These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 62, “There’s a Cow in There“, discussing the Discworld picture book, 2005‘s Where’s My Cow? with special guests, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.
Iconographic Evidence
We’re sourcing a good video of a hippo – watch this space!
We might also add some partial images from the book; we apologise this episode was so visual!
Notes and Errata
The episode title refers to the theme song of the Australian version of Play School, a children’s educational and entertainment programme produced by the ABC since July 1966. The first line of the song is “There’s a bear in there”, referring to one of the two staple toys from the show, Little Ted or Big Ted. (See below for more about them.)
The other children’s book to make its way from Discworld to Roundworld is another favourite of Young Sam’s: Miss Felicity Beadle’s The World of Poo. It appears in Snuff, and was published alongside the Corgi paperback edition of the novel. We’ll cover it when we get to Snuff, but it stays much more in-universe than Where’s My Cow?
The rock song that might have inspired Detritus’ line in the book is actually the poetic opening to the Moody Blues’ 1969 album On The Threshold of a Dream. The first words heard are: “I am, I think I am. Therefore I must be. (pause, then uncertainly) I think…”
Ben likens the Sams’ flying chair to the music video for the UK’s 2022 Eurovision song; specifically that’s Sam Ryder’s “Space Man”.
Blackboard is one of the puppet characters from the long-running Australian children’s program Mr Squiggle; we previously referred to him in #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“.
The Abominable Snow Baby is a 2021 animated adaptation of Pratchett’s early short story of the same name, produced for Channel 4. It was narrated by David Harewood, and starred Hugh Dancy as Albert, and Julie Walters as his Granny; the picture of Terry Pratchett appears in Albert’s flat, though it’s not clear if he’s meant to be Albert’s grandad or not.
The children’s book about death mentioned by Liz is Duck, Death and the Tulip by German children’s author and illustrator Wolf Erlbruch, first published in English in 2011.
The Amazing Maurice opens in Australian cinemas on 12 January 2023, but if you’ve looked this up very soon after our episode was published, you can get tickets for the 10 December preview screening in Adelaide from the Australian Discworld Convention. Head to ausdwcon.org/amazing for tickets and more info!
More notes coming soon!
Thanks for reading our notes! If we missed anything, or you have questions, please let us know.
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.
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.
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.
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 HnerNer Hner“, in which we compare the Australian and Ankh-Morpork national anthems.)
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 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:
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’s special Oggswatch Feast episode for 2021, featuring guests Elly Squire, Liam Pieper, Nadia Bailey, Anna Ahveninen and the hosts of the podcasts Wyrd Sisters, The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret and The Compleat Discography. All of them cook dishes from the 1999 Discworld companion book, “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook“, by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, and illustrated by Paul Kidby.
Iconographic Evidence
We’ll add some more images of other recipes – or links to where you can find them – soon.
Bananana Soup Surprise
Bananana Soup Surprise in the pot.Served as Nanny Ogg intended!A few moments from the video we made of this disgusting odyssey.
Celery Astonishment
Are you astonished? We certainly are.
CMOT Dibbler’s Sausage Inna Bun
As promised, the Wyrd Sisters shared some pictures of their sausages!
Figgin pastry and filling ready for assembly.Aaron’s resident big wee hag helping out. (Picture used with permission.)Figgins ready for the oven!The figginshed result!
Dwarf Bread
All the ingredients ready for dwarf baking!It certainly looks like gravel……especially close up!Not much like the illustration…Pounded flat and ready for the oven!It really did look like a slab of asphalt at this point…Finished dwarf bread!Looks the part, and actually pretty good.Proof that Anna was still enjoying it the next day.Anna and Ben’s first adventure in dwarf bakery!
Notes and Errata
A huge shoutout to the ever-amazing David Ashton for the Hogswatch version of our theme tune!
We discussed Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook in #Pratchat50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat” from December 2021.
We previously discussed Paul Kelly’s 1996 Christmas hit “How to Make Gravy” back in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“. Perhaps we should compile a Fourecksian cookbook and include a gravy recipe?
While Kelly’s description of writing “How to Make Gravy” suggests it was written fairly quickly, Ben is exaggerating when he says the song was written in an afternoon.
The “Paul Kelly Cinematic Universe” does exist, but the protagonist of “How to Make Gravy” is not the same person from his hit single “Dumb Things”. Instead Joe appears in Kelly’s earlier songs “To Her Door” (1987) and “Love Never Runs on Time” (1994).
Whamageddon is a folk game in which players try to avoid hearing “Last Christmas”, the 1984 Christmas single by Wham!, between December 1st and 24th. (No shade on the song – it’s just still very popular in the UK, where the game originates, and so gets played a lot.) The game dates back to an online forum in 2010, though it didn’t get the name until 2016, when the Facebook page took it to new heights of fame. You can find the rules at whamageddon.com.
Names suggested for Ben’s proposed Australian variant of Whamageddon have included “Gravygeddon”, “Armagravy”, “Paullkellypse” and “Catastophgravy”.
Peppers or bell peppers are indeed what we Australians and New Zealanders call a capsicum. This differentiates it from the other kinds of peppers, which all have specific names. Capsicum is the genus of plants in the pepper family, but that includes most varieties of chilli as well.
ASMR is an acronym for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a well-documented sensation of physical tingling and low-level euphoria felt by some in response to certain sounds. ASMR is a form of paresthesia, a term for sensations felt on the skin which do not have (or at least don’t match) a physical cause; “pins and needles” is the most common form. The tingling of ASMR is most often experienced in the scalp and the back of the neck, and can be triggered by a variety of things, though whispering is most common. The phenomenon is fairly widespread, and ASMR videos and audio recordings are all over the Internet. (If you go searching, be aware that while ASMR is not inherently sexual, there’s a fairly large subset of videos that mix in erotica.)
Schitt’s Creek is a Canadian sitcom created by father-and-son duo Dan and Eugene Levy, starring the pair of them, Catherine O’Hara and Annie Murphy as a rich family who lose their fortune and are forced to live in a motel in a town they once bought as a joke. It ran for six seasons from 2015 to 2020 on CBC, and is available internationally on Netflix. You can find the “fold in the cheese” scene on YouTube; it’s from the second episode of the second season, “Family Dinner”.
“How the sausage gets made” is a common idiom, meaning to discover the perhaps unpleasant process behind something on enjoys, which one might prefer not to know. It’s also a line in the song “The Room Where It Happens” from the second act of Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit broadway musical Hamilton. It describes the Compromise of 1790, in which at a private meeting Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison agree to build a new capital city for the United States in the South (rather than making New York the capital), perhaps in return for using Hamilton’s proposed financial system. The song is from the perspective of Hamilton’s friend/rival Aaron Burr, who laments that no-one really knows what was agreed in “the room where it happens”:
No one really knows how the game is played The art of the trade How the sausage gets made We just assume that it happens But no one else is in the room where it happens
American sausages are not all like Frankfurts! They have more English-like ones as well. As the Wyrd Sisters themselves explain: “They’re a fairly common breakfast food, usually as part of a larger meal. The main difference is that they’re smaller and a little drier than what you get in the UK and Australia – if your sausages are grapes, ours are raisins.” Smaller breakfast sausages are also very popular in the UK, but not often seen in Australia, at least on the East coast.
