians predominantly rhyme scone with “gone”, while it seems Americans prefer it to rhyme with “cone”.
  • The clan Mackenzie (in Gaelic MacCoinneach, “son of the fair bright one”), dates back to at least the 15th century and possibly the 12th. Their ancestral lands are in Kintail and Ross-shire in the Highlands of Scotland. The current clan seat is Castle Lead, but the castle Richard describes is their oldest one, Eilean Donan Castle, which was ruined but later rebuilt during the twentieth century. It is indeed on an island, Eilean Donan, which is on the western Highland coast, at the meeting of the three sea lochs Loch Duich, Loch Long and Loch Alsh.
  • In addition to the potted history given by Ben in the footnote, the Stone of Scone has many similarities with the Scone of Stone, not least that it is rumoured to have been destroyed and replaced more than once. But always the current Stone is considered the true one – “the thing and the whole of the thing”, one might say.
  • Greek migration to Australia started in the 19th century, but the biggest wave of migration occurred in the aftermath of World War II, from the 1940s until the early 1970s. This was initially part of Australia’s encouragement of mass immigration under the banner “populate or perish”, which made it easy for citizens of specific (and mainly European) nations to come to Australia. This was under the “White Australia policy”, a series of immigration initiatives specifically designed to stop people of colour from settling in Australia, beginning shortly after federation in 1901. The last of these policies was only removed in 1973.
  • The population of Ankh-Morpork has several times – including in Small Gods, Mort and Guards! Guards!, to list those books in chronological order – been given as around one million, though it’s usually framed as a joke involving souls:

“Ankh-Morpork! Brawling city of a hundred thousand souls! And, as the Patrician privately observed, ten times that number of actual people.”

Guards! Guards!
  • In the 2017 TV series Star Trek: Discovery, the USS Discovery‘s crew complement has varied considerably. It’s original standard crew numbered 136, but during the “red burst” crisis of 2257 it accommodated more than 200 personnel, many from the USS Enterprise. In 2258, it underwent a risky mission and only 88 of the original crew remained aboard; they only seem to have added two more to the crew since then, but its possible we just haven’t met any further additions.
  • Jurassic Park’s gamekeeper is Robert Muldoon, portrayed by the late English actor Bob Peck. He is one of the few characters employed by John Hammond who never underestimates the dinosaurs, but even he is outsmarted by the velociraptors.
  • Surprisingly, trope-listing sites All the Tropes and TV Tropes don’t have an entry for someone being continually interrupted when trying to convey important news. Sybil’s attempts in this book to tell Vimes of her pregnancy are listed under the trope “Hint Dropping”.
  • Trolls in the WarCraft videogames created by Blizzard Entertainment are an ancient species of tall, lanky humanoids with long ears and large tusks. They have adapted to many environments, and have a tribal culture. They are depicted as speaking with various Caribbean or African accents. They are notable for possessing regenerative abilities, healing quickly from all but the most serious wounds – something they have inherited from the trolls of Dungeons & Dragons, in turn inspired by the 1950s fantasy novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, which also provided D&D with its version of Paladins and the concept of alignment. Pratchett’s trolls owe more to Tolkien’s, who turned to stone in sunlight, but they weren’t creatures of living stone. None of these fictional trolls are particularly close to the ones of Scandinavian folklore, where the word and concept originate – though to be fair, like a lot of ancient monster stories, they aren’t big on detailed or consistent descriptions.
  • Caligula was the nickname of third Roman Emperor Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, who ruled from 37 CE until he was assassinated in 41 CE. Sources from the time – while not entirely trustworthy – say he turned cruel, sadistic and erratic after his first six months in the job. The most famous stories are of his sexual perversions and his attempt to appoint his horse as a Consul. We’re not sure what he’d do with an orange…
  • “Sonky” seems to have become a genericised trademark – a brand so successful it has become a common synonym the product it represents. Real world examples include biro (for ball-point pens), Aspirin (an early trademark for the painkiller acetylsalicylic acid) and in the US, jello (for jelly, from the brand Jell-O). We’ll talk more about this in #Pratchat56, our discussion of Pratchett’s sci-fi short story “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”; see the notes for that episode for more detail.
  • Condoms have been around since the mid 16th century, but were first made from rubber in 1855. These days most are made of latex, but “lambskin” condoms are still available, made from sheep intestines; they are primarily used in cases of latex allergy.
  • “Black cat freak-out” is Richard’s term for that moment in a film when the character is spooked by something seemingly horrible…but it turns out to be something innocuous, often a black cat. Weirdly this doesn’t appear on the tropes sites, but we did find this supercut on YouTube of moments in film where it happens.
  • The CSI franchise began in 2000 with CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, featuring a CSI team led by Carl Grissom in Las Vegas. Its theme song was indeed “Who Are You?” by The Who, and it ran for 15 seasons and a two-part telemovie finale, finishing up in 2015. It launched the sping-offs CSI: Miami in 2003 (which used The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as its theme) and CSI: Cyber in 2014 (which used “I Can See For Miles”), spun off via “backdoor pilots” – an episode of an existing program doubling as a proof of concept for a new show. CSI: Miami introduced another spin-off, CSI: NY in 2004 (with the Who song “Baba O’Reilly”). CSI: Miami‘s lead investigator was Lieutenant Horatio Caine (played by David Caruso); he famously removes his sunglasses when making a dramatic statement about a murder. Also of note: the early working concept for what became The Watch TV series was, indeed, CSI: Ankh-Morpork, a show which would feature new stories about the established characters of the books.
  • The red briefcases Ben is thinking of are the distinctive despatch boxes – aka “red boxes” – used by government ministers in the UK to carry official documents – and not just briefing notes. “Despatch box” itself refers to a number of different types of box used for governmental purposes. The red boxes are required for transport of anything with a security level above “Confidential”, and are still in use, though travel versions are not necessarily red.
  • The modern briefcase evolved from satchels, carpet bags and gladstone bags, first appearing around 1850. The name dates back to around 1925, and is just a compound of case and brief, in the sense of the kind of document often carried inside. The attaché case – what we’d now recognise as the dominant briefcase design – is indeed called that because it was traditionally carried by attachés.
  • Ben’s quip about “The Real Werewolves of Überwald” references The Real Housewives franchise, which began with The Real Housewives of Orange County in 2006. It and its various American and international sequels were conceived as reality television versions of the drama Desperate Housewives, and follow the relationships and tensions between wealthy socialite women.
  • The Osbournes was a reality show documenting the lives of Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne and his family – his wife and manager Sharon, and their children Kelly and Jack. It ran for four seasons on MTV from 2002 until 2005.
  • The Jackal (1997, dir Michael Caton-Jones) stars Bruce Willis as an international hitman hired to kill a powerful American target. It’s a remake of the 1973 French film Day of the Jackal, itself an adaptation of the 1971 novel by Frederick Forsyth. In the French film, set in 1963, the target is the French President. As well as Jack Black as the typically ill-fated weapon maker, the 1997 version also stars Richard Gere and Sidney Poitier, but it was not well-received.
  • The term “latte-sipping liberal” is, surprisingly to us, an American import! It rose to prominence after a 1997 article by US conservative writer David Brooks about “latte towns” where “liberalism is a dominant lifestyle”. It’s part of a longer campaign that seeks to paint left wing politics as elitist and out of touch. Comparable phrases are “champagne socialist” in the UK, and gauche caviar in France. This strategy was named the “latte libel” by Thomas Frank in his 2004 book, What’s The Matter with America?
  • “That scene” in Beauty and the Beast is the one in which Belle, berated by the Beast for going into a forbidden area of his castle, runs outside and is attacked by wolves; he saves her but is injured in the process.
  • While we mention the term “alpha wolf“, its important to note that the theory that wolf packs have “alphas” – a specific leader – is at best controversial, and more likely a load of nonsense. It was popularised by David Mech in his 1970 book The Wolf, but he later learned that the sources he relied on were based on observation of unrelated grey wolves in captivity, and no reliable. In the wild wolf packs are generally family groups with the parents more or less in charge.
  • We previously discussed the Mary Celeste in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“. In brief: the American merchant brigantine Mary Celeste was discovered adrift in the Atlantic Ocean in 1872. The crew were all missing and never found, but the ship was oddly untouched –
  • The Hulk holds up an entire mountain range – not just a single mountain! – to save the Avengers in Marvel Secret Wars issue #4 from 1984. As well as appearing within the issue, it’s also on the cover – accompanied by the caption “Beneath 150 billion tons, stands The Hulk — and he’s not happy!”
  • Several Twitter users compared the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 with Nicholas Cage’s antics in the 2004 adventure film National Treasure (dir. Jon Turteltaub). In the film, Cage plays an historian and amateur cryptologist named Benjamin Franklin Gates who believes a huge cache of invaluable artefacts and treasure was hidden by the Freemasons during the Civil War and never claimed. Most of the clues that lead to the stockpile are hidden in code on the Declaration of Independence, the document signed by representatives from various American colonies in 1776 which formed the United States of America and declared it independent of Great Britain. Cage’s character opposes stealing it, but the authorities don’t believe him when he tells them his partner Ian (Sean Bean) intends to do so, prompting him to steal it himself from the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. There’s a 2007 sequel, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, in which Cage’s character defends accusations of his ancestor being part of a conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln by kidnapping the current President (no really), and after many years of speculation and “development hell”, a third film is said to be currently in the works.
    Here’s the iconic tweet, from US sportswriter Adam Herman:

I am no longer impressed that Nicholas Cage managed to steal the Declaration of Independence.

— Adam Herman (@AdamZHerman) January 7, 2021
  • “Chad” is Internet slang for a typical “alpha male”. While it’s become more generally used, often in a mocking way, the term has awful, eugenicist origins in the misogynist incel movement. We previously discussed incels in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“.
  • The Hunt was released in March 2020, just before cinemas closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s politics seem somewhat confused; the hunter characters are “elitists” and describe their prey as “deplorables”, which seemingly casts them as caricatures of “latte-sipping liberals” rather than Republicans. Their motives are revealed as non-political, however, and critics seem to agree the film fails as any kind of satire.
  • We had Amie Kaufman as a guest for #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“, discussing the first book of the Bromeliad, Truckers.
  • In chapter 13 of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, protagonist Katniss hides from the “Career” contestants thanks to her superior tree climbing abilities, meeting and befriending the youngest contestant, Rue, who is hiding in the same tree.
  • In the original 1969 British heist film The Italian Job, Michael Caine’s Charlie Croker organises a sophisticated plan to steal gold in Italy. While preparing his team, one of them tests explosives on an armoured car and blows the whole vehicle to bits; Croker responds with the iconic line “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!” It became one of Michael Caine’s best-known lines (at least in the UK; the film was not initially a big success in the US), and he later titled his 2018 memoir Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: And Other Lessons in Life.
  • An “Agatha Christie moment” as Liz means it is the moment in a mystery where the surprising solution is revealed. An “Aldi version” is a cheap knock-off of a better known brand, as sold by the German discount supermarket chain Aldi. We previously discussed them in #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“.
  • Ben entirely misunderstood Liz’s dogfighting joke, for which he apologises. Its origins in describing air fighter combat come from its previous use to describe any kind of deadly close combat, originally between people. The modern official military term is “air combat maneuvering”, or ACM.
  • Liz and Ben make reference to the Sherlock Holmes story The Final Problem, in which Holmes tracks down criminal mastermind Moriarty. The pair fight at Richenbach Falls and seemingly perish when they both fall over the edge. We’ll later revisit this chapter in Holmes history in #Pratchat58, “The Barbarian Switch“.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 is a 2020 videogame from CD Projekt Red starring Keanu Reeves, and based on Mike Pondsmith’s 1988 tabletop roleplaying game, Cyberpunk. It features all the tropes we now identify with the genre, including cybernetic body modification.
  • The Ship of Theseus is an ancient philosophical thought experiment derived from the legend of Theseus, the Athenian who defeated the Minotaur. He returned home in a ship but forgot to change the sails as a signal to his father that he had succeeded, resulting in calamity. The ship was supposedly preserved for many generations, with its old planks replaced over time such that philosophers were divided over whether it was truly the same ship in which Theseus had sailed. Similar quandaries include the “grandfather’s axe” (as explained by the Low King), and modern examples also use bicycles. Pratchett talks about the ship of Theseus in both the Bromeliad and The Carpet People.
  • The trope in which someone hates others like themselves is identified by All the Tropes as the “Boomerang bigot“. They also list several other Discworld examples. In the real world, this idea is often used – potentially quite harmfully – to accuse conservatives who label homosexuality as evil as closeted themselves.
  • The unstoppable horror film villains Jason and Freddy are undead machete-wielding, hockey mask-wearing slasher Jason Vorhees, of the Friday the 13th franchise (1980-2009), and demoniac dream murderer Freddy Kreuger, of the Nightmare on Elm Street films (1984-2010). The pair faced off in the crossover film Freddy vs Jason in 2003.
  • Young Igor’s pet “Eerie” is a reference to the Vacanti mouse, which became headline news in the mid 1990s after photographs of it went viral via email. The hairless laboratory mouse seemingly had a human ear growing from its back, and led to protests against the misuse of genetic engineering, but in actual fact the ear was formed from cartilage cells in a biodegradable mould, placed under the mouse’s skin and supported by an external splint which was removed for the famous photo. It was not an actual human ear, and no genetic engineering was involved.
  • The Hurt Locker (2009, dir Kathryn Bigelow) is a war movie about an American bomb disposal squad during the Iraq War. It was written by journalise Mark Boal, based on his experience being embedded with soldiers during the war.
  • In the sci-fi TV series Firefly, the future human society who have colonised another solar system speak English and/or Mandarin. The main characters mostly speak English peppered with Mandarin curse words and other short phrases.
  • Lisa Simpson gets lost in Springfield’s “Russian district” in the 24th episode of The Simpson’s ninth season, “Lost Our Lisa”.
  • Twilight, the first in the series of vampire novels by Stephenie Meyer, was not published until 2005, six years after The Fifth Elephant. For more on those books, see the notes for #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
  • The inspiration for “heart in a box” is song “Dick in a Box“, the first single from comedy trio The Lonely Island (Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone). It features Samberg and Justin Timberlake crooning the instructions they used to make a Christmas present for their girlfriends by…well. It does what it says on the tin. It’s on YouTube here.
  • “Gold” is by Spandau Ballet, from their third album True, released as a single in 1983. You can watch the music video on YouTube.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Angua, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Cheery Littlebottom, Colon, Detritus, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Igor, Nobby, Patrician, Richard McKenzie, Sybil, The Watch, Uberwald, vampires, Vimes, werewolves

#Pratchat39 Notes and Errata

8 January 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?“, featuring guest Marc Burrows, discussing the third Discworld short story, 1998’s The Sea and Little Fishes.

