Dr Kat Day

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 60, “Eyes Turnwise“, a special episode in which we answer listener questions.

Iconographic Evidence

Watch out for some photos here soon!

Notes and Errata

• The episode title echoes that of #Pratchat30, but this time we’re looking the Discworld equivalent of forwards rather than exclusively backwards.
• We discussed Small Gods in #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“, with the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones.
• Steve’s questions aren’t just about Small Gods, but specifically the sequences in that book where Brutha is in Ephebe and learns about the Ephebian gods. They occur around 40% into the book.
• The Hide Park line up devised by Glitch1958 includes the ones we mentioned in the episode: English Patella Throwing Weapons; Newly Arrived Wood Pond; Tropical Penguins; Pay ‘n’ Park; Unnerved Nana; and The Quite Warm Spicy Vegetables. Glitch also added Twinkle-Up; In Bus Queue; Open square bracket, Insert new monarch here, close square bracket; Nanny Ogg’s Bananananananarama; Flu-Theater; Irritated with the motor; and No way, sis!
• On that last note: the Oasis cover band No Way Sis do exist, but they’re Glaswegian. The Australian one is Noasis.
• The quotation “He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.” is from Men at Arms, about Edward d’Eath. You’ll find it quite near the start, just before Carrot’s finishes his letter home. We the book in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.
• Chaz’s question is a reference to “The Queue” – that is, the queue to see Queen Elizabeth’s body while it lay in state at Westminster Hall. For five days leading up to her funeral on 19 September 2022, 250,000 people lined up for as much as 24 hours over a distance of up to sixteen kilometres. Lots of people live-tweeted the Queue’s status, including the dedicated account @QE2Queue. Liz mentioned the TikTok musical, which was the creation of English actor Rob Madge. You can find it on TikTok here:

• Many of the conspiracy theories around the Queen’s death originate from QAnon, and include things like her body not being in the coffin, that Queen Elizabeth II had been already dead for months or years, or even Princess Diana secretly being alive, and coming out of hiding to become the next Queen.
• We discussed the idea of “lockdown in Ankh-Morpork” in Eeek Club 2021, our special bonus episode in which topics are chosen by subscribers, for the Glorious 25th of May. We also answered some similar questions in our previous all questions episode, #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“.
• You can find links to The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret’s headcanon threads in the episode notes for Eeek Club 2021. If they do one for the Patrician’s queue we’ll link to it here.
• We discussed The Science of Discworld II just over a year ago in #Pratchat47, “A Finite Number of Shakespeares“.
• So far three podcasts have discussed all 41 Discworld novels – Radio Morpork, The Death of Podcasts and Wyrd Sisters. You can find links to all their episodes, and many more besides, at Ben’s side project, The Guild of Recappers & Podcasters.
• Here’s the Reddit thread of favourite Pratchett footnotes mentioned by Liz, from the subreddit r/Discworld.
• We mention the following footnotes while answering Manning’s question:
  • The gold/Glod typo footnote appears in Witches Abroad:
    Bad spelling can be lethal. For example, the greedy seraph of Al-Ybi was once cursed by a badly-educated deity and for some days everything he touched turned to Glod, which happened to be the name of a small dwarf from a mountain community hundreds of miles away who found himself magically dragged to the kingdom and relentlessly duplicated. Some two thousand Glods later the spell wore off. These days, the people of Al-Ybi are renowned for being unusually short and bad-tempered.
  • The Amazing Maurice does indeed appear in Reaper Man, but not in a footnote; the Dean complains about being taken in by Maurice’s scam, which had also worked in Quirm and Stopped Lat.
  • The Light Fantastic footnote about the magic shop:
    No one knows why, but all the most truly mysterious and magical items are bought from shops that appear and, after a trading life even briefer than a double-glazing company, vanish like smoke. There have been various attempts to explain this, all of which don’t fully account for the observed facts. These shops turn up anywhere in the universe, and their immediate non-existence in any particular city can normally be deduced from crowds of people wandering the streets clutching defunct magical items, ornate guarantee cards, and looking very suspiciously at brick walls.
  • The definition of the Thaum first appears in The Light Fantastic, and is later recapped in The Science of Discworld III. Here’s the original version:
    A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls.
• We’ve discussed the Long Earth books in the following episodes:
  • The Long Earth in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“
  • The Long War in #Pratchat46, “The Helen Green Preservation Society“
  • The Long Mars in #Pratchat57, “Get Your Dad to Mars!“
  • We also discussed the precursor short story “The High Meggas” in #Pratchat57West5, “Daniel Superbaboon“.
• We discussed Eric in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies“.
• We discussed Interesting Times in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
• We’ve previously discussed Pratchett’s children’s books:
  • The Bromeliad books Truckers (#Pratchat9), Diggers (#Pratchat13) and Wings (#Pratchat20).
  • The Johnny Maxwell books Only You Can Save Mankind (#Pratchat28), Johnny and the Dead (#Pratchat34) and Johnny and the Bomb (#Pratchat37).
  • Dodger in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“
  • Nation in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“
  • We haven’t yet given The Carpet People the full Pratchat treatment, but we did talk about the differences between the original and re-written versions in a video discussion for Nullus Anxietas.
• Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (not Science Fiction, as Ben misremembers) and Barlowe’s Guide to Fantasy are the work of American writer and artist Wayne Barlowe, who also works as a concept artist and creature designer in film and television on works including Galaxy Quest, Pacific Rim, Avatar and Aquaman.