There have been several separate chains of supermarkets in the US named Market Basket. Manning is talking about the New England Market Basket, which has stores in the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island. It was founded in 1917 by Greek immigrants as DeMoulas Market in Lowell, Massachusetts. Over the years there’s been a few disputes between branches of the DeMoulas family, which still owns the chain, but these were mostly settled in court in 2014, when Arthur T. Demoulas was fired and, after mass worker protests, reinstated as the company President. The workforce is not unionised, but employees who work 1,000 hours or more a year are entitled to enter a profit sharing arrangement, and the chain does not use automated checkouts.
“Freedom units” is a satirical way to refer to the imperial measurements still widely used in everyday American life, though it’s worth mentioning that this may be preferable to the weird mix of metric and imperial that you find in the UK and Canada… As Manning mentions, the “cup” is particularly confusing: a US cup is 240mL (that’s millilitres, thousandths of a litre), or 8.45 imperial fluid ounces. A metric cup – as used in Australia – is 250mL, handily one quarter of a litre. But they’re obviously very close, so you probably won’t go too far wrong.
A sous-chef is the second most senior chef in a professional kitchen. The full title is sous-chef de cuisine, French for “under-chief of the kitchen”.
Jo and Francine eat scones in their third Equal Rites episode, “Crumbs All Up In There“, from January 2020.
Nigel Slater is an English food writer, best known as the head food writer for Marie Clare magazine from 1988 to 1993, and afterwards as the chief writer for The Observer Food monthly supplement. He’s also written an autobiographical column for The Observer for more than a decade; a popular memoir, Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger, in 2003, which was later adapted for television and the stage; and numerous cookbooks, mostly concentrating on simple comfort food. His 2007 book Eating for England: The Delights & Eccentricities of the British at Table sounds like a great resource for those looking to learn more about the influences on Nanny Ogg’s cookery.
Tannins are biological molecules which bind to proteins and other organic compounds and cause them to precipitate, ie solidify out of a solution. They are naturally found in most berries, some unripe fruits, nuts, wine, tea and cannabis, and as the name might suggest are also used in tanning, the process of making leather. Wine acquires tannin both from the varieties of grapes used to make it, and through the aging process, from the wood of the barrels, giving wine it’s astringent taste. Tannins occur naturally in tea as well.
There’s a bit of confusion about books adapted into films featuring magical cooking with chocolate in the title, so to clarify:
Ben is talking about Mexican author Lara Esquivel’s 1989 magical realism novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate), about a young woman forbidden to marry the love of her life, who magically (and unwittingly) infuses the food she cooks with her emotions. It was filmed in Mexico in 1992, adapted by Esquivel, directed by Alfonso Arau, and starring Lumi Cavazos, Marco Leonardi and Regina Torné. Both novel and film include authentic Mexican recipes. A companion work, Tita’s Diary, was published in 2016.
Everyone else is talking about Chocolat, a 1999 magical realism novel by English-French author Joanne Harris. It’s about a witchy single mother, Vianne, who arrives in a small French village at Lent and opens a chocolaterie, leading her into conflict with the village’s priest. It was followed by two sequels, The Lollipop Shoes (2007) and Peaches for Monsieur le Curé (2012). It was filmed in 2000, directed by Lasse Hallström with a cast featuring Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, Alfred Molina, Johnny Depp, Lena Olin and Carrie-Anne Moss.
The media tie-in cookbooks mentioned by Joanne are:
The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook (2019) by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, for the videogame The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (and it’s many predecessors).
A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook (2012), also by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer, based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novels and Game of Thrones television series, plus the companion book From the Sands of Dorne (2017). (There’s also an unofficial one, published in 2012, The Unofficial Game of Thrones Cookbook: From Direwolf Ale to Auroch Stew, by Alan Kistler.)
World of Warcraft: The Official Cookbook (2017), also by Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, based on the MMORPG video game World of Warcraft. (Joanne wasn’t kidding about this being a lucrative gig for some authors; Monroe-Cassel also has books out or on the way for Star Trek, Overwatch, Firefly, Star Wars and more.)
Heroes’ Feast: The Official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook (2020) by Kyle Newman, Jon Peterson and Michael Witwer, inspired by the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.
While we’re talking about these books, if you’re looking for them, be wary of imitations! It seems since 2020 there’s been a rash of cheap self-published unofficial ebooks of similar collections of recipes, especially where the expiry of a license means the official one is no longer available, or where it was never offered as an ebook in the first place. It’s not clear if these are any good or even actually full of appropriate recipes, so try and save your money for the people who’ve put in the real work.
Gilmore Girls is an American dramedy series about young independent mother Lorelai Gilmour and her daughter Rory, who moved away from Lorelai’s rich parents to live in the small town of Stars Hollow. The show ran for seven seasons on The WB and The CW between 2000 and 2007, with a revival mini-series, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life on Netflix in 2016. The show has inspired more than one cookbook, which is unsurprising given how Lorelai and Rory’s lives – personal and professional – revolve around food…
Eat Like a Gilmore: The Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of Gilmore Girls (2016) and Eat Like a Gilmore: Seasons: The Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of the Gilmore Girls Revival (2021) are both by Kristi Carlson, and seem to have been the first and most popular of the bunch. They’re also available in a box set of both books, which together contain two hundred recipes!
Gilmore Girls: The Official Cookbook, by Elena Craig and Kristen Mulrooney, will be the first official one, and is coming in 2022.
The “Gas mark” is a scale for oven temperature used mostly in the UK and Ireland. It dates back to the 1930s, when many gas ovens were produced using a standard gas regulator, in most recorded cases a “Regulo” brand one, which had “marks” from 1 up to 9, as well as ½ and ¼, to indicate various levels of heat. Their instruction manuals, along with recipe books given away with some ovens, used the marks rather than a specific temperature, in the form “Gas: Regulo Mark 7”. Eventually this became widespread enough that other brand regulators used the same numbers and by the 1950s the brand name was no longer used, with recipe books referring to “gas mark 8” and so on. Gas marks correspond to temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit: gas mark 1 is 275 °F, and each mark above that adds 25 °F (or subtracts it, in the case of ½ and ¼). Similar scales exist in other countries, notably France (labelled “Th”, short for thermostats) and Germany (“Stufe“, German for “step”); those scales are, of course, different to the gas mark and to each other. But modern cookbooks will generally include a temperature, as well as the mark, Th or Stufe.
It’s not surprising Ben hasn’t heard barberries, the fruit of the Berberis plant; turns out they grow all over the world except in Australia! The European species is Berberis vulgaris, which grows wild, but has fallen out of use in many countries. It’s still popular in Iran; the Persian name for it is zereshk (زرشک), and in Europe at least most commercially available barberries are grown there. The berries are tart and tangy, and when dried are around the size of a currant, though red in colour.