  • The episode title was inspired by the fete or fair-like atmosphere of the Witch Trial, and by UK singer David Essex’s album, song and jukebox musical “All the Fun of the Fair”.
  • The Sea and Little Fishes was first published in a promotional “sampler” alongside the The Wood Boy by Raymond E. Feist. Both then appeared in the novella collection Legends, along with other new work by the likes of Stephen King, Ursula Le Guin, George R. R. Martin and Anne McCaffery. At just over 13,500 words, it’s maybe a little short for a novella, but very long for a short story.
  • For more information on the Wurundjeri people, visit the web site of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Aboriginal Corporation.
  • The two-part television adaptation Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather was made by British production company The Mob, and first broadcast on Sky1 in the UK on the 17th and 18th of December, 2006. We talked about it and the other Pratchett adaptations to date briefly in #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“. We discussed the novel Hogfather back in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“.
  • On the subject of swears appearing early on in the books, Rincewind tells Bravd the Hublander to “bugger off” in The Colour of Magic. “Shit” appears four times in Guards! Guards!, but we couldn’t find any swears in the first ten pages or so; Marc might have been thinking about another book.
  • Douglas Adams (1952-2001) was an English radio and television writer and novelist, best known for The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which…well you know. We’ll probably talk about it in more detail another time.
  • Robert Rankin is another British author of comic fantasy whose books are loosely connected by the (fictional) English village of Brentford, where many of them take place. These kicked off with his first novel, 1981’s The Antipope, part of “The Brentford Trilogy”; he is currently working on the final book of “The Final Brentford Trilogy”, which began with The Lord of the Ring Roads in 2017.
  • Here’s @terryandrob’s tweet about Marc’s book:

It isn’t an official or authorised biography, our lawyers have read it – we haven’t – and although we don’t endorse it, we do wish @20thcenturymarc all the best.

— Terry Pratchett 🇺🇦 (@terryandrob) March 31, 2020
  • If you’re a regular listener then you’re probably familiar with Liz’s history with English children’s author Enid Blyton (1897-1968). It’s previously come up in our discussions of Truckers, The Unadulterated Cat, The Amazing Maurice and Johnny and the Bomb. The subject of the forum’s (misplaced) ire was Liz’s 2012 article “Is it okay: To read Enid Blyton books?” for Lip Magazine, which revisits the tropes common to her work which we now consider harmful.
  • A quick bit of errata: Enid Blyton was born in East Dulwich, but by 1938 had moved to Beaconsfield, where Pratchett was born, and lived and worked there for the rest of her life. Terry was born in 1948 – twenty years before Blyton’s death in 1968, at the age of 71! They could have met, but it seems like the sort of thing Marc would have discovered when writing his book. The pair had a few other things in common: Blyton was also a workaholic, writing more than 700 books during her career, and also suffered from Alzheimer’s disease towards the end of her life.
  • G K Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English writer best known for his Father Brown series of mystery stories. He was born in Kensington in London, but moved to Beaconsfield in 1909, by which time he was a successful author.
  • We discussed the Valhalla Cinema Blues Brothers story back in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • Kirsty MacColl (1959-2000) was a British singer/songwriter who is best known to many for her performance on “Fairytale of New York”, a very non-traditional Christmas song performed by The Pogues, produced by her husband of the time, Steve Lilywhite – a probable source for the criminal brothers’ surname in Hogfather? One of her many hits was 1981’s “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis”, the lead single from her debut album Desperate Character. You can see her performing it on YouTube.
  • Pratchett’s first published story was The Hades Business, in which the Devil engages a shady marketing executive named Crucible to advertise Hell. It’s reprinted – with an author’s note full of embarrassment – in A Blink of the Screen, but first appeared in Science Fantasy volume 20, #60 in August 1963 (a few months before the debut of Doctor Who). You can find it online at the Internet Archive, where you can also find Terry’s never-collected second published story Night Dweller in New Worlds volume 49, #156 from November 1965.
  • “Theatre of Cruelty” was the second Discworld short story, written in 1992 for a publisher’s magazine and later collected in The Wizards of Odd in 1996. It features Captain Vimes and Corporal Carrot of the Watch investigating the murder of a children’s entertainer.
  • “The Sea and Little Fishes” is presumably set before Carpe Jugulum, and as discussed about 1,000 words were cut and later repurposed as a scene in that novel. Granny’s worries about her growing power and propensity for darkness in Carpe Jugulum fit in well as a consequence of this story. Tiffany attends her first Witch Trial in her second novel, A Hat Full of Sky, which features the return of several characters from this story including Letice Earwig and the dwarf Zakzak Stronginthearm. We later discussed A Hat Full of Sky in #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • Ben’s comment “I’m too old for this shit” is referencing the line made famous by Danny Glover as aging police detective Roger Murtaugh in the Lethal Weapon films, beginning with 1987’s Lethal Weapon. Glover has used the line in several other roles and cameo appearances as well.
  • We previously discussed whether Nanny Ogg was the more powerful witch in our Wyrd Sisters episode: #Pratchat6, “Enter Three Wytches” with Elly Squire.
  • Marc is referring to the original 1971 edition of The Carpet People, Pratchett’s first published novel, which he sold at the age of 23, though it came from much earlier writings. We discussed the original version of The Carpet People in a special video panel for the Australian Discworld Convention, which we also released in a special annotated form to Pratchat subscribers as “A Tale of Two Carpets”. You can see the original, unannotated version of the discussion on YouTube. We covered The Dark Side of the Sun back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“. And don’t worry – we’ll get to his other pre-Discworld sci-fi novel, Strata.
  • The Country Women’s Association formed as separate chapters in Australian states in 1922, with a national body (the CWAA) formed in 1945. They’re still incredibly important in rural Australia.
  • The witches go to the opera in Maskerade (#Pratchat23), and the theatre came to them in Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4).
  • Willow’s disappointing meeting with her college’s upsettingly mundane Wiccan group, the “Daughters of Gaea”, occurs in the season four Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Hush”. We previously talked about this way back in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“.
  • The word “grok” comes from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Human Valentine Michael Smith is born on Mars and raised by Martians, learning their ways, which he later tries to teach on Earth. The Martian word “grok” (invented by Heinlein) is very important in his teachings; it literally means “to drink”, but metaphorically means a deep and empathic or intuitive understanding. The term was popularised on the non-fictional planet Earth by nerds and hippies, who embraced the novel and many of its messages.
  • The weasel-word phrase “You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment” was made famous by politician character Francis Urquart, protagonist of the novel and television series House of Cards. In the original English series, he is played by Ian Richardson; when he later voiced Death in The Mob’s television adaptation of Hogfather (see above), they gave him a very similar line as an in-joke.
  • We covered the Johnny Maxwell books Only You Can Save Mankind in #Pratchat28, Johnny and the Dead in #Pratchat34, and Johnny and the Bomb in #Pratchat37.
  • Kermit the Frog is the most famous of Jim Henson’s puppet characters, the Muppets. Performed by Henson himself until his death, he made his debut in 1955 as a lizard-like creature on Henson’s first television show, Sam and Friends, though he wasn’t specifically referred to as a frog until the 1960s. He is best remembered as a reporter on Sesame Street, the host of The Muppet Show and the central character of the subsequent Muppet films, the first of which – 1979’s The Muppet Movie – tells the story of his rise to fame. The film memorably opens with Kermit singing “The Rainbow Connection”, accompanying himself on a banjo.
  • The frog from the famous Merry Melodies cartoon was later named “Michigan J Frog“, though it is not given a name in the original cartoon, 1955’s One Froggy Evening. He was later revived as the mascot of Warner Brothers cable network in the 1990s.
  • Margaret Hamilton (1902-1985) played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. She suffered burns to her face and hand in the scene where she vanishes in a ball of flame, which was achieved with real flame while she dropped through a trapdoor. She took six weeks to recuperate, but is reported to have said: “I won’t sue, because I know how this business works, and I would never work again. I will return to work on one condition – no more fire work!”
  • Marc is referring to the scene near the end of Ghostbusters (1984, dir. Ivan Reitman), when the heroes are confronted by Gozer, herald of a supernatural “Traveller” who will take on a form chosen by one of its victims. The Ghostbusters try not to think of anything, but Ray Stantz (Dan Ackroyd) can’t manage that. Instead he tries to think of the least dangerous thing possible – and unwittingly summons a giant killer version of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a confectionary mascot.
  • Room 101 appears in George Orwell’s novel 1984 as the feared location where a prisoner of the state is taken to receive the ultimate, personalised torture. As government agent O’Brien explains to Winston Smith: “The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.” It inspired a BBC radio and television show of the same name, in which celebrity guests are asked to discuss their pet hates, trying to persuade the host to put them in Room 101 where they will never be seen again. (Which isn’t really the spirit of the original, but the show is often funny.)
  • Fuck has long been considered the most versatile swearword. George Carlin has a famous routine about its many uses, which was widely copied and remixed and sent around via fax and email in the 1980s and 1990s. (it’s also been widely shared via YouTube, but there’s no official version so we’ll leave it up to you to find it.) Fuck is also the subject of the first episode of the Netflix series History of Swear Words, hosted by Nicholas Cage.
  • To untangle the superhero confusion: Ben referred to Liz as Ms. Marvel; while this is an older name used by Captain Marvel (aka Carol Danvers, played by Brie Larsen in the recent films), Ben meant the current Marvel superhero of that name, Kamala Khan, who has shapeshifting abilities, which she uses in her early stories to make her fists bigger while fighting bad guys. Liz mentions being married to “Yon-Rogg“, an alien Kree warrior who mentors Captain Marvel in the Captain Marvel film; he’s played by the always dishy Jude Law. They’re not married, but we can all dream. (Thanks to listener Claude, who helped Ben realise this is who Liz was talking about – he thought she said “Ioan Gruffudd“, the also handsome Welsh actor, whose only superhero role was as Reed Richards, aka Mr Fantastic, in the 2005 film Fantastic Four and its sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer. He also has stretching powers that would allow him to make his hands bigger. The character’s wife is Susan Storm, aka the Invisible Woman, who is played in the film by Jessica Alba.)
  • The song “Very Mild Superpowers” is by Irish comedian David O’Doherty; you can watch him performing it on Australian musical gameshow Spicks & Specks on YouTube. 
  • Marc’s band, The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing, was founded by Andy Heintz and British anarchist and occult comedian Andrew O’Neill, with whom Marc has also toured as a stand up.
  • The Manic Street Preachers, subject of the anthology book Marc is editing, are a Welsh punk and alternative rock band formed in 1986. They’ve been as famous for their “controversial” behaviour as their music, especially in the case of former member Richey Edwards, who disappeared in 1995. The band’s single “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” and the album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours reached number one in the UK charts in 1998.
  • English musician Marc Bolan (1947-1977) was lead singer of the glam rock band T. Rex, and is credited by many for starting the glam rock movement when he appeared on Top of the Pops in 1971 dressed in glitter and satin. He died in a car crash in London just before his 30th birthday. (We’re gonna guess you know who David Bowie is.)
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Agnes Nitt, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Granny Weatherwax, Lettice Earwig, Marc Burrows, Nanny Ogg, short story, Witches

#Pratchat36 Notes and Errata

8 October 2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“, featuring guest Gillian Cosgriff, discussing the twenty-third Discworld novel, 1998’s Carpe Jugulum.