More notes coming soon!

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

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory“, discussing Pratchett’s 2005 collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch.

Iconographic Evidence

Feast your eyes on this video of Kat’s extraordinary Pratchett shelf!

Notes and Errata

• The episode title is of course inspired by Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in which young Charlie Bucket manages to find a “golden ticket” admiring him to the magical factory of weird chocolatier Willy Wonka. We’re not entirely sure if Charlie Darwin would rather have encountered the oddities of Wonka’s factory, but he certainly didn’t seem to have enjoyed seeing the God of Evolution’s whale production line… The book was memorably filmed in 1971 as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with Gene Wilder playing the part of Wonka, though Dahl did not like it. It was a modest success at the time, but became a cult classic in the 1980s when it was frequently broadcast on television. A 2005 adaptation using the same title as the book was directed by Tim Burton and starred Johnny Depp as Wonka, but the less said about that the better.
• We discussed The Science of Discworld II: The Globe in #Pratchat47, “A Finite Number of Shakespeares“, with guest Alanta Colley. We felt afterwards we hadn’t adequately expressed all of our feelings about it, so we discussed it a bit more in episode seven of our bonus subscriber only podcast, Ook Club, released in October 2021.
• We’ve previously mentioned Richard Dawkins in #Pratchat29 and #Pratchat47. His early books on evolution are good, and The Blind Watchmaker, published in 1986, makes a great companion piece to Darwin’s Watch. But in the early 2000s he became more and more focused on being anti-religion, and in 2006, a year after The Science of Discworld III, he published The God Delusion, which argued that any belief in a god was delusional. It became his best selling work. He has continued to attract controversy over the years, thanks to his large audience and his perceived position (until fairly recently) as a representative for atheists, whether they want him or not. He’s made enough problematic statements that there’s an entire Wikipedia article titled “Views of Richard Dawkins“.
• Redshift is an increase in the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, that occurs when observing objects which are moving away from us – making the light from very fast moving objects over large distances appear redder than it truly is. This is mostly observed with the light from distant stars as the universe expands. It can happen in the opposite direction too, with the wavelengths getting shorter, which is known as blueshift. Kat mentions Terry’s use of it in Thief of Time; she also mentioned that it appears in Thud! but we cut that as we didn’t want to spoil a book we’ll be covering very soon.
• You can get a good overview of Monopoly‘s history as The Landlord’s Game via episode 189 of the 99% Invisible podcast, “The Landlord’s Game“. In recent years there’s been renewed interest in Elizabeth Magie’s original 1904 game, which tried to popularise Georgism, an alternate form of land tax. You can find out way more about it at landlords-game.com. Meanwhile, if you still think the modern game is fair, check out this monopolynerd.com blog post from 2012 which breaks down the probability of getting a full set of properties through luck (i.e. landing on them and buying them, without having to trade with other players), based on turn order.
• I’m You, Dickhead is officially available for free here on YouTube. Note that it really lives up to the title; there’s swearing and the protagonist truly is a dickhead.
• Bees and wasps (and ants) are members of the order Hymenoptera, a group of insects that includes more than 150,000 species. Spider wasps, the parasitic wasps which prey on spiders, are in the family Pompilidae; there are around 5,000 species of them, most of which specialise in specific kinds of spider.
• The telephone is usually attributed to Alexander Graham Bell, who was the first American to be granted a patent for the device in February 1876. But even at the time this was controversial; rival inventor Elisha Gray also filed for a patent the same day, and Bell’s patent was suspended for three months so the matter could be settled – which it was, eventually, in Bell’s favour. But there are plenty of good reasons to think this wasn’t entirely fair or just… (Ben didn’t mean to conflate this dispute with the War of the Currents, but they two conflicts have a very similar vibe.)
• Elizabeth Fulhame was a chemist lived in Edinburgh in the late 18th century, though some details of her life are lost to history. The book from which Kat quotes is An Essay On Combustion with a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting, wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous, which she published in 1794. Catalysis, which she describes in the book, is the now commonplace practice of speeding up a reaction between two chemicals by using a third substance, a catalyst, which isn’t affected by the reaction.
• Kat is remembering The Science of Doctor Who, which did indeed star Brian Cox and was broadcast on BBC Two in November 2013 as part of the programme’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations… Which means Ben has it one the Blu-Ray box set he has of all those anniversary specials!
• We’ve previously mentioned the cellulose billiard balls way back in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory” (about Men at Arms), and #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“ (about Moving Pictures). The 99% Invisible episode about the invention of cellulose mentioned by Ben is The Post-Billiards Age from May 2015, which we also mentioned in both of those episodes.

More notes coming soon!

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