Figjam is the 2005 single released by Brisbane hip-hop band Butterfingers, from their 2006 album The Deeper You Dig… It reached number 11 in the Triple J Hottest 100 that year, but only around 50 in the mainstream charts. In the song, the acronym is “Fuck I’m Good, Just Ask Me” rather than Great.
Figgins are indeed mentioned in Guards! Guards!; the master of the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night uses the term repeatedly as a vague threat, mentioning that interlopers will “have their figgin put on a spike”, and noting to himself that his followers have never asked what a figgin is. A footnote explains that in The Dictionary of Eye-Watering Words, a figgin is defined as “a small short-crust pastry containing raisins”, and provides several other obscure culinary delights that could have made it into the Master’s speeches. CMOT Dibbler is later seen selling figgins from his tray alongside his sausages, and it’s a repeated joke that the Elucidated Brethren assume anything said about figgins describes a horrifying form of torture. Figgins also score a minor mention in Men At Arms, when Vimes imagines his fate if he were to stay in the watch to an old age with no family.
The Discworld cookery masterpost on Tumblr is a delight. Thank you, user toooldforthisbutstill, and to the major contributor, fantasyfeasts, who also makes stuff from other worlds.
We’ll add a few more notes 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 episode 45, “Hogswatch in Grune“, featuring guest Penelope Love, discussing Pratchett’s 1987 short story, “Twenty Pence, with Envelope and Seasonal Greeting“.
The episode title – and our choice of short story – is inspired by tradition of “Christmas in July“, Hogswatch being the Discworld equivalent of Christmas (see our Hogfather episode, #Pratchat26) and Grune being the Discworld month that comes after June. In Australia, and the rest of the Southern hemisphere, December 25 occurs during Summer, and so workplaces and friendship groups here and in New Zealand sometimes celebrate a gathering during the Winter, when the colder weather makes it feel a little closer to a traditional European Christmas (and makes it more palatable to eat enormous Christmas dinners). Much to our surprise, this tradition turns out to have begun rather more ironically in America in the 1930s or 40s, though mostly as a marketing ploy rather than an actual gathering of loved ones.
Call of Cthulhu by Sandy Petersen is a horror roleplaying game, and one of the oldest RPGs still in print: the first edition was published by Chaosium in 1981. The current 7th edition was first published in 2014. The world of the game is based on the “Cthulhu Mythos”, drawn from the stories of horror writer (and, sadly, infamous racist) H P Lovecraft and his contemporaries and successors, including Frank Belknap Long, Robert E Howard and August Derleth. It’s theme is “cosmic horror” – as Penny says, the players generally discover they live in a universe where immensely powerful and ancient beings could easily destroy our world – and the characters’ grip on reality. The game uses a version of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying System, modified to track each character’s “sanity” – which they lose as they glimpse the awful truths of the universe – alongside their skills and abilities. The default setting for the game is 1930s America, where Lovecraft’s stories are set, but play in many other eras and locations is also supported – including, via one of the books Penny worked on, Australia.
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, aka P G Wodehouse (1881 – 1975) was an English author best known for his humorous novels, especially those chronicling hapless toff Bertie Wooster and his hyper-capable valet Jeeves, whose name has become synonymous with the image of the unflappable English manservant. He also wrote Broadway musicals, and worked for a time in Hollywood, though he felt his own talent and that of many others was being wasted there, and said so publicly. He moved to France to avoid paying taxes in the UK, and as a result was captured by the Germans; he was later released and made speeches over German radio, leading to outcry in the UK and effectively sending him into exile, living out the last decades of his life in the US.
Wodehouse is pronounced “Woodhouse”; Ben is getting it wrong, and Penny knows what she is talking about. This is a pattern for much of the episode.
The Code of the Woosters (1938) is the third full-length novel to feature Jeeves and his employer, Bertie Wooster. It’s a sequel to 1934’s What Ho, Jeeves and as well as returning character Gussie Fink-Nottle, it also introduces Roderick Spode, a broad parody of British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists.
Pratchett’s very first professionally published story was actually “The Hades Business”, originally published in Science Fantasy vol. 20, no. 60 in August 1963. That story is collected in Once More* * With Footnotes, A Blink of the Screen and a few other anthologies. The serious story Ben is thinking of is his third published story, “Night Dweller”, which was published in New Worlds volume 49, #156 in November 1965 – at the time edited by Michael Moorcock (more about him in a bit). You can find a digital facsimile of the original magazine at the Internet Archive. We previous talked about both stories in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” (Note that we are not counting the stories Pratchett had published in his school newspaper, the Technical Cygnet, but also note that he was fifteen years old when he had this incredibly competent and actually pretty creepy space-based horror story published in a professional magazine!)
There have been several “facsimile” editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan-Doyle, which were published between 1887 and 1927 in The Strand Magazine. The Strand featured short fiction – either complete stories, or short serialised novels – and general interest articles, and was published monthly in London for sixty years, from 1890 to 1950. It was also published in the US from 1891 until 1916. In London it had a circulation of around half a million readers. The name comes from the major London street the Strand, which was near the offices of the magazine on Burleigh Street and later Southampton Street. Conan Doyle was a frequent contributor, and published 121 short stories in the magazine, as well as nine novels (including the Sherlock Holmes ones), 70 non-fiction articles, two interviews and one poem!
We’ve previously mentioned Pratchett’s love of “gl” words; he writes about this in The Wee Free Men (see #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“). We’re also sure he does this in another book, but we’ve never been able to remember which one.
The epistolary novel – one presented as a series of documents, most often letters or diary entries – has a long tradition, with famous examples of the style including Les Liaisons dangereuses, The Screwtape Letters,The Color Purple, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, The Martian, Bridget Jones’ Diary, World War Z and the Illuminae trilogy by Jay Kristoff and previous Pratchat guest, Amie Kaufman. Bram Stoker’s Dracula features letters, diary entries and even transcripts of wax cylinder recordings, but it was popular for horror novels too – in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the doctor’s story is relayed by Captain Robert Walton (who finds him in arctic waters) to his sister in a series of letters.
Lovecraft used the epistolary style in several stories, most notably The Whisperer in Darkness (1931) and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941). Some of his other stories, including The Call of Cthulhu (1928), also include newspaper excerpts or other documents without being told entirely in that style.
Verisimilitude in fiction is the believability of the work, or its contents, either in comparison to reality (“cultural verisimilitude”) or the work’s genre (“generic verisimilitude”). Victorian horror stories often strive for believability in terms of how the characters react to the bizarre and horrifying beings and situations they encounter, whereas modern horror – especially in films – often has the characters behave in unbelievably stupid ways to further the plot.
We mentioned Michael Moorcock just last month, when guest Joel Martin brought up his novel-length essay “Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy”. As well as publishing one of Pratchett’s first stories (see above), Moorcock is best known for his fantasy novels, many of which depict a cosmic battle between the forces of Law and Chaos. These often feature an incarnation of “the Eternal Champion”, whom we compared to Rincewind’s “Eternal Coward” role in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“, and discussed Elric of Melniboné, one of those incarnations, in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“.