  • You’ll understand the episode title when you get to about the 1 hour 45 minute mark. Ben would also like to mention his second episode title choice, “Thoroughly Modern Magpyr”, which references the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie.
  • We discussed Maskerade with opera singer and teacher Myf Coghill back in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • The Truth, which concerns the rise of the Fourth Estate (i.e. journalism and a free press) in Ankh-Morpork, is the twenty-fifth Discworld novel. It introduces Pratchett’s most beloved vampire character, iconographer Otto von Chriek. We cover it in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“, six months after this episode.
  • The performing arts (along with the arts sector in general) have been especially badly hit by the COVID-19 crisis: theatres and cinemas and other venues were the first to shut down, the sector and its businesses have received little in relief funding, independent artists often find it hard to qualify for individual support and it is much more difficult to get audiences to pay for online live performance. On top of that, theatres will likely be among the last businesses allowed to open up again, as they are considered high risk and non-essential. If you can support your local artists, please please do.
  • Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the 2016 live theatre sequel to the Harry Potter books, set nineteen years after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It features Harry and friends as adults, though the main protagonist is one of his sons, Albus. Before the worldwide shutdown of theatres there were only three productions worldwide, in London’s West End, Broadway in New York, and at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne. A fourth, in Toronto Canada, was originally planned to open this month.
  • A word about the ethics of supporting J K Rowling: we won’t give any more space to her many public transphobic comments, but instead we want to make it clear that Pratchat supports the rights and respects the identities of all- (and non-) gendered folks. While boycotting Rowling’s work may seem an easy choice, a large production like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child makes those ethics complex. While undoubtedly you would be fuelling Rowling’s wealth and thus influence by buying a ticket, the show also provides vital ongoing employment for hundreds of workers on and behind stage – many of them trans or non-binary themselves. And of course many see – or saw – Harry Potter as a story about someone finding a community and chosen family who accept them for who they are, when their own relatives reject and abuse them, making Rowling’s comments all the more hurtful.
  • #KeepTheSecrets is the hashtag used by productions of The Cursed Child to encourage those seeing the play to avoid spoiling others, since with only three productions worldwide, opportunities to experience the story are far more scarce than for the books or films that precede it.
  • “Say no more, say no more, a nod’s as good as a wink to a blind bat” is a line from Monty Python’s “Candid Photography” sketch, aka “Nudge Nudge”. In it, Eric Idle asks increasingly outrageous “suggestive” questions to Terry Jones in a pub. It first appeared at the end of the third episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in October 1969.
  • ATMs (aka cashpoints) in Vatican City are indeed probably the only ones in the world which offer Latin as a language option. While Vatican City’s official language is modern Italian, all visiting Catholic church officials can read Latin, so it’s an easy way to make sure everyone can use them.
  • The Igor employed by the Counts Magpyr is indeed the first we meet in the course of the Discworld novels, but far from the last. In fact we meet about thirteen actual Igors (and Igorinas), with a few more mentioned. We’ll meet several more in the next Discworld book, The Fifth Elephant.
  • The popular culture version of Igor stems from Victor Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant in the 1931 film Frankenstein, though as usual with these things it’s not that simple, since that character is named Fritz. The assistant does not appear in the book, and is borrowed from one of the early stage adaptations. Two of the later sequels had a character played by Bela Lugosi named Ygor, and by the 1950s the name and the archetype had been merged together in the popular consciousness. “Igor”, by the way, is a real name, supposedly Russian in origin and meaning “warrior”.
  • The X-Files, created by Chris Carter, was an American sci-fi drama series which originally ran for nine seasons on the Fox Network between 1993 and 2002. The series follows two FBI agents, believer Fox Mulder and skeptic Dana Scully, as they investigate various unexplained phenomena that are consigned to the so-called “X-Files” of the Bureau. It alternated between weird monster-of-the-week stories and a labyrinthine ongoing plot about a complicated alien conspiracy. It was immensely popular, and spawned the films The X-Files (1998) and The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008), the spin-off series The Lone Gunmen, and the related Chris Carter series Millennium. The X-Files itself was revived for tenth and eleventh seasons in 2016 and 2018.
  • We covered The Wee Free Men, the first Tiffany Aching book and the first appearance of the clan of Mac Nac Feegle we know best, in #Pratchat33, “Meet the Feegles“. Not only do they speak differently in Carpe Jugulum, but their name is capitalised differently (“Nac mac Feegle”, not “Mac”), they wear loincloths rather than kilts, and they are depicted wearing smurf-like caps (see the next note). Later Tiffany books make reference to a clan in the mountains who live by a lake and write things down, which is probably the one depicted here.
  • We previously mentioned the Smurfs in our episode about Truckers, “Upscalator to Heaven” (#Pratchat9). They were created in 1959 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo – no, not Peyote, thanks autocorrect – and grew to worldwide prominence through an American animated series that ran throughout the 1980s. They are the archetypal jolly little characters with adjective-based names like “Happy Smurf”, “Brainy Smurf” and “Papa Smurf” which helpfully describe each Smurf’s personality or skills. Since the Smurfs are small, blue, magical and live in a community with 99 men and one woman, its clear that parodying them was at least part of Pratchett’s intent with the Feegles, who in this book are even depicted wearing pointed caps which droop down just as the Smurfs’ do (though the Feegle’s caps are blue, not white or red).
  • Scots is a Scottish language distinct from both English and Scottish Gaelic. While Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language derived from an eastern dialect of Middle Irish (making it a sister language to modern Irish), Scots is Germanic language derived from a northern dialect of Middle English (making it a sister language of modern English). Helen Zaltzman made an excellent episode of The Allusionist podcast about the survival of Scots despite the efforts of English rule to eradicate it (episode 78, “Oot in the Open“), and another about modern efforts to introduce LGBTIAQ+ terms to the language (episode 117, “Many Ways at Once“).
  • We discussed Wyrd Sisters way back in #Pratchat4, “Enter Three Wytches“, with guest Elly Squire. We had a lot of thoughts about Magrat and Verence’s courtship.
  • Harry and Meghan are Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, sixth in line to the British Throne, and American actress Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. They have been outspoken on many issues, including Meghan’s own treatment by the press, which is hard not to see as racist when compared to the way they treat Prince William’s wife, Kate Middleton. In January 2020, the couple announced they were stepping back as senior members of the royal family, a move described in scathing tones by the British press as “Megxit”, a play on Brexit.
  • Charles, Prince of Wales, usually known as Prince Charles, is the eldest child of Queen Elizabeth II and heir apparent to the British Throne. He has long taken an interest in various public and philanthropic subjects, most notably urban planning, architecture and the environment. But it’s not all good news: his relationship with Diana Spencer was…not great, to say the least, with both having extra-marital affairs before a controversial divorce and her death in a car accident. His environmentalism has been viewed as a bit dodgy, and he’s also controversially a fan of alternative medicines – including homeopathy which, as Granny knows well, is nonsense. He is in many ways the quintessential weirdo royal who gets away with being eccentric.
  • Gentrification is the process in which more affluent (usually middle class) folks move into neighbourhood and prompt (or demand) changes which drive up rents, house prices and the general cost of living (replacing cheaper stores, cafes and restaurants with more expensive ones, for example), forcing out the poorer folk who originally lived there.
  • Giacomo Casanunda, the dwarfish parody of real-life famous lover Giacomo Casanova, appears in only three novels: Witches Abroad, Lords and Ladies and the brief cameo here. He is first briefly mentioned in a footnote in Reaper Man as one of the Disc’s greatest lovers, though that early version of the joke uses the less subtle spelling “Casanunder”.
  • Ben’s comment that Magrat is “a bit of a helicopter” is in reference to a “helicopter parent“, one who constantly “hovers” near their child rather than letting them make their own mistakes and learn their own lessons. It’s probably an unfair assessment, given young Esme’s age. (Incidentally, Liz revealed the surprising etymology of “helicopter” back in #Pratchat26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul“.)
  • The meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen, usually known as “pointing Rick Dalton” or “pointing Leonardo DiCaprio”, is an image taken from the 2019 Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In the scene DiCaprio’s character, actor Rick Dalton, is watching a television show with his stunt double (Brad Pitt) in a private cinema, and points at the screen when he sees himself on screen. Read about some of its famous uses on knowyourmeme.com.
  • Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Horribly, Hilariously Wrong is a blog started in 2008 by Jen from Orlando. It showcases the often terrible cakes people get from professional bakeries which don’t quite match the representative image, or when the notes on what to write in icing are read a little too literally. It’s still going strong at cakewrecks.com. Thanks to Twitter listener Ilbeon for mentioning it in this context!
  • Hollywood-style hacking has very little resemblance to the real world equivalent. You can find a list of those inaccuracies on the All the Tropes web site under “Hollywood Hacking“, though the specific version Ben references is the “Phone Trace Race“, as it used to be about tracing a phone call. You can find it in films like Hackers, Swordfish and to a lesser extent even classics like Wargames. If you want to feel like a (Hollywood) hacker yourself, we recommend playing with hackertyper.com.
  • The “Tolerant Left” is a sarcastic term used by conservative commentators when they try to point out ways in which progressive or “leftist” politics is intolerant. It’s best known from the meme “so much for the tolerant left“, in which various spurious examples are given to show how petty and inconsequential most of the conservative complaints are. The phrase can also be used to describe the more right-leaning branches of supposedly leftist parties, like mainstream Democrats in the US or many factions within the Australian Labor Party. Their politics are actually pretty conservative on an absolute scale, while still being quite far left of their more obviously conservative opponents.
  • The “Boris Johnson approach” to COVID-19 was to resist any kind of lockdowns or restrictions on gatherings, as seen across the rest of Europe and in many other countries. Early on his government seemed to be following advice to let people to contract the virus in the hope of achieving “herd immunity”, a move opposed by doctors as it would lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Similar criticisms have been levelled at the United States and Sweden, though the latter is a bit of a special case from a political perspective.
  • It’s true; Liz promised/threatened to talk about vampire boners in our previous episode, “Great Balls of Physics“. Er…the title of that episode was not meant to be a pun on this.
  • Many of the weird vampire myths mentioned in the book are indeed real, as Terry himself is quoted as saying the Annotated Pratchett File: “”As an aside, very little vampiric legend and folklore in CJ is made up – even the vampire tools and watermelons are real world beliefs.” Both of those examples are from Slavic folklore. (See the later note for more about the socks thing.)
  • We’ve mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer many times, including in our discussions of Mort, Dodger, Eric, Guards! Guards!, Truckers, Diggers, Hogfather and The Last Continent. In brief it was a highly influential TV show created by Joss Whedon, based on his 1992 film, which ran from 1997 to 2003. It followed the adventures of teenager Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who tries to live a relatively normal Californian high school life while also fulfilling her destiny as the Slayer, a once-in-a-generation Chosen One granted supernatural powers to fight vampires and demons. (There’s some more about it during the listener questions section in this episode.)
  • Vampire: The Masquerade, “a roleplaying game of personal horror”, is a tabletop roleplaying game first published by White Wolf Publishing in 1991. Players take on the roles of vampires, who called themselves “kindred”, and try to survive both the urges of their darker side (“the Beast”) and the politics of modern vampire society. The “Masquerade” of the title is one of the major rules, or “Conventions”, of the Camarilla, a vampire sect who, like Count Magpyr, reject superstition and try to move with the times. The Convention of “Masquerade” is that vampires do not allow their existence to become common knowledge. The game has seen continued popularity, with (so far) five major editions and spin-offs including a TV series (Kindred: The Embraced; it was pretty terrible), several videogames, a trading card game (Vampire: The Eternal Struggle) and even a professional wrestler!
  • Yoga is a Hindu spiritual and philosophical tradition dating back around 3,000 years. It takes many forms, including hatha yoga, a physical discpline which has been adapted into the modern practice of “yoga as exercise”. Bikram Choudhury popularised his form of “hot yoga” in America (and from there throughout the Western world) as Bikram Yoga, in which participants strike various physical poses in a heated environment. It is now well-documented that Bikram abused his popularity and position of trust and authority, abusing and assaulting many students and instructors. Choudhury fled the United States in 2017 following multiple law suits and criminal charges. The five part series Bikram from the 30 For 30 podcast tells the story in a lot of detail.
  • The Twilight novels by Stephenie Meyer, beginning with Twilight in 2005, chronicle the love affair between clumsy teenager Bella Swan and 104-year-old telepathic vampire Edward Cullen, who is drawn to her in part because he cannot read her mind. Famously Meyer was unfamiliar with standard vampire tropes; her vampires can have (half-vampire) children, lack fangs, glitter in sunlight, and create new vampires by injecting venom. Unfortunately, Gill is wrong about the vampire boners: they are not described in any detail in the novels, as Meyer’s Mormon sensibilities led her to steer away from any detailed description of the sex that occurs in the final book, Breaking Dawn. Meyer is however happy to describe the horrifying vampire baby birth in great detail, and also tells us that Edward’s vampire super-strength leaves Bella bloody and bruised after their first night together – one of many questionable things about the novels.
  • The Southern Vampire Mysteries, also known as True Blood, are a series of thirteen novels by Charlaine Harris, beginning with 2001’s Dead Until Dark. They follow Sookie Stackhouse, a telepathic waitress in Louisiana, who lives in a world where vampires exist and have recently become public knowledge. She works in a bar frequented by vampires and likes hanging around them, including her 173-year-old romantic interest Bill Compton, because she can’t hear their thoughts. They were adapted into the HBO television series True Blood, which ran for seven seasons from 2008 to 2014 and starred Anna Paquin as Sookie. The TV series is named for a synthetic blood alternative, “Tru Blood”, which was developed by vampire authorities prior to their “coming out” to help in their campaign to co-exist with humans.
  • Midnight Sun, the Twilight book retelling the story from Edward’s perspective, was published in August 2020. Stephenie Meyer began writing it in 2008, and showed it to cast and crew of the Twilight films to influence their portrayal of Edward. Chapters from it were leaked in the Internet in 2011. She intends to write two more Twilight books.
  • Clementine Ford is an Australian writer, broadcaster and public speaker whose focus is feminism. As well as seven years of columns for The Age newspaper’s Daily Life and numerous articles for various online publications, she’s written two books, Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys, and you can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @clementine_ford.
  • Lord Grantham (played by Hugh Bonneville) is Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham in the TV series and subsequent film Downton Abbey, which follows the lives of his fictional aristocratic family and their servants between 1912 and 1927. Discworld fans will note that Grantham’s eldest daughter Mary is played by Michelle Dockery, who in one of her earliest screen roles portrayed Death’s granddaughter Susan in the 2006 television adaptation of Hogfather.
  • Ben cannot substantiate whether there is an official Catholic Church position on vampires and crosses. In medieval times the church attributed any evil creatures of folklore to the influence of demons, and so therefore they were warded off by the power of God, but there’s no consensus on the mechanism.
  • The film Ben is thinking of where a Star of David is used to repel a vampire is the 1979 comedy Love at First Bite starring George Hamilton as Dracula. Psychiatrist Jeffrey Rosenberg (Richard Benjamin), who is revealed to be van Helsing’s grandson, tries using a Star of David on Dracula, but as Dracula is really the protagonist of the film he brushes this off, just as he does a mirror, garlic and various other attempts to kill him. In several other films, including The Fearless Vampire Killers, vampires are presented with a cross but shrug it off because they were Jewish in life. A couple of other films doing this joke have their vampire hunters go on to use Nazi symbols to repel the vampires, which is a whole new level of wrong.
  • The Doctor Who vampire story Ben mentions is 1989’s The Curse of Fenric, starring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor. As well as Russian soldier Sorin’s belief in communism and the Doctor’s faith in his companions, there are two sad scenes where a character’s faith is broken and no longer works (but we won’t spoil those).
  • Hammer Film Productions Ltd, also known as Hammer Horror or Hammer’s House of Horror, is a British film company founded in 1934 who are best known for their gothic horror films of the 50s, 60s and 70s. They produced the first popular colour films about characters like Frankenstein, Dracula and the Mummy, and made international stars out of Peter Cushing (mostly as Victor Frankenstein, van Helsing and other human villains and slayers, rather than monsters) and Christopher Lee (who played Dracula for Hammer in seven films).
  • Blaskó Béla Ferenc Dezső, better known as Bela Lugosi, was a Hungarian-American actor who rose to fame by playing the title role in Dracula on Broadway, and in the 1931 Hollywood film adaptation of the play. He was an active union member both in Hungary – leading to his persecution after the revolution of 1919 – and in Hollywood. After Dracula Lugosi became typecast in horror roles, and was frustrated as he constantly received second billing under Boris Karloff, even when he was playing the lead. He later became addicted to the morphine he took as a painkiller for extreme back pain, and by the time of his death was only offered roles by famously terrible director Ed Wood.
  • Count von Count, usually just called “The Count”, is one of Sesame Street’s longest-running muppet characters, debuting in the show’s fourth season in 1972. As per a popular bit of folklore about vampires, he loves to count things, but while he has fangs, wears evening dress and can turn into a bat, he has now shed any of his more frightening attributes – he used to be able to hypnotise people, and his laugh was more sinister and accompanied by thunder and lightning! He was originally performed by veteran muppeteer Jerry Nelson until his death in 2012, when Matt Vogel – who had already been doing the physical pupeetering – took over The Count’s vocal performance.
  • Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is the modern name for what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). Media portrayals often include an identity or “personality state” which is violent and dangerous, which is rarely the case in real life. In some cases it has been seen as a positive coping mechanism in the face of traumatic experiences. Dissociative Identity Awareness Day is March 5.
  • Laura Davis, award-winning Australian comedian and favourite of everyone in this episode, can be found online at lauradaviscomedy.com. Her latest album is The Bus Show, a special audio-only edition of her 2019 Edinburgh Fringe hit Better Dead Than A Coward. You can buy it and two other comedy performances via her web site.
  • Liz is referencing We Need to Talk About Kevin, a 2003 novel by American author Lionel Shriver. It is told as a series of letters written by a mother trying to come to terms with the fact that her son, Kevin, has perpetrated a school massacre. It was adapted as a film in 2011 starring Tilda Swinton as Kevin’s mother, Eva, and Ezra Miller as Kevin.
  • The concept of the “shame gremlin” is largely derived from American researcher Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability. She rose to international prominence when her 2010 talk for TEDxHouston went viral; it’s since been viewed over 50 million times.
  • Stealing a vampire’s sock, you’ll be glad to hear, is indeed based on a real bit of folklore, possibly from Romani tradition: they are compelled to chase their socks, so you can banish a vampire by stealing them and throwing them outside the town limits. Variations on this do seem to specify the left sock, while others say you fill them with grave dirt or rocks or garlic, and throw them into a river. This method is one of Taika Waititi’s favourites from his research for What We Do in the Shadows.
  • Liz’s euphemism for vampire testicles is a reference to The Lost Boys, a 1987 comedy vampire film directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland. It made Coreys Haim and Feldman famous for their roles as “the Frog brothers”, a pair of amateur vampire hunters, and Alex Winter (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and Dianne West also appear! It was a very important film – and soundtrack – at the time. It did get a sequel and comic book series twenty years later, but neither made the same splash as the original.
  • “1337speak” – aka 1337, l337, leet and eleet – is a style of writing which uses alternate spellings and numbers or symbols in place of regular letters. “1337” thus translates to “leet”, short for “elite” – supposedly referring to the superior status of the hackers and videogame players who invented it on bulletin board systems in the 1980s. The symbols either look like the letters they replace, or sound like parts of the word when reading out the symbol’s name. (Of note: don’t use this method to add numbers and symbols to important passwords, as computer programs and hackers know it well.)
  • Derby names are the nicknames used by roller derby players. Traditionally they are puns or wordplay, often involving pop culture references and a saucy or violent twist that reflects the sport’s full-contact nature and punk- and rockabilly-inspired culture. Not unlike the faces of clowns discussed in our first episode, they can be registered in various places, including rollerderbyroster.com; some examples include Heather Blocklear, Candy Crush-Her, Robin Graves and Velvet Landmine.
  • The Fates of Greek mythology, more properly known as the Moirai, are the personifications of destiny, who control the fates of mortal lives, represented by a thread. They appeared in a few different versions before settling on the best known trio: Clotho spins new threads to begin lives; Lachesis measures the threads and decides how long each life should be; and Atropos cuts the threads, choosing the manner of their death.
  • The Norns are female beings in Norse mythology, sometimes described as giants, who control fate and destiny (though this is a modern distinction; in the source many terms are used interchangeably, including valkyrie). There are many of them, but the three most important – Urð, Verðandi and Skuld – guard the Well of Urðr (or Fate), and use its waters to feed the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree. Like the Moirai (see above) they decided the fates of mortals, and are sometimes also depicted measuring and cutting threads.
  • In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books the wizards, or istari, appear as old men, but are in fact angel-like beings called Maiar sent to Middle Earth to guide mortals. There are three main wizards: Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White, and Radagast the Brown. (Mustrum Ridcully is also known as Ridcully the Brown, and his love for nature – expressed through hunting it down – is a parody of Radagast.) Tolkien’s supplemental writings also briefly mention two other wizards wearing sea-blue robes, who headed into the East of Middle-Earth. We don’t know what happened to them.
  • We briefly discussed Gill’s operatic cabaret, Lorelei, at the end of our Maskerade episode. Co-written with Julian Langdon and Casey Bennetto, with lyrics by Gill and Bennetto, it tells the story of the lorelei, three sirens on the River Rhine who are wondering if they are sick of all this luring sailors to their deaths business. It was produced by Victorian Opera at the Malthouse for a short season in November 2018, and might one day return… You can read about it at the Victorian Opera web site.
  • Frankenweenie was Tim Burton’s 1984 live-action debut, a black and white short film for Disney about Victor Frankenstein, a boy living in 1950s America who brings his beloved dog back to life. It starred Barret Oliver (best known for his starring role as Bastian in The Neverending Story) as Victor and Shelley Duvall as his mother, and deliberately echoed the 1931 film version of Frankenstein. (Ben saw it in the cinema as a boy and loved it; it’s also included as an extra on some versions of The Nightmare Before Christmas.) In 2012 Burton remade it as a full-length stop-motion animated film, starring Charlie Tahan as Victor alongside a cast of old Burton faves including Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara and Martin Landau.
  • “Bigger on the inside” is a Doctor Who tradition; the phrase is frequently uttered by humans who enter the Doctor’s TARDIS time machine for the first time, since on the outside it’s a 1960s London police box, but on the inside it’s a vast space. This is often subverted or lampshaded in the modern series; Ben’s favourite is in “The Husbands of River Song”, when the Twelfth Doctor pretends he’s never been inside the TARDIS before and hams up his own rendition. The episode “Smith and Jones” is another good one: the Tenth Doctor mouths the line when new companion Martha Jones says it (supposedly an ad-lib from actor David Tennant).
  • Tomb Raider is a videogame series originally published by Eidos and developed by Core Design and then Crystal Dynamics. Beginning with Tomb Raider in 1996, the series starred Lara Croft, a young English aristocrat and archaeologist who explores various secret tombs and ancient ruins looking for treasure and shooting a lot of people and animals. The series was famous for the title character and also for the puzzle-based exploration third-person gameplay, which was very different to the first-person shooters that still dominated the market at the time. After nine games, Eidos was bought by Japanese publisher Square Enix, and the series was rebooted in 2013. The new Tomb Raider featured a younger Lara in an origin story in which she is shipwrecked and forced to fight to survive against worshipper’s of the island’s god.
  • Rhianna Pratchett was lead writer for the new, more grounded Lara of the 2013 Tomb Raider. She was also the sole writer on the 2015 sequel, Rise of the Tomb Raider, for which she won multiple awards, including the Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Videogame Writing. She did not work on the subsequent game, 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
  • Granny’s famous “I ate’nt dead” sign doesn’t appear until her fourth novel, Lords and Ladies, as we discussed in #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“.
  • “One For Sorrow” is the final track on Australian indie rock/pop musician Megan Washington’s 2014 album, There There. The rhyme in the song’s context is counting stars, not magpies, which has precedence in folklore as well. The song is on YouTube here.
  • “Magpie” appears on The Unthanks’ 2015 album Mount the Air. You can find a great live version on YouTube from their appearance on Later… with Jools Holland.
  • We previously mentioned the 2001 Dreamworks animated film Shrek – and the fairytale-hating Lord Farquaad – in #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles” and #Pratchat33, “Cats, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“. The original picture book by William Steig was published in 1990. As revealed in the biography A Life in Footnotes, Pratchett was not very impressed by the film version.
  • The phrase “Up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen” is from the well-known poem “The Faeries”, written in 1850 by Irish poet William Allingham. The relevant verse is the most famous:
Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men;
  • Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is British director Guy Ritchie’s 1998 feature film debut. It stars an ensemble cast of crooks and gangsters whose various schemes, initially disparate, all converge in a bloody finale. We referenced it in the title of #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“.
  • There’s no sign of any Pratchett family experience with Alzheimer’s prior to his own diagnosis. In this Guardian article, reprinted after this death in 2015, he mentions that his father died of cancer but glad he had “all his marbles”.
  • Once again we advise that The Rocky Horror Show can’t really be explained; you just have to see it. The song we reference here, “Over at the Frankenstein Place”, is the third one. It also appears in the film version, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  • In Suzanne Collins’ novel series The Hunger Games, the future dystopian North American state called Panem is divided into twelve Districts. As a reminder of the failure of a previous uprising against the Capitol, the Districts are forced to select one boy and one girl via lottery each year to participate in the Hunger Games, where they are forced to fight and kill each other until only one remains.
  • Home Alone is a 1990 John Hughes comedy film, directed by Chris Columbus, in which eight-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) is accidentally left behind when his family go on Christmas holiday to Paris. When a pair of burglars try to rob the house, he sets up traps using items from around the house to defend himself, many of which would be deadly outside of the cartoon logic of Hollywood.
  • The Princess Bride is a 1987 adventure comedy film, written by William Goldman and based on his 1973 comic novel of the same name. Without spoiling too much, a key plot point/gag at one point is that one of the protagonists is diagnosed as being only “mostly dead”, allowing him to be revived, but in a severely weakened state.
  • The Scorpion King (2002) was a spin-off prequel film about The Rock’s antagonist character from The Mummy Returns (2001), the not-nearly-as-good sequel to The Mummy (1999). Amazingly The Scorpion King had no fewer than four direct-to-video sequels, the most recent in 2018. None of them star The Rock as he was too busy being awesome.
  • It’s true: the Rock tore his gate off to get to work. On September 19, wrestler turned action movie star and all-round superhero Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson posted on his Instagram that a power outage had prevented the gates opening at his estate. Not wanting to wait 45 minutes for the repair company and be late to set, he tore the gate off its hinges. And yes this is all after he and his family have had and recovered from COVID-19. The film in question is Red Notice, an action comedy also starring Gal Godot and Ryan Reynolds. Incidentally, The Rock now has more Instagram followers than anyone in the world, knocking Kylie Jenner from the top spot.
  • The Neville we’re referring to in “a very Neville moment” is Neville Longbottom, a supporting character in the Harry Potter books and films. Neville became a fan favourite thanks to the double success of stepping up to win a key victory in the last book, and also dorky child star Matthew Lewis – who plays him in the films – growing up to be a total babe by the time of the last one.
  • Australian Magpies are not closely related to their European and Asian namesakes. The various species of Eurasian magpies are corvids, related to crows, rooks and ravens, and among the smartest birds in the world. Australian magpies (locally nicknamed “maggies”, “swoopy bois” or a variety of curse words) and their cousins in New Guinea are passerines, or songbirds, the largest and most diverse Order of birds. They are found throughout most of Australia in nine subspecies, have a distinctive warbling song, are quite intelligent, and very social – but also very territorial, and famously aggressive in Spring.
  • Australian children are taught many anti-magpie techniques, not all of which are effective. This magpie video from the Australian Academy of Science is a great explainer for what to do to stay safe in swooping season. You can also find many videos online of folks on bikes being repeatedly swooped, and while completing these show notes, there was news of a magpie pecking the eyes of an elderly man in Pratchat’s home state of Victoria. Thankfully he’s expected to recover his sight after emergency surgery, and such extreme aggressiveness is rare.
  • The Duchess is a new Netflix sitcom created by and starring Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan. Set in London, Ryan plays a single mother and “terrible person” who is considering having a second child. Of note, the show also features Sydney comedian Steen Raskopoulos in a major supporting role!
  • “White feminism” refers to mainstream feminist activism, which has historically centred around the concerns of middle-class, educated white women while ignoring the plight of other women. The most obvious example of this is that in Western countries, the dates celebrated for achieving women’s suffrage usually only secured voting rights for white women, while black women, indigenous women and women of colour were still unable to vote. Modern feminist movements strive to be intersectional – considering all forms of social injustice as connected, and thus to be resisted together.
  • The idea that the left and right hemispheres of the brain are responsible for logic and creativity, respectively, is still popular in culture. As is usual in science, it’s not that simple. The original idea was based on experiments done with patients who, as a treatment for severe epilepsy, had the connection between the sides of their brain – the corpus colosum – severed. But observation of activity in intact brains has given us a very different idea about brain function. While there are certainly some functions that to reside predominantly in one hemisphere of the brain, such as language, both hemispheres seem to play at least some part in most complex tasks. It is true, though, that the right hemisphere controls movement in the left side of the body, and vice versa.
  • The Downton Abbey cast includes Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham; Elizabeth McGovern as his American wife Cora; Michelle Dockery as his eldest daughter Mary; Laura Carmichael as his younger daughter Edith; and Dan Stevens as Matthew, a distant cousin.
  • Australian comedian Luke McGregor is probably best known for his television work with Celia Pacquola. The two appeared as civil servants in two seasons of the ABC political satire Utopia before creating their own show, Rosehaven. McGregor plays Daniel, a young man who returns to his (fictional) their Tasmanian hometown of Rosehaven to help his ailing mother run her real estate business, where he is reunited with his childhood friend Emma (Pacquola), who has fled her marriage during her honeymoon.
  • We discussed The Dark Side of the Sun with Will Kostakis back in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Agnes Nitt, Ben McKenzie, Carpe Jugulum, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Gillian Cosgriff, Granny Weatherwax, Igor, Lancre, Magrat, Nanny Ogg, Uberwald, vampires, Witches