While best known for Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote science fiction and horror. Such works include the novels and stories starring scientist Professor Challenger, most famously The Lost World, and many short stories such as “The Case of Lady Sannox”, “The Leather Funnel” and “The Horror of the Heights”.
Creepy collections of Victorian Christmas cards did the rounds on social media in 2015, resulting in multiple articles like this one at the BBC and this one in online magazine Hyperallergenic. Both contain excellent examples of the grotesque, bizarre and just not-quite-right illustrations which just don’t quite say “Merry Christmas”. The frogs on display there aren’t musical, but are doing a murder on each other; the one Ben discusses is actually American, but from the same era. You can find it (if you dare!) in this American Antiquarian article.
We discussed Pratchett’s Dickens homage/pastiche Dodger in #Pratchat6, “A Load of Old Tosh“.
To explain Ben’s “nerdy roleplaying game reference“, the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons features a city, Sigil, which is located on the inside of a torus (basically a ring) floating at the top of an infinite spire (don’t think about it too hard). Known as the City of Doors, it allows travel to and from the other planes of existence, and is ruled by a mysterious supernatural figure known as the Lady of Pain. She is generally permissive, but suffers the worship of no gods in her city; doing so, or otherwise invoking her ire, often leads to being “mazed” – placed inside a unique labyrinth-like pocket universe, which can only be escaped by traversing the maze. A lot of her victims die in the attempt.
We discussed Pratchett’s more sexual explicit writing in our previous episode, #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, in the context of some comments about Rincewind’s sexual experiences – solo and otherwise.
The tradition of the “saucy seaside postcard” (sold throughout the UK) was largely the work of one artist, the prolific Donald McGill (1875-1962). He produced more than twelve thousand postcard designs over his career, from 1905 through to his death in 1962. During World War I, he produced anti-German propaganda designs, but his most famous postcards feature cartoons of men and women making suggestive double entendres, not only at the seaside but in many other situations. He ran afoul of the “war on smut” in the 1950s, put on trial in 1954, but later helped to revise the Obscene Publications Act 1857. His most famous postcard, featuring the joke “Do you like Kipling?”; “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!”, reportedly holds the record for the world’s best-selling postcard, with claims it had sold over 6 million copies. A museum was opened in 2010 in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, celebrating his work, but has since shut down.
Penny comments that the Oxford scholar’s end was “very Pickwickian“, a delightful adjective described by the Oxford Dictionary as meaning “Of or like Mr Pickwick in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837), especially in being jovial, plump, or generous.” It is used in the novel itself to describe a word or phrase that is misused or misunderstood, which is said to be using such a phrase in “the Pickwickian sense”.
L’Île mystérieuse (Mysterious Island) is an 1875 novel written by Jules Verne; it is a sequel not only to Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), but also his 1867 novel Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (In Search of the Castaways). In the story, a group of prisoners of the South in the American Civil War stage a daring escape via hot air balloon, but are blown out to sea and crash on an island. They have many adventures, including rescuing a castaway from a smaller island nearby (a character from In Search of the Castaways), but are mysteriously helped by an unseen force, who saves them on multiple occasions. This turns out to be none other than Captain Nemo, who survived the maelstrom at the end of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – though this makes no chronological sense since 20,000 Leagues is set after the Civil War had ended. This book reveals his origin story as an Indian Prince, something not alluded to at all in the first novel. The book doesn’t contain any giant animals, but the 1961 film – starring Herbert Lom as a distinctly non-Indian Nemo – features a giant crab, flightless bird, bees, plants and octopus, all explained to be the results of Nemo’s genetic experiments. The creatures were stop-motion animated by Ray Harryhausen.
“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is one of Lovecraft’s most famous stories, originally published in 1936. In the story, the narrator tells of his investigation into the port town of Innsmouth some years previously. He discovers much superstition and mystery surrounding the town, where its founding father Obed March started a cult, and many of the inhabitants have “the Innsmouth Look” – unusually flat noses, bulging eyes and narrow heads. It’s eventually revealed that they are hybrids, born of humans cross-breeding with the “Deep Ones”, fish people who live in an underwater city and worship the foul god Dagon.
Penny’s Lovecraft quote “things he cannot and must not recall” is from the 1925 story “The Festival”:
They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Festival”; Weird Tales vol. 5, no. 1 (January 1925): 169–174.
The article Ben mentions about Dickens’ inventing modern time travel fiction may have been this BBC piece by Samira Ahmed in 2015, or this one, by Joshua Sargeant for SF Gate. (He’s not sure – it wasn’t as recent a read as he thought!) A Christmas Carol (1843) definitely pre-dates The Time Machine (1895), and is the first story we know of to depict someone seeing their own future and subsequently changing it. There are many earlier tales featuring a kind of time travel, including Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819), which set up the tradition of one-way travel into the future via magical sleep.
Dickens’ story “The Signal-Man” was first published in the 1866 Christmas edition of Dickens’ weekly magazine All the Year Round. He started the magazine in 1859 after he had a disagreement with the publishers of his previous magazine, Household Words, who he sued to win control of the name and then shut down, with a final issue announcing it would be merged with All the Year Round. His sub-editor was William Henry Wills, who also worked on the previous publication; they co-founded and co-owned the new magazine, but Dickens had much greater editorial control. All the Year Round kicked off with the first part of Dickens’ serialised novel A Tale of Two Cities and was an immediate success, with a first series of twenty 26-week long volumes running under Dickens’ control until 1868, though he wrote less in the magazine as he spent more time doing public readings of his work. He hired his own son, Charles Jr, as a subeditor on the “new series”, then bequeathed the magazine to him; Charles Jr edited it until at least the end of the second series in 1888, with a third series running until 1895.
“Obverse” isn’t actually a synonym for “reverse”, but it’s opposite, generally used only when referring to the faces of coins or other two-sided objects. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines it as “The side of a coin or medal that contains the principal device” – i.e. the “heads” side for traditional European-style coins. In the context of the story, though, it’s used to simply mean “the other side” – as the blank sides with the writing are said to be the “obverse side” of the “windows”, which are clearly the illustrated covers of the cards.
Shirley Jackson (1916 – 1965) was an American horror and mystery writer, most famous for her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House (since adapted many times for the screen) and 1948 short story “The Lottery”, which was first published in The New Yorker (and is currently in development as a feature film). The story about being trapped in a painting is “The Story We Used to Tell”, which was potentially unpublished until 1996, when it appeared in the collection Just an Ordinary Day with other rare stories discovered by her children. It is currently in print as part of the collection Dark Tales, and you can also hear it read by LeVar Burton in the October 20, 2020 episode of his LeVar Burton Reads podcast.
There are no shortage of “creepy things kids say” articles on the Internet. We couldn’t find a definitive or best one, so we’ll leave you to google them for yourself…if you dare. Please share your favourites with us!