#Pratchat35 Notes and Errata

8 September 2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 35, “Great Balls of Physics“, featuring guest Anna Ahveninen, discussing Terry’s 1999 collaboration with Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Science of Discworld.

  • The episode title plays on the classic Jerry Lee Lewis song, “Great Balls of Fire”, in honour of Roundworld’s tendency to shape matter into spheres.
  • Anna (and Liz and Ben) know that pharmacists do not just “sell molecules”. Modern pharmacy is the science of understanding and preparing medicines. Pharmacists are highly trained healthcare professionals, rightly held in high regard. But in “Commonwealth English”, “chemist” is a common synonym for pharmacist, hence Anna’s joke and our hyperbolic extension of it. (While we’re on the subject, it’s not entirely true that “everything” is made of molecules, but certainly everything that humans are likely to sell on Earth is.)
  • The story of the science fiction convention, which was held in the Hague in an unspecified year, appears in the book in Chapter 22, “Things That Aren’t”. Jack Cohen gave a longer account of Terry’s involvement, as well as some other background on how the book was written and published, in the Guardian article “Terry Pratchett and the real science of Discworld” by Sam Jordison, published a couple of months after Terry’s death.
  • A Teaspoon and an Open Mind: The Science of Doctor Who was written by Michael White in 2005, and if Ben were feeling uncharitable he might suggest it was rushed out to cash in- er, coincide with the hugely successful revived series that same year. White is an English author and former member of 80s band The Thompson Twins who now writes novels, but has also written a number of acclaimed biographies of da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Tolkien, Asimov and many more. He also wrote The Science of The X-Files – which gets mentioned in the introduction of The Science of Discworld! The Doctor Who book’s title comes from the 1979 story The Creature From the Pit, in which the Doctor, having succeeded where another has failed, quips: “Well to be fair I had a couple of gadgets he probably didn’t, like a teaspoon and an open mind.” This line was almost certainly influenced by Douglas Adams, who was script editor of Doctor Who at the time. A Teaspoon and an Open Mind is also the title of the dedicated Doctor Who fan fiction site whofic.com.
  • Paul Davies is a famous English physicist and broadcaster who has written thirty books, most of them popular science titles which were bestsellers in the 1980s and 1990s. His most famous books are God and the New Physics (1983), The Mind of God (1992), and Ben’s favourite, How to Build a Time Machine (2002). Though less prolific in recent years, he did publish a new book in 2019: The Demon in the Machine.
  • Back to the Future Part II and Part III were filmed “back to back”, meaning that they were produced together, one immediately after the other. This allowed the two to make numerous references to each other and include many of the same actors.
  • In the 2007 Doctor Who story “Blink”, often cited as one of the best, the Tenth Doctor famously explains causality and time travel like this: “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but, actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.”
  • Jack Cohen was a zoologist with a long career in academia, and also advised science fiction authors how to write plausible aliens, including Anne McCaffrey, Harry Harrison, Larry Niven and Terry himself. He died in 2019. Ian Stewart is a mathematician who has written a large number of academic and popular mathematics books. Both worked at the University of Warwick, which granted Terry Pratchett his first honorary degree in 1999 following the publication of The Science of Discworld. (At the same ceremony, Terry made Jack and Ian honorary wizards of Unseen University.)
  • Orwell’s Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest is a 1994 book by Peter Huber which tries to refute the dystopia of 1984, claiming that information technology will always be subverted for good because information wants to be free. Ben was skeptical when he first read it twenty-four years ago, and is no less skeptical now he’s discovered it was one of Mark Zuckerberg’s picks for his public book club in 2015.
  • Thaumaturgy comes from Greek, and means “miracle work” or “wonder work”. It is not only used to describe magic, but also the ability of some saints to perform miracles. In the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade, the vampire clan Tremere are descended from a cabal of human mages who transformed themselves into vampires to achieve immortality, but lost their ability to use wizard magic. They developed a type of blood magic based on hermetic principles as a replacement, which they call thaumaturgy. (Ben’s pronunciation is correct.)
  • The Manhattan Project was the US Army’s effort to build nuclear weapons during World War II. As part of the project, the world’s first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was built in an old squash court in Stagg Field, a football field and sports complex at the Hyde Park campus of the University of Chicago. It was completed on December 1, 1942, and the reaction started with removal of the control rods the next day.
  • Ben’s old saying about specialists is one that’s evolved a lot over time and likely has multiple origins, as so many of these things do. The earliest example seems to be from William Warde Fowler, a scholar at the University of Oxford, who used a shorter version of the phrase in a review published in 1911. The earliest version to add the bit about “knowing everything about nothing” also included the saying’s witty opposite, from Stanford University’s Robert E. Swain, appropriately enough a chemist, in 1928. He was talking about the difference between scientists and philosophers: “Some people regard the former as one who knows a great deal about a very little, and who keeps on knowing more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. Then he is a scientist. Then there are the latter specimen, who knows a little about very much, and he continues to know less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. Then he is a philosopher.”
  • A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes is Stephen Hawking’s bestselling popular science book, first published in 1988. Special and general relativity are covered in chapter two, which might challenge a few readers, but chapter four – while less than twenty pages long – introduces mind-bending ideas from quantum mechanics like the “spin” of quarks. Because it sold 25 million copies but contains such difficult concepts, it is often called “the most unread book of all time”. (There’s no shame in this; have another go if you like!) In 2014, American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg used publicly available data on Amazon Kindle highlighting to judge which books were abandoned partway through, a measure he cheekily called the “Hawking Index”. A Brief History of Time appeared as the third or fourth in the list.
  • What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life was originally published as Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life in 2002. Its central thesis is that if we want to find life elsewhere in the universe, we need to broaden our understanding of the forms life might take, as our current searches only look for life similar to that found on Earth. “Jack&Ian” appears in the preface as the name of their “collective entity”, though it should be noted that the book is largely based on Jack’s often given lecture “The Possibility of Life on Other Planets”, or POLOOP, which he had originally wanted to call “What Does a Martian Look Like?”
  • It is generally acceptable to reference your own work in science academia…though since the frequency with which a researcher’s work is cited is a mark of respectability and influence, there have been those who perhaps do so too often…
  • We’ve mentioned Arthur C Clarke, famous author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and many other influential science fiction novels before. Clarke’s most famous quote, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“, was the last of his “three laws”, added to a revised version of his 1962 essay “Hazards of Prophecy: the Failure of the Imagination” in 1973. (The other two are much less famous.) The converse law quoted in the front of the book, “any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced“, is attributed in the first edition of The Science of Discworld to Gregory Benford – but while a version of it does appear in Benford’s 1997 book Foundation’s Fear, the original appears to have been written by Professor Barry Gehm, published in the science fiction magazine Analog as “Gehm’s Corollary to Clarke’s Third Law” in 1991.
  • The story from The Simpsons in which Bart messes up Lisa’s science project, creating a miniature world full of tiny people in a bathtub, is the segment “The Genesis Tub” from the Halloween special “Treehouse of Horror VII” in 1996.
  • We previously referred to the universes hidden inside things in the first two Men in Black films in our Truckers episode, “Upscalator to Heaven“. In the first film, aliens play with a marble which somehow contains the Milky Way galaxy, while in the sequel, our entire universe is shown to exist within a locker in an alien train station.
  • A microcosm is any subset of a thing which is said to represent the whole. Ben’s wordplay “microcosmos” isn’t that clever, since the word comes via Latin from the Greek mikros kosmos, which literally means “tiny cosmos”.
  • Ben used out of old habit he is trying to break the older LGBT acronym, which is now considered incomplete. The longer version preferred these days is LGBTIAQ+, which encompasses lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex, asexual and/or agender, queer and more identities. The intent of the acronym is to represent the diversity of experience outside of “traditional” binary gender and heterosexuality. While not everyone likes it or identifies with the term, “queer” is commonly used as spoken shorthand for the acronym.
  • The first clear fossil evidence of dinosaur feathers was found in the 1990s, and palaeontologists have only found more since then.
  • The luminiferous æther – not to be confused with the class of organic compounds called ether – was a proposed “medium” of some kind of matter that filled space, and explained the transmission of light waves. In 1887, scientists Albert A. Michelson (who made some of the early precise measurements of the speed of light) and Edward W. Morley (famous for measuring the precise atomic weight of oxygen) conducted an experiment to detect the motion of the Earth through the æther. It failed, leading to the end of æther theory, and paving the way for others, including Einstein’s special relativity.
  • There are currently 118 chemical elements that have been identified. New elements are acknowledged by a Joint Working Party formed in 1999 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). It can take years between the first experimental discovery and formal acceptance of a new element, as initial claims are often disputed. The most recent four were acknowledged in 2015 and officially named in 2016, but were first synthesised years earlier. In order of their first recognised synthesis, they are:
    • Oganesson (Og, atomic number 118, named after Russian physicist Yuri Oganessian) in 2002;
    • Moscovium (Mc, atomic number 115, named after Moscow) in 2003;
    • Nihonium (Nh, atomic number 113; named after Japan, Nihon) in 2004; and
    • Tennessine (Ts, atomic number 117, named after the US state of Tennessee) in 2009.
  • Plumbum is the Latin name for lead, which is why its chemical symbol is Pb. (This also helps distinguish it from the five other elements with names that begin with L.)
  • The idea that science works by disproving things was popularised by philosopher Karl Popper as falsifiability or falsificationism. Popper claimed that science worked not by looking at evidence in the world and using that to formulate laws, but by formulating laws and then testing them against reality, trying to prove them false. As Liz says, this is a lie-to-children – or at least a step in the development of the philosophy of science.
  • Pluto’s status had been in question since 1992, when several other similarly-sized objects were discovered in the Kuiper belt. In 2005 a bigger object, Eris, was discovered, and so in 2006 the International Astronomical Union decided to formally define what a planet was. As a result they also created the classification of “dwarf planet”, which they applied to Eris, Pluto and several other Kuiper Belt Objects.
  • Winter in Game of Thrones, like Summer, lasts a long but variable time – sometimes many “years”. (How they even have “years” of standard length when the seasons are like this is unclear.) Despite fan attempts to devise solar system models that might explain this, George R R Martin – author of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels on which the show is based – is on record saying there is a non-scientific explanation for the seasons that will be revealed by the time he finishes writing the series.
  • The term “virtual reality” had become popular by the 1980s, and the first publicly available VR arcade games and consoles as early as the mid-90s, but the technology didn’t really take off while computer graphics were incapable of producing realistic looking worlds. Affordable VR headsets and kits became viable in 2010 with the invention of the Oculus Rift, and there are now several different commercially available VR systems, the most popular being Playstation VR, released in 2016 by Sony.
  • The Lawnmower Man is a 1992 film very much not based on the short story of the same title by Stephen King, who sued the production company to have his name removed from posters even though they did own the film rights to the story. In the film, Pierce Brosnan plays a scientist who uses experimental drugs and VR technology to improve the intelligence of Jobe, an intellectually disabled man who works mowing lawns. Jobe becomes malevolent and “uploads” himself into “cyberspace”. It’s…look, it’s very 1990s.
  • The Last of Us is a 2013 videogame for the Playstation 4 set in a dystopian future America where humans and many other animals have been taken over by a mutated version of the Cordyceps fungus. Cordyceps is a real genus, though the famous example which infects ants and alters their behaviour is now reclassified as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. The fungus causes ants to climb to the underside of leaf and grab on tight, where it dies. The fungus replaces its body tissues and grows a fruiting body out of its head to spread its spores, and what’s more it’s been doing this to poor little ants for around 50 million years or more.
  • The Andalite Chronincles are better known as Animorphs, which we’ve previously talked about in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In“. The Yeerks are small parasitic aliens, and mortal enemies of the animorphs, teenagers given shapeshifting powers in order to fight back against the Yeerk invasion.
  • Jack&Ian coined the term “extelligence” in their first book together, Figments of Reality: the Evolution of the Curious Mind in 1997. They define it in the introduction as “the accumulating knowledge of generations of intelligent beings” and consider it “a thing or process with its own characteristic structure and behaviour” requiring a new name. The book is largely devoted to exploring it. While it’s not as clear in The Science of Discworld, both Figments of Reality and What Does a Martian Look Like? explicitly include cultural knowledge like folklore and other non-written forms of knowledge as part of extelligence.
  • SimEarth was originally released in 1990, and was the second game in the “Sim” series following SimCity. (The third was SimAnt, in 1991.) It wasn’t just based on James Lovelock’s work; he directly advised on the game and wrote an introduction for the manual. As well as intelligent dinosaurs, it was possible to have machine life (assuming an advanced civilisation blew themselves up), intelligent carnivorous plants, and yes, a crustacean civilisation could totally be a thing.
  • The short story collection about women associated with the Nobel Prize is Ordinary Matter by Australian writer Laura Elvery, published in September 2020 by University of Queensland Press.
  • If you’re interested in a perspective on sexism in the Nobel Prize (along with other biases), this article on Massive Science is a good starting point.
  • While we’re used to thinking about Discworld wizards as men and witches as women, there are exceptions. Eskarina Smith, the Disc’s first woman wizard, appears in Pratchett’s third Discworld novel Equal Rites, which we covered in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. Watch out for more on that front in future episodes. (No spoilers for books we’ve not covered yet!)
  • Mileva Marić was a Serbian physicist and mathematician. Her career in academia was interrupted by her relationship with Albert Einstein, who was her lover, husband and the father of her children. While she is not credited as a co-author on any of his work, there is evidence to suggest she may have substantially assisted Einstein in his early work, including the papers for which he won the Nobel Prize.
  • There are plenty of podcast episodes about the forgotten women of science, but so far we’ve not found a whole show about this. Let us know if you find one! Meanwhile some good feminist science podcasts are Lady Science and Superwomen in Science, while great more general science shows hosted by women are Ologies with Alie Ward and Talk Nerdy with Cara Santa Maria.
  • For books on women in science, Anna recommends Women in Science by Rachel Ignotofsky, Inferior by Angela Saini and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. You can also check out the books on the STEMMinist book club list. (As usual, we recommend sourcing them from a local independent book shop, who can order in anything you want and needs your custom more than Amazon or BookDepository.)
  • William of Ockham (1287 – 1347) was a friar, philosopher and theologian whose most famous contribution to what would become scientific thought was the idea that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity” – i.e. that an explanation that involves fewer things is more likely correct. This is known as the law of parsimony, or more famously, Occam’s Razor – hence the beard gag. (It should be noted that William himself used the idea to defend the idea of miracles.)
  • In most versions of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect end up on a space ark full of middle managers and other people claimed by their society to be the “useless” third, sent to crash into prehistoric Earth. On Earth, Arthur tries to communicate with the original inhabitants, the not-cave-people (they don’t live in caves), by teaching them to play Scrabble with tiles he makes himself. It doesn’t work. The Primary Phase of the radio series, the second book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and the original television series all end with Arthur and Ford trying to determine the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything by getting the not-cave-people to pull Scrabble letters out of a bag at random.
  • Ben thought about including all the cancelled space missions in these show notes, but decided to save that depressing list for the separate article he might write with updates on some of the science in the book.
  • Humans have rarely thought scientifically about the Flat Earth. It was clear to many ancient civilisations that the planet must be round, and the first written account of the spherical Earth was in about 250 BCE by Eratosthenes and other Greeks, using geometry to mathematically prove its shape and possibly accurately calculate its size. (Jack&Ian point out that the accuracy is based on modern estimates of the unit they used, the stadion, but they are maybe a little overly suspicious.)
  • Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical 1884 novella by English schoolteacher Edwin A Abbott. As well as considering how two-dimensional beings might experience one- or three-dimensional worlds, it is also a fairly savage satire of the Victorian class system; the sexual politics of the book are either even more savage satire, or emblematic of the sexism of the time, depending on your interpretation. Ian Stewart not only wrote a sequel, Flatterland, in 2001, but an annotated version of the original, The Annotated Flatland, in 2002 (the same year as the updated The Science of Discworld and its sequel).
  • Mosasaurs are now well-known to the general public after appearing in a marine exhibit in the film Jurassic World, the 2015 sequel to the original three Jurassic Park films. Two different species of mosasaur were featured in the final episode of Impossible Pictures’ Sea Monsters, a 2003 follow up to 1999’s Walking with Dinosaurs.
  • Listener Bel described three categories of lies-to-children:
    • Protecting children e.g. “The world is a good and safe place”, stranger danger, “adults know what they’re doing”
    • Simplifications e.g. there are goodies and baddies and you can tell the difference by looking at them, “this is what an atom looks like”
    • Protecting adults, or “keeping the status quo”, e.g. sexism, racism, ableism, ageism and many more.
  • On being able to tell that a creature had hooves from its tooth, the specific instance Jack&Ian mention is of the Tingamarra tooth, which supposedly “demolished” the theory that placental mammals never made it to Australia. That call was a bit premature, since the claim is regarded at best as highly controversial and has not significantly changed the view of Australian palaeontology. It is still the consensus that the only placentals to arrive in Australia before humans were bats and rodents.
  • Temperance “Bones” Brennan is a fictional forensic anthropologist and protagonist of all twelve seasons of the television series Bones, which ran from 2005 to 2017. She’s played by Emily Deschanel. The television series is based on the Temperance Brennan series of novels by Kathy Reichs, which began with Déjà Dead in 1997 and, as of 2021, includes twenty novels and a short story collection. Ben is glad he missed this reference because while forensic anthropology is real – Reichs is one herself! – the show is pretty ridiculous. Bones has a hologram table! But it’s all good fun, and it gave David Boreanaz something to be cool and vulnerable in after Angel finished.
  • Teeth are great for palaeontologists because their enamel allows them to be preserved, and their shape and patterns of wear can be used to determine a great deal about diet and behaviour. Teeth are also very distinctive, and so you can tell a hooved animal’s tooth from that of an elephant or similar.
  • Liz’s joke about a creature with “don” in its name being really into “ham” is a reference to popular Australian ham, bacon and smallgoods brand Don. They are famous for their slogan “Is Don. Is good.”, coined for a series of ads in which a man spruiks their products in slightly broken, accented English before concluding with the phrase. (The same actor also plays the owner of a Gogomobil in another famous Australian ad from 1992 for the Yellow Pages phone directory. We have a lot of famous ads, probably because most of our television is otherwise sourced from the US or the UK; ad breaks were some of the rare times when you’d see Australian actors and sometimes hear Australian accents.)
  • To answer Liz’s questions: Are beak just giant tooth? No. Beak are is hair? …also no, but closer. Beaks are made of keratin, which is the same protein from which hair is formed. But there are two kinds of keratin: alpha-keratin is found in all vertebrates, and is used to form hair, wool and other softer but tough materials, like the outer layers of bony horns; and beta-keratin, found only in reptiles and birds, which is used to make scales, claws, feathers, shells and beaks.
  • Evolutionary electronics – also known as evolvable hardware – is totally a real thing, as is the circuit described in the book, evolved by Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex in 1996. Though it hasn’t led to anything groundbreaking, the same principles can be used to make adaptive hardware that can alter itself in response to changes in the environment.
  • A blimp is an inflatable airship that doesn’t have any internal structure – basically a big shaped balloon held in shape by internal pressure. “Zeppelin” is the common name for rigid airships, in which the body is supported by an internal structure. Zeppelin was the name of the German aircraft manufacturer which built many of the most famous airships, including the Hindenburg. The company vanished for around fifty years following World War II, but was revived in 2001 and still operates today – including working with Goodyear to replace their older blimps with semi-rigid airships. These have a supporting keel along the base of the envelope that holds the lifting gas, but no other internal structure.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Anna Ahveninen, Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, HEX, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Science, Science of Discworld, Wizards

#Pratchat57West5 Notes and Errata

8 July 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for bonus Pratchat episode 57 West 5, “Daniel Superbaboon“, discussing the 1986 short story “The High Meggas“.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is…well, if you’ve read the story, you get it. Ben would share his draft title idea, but he’s actually pretty sure it will work even better for The Long Mars, so we’ll wait until that episode comes out.
  • Our previous Long Earth episodes are #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, and #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society”. We talk about The Long Mars in #Pratchat57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!”
  • “The High Meggas” was first published in 2012 – but A Blink of the Screen wasn’t actually its first appearance! The Long Earth was published four months earlier, and one of the first editions – specifically the “Iron Edition” with a metallic cover, produced in an edition of 8,000, mostly for Waterstones – included the short story at the end, along with an author’s note which seems to match the one in A Blink of the Screen. Interestingly, Colin Smythe’s website suggests that the story was written “in late 1985 or early 1986 after completing Equal Rites“, which contradicts Pratchett’s introduction, which places it in between The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Either timeline works, though The Colour of Magic would have been sent to Colin Smythe years before 1985, since it was published in 1983. This could mean Smythe is right, and the story was actually written between The Light Fantastic (published in June 1986) and Equal Rites (published in January 1987, and so written in 1986). But if Pratchett’s recollection is correct, it’s possible he was just doodling with these ideas for years – which certainly makes sense given how developed the concepts are in “The High Meggas”.
  • “Hard science fiction“, as we explained in the notes for #Pratchat31, is “realistic” science fiction that tries to stick to established science, or plausible extensions of it.
  • The “fan on speed-dial” was David Langford, an editor and writer who became one of Pratchett’s close friends. He was one of the first people to review The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic in their first editions, both for White Dwarf magazine, and as a result was asked to give a reader review for the manuscript of Equal Rites by Gollancz. His feedback was well received, and he continued to provide notes at an early stage for each novel thereafter, eventually corresponding directly with Terry via letters and email. He wasn’t just on call to prevent the repetition of jokes, but also to act as part of a collective Discworld encyclopaedia (this was in the days before wikis, remember). This arrangement continued up to Thud! As well as a long list of non-fiction and short fiction, Langford write a novel that Pratchett loved, The Leaky Establishment, and edits the long-running and multiple Hugo Award-winning fanzine Ansible, which is still going today. (It’s named after a term for a long-distance communicator coined by Ursula Le Guin in her 1966 novel Rocannon’s World.) Dave also compiled the two Discworld quiz books, Unseen University Challenge and The Wyrdest Link. You can find out more about Dave and Ansible at ansible.uk.
  • Libertarianism – the philosophy or political position of libertarians – believes in maximum personal freedoms, usually (if we may editorialise) the detriment of society as a whole. It’s particularly popular in the United States, where it’s linked to some of the ideas behind the founding of the country and its split with the United Kingdom, but in practice it usually means a resistance to all forms of government intervention, both personally and in the free market ideal of capitalism, and usually a strong distrust of authority. Its influence on the politics of America, and particularly the Republican Party, has been profound, especially over the last four decades or so.
  • Ron Swanson – played by the wonderful Nick Offerman – is a character in the American sitcom Parks and Recreation (2009-2015). Swanson is the Director of the Parks and Recreation Department of Pawnee, Illinois, but despite his senior role in local government is a staunch libertarian who tries to reduce his department’s activity as much as possible. (He’s a big softie at heart, though, which is why we love him.)
  • The “double-tap” rule is the idea in fiction that competent killers always make sure their target is dead, usually by shooting them twice. It comes from the military term “double-tap”, which means to shoot twice in rapid succession – a technique introduced in the 1930s to overcome limitations of full-metal jacketed ammunition. (We’d rather not go into any more detail about the history of making sure guns can kill people, but if you’ve the stomach for it some of the details are quite interesting.)
  • We filmed a special video discussion of The Carpet People for the Australian Discworld Convention, which was played as part of their Virtual Discworld Fun Day on 18 June, 2022. It’ll be released publicly soon, and we’ll link to it when you can watch it. Because it’s a discussion of the differences between the two versions of the book, and we show off the illustrations in the original, we don’t plan to release it as an audio-only episode of the podcast. Subscribers and one-off supporters already have access to a special annotated version of the video on Ko-Fi titled “A Tale of Two Carpets”. You’ll need to be a Ko-Fi donor or member to access it, and to log in. (See the Support Us page for more about how that works.)
  • Terry’s early short stories for children have been published in four volumes: Dragons at Crumbling Castle (2014), The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner (2016), Father Christmas’s Fake Beard (2017) and The Time-Travelling Caveman (2020). These are collected from those he wrote for the Bucks Free Press between 1965 and 1973 (so between the ages of 17 and 25, skewing towards the younger end), though the third volume contains some later Christmas-themed stories as well. In his introduction to Dragons at Crumbling Castle, the only volume published before his death, Pratchett says the stories are “mostly as they were first printed”, with just “the odd tweak here, a pinch there, and a little note at the bottom where needed, and all because the younger me wasn’t as clever back then as he turned out to be.”
  • Ben couldn’t find the quote he mentions about the difference between fantasy and science fiction. Pratchett has certainly had much to say about both, but he doesn’t make such a clear distinction between the two; he’s said both that science fiction is a modern sub-set of fantasy, and something to the effect that science fiction is fantasy with bolts painted on the outside. There are multiple versions of that last one, but Ben couldn’t find a source, so treat it with a grain of salt, even if it’s definitely the sort of thing Pratchett would say.
  • The Expanse is a series of nine novels (and associated shorter fiction) beginning with 2011’s Leviathan Wakes. The books are written by “James S. A. Corey”, a pseudonym for writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who came up with the idea initially as a setting for a roleplaying game. The story takes place in a realistic 24th century future in which humans have colonised Mars and parts of the asteroid belt, and combines hard sci-fi, inter-planetary politics and class warfare with more fantastic sci-fi ideas. It was adapted for television over seven seasons between 2015 and 2022, first by SyFy, then Amazon Prime for seasons four through seven.
  • Liz’s specialist subjects have been brought up by her on the podcast before:
    • Queen Victoria Markets and (to a lesser extent) the Melbourne General Cemetery were both mentioned in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“
    • We just recently talked about magician Will Alma in #Pratchat54, “The Land Before Vimes“
  • We discussed “#ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time'”, Pratchett’s 1990 story about machine-created artificial realities, in #Pratchat56, “do { Podcast(); } while (unreadPratchetts > 0);“.
  • In The Long Earth, the asteroid, comet or whatever it is that destroys the Earth of the Gap doesn’t yet have a name. It’s christened “Bellos” by the nerds at GapSpace, as we learn in Chapter 31 of The Long War, after the rogue planet in the 1951 film When Worlds Collide.
  • We did indeed discuss fuel weight and other considerations of air travel, especially on Concorde, in our episode about Wings, the third and final book in Pratchett’s Bromeliad trilogy. That was in #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings“.
  • Roger Moore was the third actor to play James Bond in the official series of films from Eon Productions, taking on the role in seven films between 1973 and 1985. “The High Meggas”, assuming it was written in 1986 (see the third note at the top of this page), was actually written in between Moore’s final Bond film and the first of his predecessor, and Ben favourite, Timothy Dalton. It’s also worth noting that while this story certainly does delve into “real Bond areas”, the stock character of the femme fatale is much older.
  • Robinson Crusoe is the titular protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Written by Himself. Standards for titles have changed a lot in three hundred years.
  • “Manumission” is an obscure word these days; it’s a term for a slave owner freeing their slaves. Modern descriptions of such acts would more likely use the less specific terms “enfranchisement” or “emancipation”.
  • A quick guide to the other references we mention in passing:
    • Marion Robert Morrison (1907-1979), better known by his screen name John Wayne, was an American actor best known for playing heroes in Western and war films during the Golden Age of Hollywood. He was also an outspoken conservative and supporter of the Republican Party, and held some pretty horrendously racist views.
    • Captain Nemo is the captain of the Nautilus, the mystery submarine in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. We previously talked about that book in #Pratchat27 and #Pratchat31, and about its sequel, The Mysterious Island, in #Pratchat45.
    • Daniel Boone (1734-1820) was a real person – a pioneer who founded European settlements in Kentucky. He published an account of his “adventures” in 1784 and became a folk hero during his own lifetime. He’s been idolised (and idealised) ever since, notably in a popular American television series that ran from 1964 to 1970 and was also broadcast in Australia.
  • While it does seem like a modern idea, even in 1986 proxy wars and secretly state-funded militias were a familiar feature of the Cold War (and go much further back in history). The Soviet-Afghan War ran from 1979 to 1989, and provided an excuse for America and other countries to supply funds and arms for Mujahideen insurgent groups to use fighting the Russian-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. After the fall of the Soviet Union, their forces left Afghanistan, and a few years later the country’s government was toppled and the Taliban took over.
  • Liz loves to mention The Shawshank Redemption – it’s probably her most “left ear” conversation topic! Previous mentions include #Pratchat14, #Pratchat28, #Pratchat38, #Pratchat47 and #Pratchat53.
  • How to Host a Murder is the most famous brand of murder mystery party game. The series was first published by Decipher Inc between 1983 and 2003. They were hugely popular for a decade or so, with around two dozen published, including ones themed for teenagers and children, and even one set in the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Players take on the roles of guests at a dinner or other party where a murder (or sometimes another crime) has been committed, and every one of them is a suspect. Over several rounds (and between courses; it’s designed to played over dinner), players are guided by an audio recording and individual booklets, which give them secret information about themselves and other guests. Through conversation they are meant to reveal some of this information, gradually gathering enough clues together to try and work out who committed the murder. (No-one – not even the murderer – knows who did it until the end.) The series is pretty light-hearted, and often silly, with lots of puns, corny jokes, over the top characters and outlandish themes. If you’re thinking of picking one up (and they show up often in charity shops, since you can’t play the same one twice), note that some – especially the earlier ones – also feature plenty of lazy racist and sexist tropes that wouldn’t fly today.

More notes coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat54 Notes and Errata