As Ben and Penny mention, the names of the three wise kings (or magi) are traditionally given as Melchior, a Persian scholar; Balthazar, an Arabian king; and Caspar (aka Kaspar or Gaspar), a King from India. The magi are only mentioned once in the Bible, in Matthew 2:1-12, without names or number; it just refers to “wise men from the East”. Most likely they are counted as three to match the number of named gifts: the famous gold, frankincense and myrrh. Their names are said to come from a Greek manuscript written around 500 CE. The magi also feature in Amahl and the Night Visitors, a one-act opera we discussed briefly back in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is a short horror story first published in the November 1846 issue of the American women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book. It’s one of many stories of the time to revolve around someone being buried alive.
Snoopy is the beagle who features in the comic strip Peanuts, written, drawn and coloured solo by American cartoonist Charles M. Schultz (1922-2000). Peanuts is considered the most popular comic strip in history, originally running from 1950 through to 2000 (around a month before Schultz’s death) in syndication in newspapers in the United States and across the world. Its popularity led to several animated television movies, most famously A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, the first full-length adaptation of the characters, which along with others themed after other holidays are indeed still shown on television every year in the States. The strip follows the adventures and social interactions of a group of children, with the two main characters being determined anxious failure Charlie Brown (whose closest thing to a catchphrase was his frequent utterance “good grief”), and his dog, Snoopy, who first appeared in the third strip on October 4, 1950. Snoopy doesn’t speak, but has human-like thoughts, written as thought balloons in the comic strip but communicated through non-verbal grunts in animation. Snoopy often retreats into his imagination and adopts various alter-egos, most famously a World War I flying ace who is always shot down by the Red Baron. During the 1970s, Snoopy’s increasing popularity led to a greater focus on him in the strip. Toys and other merchandise of the main characters, especially Snoopy, have been available since the late 50s, and by the 1980s Snoopy was ubiquitous.
Candy canes have been associated with Christmas since at least the nineteenth century. An unsubstantiated origin story in folklore traces the tradition back to 1670, in Cologne, Germany, where a choirmaster supposedly wanted to give “sugar sticks” to children to keep them quiet during a recreation of the nativity scene, and justified this by asking for them to be made in the shape of shepherd’s crooks. Gingerbread men are a form of confectionary popular in Europe since the sixteenth century. They are made and eaten at various festive occasions and holidays, and especially Christmas, when they are sometimes hung from Christmas trees as edible ornaments.
We previously discussed Garfield, the orange cat and star of Jim Davis’ comic strip Garfield, in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“. Garfield is one of the few comic strips to seriously rival Peanuts in popularity, the other main contender being Bill Waterstone’s Calvin & Hobbes.
The “Kitten of the Baskervilles” is a reference to The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan-Doyle’s third and most famous novel-length Sherlock Holmes adventure, which was serialised in The Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902.
“Kitten Kong” is the seventh episode of the second series of The Goodies, originally broadcast on November 12, 1971. The Goodies is a television comedy written by and starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie, using a hybrid sketch show and sitcom format in which the three “Goodies”, whose motto is “Anything, Anytime”, take on a variety of weird jobs and schemes. In “Kitten Kong”, they start a business looking after “loony animals” that leads to a number of misadventures, culminating in feeding too much growth formula to a kitten which grows enormous and threatens to destroy parts of London. A re-edited version of the episode with extra gags, “Kitten Kong: Montreux ’72 Edition”, won the Silver Rose at the 1972 Rose d’Or Festival, held in Montreux, Switzerland. (The Rose d’Or is a European television award, held annually since 1961.)
The original horror short story “The Birds” was written by Cornish author and playwright, Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, DBE (1907-1989). It was first published in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree, so a bit later than Penny’s guess of the 20s or 30s (though du Maurier was definitely active then; her most famous novel, Rebecca, was published in 1938). As well as Alfred Hitchcock’s famous 1963 film adaptation, it has also been adapted several times for radio and television, and even for the stage!
The Irregulars is a British mystery show created for Netflix by British screenwriter and playwright Tom Bidwell. It is very loosely based on the Sherlock Holmes stories, but centred on “the Irregulars” – four homeless youths who fulfil the role of the “Baker Street Irregulars” from the Conan Doyle stories. In the series they are not merely informants, but do all the detective work, contracted by Dr John Watson. The series has them investigating various mysteries with supernatural causes. The Irregulars was cancelled after its first eight-episode season.
Liz’s ghost story about person who haunts a vague acquaintance is “There in Spirit“, published in June 2020 in The Saturday Paper. (You’ll need a subscription to the paper to read it.)
Shaun of the Dead (2004) is a romantic zombie comedy film (or “rom-zom-com”) directed by Edgar Wright, written by Wright and Simon Pegg, and starring Pegg and Nick Frost, with Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Bill Nighy, and Penelope Wilton. Pegg stars as Shaun, a retail assistant whose life is already going nowhere when a zombie apocalypse comes. He tries to rescue his ex-girlfriend Liz, her flatmates and his parents with the help of his equally aimless friend Ed (Frost). It started life as an episode of Pegg and Wright’s sitcom Spaced, in which Pegg’s character Tim hallucinates a zombie apocalypse while taking drugs and playing videogames. It’s the first film in the “Three Colours Cornetto” trilogy of films, which while unrelated in plot share core cast and crew and couch a relationship comedy in the context of a genre film.
Grabbers (2012, dir. Jon Wright) is a horror comedy starring Moist von Lipwig himself, Richard Coyle, as an alcoholic Garda (Irish police officer). His new partner gets them assigned to a remote Irish island, which they soon discover is under attack from voracious tentacled aliens who need bood and water to survive. Like Shaun of the Dead, despite the comedy it doesn’t shirk the gore.
Tremors (1990, dir. Ron Underwood) is western/sci-fi/horror/comedy film starring Kevin Bacon in which the residents of a small desert town in Nevada are attacked by giant worm-like creatures that burrow through the ground and eat people. The film was a hit and spawned six sequels, as well as a short-lived television series, though Kevin Bacon isn’t in any of them. One of the characters from the basement scene Penny describes – Burt Gummer, played by Family Ties Dad Michael Gross – does return in all of them, including a prequel set in the Old West in which Gross plays his character’s ancestor.
Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette is a 2017 one-hour stand-up comedy show, which was filmed at the Sydney Opera House and released on Netflix in 2018. It deconstructs comedy and also tells some honest stories of Gadsby’s experiences growing up queer and gender non-conforming in conservative rural Tasmania.
Montague Rhodes James OM FBA (1862 – 1936), better known as M R James, was not an Oxford don; sorry Penny, but he went to “the other place”: he was a provost (a senior academic administrator) and later Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is best known for his work as an author, with a style so distinctive it has often been emulated and described as “Jamesian”. Penny specifically mentions his stories “Lost Hearts” (1895) and “O Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad” (1904).
Charles Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. At 3:13 PM on the 9th of June 1865, a train travelling to London on the South Eastern Main Line derailed when it crossed an aqueduct where part of the track had been removed for works. A worker was present to flag down trains, but was only about half as far from the missing section as required by regulations, and the train could not stop in time. Fifty people were injured, and ten of those died – some while being tended to by Dickens. He was hugely affected by the incident – his son said he never really recovered from it – and his story “The Signal-Man” was published a year after the accident, in the Christmas 1866 edition of All the Year Round. It may well have been influenced by the Staplehurst crash, though the train crash detailed in the story is more likely modelled after Clayton Tunnel crash of 1861. Perhaps not coincidentally died, Dickens died on June 9, 1870 – five years to the day after the accident.