8 April 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 54, “The Land Before Vimes“, discussing the twenty-ninth Discworld novel, 2002’s Night Watch with returning guest Nadia Bailey.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title puns on the 1988 animated feature film The Land Before Time (dir. Don Bluth), in which an improbable group of very cute baby dinosaurs who are separated from their parents and search for a safe haven known as the Great Valley. It was quite the sensation at the time, and spawned no fewer than thirteen direct-to-video musical sequels. (Ben tried out several different time/Vimes puns and liked this one the best, since the Ankh-Morpork of thirty years ago is effectively the land before Vimes.)
  • Nadia last appeared on Pratchat just over three years ago, in March 2019, for #Pratchat17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders“, discussing Lords and Ladies. (Not including “pandemic time”, that’s only about twelve months ago.) The last time we recorded in person was a year after that, for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“, released in March 2020.
  • Will Alma (1904-1993) was a Melbourne magician and historian of magic. Liz did indeed create the Wikipedia page about Alma; we’ll let you read it to find out more. You can also find information about the W G Alma Conjouring Collection on the State Library of Victoria website.
  • Iceland spar is a transparent form of crystallised calcium carbonate, or calcite; it looks a bit like chunky glass, and crystals are usually rhombus shaped. It’s found in many parts of the world, but the most famous source is the the Helgustadir mine in Iceland – hence the name. It has birefringence, which means that it refracts light differently depending on its polarisation. (Polarisation describes the direction in which a wave oscillates. Light from the sun and most natural sources is said to be “unpolarised”, because it’s made up of a mixture of waves oscillating in all directions.) In practical terms, Iceland spar splits unpolarised light into two distinct beams when it passes through the crystal. It’s thought to be the crystal known as sólarsteinn (“sunstone” in Old Norse) by the Vikings, who used the birefringence effect on sunlight to find the exact position of the sun – a vital bit of data in navigation – even when it was obscured by cloud.
  • Back to the Future (1985; dir. Robert Zemeckis) is the classic comedy time travel movie, and we’ve mentioned it on the podcast before. In the film, teenager and wannabe rockstar Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) accidentally activates a time travelling car built by his mentor, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), and gets stranded thirty years in the past. When trying to get home, he interrupts the event that caused his parents to meet, and spends the rest of the film trying to get them together before he alters history and wipes himself from existence. This is a form of the Grandfather Paradox – a time traveller interfering with the past in such a way as to cause themselves not to exist.
  • The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is actually the Discworld book immediately before this one; it’s the first explicitly written for younger readers, and also the first not to have a cover by Josh Kirby after he was established as the regular cover artist. (The Colour of Magic was initially published with a cover painting of Great A’Tuin by Alan Smith; Kirby was brought in from that book’s second edition.) We discussed The Amazing Maurice back in July of 2020, in #Pratchat33, “Cat, Rats and Two Meddling Kids“. An animated film adaptation, The Amazing Maurice, is scheduled for release some time in 2022.
  • We discussed Men at Arms, including Vimes’ possible retirement, back in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“. We revisited it (rather shambolically) for the live recorded episode #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive“.
  • There are many fan-produced Discworld timelines but the most famous is the one developed by members of the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup, and published on the L-Space Web. You can find the latest evolution of that timeline on the L-Space Wiki.
  • Sergeant Abba Stronginthearm was recruited by Carrot as part of his militia in Men at Arms, and subsequently mentioned in Jingo (where he is the next senior Corporal after Nobby) and features briefly in The Fifth Elephant (where’s he’s made Sergeant, and takes part in the Ankh-Morpork investigation into the theft of a model of the Scone of Stone).
  • Poppies are the symbol of Remembrance Day (November 11, marking the armistice that ended hostilities in World War I) and, in Australia and New Zealand, ANZAC Day (April 25, marking the landing of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli in Turkey, and the subsequent campaign in which thousands died). They are mostly worn in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. Pins of artificial poppies are sold to raise funds for veterans, and are worn by anyone who wishes to remember the dead of World War I (and, later, World War II). The poppy as an emblem was inspired by John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields”, which refers to poppies growing in what were the battlegrounds in France and Belgium. The first lines of the poem read:
In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row, 
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
  • We’ve mentioned the end of Disney villains like Gaston before, in Eeek Club 2021, and #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“. The trope is that the hero doesn’t kill the villain, but they die anyway because they act on their own wrath or greed, causing their own death (often by falling). This simplifies the story by preventing the need for any kind of forgiveness or punishment, giving the heroes an easy happy ending. (TV Tropes calls this a “Disney Villain Death”, which is specifically for the falling off of something version.)
  • We’ve mentioned the dimension-hopping TV show Sliders before, mostly in episodes about Pratchett’s own multi-dimensional epic, The Long Earth series (see #Pratchat31 and #Pratchat46), but also in #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“. The specific episode Ben refers to here is “Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome”, from about halfway through the second season in 1996. The title also refers to the framing device of one of the sliders, soul singer Rembrandt Brown, telling his story to a psychiatrist. Arturo’s final line that episode was indeed “Oh, my God…”
  • While Ben still questions applying it to time travel, Liz is right in that realistic theories of teleportation involve destroying a person and building a copy of them at their destination. This is because the transmission of actual matter is impossible, but it’s at least theoretically possible to transmit the information about the physical state of a person or thing and then recreate it perfectly at the destination. In such a setup, the original is disintegrated, possibly as part of the scanning process, or just to avoid creating copies of people and collect raw material for the return journey. There’s some disagreement over whether this is how transporters work in Star Trek – some explanations say it is, while others claim they transmit the original matter at a “quantum level”, though it is definitely broken down first. The philosophical implications of either version are usually ignored until it goes wrong, perhaps most famously in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Tuvix”. Some other stories which explore these ideas include Australian author Sean Williams’ Twinmaker trilogy of YA novels, a film we won’t name because it’d be a spoiler, and Ben’s own audio comedy mini-series Hello! My Name is Eddie, specifically in the episode “The Psychological Experiment of Death”.
  • Buggy Swires, gnome watchman, rides a heron for this kind of operation. He prefers a sparrowhawk for crowd control, but doesn’t seem unhappy with his heron, which he tames through a combination of concussion and a secret potion. If this feels a bit like the bird-riding antics of a certain Nac Mac Feegle, don’t worry – all will become clear in several books’ time.
  • For more information about the lightning strike from Thief of Time, see our episode about the book: #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“.
  • In The Terminator (1984; dir. James Cameron) and its sequels, characters from the future explain that the “time displacement equipment” they use requires a bioelectric field to work, which is why only living organic beings or things which mimic them successfully can travel through it. This includes the T-800 terminator, which has real flesh covering its metal endoskeleton, or the later models which are either composed of or covered in “mimetic polyalloy”, described as “living metal”.
  • We previously discussed the rules that come with the mogwai creatures in Gremlins (1984; dir. Joe Dante) in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer“. We’ve also mentioned the sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990; dir. Joe Dante), in #Pratchat34, “Only You Can Save Deadkind“.; in that film, a minor character derides protagonist Billy’s explanation of the “don’t feed them after midnight” rule.
  • Doctor John “Mossy” Lawn makes his only major appearance here, but he does return in a cameo role in several later books, notably Going Postal (see #Pratchat38, “Moisten to Steal“).
  • The “vet” Vimes relies on in other novels is Doughnut Jimmy. He makes his major appearance in Feet of Clay, when he is called upon to treat the poisoned Patrician, but is also mentioned in Jingo and The Last Continent.
  • We talked about germ theory, hand washing and Semmelweis in #Pratchat48, “Lu-Tze in the Sky with Lobsang“. We’ll again point you to this episode of NPR’s Shortwave podcast, which shows that even after Semmelweis’ intervention, doctors did not want to admit that they might be causing sickness or death.
  • Granny Weatherwax explains her goblin-shaped germ theory to Tiffany in A Hat Full of Sky. We previously discussed this in #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • As Ben will remember later in the episode, John Keel’s real-world counterpart is Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), a British Member of Parliament, and twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, though he remains most famous for founding the Metropolitan Police Force. He’s considered the “father of modern policing”, but his other achievements include the establishment of the modern Conservative party, free trade and modern banking in the UK. While we’re not a fan of his politics in general, it’s worth noting that he often started out with a traditional conservative opinion on a matter, but would later change his mind. Most famously, while he initially supported high tariffs on imported goods, he eventually moved to repeal the “corn laws” that made imported staple foods expensive in order to help alleviate the Great Famine in Ireland – acting against the wishes of most of his party, and leading to his resignation as Prime Minister.
  • To be clear, “Mrs Palm and Her Five Sisters” (and variations thereof) is a euphemism for the hand when used for masturbation, the five sisters being the fingers. The phrase is most prevalent in the UK, but is pretty common in Australia too.
  • Fred and Nobby’s ages are not specifically mentioned in the books. In Guards! Guards! Fred is said to have been married for thirty years, which certainly tallies with his younger self in Night Watch. Nobby is never described in a way that gives much of a clue as to his age, but given Fred is probably in his early twenties at most in Night Watch, the age gap between them is probably only a decade or so – not much of a consideration after thirty years.
  • Fred’s military service is more-or-less first mentioned in Guards! Guards!, where he is said to have “served in foreign parts”, though the nature of that service is not described. We say “more-or-less” because also in that book is the famous passage describing him as one of life’s Sergeants, which specifically says “if he took up a military career”, though Nobby also says towards the end that Colon had told him stories about winning archery contests in the army. In any case the Watch is not treated quite as distinctly from the military in the first couple of books as it would be in later ones, with the distinction first being very clearly made in Jingo. Nobby’s adventures in stealing stuff, meanwhile, also get a minor mention in Guards! Guards!: in the aftermath of Carrot’s brawl in the Drum, Nobby is sizing up the boots of some of the unconscious brawlers and is described as a “veteran of of a score of residual battlefields”, suggesting quite ruthlessly that they could cut the throats of the fallen. There’s no mention of this experience being on literal military battlefields, though, and in Men at Arms, when Fred is comparing Detritus to his old drill sergeant, Nobby makes no mention of having been in the army with him, so it seems likely only Fred went into military service.
  • Lu-Tze’s first re-writing of history occurs in Small Gods, and you can hear us discuss it in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“.
  • Sam spends about four days and one night in the past – a limit imposed by Qu, due to the situation and strain of both the magical and bureaucratic kinds, meaning Vimes arrives on the night of the 21st (or the early morning of the 22nd). This seems to be about the same amount of time Keel had in the Ankh-Morpork Night Watch before the 25th of May, so his lifelong impact on the younger Vimes took him only a few days to establish.
  • The Gestapo – short for Geheime Staatspolizei, “Secret State Police” – were established in 1933 by Herman Göring through a merger of the political and intelligence arms of the Prussian police force, making the new body national. They were responsible for sniffing out and eliminating any opposition to the Nazi regime, both in Germany and Nazi-occupied parts of Europe. They were disbanded in 1945, after being declared a criminal organisation in the Nuremberg trials, both for their involvement in the Holocaust and their ruthless and brutal suppression of any potentially anti-Nazi organisation. Their legacy of using informants and appearing to be all-knowing and around every corner were taken up by the Stasi (short for Staatssicherheitsdienst, “State Security Service”), the secret police of East Germany from 1950 until the reunification of Germany in 1990.
  • There’s no single consistent definition of “psychopath“, nor is psychopathy a recognised mental illness or condition. It’s often described in terms of a lack of “usual” characteristics, primarily fear, inhibition, impulse control and empathy, though the definition is still very broad. The modern concept of the psychopath is shaped largely by the work of Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare, whose famous Hare Psychopathy Checklist has been roundly criticised. As for whether Carcer and Swing would fit the bill, the answer is – probably, depending on who was asking the questions. UK journalist and writer Jon Ronson examined a lot of these questions (in general, not about these characters specifically) in his 2011 book The Psychopath Test, which brought the questionnaire to broader public attention, though the book itself did not avoid criticism either.
  • In Men at Arms, Vimes thinks during the book that it is much better to be threatened by an evil man, since he’ll want to see you squirm and will gloat and talk, giving you a chance to escape, whereas “A good man will kill you with hardly a word.” At the climax of the book, Carrot kills Dr Cruces in order to save Vimes and destroy the gonne, without saying anything, prompting Vimes to think his earlier thoughts again. (For more discussion of Men at Arms, see #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.)
  • The “revolution” in Les Miserablés is the real-life June Rebellion of the 5th and 6th of June in 1832 Paris. It has similarities with the events of Night Watch, but doesn’t seem to be the primary inspiration. At the time, Parisians were experiencing great hardship, with crop failures and economic problems causing a huge amount of suffering, alongside repeated attempted insurrections by supporters of the previous royal line deposed in the 1830 revolution (the one which followed the most famous one). A cholera epidemic swept through the city, killing more than 100,000 people – including the conservative Prime Minister Perier, and, on June 1, General Lemarque, an influential ex-military commander. Lemarque was involved in the 1830 revolution, and was one of the few members of the French parliament openly critical of the monarchy, making him hugely popular with republicans. After the massive state funeral for Perier, critics of the regime saw Lamarque’s funeral as a chance to show massive support for the republican movement, and turned out in huge numbers. Lafayette (yes, the one from Hamilton) was there, and called for calm after giving a speech for Lamarque, but to no avail. The republican movement was organised by secret societies like the “Friends of the People”, on which the fictional “Friends of ABC” from Les Miserablés is based (their name is a French pun). They raised flags with the famous revolutionary slogan “La Liberté ou la Mort” (“Liberty or Death”), and violence broke out between them and government troops. The insurrectionists put up barricades and claimed parts of the city. Fighting killed hundreds on each side, but the rebels were outnumbered and eventually defeated. In the aftermath, they were portrayed as an extremist minority, and the republicans would not have a true revolution until 1848 – but that’s a whole other story.
  • Javert is the antagonist of Les Miserablés, a guard at the prison from which Jean Valjean escapes, and later a police inspector in the town where Valjean has made a new life as mayor; he is the one who realises Valjean’s true identity, and becomes obsessed with bringing him “to justice”. In the end, Valjean offers to surrender to Javert, but Javert is overcome with confusion and regret when he realises the brutal criminal he’s hunted for so long is actually a compassionate man seeking to do what’s right, and unable to reconcile the law with his morals, drowns himself. In the famous musical adaptation of the story, he is changed little from the character in the book. He was perhaps most famously played on stage – in English at least – by Australian actor and former Playschool presenter Philip Quast, while in the 2012 film version of the stage musical, he is played by another Australian, Russell Crowe. Quast’s vocals are legendary, but Crowe’s were less well received, though it should be noted that the film was unusual for a musical in that the actors’ singing performances were recorded live on set rather than mimed along to studio recordings, as is usual practice. (It wasn’t the first film to do this, but it was a big deal at the time.)
  • Findthee Swing is described in the book as “a small, thin figure” and “a pale man with the screwed-up eyes of a pet rat.” Considerably more attention is given to the way he moves, which is summed up with the sentence: “There was no rhythm to the man.”
  • Corporal “Mayonnaise” Quirke is here kicked out of the Night Watch by Keel/Vimes, sent to join the Day Watch instead. Along with Sergeant Knock and Ned Coates he’s part of Carcer’s troop who attempt to capture John Keel towards the end of the book, though his exact level of participation in the fighting is not noted – presumably he is wounded or flees during the first ambush by the Night Watch, before Ned Coates changes sides. He remains in the Day Watch, and by the time of Guards! Guards! has been promoted to its Captain – an equivalent rank to Vimes, but much more prestigious. During the events of Men at Arms, Captain Quirke wears his obvious racism on his sleeve, arresting an innocent troll for the murder of a dwarf, starting riots across the city. The Night Watch continue to investigate the crime, leading to them being told to stand down; Quirke is the one sent to take the Watch’s weapons, and thinks that once Vimes is retired the watches will be combined under his command. When Carrot later forms a citizen’s militia, Quirke arrives to stop him, but Carrot announces he is relieving Quirke of command and knocks him out cold with a single punch, much to everyone’s delight. Quirke is never mentioned again, the Day Watch being dissolved and merged into a single Watch under the command of the newly promoted Vimes.
  • Winsborough Knock is the duty sergeant of the old Night Watch, a new character in this book. He is shown to be a thoroughly dirty copper, known to accept bribes and also attempting to frame Keel after he is demoted below him. He is also a coward, dropping his weapons and running away from the fighting at Treacle Mine Road.
  • As noted in #Pratchat51, Pratchett was officially diagnosed in 2007 with Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA – a rarer form of Alzheimer’s), announcing it publicly on the 11th of December that year, slightly more than five years after the publication of Night Watch. The earliest he and his close friends and family realised something was up was in 2006, though they would retroactively trace his symptoms back as far as 2005. Perhaps his official biography will shed light on whether he had any personal experience of dementia in others, or otherwise why it so often comes up in his work well before his own diagnosis. See also our episode about Johnny and the Dead.
  • “The powers that be” – meaning a group or organisation etc that has authority – dates back to at least the sixteenth century, where it appeared in the Tyndale Bible, the first in English to be mass-produced via printing press, and the first in Modern English to be translated from the original Greek and Hebrew, rather than from later Latin translations. The phrase features in Romans 13:1, which states that “There is no power but of God. The powers that be, are ordained of God.” This wording was preserved with only minor changes in the later King James Bible, still the main English Bible used in the world today, and from there into common usage. These days its probably best known from the Public Enemy song “Fight the Power”, whose chorus is a repetition of the title followed by “We’ve got to fight the powers that be”. Ben learned it there, but also from its usage in the TV series Angel, where the titular vampire with a soul and his team of demon hunters use it as a euphemism for the entities aligned with good which grant them visions and other powers. In the series the name is capitalised The Powers That Be, and sometimes abbreviated (as in real life) to TPTB.
  • The seamstress who is actually a seamstress is Miss Battye, aka “Sandra the Real Seamstress”. While played for laughs in the Discworld, “seamstress” has been a euphemism for sex worker on Roundworld for centuries – there’s a pun along these lines in Shakespeare’s Henry V, for example. As usual, though, Terry has done a deep dive into history and based his jokes on something much more specific. As noted in a great Twitter thread by writer Gabrielle Kent, Men at Arms features a gag where the census finds that seamstresses in the Ankh-Morpork docks vastly outnumbered needles. This is a reference to a real occurrence in Seattle in the late nineteenth century, where a census revealed 2,700 seamstresses in one small part of the city; they were, of course, sex workers. The city, on the edge of bankruptcy after closing down many of the vice industries which had previously paid it big taxes, worked out a deal with the sex workers that they pay a $10 per week “sewing machine tax”, solving the city’s revenue problems and allowing the seamstresses to continue working without interference. (Thanks to Stevonnie Ross for their corrections to this note!)
  • Dibbler’s full name is given as Claud Maximillian Overton Transpire Dibbler in Making Money, making his failure to coin his own nickname even weirder. While the phrase is most associated with Dibbler, though, he’s surely not the only salesman to have used it, so it’s also possible that in the original timeline Keel might have heard the phrase somewhere else and passed it on in the same way as Vimes does here, without having got it from future Dibbler. (And it’s also possible that Dibbler changed his name in order to allow him to legally be CMOT Dibbler, which is probably useful for brand recognition purposes.)
  • If you want to learn more about the militarisation of police and armed police response to peaceful protest, this 2020 article from The Conversation is a good starting point. While its most often discussed in the context of the US, it’s also been happening here in Australia for years, as noted in this ABC article from 2019. Protests around the time of the book’s publication included huge ones in early 2003 against the war in Iraq, which were held around the world…and soundly ignored by most of the involved governments.
  • You can hear more about Pyramids and the “Assassin’s School Days” section at the start of the book, in #Pratchat5, “Ten Points to Viper House“.
  • Vimes does indeed tell Madam Roberta his thoughts about her motives for supporting the change of Patrician; he can see Lord Winder and his associates are bad for business, and tells her he doesn’t want to join her revolution. Vetinari is hidden in the room and watches the whole exchange.
  • In the Batman comics, the young Bruce Wayne spent years travelled the world training with martial artists, detectives and trackers in order to become the ultimate crime fighter. A good use of his fortune? Probably not, but it has given us some great stories. The recent series Batman: The Knight revisits some of this time of his youth, and you can read more about his mentors in this DC Comics article.
  • Vimes contributions to the Widows and Orphans fund are a plot point in Men at Arms, when Angua discovers why Vimes never has any money. His notebook has many names of women and how much money he gives them; it turns out they’re all widows and orphans of dead Watchmen.
  • For more on Pratchett’s love of Dickens, see #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“, our episode discussing his Dickens pastiche Dodger.
  • As quoted in the Annotated Pratchett File, Pratchett described the ginger beer trick like this: “To save debate running wild: I’ve heard this attributed to the Mexican police as a cheap way of getting a suspect to talk and which, happily, does not leave a mark. The carbonated beverage of choice was Coca-Cola. Hint: expanding bubbles, and the sensitivity of the sinuses. I seem to recall a brief shot of something very like this in the movie Traffic.” Traffic is a 2000 Stephen Soderburgh movie about the illegal drug trade. In the scene Pratchett mentions, a killer who worked for the Tijuana Cartel is tortured by police officers who mix soda water and chilli powder and put it up his nose.
  • You can hear Ben’s thoughts about the end of The Fifth Elephant in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“.
  • Lord Ronald Rust appears in primarily in Jingo, but also crops up regularly as a typically awful example of Ankh-Morpork’s aristocracy, including in Men at Arms, The Fifth Elephant, Monstrous Regiment and Snuff.
  • We’ve previously mentioned sitcom character Hyacinth “it’s pronounced Bouquet” Bucket of Keeping Up Appearances many times, including in #Pratchat51, “Boffoing the Winter Slayer,” #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home” and #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?“
  • We know a little more now about the likely origins of “All the Little Angels”, thanks to reddit user armcie! On the alt.fan.pratchett newsgroup in November 2002, Pratchett was asked about the song, and said he based it on one he could only vaguely remember from his youth; to quote the man himself: “consensus of opinion is that it may be a WW1 trench song which became an early version of what are now known as ‘Rugby songs.’ Whatever the tune, it should be simple and swing along. it’s only ‘sad’ in context.”
    Armcie also found that Terry seems to have asked folk song expert Steve Roud about the original song not long before the book’s publication; Steve hadn’t heard of it, but put out word for more info. Jacob B, in this old forum thread from the Mudcat folk and blues website, had the closest answer: a song sung to the tune of the German children’s song “O du lieber Augustin” (“Oh, you dead Augustin”), which puns “ascend” and “arse-end”, and has very similar lyrics.
    You might not know the name of that German song, but you’ve almost certainly heard the tune, as its been re-used by dozens of songs, mostly for children, since it was published around 1800. In Australia or the UK, you might know the Scottish-themed “Have You Ever Seen a Lassie?”, while American versions include “The More We Get Together” and “Willy Had a Goldfish”. Most likely, though, you’ve seen the episode of The Simpsons featuring the song “Hail to the Bus Driver”, which seems to be a genuine American schoolyard song using the tune.
    In any case, “O du lieber Augustin” is in 3/4 time, so it’s not much use as a marching song – it’s clearly not the tune used on the Discworld. But it does seem a likely contender for the song Terry remembered from his youth. Terry’s quote above suggests he had no specific tune in mind for the song Dickson and the others sing, though, so feel free to make up your own. Thanks again, armcie!
    Here are the lyrics to the possible inspiration for “All the Little Angels”:
All the little angels ascend up to heaven
All the little angels ascend up on high
Which end up?
Ascend up.
Which end up?
Ascend up.
All the little angels ascend up on high
  • There are multiple recordings of the more upbeat version of “All the Little Angels” on YouTube, all based on the arrangement by Sunday Comes Afterwards. It’s not a million miles away from “O du lieber Augustin“, but definitely its own thing. Here are the links:
    • Sunday Comes Afterwards – All the Little Angels: their version is a simple demo of the tune they devised, with ukelele and vocals. The arrangement is also available as sheet music via flat.io. Released in March 2018.
    • DJ Boogie – All the little angels (how do they rise up): this version from is the most “music with rocks in” of the three. The video also contains numerous references to the book. Released in May 2020. (Boogie is clearly a fan; he has a YouTube list of several Discworld tunes, including a very funny filk of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” written to fans, and a parody of “A Few of My Favourite Things” rewritten to be a list of Abominations Unto Nuggan.)
    • Hate Kills – All the Little Angels: from a parody duo based in Devon, this version features acoustic guitar and some lovely harmonies. Released in May 2021. (They also do a great a cappella version of “The Hedgehog Song“.)
  • Another, very different version of “All the Little Angels” is by US-based musician Genviel. It’s not trying to be the song sung by the characters in the book, but uses the Little Angels chorus to make a song referencing the events of the Glorious 25th of May and more generally being critical of war. You can find “All the Little Angels, Night Watch & Terry Pratchett Tribute feat. Marcello Vieira” as the final track on Genviel’s 2019 album “Chronicles of a Collapse”, available on their website as well as Soundcloud, YouTube music and more.
  • Stevonnie Ross – Sunday Comes Afterwards themselves! – contacted us to let us know about another arrangement of “All the Little Angels” they thought our listeners might enjoy. This one is from Discworld-themed Celtic/German folk band “The Band with Folk In”, and definitely has a more “authentic folk music” kind of feel – especially the way they end. You can listen to it here on YouTube, and find some of their other songs there too; many of them are Discworld-themed “filks” – traditional or classic songs (including popular Tik-Tok sea shanty “The Wellerman”, and the Beatles’ “Let It Be”) with new, nerdy lyrics.
  • One more for the road, added after the fact: community choir Liber Chorus recorded another very different choral version of “All the Little Angels”. We can imagine this might be how it might be sung many years after the fact in a temple on the Glorious 25th, by any religious folks who remembered that day. It’s certainly not how the Watch members would have sung it at the time, but it is worth a listen; you can find a video of the song on Youtube, released in early July, 2022. The video shows members of the choir, but also features some gorgeous illustrations of some of the participants from the barricades of the Glorious Revolution.

More notes for this episode coming soon!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Mustrum Ridcully, Nadia Bailey, Vetinari, Vimes

#EeekClub2022 Notes and Errata

25 May 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for our special Glorious 25th of May episode, “Eeek Club 2022“, discussing topics chosen by our Eeek tier subscribers.

Iconographic Evidence

We’ll add a photo of the enormous Senate ballot paper from the 2013 election as soon as we can find one!

Notes and Errata

  • We’ll find the “buckle up as I teach you about something I just learned myself!” tweet at some point, but it’s eluded us for the moment. (Let us know if you find it!)
  • You can find the biggest Democracy Sausage project at democracysausage.org or on Twitter at @DemSausage. Note that this project is not, In any meaningful way “official”, but it’s an impressive effort nonetheless. We’d also make the comment that while the democracy sausage is a fun tradition, it ought not to be so universally necessary for public schools to fundraise for themselves in this way every election…
  • We did indeed talk about the confluence of the Glorious 25th of May and Towel Day in last year’s Eeek Club episode.
  • Our previous T-shirt ideas have been a “Sausage Inna Bunnings” design, from #Pratchat50, and the “Sausorobos” design – a sausage in a circle eating it’s “tail” – in #Pratchat53. We also considered a Helvetica names T-shirt of the Hogfather’s four boars in #Pratchat26.
  • Listen Sven told us about the early, cheaply-made German editions of the Discworld books, from publisher Heyne, who inserted an ad for Maggi cup-a-soup into their version of Sorcery (and possibly other books). These were discontinued not long after Terry found out. They “wouldn’t promise not to do it again” in Terry’s words, and so they took the German publication rights to Goldmann instead.
  • Our previous reflective episode, with also served to give us some breathing room at the start of the pandemic lockdowns, was #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, in April 2020.
  • Our single episode overview of The Watch is #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience“.
  • We mention three recent screen adaptations of Sherlock Holmes this episode:
    • Sherlock (2010-2017) – the BBC “prestige” series, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as a modern-day Holmes and Watson.
    • Elementary (2012-2019) – the CBS procedural crime drama, born out of a failed attempt to make a US adaptation of the BBC show. It stars Johnny Lee Miller as a modern-day Sherlock who, after becoming addicted to heroin, relocates to New York to start over. Lucy Liu plays Joan Watson, an ex-doctor and Sherlock’s assigned “sober companion” as he recovers from his addiction.
    • Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows (2011) – Guy Ritchie’s film versions, set in the same time as the original stories, but with dashes of action, steampunk and occultism. Both star Robert Downey Jr as Sherlock, and Jude Law as Watson.
  • The 100 (2014-2020) is an American dystopian science fiction TV series. The series is set in a future where the Earth has been devastated by nuclear war, but humans have survived in an orbiting space station, the Ark. A century after the war, one hundred “juvenile delinquents” are sentenced to a form of community service in which they are sent back to Earth to determine if it’s safe for the rest to return.
  • Liz has previously written about adapting the work of one of her other favourite authors, Philip K Dick, in this piece for Kill Your Darlings magazine.
  • The Hunger Games was originally a series of three novels – The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay – by American author Suzanne Collins, published between 2008 and 2010, with a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, published in 2020. The original trilogy was adapted into four films – the last book in two parts – and Collins co-wrote the adaptations for all of them except Catching Fire. She has also adapted the screenplay for the prequel, which is set to be released as a film in 2023.
  • We’ve mentioned Diana Wynne Jones loads of times on the podcast. As well as the 2004 Studio Ghibli adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle – which as Liz says, is fairly loosely based on the book – another of her books, Archer’s Goon (1985), was adapted for television by the BBC in 1992. The book features an ordinary family who find a “goon” on their doorstep, who says he has come to collect the two thousand words which thirteen-year-old Howard supposedly owes to someone named Archer. (Which is an amazing concept for a story in any medium!) Wynne Jones was quite closely involved in the adaptation, as the producer, Richard Callanan, wanted to make the series faithful to the book; Wynne Jones described her job as sitting with the producer around a table with scriptwriter Jenny McDade, persuading her to make it more like the book. While she didn’t think McDade enjoyed this process, Jones seems to have been happy with the result. The author also commented that she sees the two modes of writing as very different ways to tell a story, and scriptwriting did not appeal to her.
  • To clarify, the “one million dollars per hour” figure for drama television refers to how much it costs to make an hour of finished television, not how much it costs to work on a show for an hour. This number is based on analysis done by Screen Australia, but Ben’s fudged an overall average here he got from someone else because the cost of television varies a lot. For long-running series or serials, costs are spread out over dozens of episodes, bringing that cost down to about $350,000 per hour. That average is probably quite a bit lower than most shows cost, though, due to the effect of long-running soaps like Home and Away and Neighbours, which produce hundreds of hours every year on very tight budgets. (Now Neighbours has closed down, the average will probably shoot up considerably!) Compare that to a mini-series, which costs much more than Ben’s average – over $1.7m per hour. And then children’s drama, treated as a separate category, costs quite a lot too: about $1.25m per hour! Possibly because it’s more often fantastical, whereas we make hardly any adult sci-fi or fantasy in Australia these days?
  • Firefly (2002) was a fan favourite space western infamously cancelled by the Fox network half-way through its first season. Set in the 26th century, it imagines a future where the wealthiest cultures on Earth – implied to be the US and China, though elements of some other cultures also remain – terraform the numerous planets and moons of a trinary star system and establish a new life there after the Earth is “used up”. It was followed by the film Serenity in 2005, produced by Universal, which continued and wrapped up the main story arc from the series. The story has continued though, mainly in comic books. The rights to the show passed to Disney when they bought Fox, and as recently as February 2022, rumours circulated that Disney might reboot the show for Disney+ – though the fan base is much keener on a continuation of the old one.
  • Troll Bridge, based on the first Discworld short story (see #PratchatNA7), was produced in Australia by Snowgum Films, starring Don Bridges as Cohen the Barbarian. The original crowdfunding campaign ran on Kickstarter in 2011, though work on the film started as early as 2004. The film was released in 2019, and is now available for free on YouTube.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer finished at a perfectly acceptable point after seven seasons, but it was continued in several comics both during and after its run – including an official continuation of the series from IDW Publishing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, produced by original series creator Joss Whedon from 2007 to 2011. It was a big success for IDW and led to a follow up, Season Nine, from 2011 to 2013, and also a similar continuation of Buffy’s spin-off series Angel, and a connected series based on the popular character of Spike.
  • The Mob’s Discworld adaptations for the UK pay television channel Sky1 are Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (2006), Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (2008) – which combined The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic – and Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal (2010). All three are presented as two-part telemovies.
  • The Doctor Who novelisations were most famously produced by Target Books, an imprint of Universal-Tandem publishing and later W H Allen, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Aimed at middle grade readers (mostly), each book adapted one of the original show’s serialised adventures, which usually ran for four to six episodes, and included a few internal illustrations as well as exciting covers. Where possible the original scriptwriter was hired to adapt their own stories, sometimes resulting in very interesting choices and a chance to restore things cut or changed during editing, or adding additional background or motivation to characters. A huge number of these were written by former Doctor Who script editor Terrance Dicks, who is affectionately known as Uncle Terry by many fans who grew up reading the books. Target no longer truly exists – W H Allen was bought by Virgin (who produced original Doctor Who novels in the 1990s), who was in turn bought by Random House and folded into their imprint Ebury Books. The Doctor Who license reverted to the BBC, and since 2018 they’ve published both novelisations of the stories never originally covered by Target, and new novelisations of stories from the 2005 incarnation of the show, published in a paperback format which deliberately mimics the old Target books style. You can still find the Target books in secondhand book shops all over Australia, which is where Ben collected nearly all of them as a boy.
  • The cynicism/stoicism/epicurean quote is, in fact, from Terry himself! It appears in Small Gods as a summation of the philosophy of Didactylos, who combines the thinking of all three schools (or at least their modern popular interpretations). Here’s the relevant section:

Although one of the most quoted and popular philosophers of all time, Didactylos the Ephebian never achieved the respect of his fellow philosophers. They felt he wasn’t philosopher material. He didn’t bath often enough or, to put it another way, at all. And he philosophised about the wrong sorts of things. And he was interested in the wrong sorts of thing. Dangerous things. Other philosophers asked questions like: Is Truth Beauty, and is Beauty Truth? and: Is Reality Created by the Observer? But Didactylos posed the famous conundrum: ‘Yes, But What’s It Really All About, Then, When You Get Right Down To It, I Mean Really!’

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools – the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans – and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, ‘You can’t trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so let’s have a drink. Mine’s a double if you’re buying. Thank you. And a packet of nuts. Her left bosom is nearly uncovered, eh? Two more packets, then!’

Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (1990)
  • Ben mentions our episode about Guards! Guards!, which sis #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“, from June 2018.
  • A quick primer to the various philosophies that crop up in this discussion:
    • Cynicism dates back to around 400 BC, and the philosophers Antisthenes (a student of Socrates) and Diogenes (who it’s said lived in a clay jar in the streets of Athens). The core belief of cynicism is that being virtuous is the only important goal of life, and thus they rejected societal morés as a distraction. They were big on rejecting most things, actually, including hierarchy, shame and pomposity. They distrusted earnestness and anyone who claimed superiority, and thought it hypocritical to claim that humans are anything other than another kind of animal. This way of thinking led to the original Cynics giving away their wealth and possessions and trying to live “naturally”, or at least simply. They were not popular at the time; the name “Cynics” was a derogatory one, meaning “of a dog” in Ancient Greek, but they adopted it wholeheartedly. (Thanks to subscriber Felix for supplying some of this info!)
    • Stoicism is also an Ancient Greek philosophy, founded by Zeno in around 300 BC. It also asserts that being virtuous is the only important goal in life, but they considered everything else – wealth, pleasure etc – to be neither good nor bad in themselves. They were also keen on living in harmony with nature, and emphasised the importance of action over speaking when it comes to evaluating virtue. The modern meaning of stoicism – of someone who resists strong emotional responses – comes from the original Stoic philosophy that “virtue is sufficient for happiness”, meaning that they considered that as long as you acted in a virtuous way, you could be happy no matter what misfortune you suffered.
    • Epicureanism is named after its founder, Epicurus, another Greek philosopher, and is also from around 300 BC, originally as a challenge to the philosophy of Plato. It’s more or less a form of hedonism: its main tenet is that pleasure (rather than virtue) is the greatest good in life, and that one should live as pleasurably as possible (though in moderation, to avoid the suffering that comes from overindulgence). Epicureanism is about pleasures of the mind rather than physical ones, though, and also concentrates on “natural” desires, though Epicurus didn’t think much of sex or passion. He instead focussed on the desires of minimising negative experiences like pain, suffering and anxiety, which he saw in part stemming from belief in the gods.
    • Utilitarianism is an ethical framework which judges whether an action is right or wrong based on its outcomes, with the goal of maximising happiness or wellbeing for the largest number of people. Thus it considers that it is okay for one or a small number of people to suffer, if it means much much larger number of people are made safe or happy. It has ancient roots, but was popularised as a distinct position in the 18th and 19th centuries through the work of philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.
    • Paternalism is less an ethical stance and more a derisive term for those who seek to limit the freedoms of others supposedly in their own good. It’s been applied to a wide range of things from parenting styles to government interventions; in Australia the term “Nanny State” has been used to criticise everything from the introduction of seatbelt laws to the restriction of sales of alcohol and tobacco.
  • Vetinari reads sheet music for pleasure in Soul Music, not Feet of Clay, as Ben guessed. We discussed Soul Music in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got Rocks In“.
  • The article Frank sent us about Pratchett’s philosophy is “Terry Pratchett rethought as a philosopher in new study“, from The Guardian in 2014. It refers to the book Philosophy and Terry Pratchett, which we don’t currently have on our list for the podcast – let us know if you’d like us to cover it! (We have a few other similar books in the collection – we can talk about those too, though as they generally contain essays about a wide breadth of Pratchett’s work, episodes like that would necessarily contain some spoilers for books we’ve not yet discussed, and we’d probably leave them until near the end of the show’s run.)
  • Here’s Patrick Alexander’s classic Australian election comic “You Can’t Waste Your Vote!”, starring Dennis the Election Koala and Ken the Voting Dingo (please disregard whatever names Ben misremembered). If you find it useful, please consider throwing a tip Patrick’s way; he isn’t otherwise paid for doing this!
  • You can find the list of weird Australian Capital Territory political parties in the Wikipedia article about the 1989 ACT election. Thanks again Karl!
  • More notes to come!

Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards
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