The JibJab dancing elves Ben remembers is the company’s website Elf Yourself, which launched in 2007 and still exists.
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale was released in 2010 and was written and directed by Jalmari Helander. It is based on two earlier short films, Rare Exports Inc and Rare Exports: The Official Safety Instructions. It’s not included in any streaming services but you can rent or buy it on Apple TV, YouTube, Fetch and several others.
The Krampus is a mythological figure from the Alpine region of Europe. The horned beast is said to accompany Saint Nicholas on his rounds, scaring children who have been badly behaved and, in some versions, punishing them by whipping them with birch rods or even kidnapping them and taking them to hell. His origins are unclear, but he might be inspired by pre-Christian beliefs, and he was outlawed in Austria for a time. The Krampus has more recently found international fame after featuring in the 2015 Christmas horror film Krampus, written and directed by Michael Dougherty and starring Adam Scott and Toni Collette as the parents of a boy who unwittingly summons the Krampus.
A great example of the “kids drawings made real” genre is thingsihavedrawn.com, the website where Photoshop artist Tom makes “real” versions of the drawings made by his kids Dom and Al.
The BBC has adapted several of M R James short stories for television as part of A Ghost Story for Christmas – and also Dickens “The Signal-Man”! This series of shorts originally ran at Christmas between 1971 and 1978, but was revisited in the 2000s with several new adaptations of M R James stories, including “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” in 2010 and “Mezzotint” in 2021.
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946, dir. Frank Capra) is based on the 1943 short story “The Greatest Gift” by American author Philip Van Doren Stern, itself inspired by A Christmas Carol. In the film, George Bailey, a selfless resident of the town of Bedford Falls, thinks of killing himself, but his guardian angel – on his first assignment to Earth – intervenes, showing him what life would have been like for the people of the town if he got his wish to have never been born.
The Bon Jovi song Liz refers to is “Livin’ on a Prayer”.
These are the show notes and errata for episode 42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“, featuring guest Stephanie Convery, discussing the 25th Discworld novel, 2000’sThe Truth.
The episode title is a riff on Douglas Adams’ most famous joke in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. When a race of “hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings” build a supercomputer to answer “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything“, it takes seven and a half million years to confidently announce the Answer is…42. A subsequent computer is built to work out what the question actually is so the answer can be understood.
As a side note, this episode marks the point at which there are more episodes of Pratchat than there are Discworld novels, a weird and bittersweet milestone. Thanks for sticking with us.
Stephanie was last a guest on #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“, discussing Mort. It was released on December 8th, 2017 – that’s three years and four months ago.
The book 42, subtitled “The wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams”, is edited by his friend and collaborator Kevin Jon Davies. It will feature facsimiles of Adams’ writing taken from the archive of his work donated to his old college after his death, with added notes for context and explanations. A publication date has yet to be confirmed but it has hit its crowdfunding goal on both Unbound and Kickstarter, and at the time of publication you still have a couple of weeks to get in on it. Later in the episode Ben mentions this extract published in the Guardian UK.
Nominative determinism is the idea that one’s name will subtly influence you to do things that match your name, the most famous example perhaps being Thomas Crapper, an English engineer and plumber who made several important refinements that became standard in modern toilet design. (This is contrary to popular belief, which suggests he is the reason “crapper” is a euphemism for toilet, but this seems to pretty clearly pre-date his…er… contributions.)
Movable type is mentioned in more than one earlier Discworld book, but tracking down which ones is proving tricky. We’ll list them here when we find them out!
The Watergate scandal ended the Presidency of Richard Nixon in 1974, after it became clear he both knew about and tried to cover up his administration’s involvement in a break-in at the Watergate Office Building in Washington. The break-in was part of illegal wire-tapping to gain intelligence on the Democratic party; the Democratic National Convention HQ was in the Watergate building. Key evidence against Nixon were recordings he had made of conversations in the Oval Office, especially one known as the “smoking gun” in which he agrees to the cover up plan. The story was uncovered by journalists, especially Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who aided by anonymous sources including one who called himself “Deep Throat” and met with them in a carpark… You can see the references piling up, can’t you? The Truth also references the 1976 film about the scandal, All the President’s Men, based on the 1974 book by Bernstein and Woodward.
Pulp Fiction is Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 hit black comedy film which tells several crime stories set in Los Angeles. Two of the characters in the film are Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winfield (Samuel L Jackson), enforcers and hit-men working for a ruthless crime boss. Most of the references to the film are to their characters, who between them discuss what a Quarter Pounder burger is called in France, have a wallet with “Bad-Ass Motherfucker” written on it, extoll the virtues of dogs and declare they are going to “get medieval on yo ass”.
Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, “the Old Firm”, appear in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the story of unremarkable Scot Richard Mayhew, who, when he refuses to abandon a seemingly homeless girl on the pavement, discovers the invisible “other London” world of London Below. Neverwhere first saw life as a television series in 1996, in which Croup and Vandemar were played by Hywel Bennett and Clive Russell. It has since been a novel, a comic book, the basis of several stage productions and most recently a radio adaptation by the BBC starring James McAvoy, in which Croup was played by Pratchat favourite Anthony Head! Gaiman is currently writing a sequel. Terry himself grew tired of the frequent comparisons between the two Firms; as he says in the Annotated Pratchett File: “Fiction and movies are full of pairs of bad guys that pretty much equate to Pin and Tulip. They go back a long way. That’s why I used ’em, and probably why Neil did too.”
Yes, Stephanie – intertextuality is indeed a word! It refers to the way that works of art, especially literature, draw on and influence each other.
Ben makes a mistake here; the Watergate activities were the work of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, which is mostly important to note because it was quickly shortened to CREEP once the scandal broke.
The Skulls (2000; dir. Rob Cohen) stars Joshua Jackson (of Dawson’s Creek and Fringe fame) as a poor law student who scores a rowing scholarship to Yale University, and is invited to join “the Skulls”, a secret society for the rich and powerful. It’s based on the real life student society called the Skull and Bones, which was founded in 1832 and is one of three major student organisations at Yale, the others being similarly ominously-named the Scroll and Key and the Wolf’s Head. The Skull and Bones have their own meeting hall called “the Tomb” and own a small island, once luxurious but now considered a dump, in the St Lawrence river in upstate New York. Plenty of conspiracy theories involve the Skull and Bones; their members, or “Bonesmen” (women have only been admitted since the 1990s) certainly include many powerful people like major league sports stars and Presidents.
We couldn’t turn up anything Terry might be referencing with the high-backed chairs and circle of candles; if you find something, let us know!
“Disruption” is a popular buzzword amongst entrepreneurs, especially in the tech sphere, where the idea is that they don’t invent a new product or service, but a new way to organise an old one – often with complete disregard for how this might affect the livelihood of people involved in the existing industry. Uber is the most-often cited example; their system allowed anyone with a car to operate as a taxi driver for rides booked through the app, undercutting existing taxi services and circumventing licensing rules in the process. In Australia and many other countries taxi drivers do not have a union, and so they were powerless to do much about it; the owners of taxi companies and cars eventually tried to act, but with little success.
There are two calendars used on the Discworld: the Imperial Ankh-Morpork calendar (AM), which counts full-years (a full revolution of the disc) since the founding of the city, and the University Calendar (UC), which counts half-years (one full set of seasons), and starts with the founding of Unseen University. The University calendar begins in AM 1282. The years given in The Truth use the University Calendar, which supplementary material tells us is preferred by most folk since it actually matches the seasons. As for the Centuries, it seems they might use the other calendar, since it is clearly the Century of the Anchovy by the time of Going Postal, but in Moving Pictures and it is still the Century of the Fruitbat, and based on a number of clues The Truth seems to happen in the late 1980s or possibly 1990, the first year of the Century of the Anchovy. (For more on how seasons and so on work on the Disc, see the episode notes for #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation”.)
You can find out more about the State Library of Victoria’s newspaper collectionon their website.
Trove is an online digital archive created by the National Library of Australia and other libraries around Australia. It really does have an amazing collection of stuff!
Liz refers to the “folly” at Werribee Mansion; a folly is an architectural feature or building constructed purely for decoration, especially one that is expensive and/or made to look like it serves a function, even though it doesn’t.
Otto’s surname may also be a reference to Max Schreck, the German actor who portrayed Count Orlok, the vampire in F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film classic Nosferatu. Nosferatu was an unauthorised adaptation of Dracula, and most of the prints were destroyed after legal actual by the Bram Stoker estate, but the surviving print turned it into a cult film.
Clippit – not Clippy, though that’s what everyone called it – was the default form of the Microsoft Office Assistant, an “intelligent assistant” introduced in Office 97. Clippit was an animated paperclip, and famously would pop up asking if you wanted help with a variety of common writing tasks based on the content of your current document. Most people did not want help, but also didn’t know how to turn Clippit off. While the assistant could have other forms, Clippit was the default and most recognisable. The assistant was based on research showing that people interacted with computers as if they were people, but the inclusion of a person-like assistant made things worse as it felt like one person too many! After widespread user dissatisfaction and industry mockery the assistant was turned off by default in Office XP in 2001 – accompanied by ads saying Clippit was out of a job! – and then removed entirely in Office 2007 (and Office 2008 for Mac).
The recent review of The Truth in the actual -ing Times is by Laura Freeman and was published on the 26th of March, 2021. Sadly it’s behind a paywall, but you might get to access it for free depending on when you visit; it’s Rereading The Truth – a comic novel that rivals Evelyn Waugh.
The accident-prone vampire who may or may not be Otto does indeed appear in Feet of Clay. He takes jobs as a holy water bottler, garlic stacker, pencil maker, picket fence builder and sunglasses tester. (We mention him in our episode about that book: #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“.)
Here’s the original version of the menboys tweet:
why do we call them cowboys when they're men. we should call them menboys
In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserablés – and its famous musical adaptation – protagonist Jean Valjean struggles to find work as an ex-convict and is taken in by the Bishop of Digne. In the middle of the night, Valjean decides he may as well live up to everyone’s expectations of him and steals the church’s silver, but he is caught and the next morning brought before the Bishop…who tells an astonished policeman that he gave the silver to Valjean – going so far as to hand over two silver candlesticks he claims Valjean forgot! He tells Valjean he must use the silver to become an honest man, as he has bought Valjean’s soul for God, convincing the bitter Valjean to change his life around. (As a side note, Ben is a big fan of the West End production of the musical, and in the not-as-great film, Hugh Jackman plays Valjean – and London cast Valjean, Colm Wilkinson, shows up as the Bishop of Digne!)
Before social media or web-based forums, there were Usenet newsgroups, the first internet equivalent to local bulletin board systems. Started in 1980, the Usenet system allowed for “threads” of messages posted by various users, organised into groups that were categorised in hierarchies similar to domain names. The “alt.fan” category became a popular meeting place for fans of all kinds of different media, discussing their favourite TV shows, comics and books, and posting documents – like the famous Annotated Pratchett File (APF) – that would later be hosted on websites or wikis instead. Pratchett himself was known to lurk on alt.fan.pratchett and occasionally answer questions, many of which are quoted in the APF.
The Guardian is a British daily newspaper originally founded in 1821, and notable as it is funded by a charitable trust which aims to preserve its independence. As well as the print paper in the UK, it has online publications there and in the US and Australia. The Saturday Paper is a similarly independent weekly paper produced in Australia by Schwartz Media since 2014, who also publish Quarterly Essay and The Monthly, which focus on long-form journalism and opinion, and the podcast 7am, a weekday podcast which tries to give a deeper look at a single story from the week.
Ben is remembering a story from design podcast 99% Invisible, but the streets under the streets aren’t in San Francisco, they’re in Seattle. It’s the last story in episode 290, “Mini-Stories: Volume 4“, from 2018. We previous mentioned that 99% Invisible episode in #Pratchat11, “At Bill’s Door“.
The story of Darwin embracing Christianity on his deathbed is commonly told by anti-evolutionists, as it also claims he recanted his theory at the same time – but it was invented by a woman who hadn’t been there. This New Yorker article is a good account of the truth.
Pascal’s wager was the posthumously published argument by French philosopher Blaise Pascal in which he used ideas of probability theory, decision theory, existentialism, pragmatism, and voluntarism to argue that all humans should try and believe in God, since the reward if He exists is infinite, and the loss if he does not is negligible.
The character of Benny in Pratchat favourite movie The Mummy (1999) first tries to ward off Imhotep the undead monster with a cross, but when that doesn’t work he reveals a collection of religious charms for which he knows accompanying prayers. (We think we last mentioned The Mummy in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“, but there are many earlier examples too. See also the next note.)
While there is a Scorpion King 4: The Quest for Power, and it was released on Netflix, that was in 2016. The one recently added to Netflix Australia was Scorpion King 3: Battle for Redemption. There’s also a fifth film, The Scorpion King: Book of Souls, a direct sequel to Scorpion King 4. (We previously mentioned the Scorpion King franchise in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.)
Hood ornaments on cars were originally invented because in early designs the radiator cap protruded from the front of the car. Instead of a boring functional cap, some manufacturers made small ornaments and used those as the cap; once they became a symbol of the brand, like the Jaguar jaguar and the Rolls Royce angel, they continued to be attached to the hood even once the radiator was relocated to entirely inside the hood. They disappeared in part due to changing tastes, but also because of pedestrian safety standards in Europe.
Mulder and Scully are the protagonists of the television series The X-Files, which we previously mentioned in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“. The pair are FBI agents who investigate cases which are supernatural or otherwise unexplained. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is a profiler and believer in aliens and conspiracies, while Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is a doctor and a skeptic; the professional and later romantic and sexual tension between them was a popular part of the show. They eventually begin a relationship during the last few seasons of the show’s initial run, and they try to stay together through the subsequent films and revival seasons.
Stephanie is right: The Truth (2000) comes a few years and five Discworld novels before the first Tiffany book, The Wee Free Men (2003). We discussed the latter in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“.
Privilege comes from the Latin “privilegium”, which does indeed means private law; in many legal jurisdictions, a privilege is still defined as a “private law” that affords a particular entitlement or protection to a person or class of persons.
The one who thinks in italics is, as suggested by Liz, Edward d’Eath, the antagonist of Men at Arms. The book says of him: “He could think in italics. Such people need watching. Preferably from a safe distance.” (We discussed Men at Arms in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“.)
The use of eyeglasses goes back to at least the 13th century, with the earliest records show them in Pisa, Northern Italy. There’s some contention about whether they may also have been invented around the same time or earlier in China or India, but unlike many other inventions which were clearly found in Asia first, the evidence for this isn’t clear.
Douglas Adams died in 2001 at the age of 49. He began writing professionally in around 1974, primarily in radio and television, and wrote ten books (including seven novels) between 1979 and 1992 (though it’s probably fairer to count it as nine, since The Deeper Meaning of Liff is really an extended version of The Meaning of Liff). The Salmon of Doubt was published after his death, containing a collection of fiction and non-fiction, some of which had not been published before.
While the form of “gazette” adopted into English does come via French, it ultimately derives from the Venetian phrase “gazeta dele novità“, or “a gazeta of news” – gazeta being the cost of the short paper, equivalent to a half-penny. It’s therefore not quite right to remove the -ette suffix, but we could offer “gaz” or even “megagaz” as the bigger equivalent?
Green Left, previously Green Left Weekly, is an Australian socialist newspaper founded in 1990. It is associated with the political party Socialist Alliance, though it is run independently by the Green Left Association.
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 Appearanceswas 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.
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.
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”.
These are the show notes and errata for episode 41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“, featuring guest Dr Charlotte Pezaro, discussing 2008’s standalone young adult novel, Nation.
The episode title is riffing on the title of The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005, dir. Robert Rodriguez). It references Mau’s feeling of being like a hermit crab, looking for a bigger shell to live in, and Daphne’s status as a “trouserman”.
For listeners outside of Australia, some brief background on our opening acknowledgement: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples never ceded sovereignty of Australia to English colonisers in the 18th century. The English used the legal concept of terra nullius to claim the land belonged to no-one, and could be claimed for the Crown. Over two centuries later, in 1992, the High Court of Australia ruled in the case Mabo v Queensland (No 2) that indigenous peoples’ traditional ownership could be legally recognised, introducing the concept of “native title”. While this has not yet resulted in Australia or any of its states signing treaties with indigenous peoples, it has since become common practice for an “acknowledgment of country” or “acknowledgment of traditional owners” to be given at events, paying respect to and publicly naming (if they are known) the custodians of the land on which the event takes place. We’d like to thank Charlotte for providing wording to appropriately acknowledge the history of indigenous science.
Lost is a television drama created by by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams, and Damon Lindelof in 2004. It follows a large ensemble cast of plane crash survivors who are lost on an island in the South Pacific. They are threatened by weird creatures, supernatural occurrences, a mysterious organisation and other inhabitants of the at first seemingly empty island. It was famous for its ongoing supernatural mystery with complex storylines; use of flashbacks and flash-forwards; and, ultimately, for failing to provide a satisfying conclusion to the mystery after six years of buildup.
Terry said Nation was his favourite of his books in many interviews, but perhaps most famously in the acceptance speech for the 2009 Boston Globe-Horn Award, which Nation won. As Ben reads out in a footnote, he said “I believe Nation is the best book I have ever written or will ever write”, and doesn’t appear to have changed his mind afterwards. The entire speech appears in his non-fiction collection A Slip of the Keyboard. (This is a also a good source for his comments about feeling the need to write Nation.)
In nautical terms, a schooner is a ship with two or more masts with “fore-and-aft” rigged sails; to avoid more nautical jargon, this means the edges of the sails point at the front and back of the ship, rather than sticking out over the sides as in square-rigged ships. Interestingly this is the sort of rigging used by Austronesian sailors thousands of years ago – including the “lobster-claw” sails mentioned in the book (presumably a relative of the crab claw sails of our world).
In beer terms, a schooner is…certainly a size of beer glass used in Australia. The sizes of beer glasses and their names are notoriously varied across Australia’s states and territories. “Schooner” is almost universally used for a glass which holds 425 millilitres (or 15 fluid ounces), but they’re not common in all states – most pubs won’t have them in Victoria, for example. We say “almost universally” because in South Australia the 425ml glass is called a “pint” (even though every other state uses a standard 570ml glass for pints), and they use “schooner” to mean the common smaller-sized glass of 285ml. In Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane this smaller glass is called a “pot”, while in Sydney and Canberra (where standard schooners are more common) it’s a “middy”. Learning to work in a bar in Australia is quite an education.
We’ve so far covered a few of Terry’s standalone novels, most of which came at the start and end of his career. They include the early sci-fi novels The Dark Side of the Sun (see #Pratchat18) and Strata, his first novel The Carpet People, Good Omens with Neil Gaiman (see #Pratchat15), Nation and Dodger (see #Pratchat6).
Fight Club began life as a short story by author Chuck Palahniuk before being expanded into a novel published in 1996, and adapted into a film in 1999 by David Fincher starring Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. The story follows an unnamed insomniac protagonist who is tired of his normal, numb existence. When his home is destroyed, he moves in with soap salesman Tyler Durden and the pair start “Fight Club”, an underground group in which men physically fight each other in order to feel something. Famously, both the first and second rules of Fight Club are “Do not talk about Fight Club.”
There are many creation stories found in the Pacific Islands; Ben is taking some time to research them for signs of inspiration for those of the Nation. The idea of human souls becoming dolphins, though, is not a Polynesian one; dolphins are considered lucky and to be respected in many sailing traditions, though, and feature in many stories of Greek mythology, where it was taboo to kill them.
The Russian flu is a name sometimes used for the flu pandemic of 1889-1890, also known at the time as the “Asiatic flu”, though neither name is used in literature now. It killed around 1 million people worldwide, but what caused it isn’t known for sure. The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was much worse, killing between 17 and 100 million people; it was caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus, which was also responsible for the 2009 “swine flu” pandemic.
12 Monkeys is a 1995 time travel film directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt. Inspired by the French short film La Jetée, it follows James Cole, a prisoner in the virus-ravaged future of 2035, where humanity is forced to live underground. A group of scientists select Cole as a test subject to be sent back in time to stop the release of the virus, which they think was engineered by a terrorist organisation known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. The film was later adapted into a television series which ran for four seasons from 2015 to 2018.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) made his famous voyage on the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, and by the time of his return to England was already well-known in scientific circles. The Origin of Species was first published in 1859. All of this marries well with the idea that the book takes place in the 1860s, though there’s plenty of room to move. We’ll talk a lot more about him eighteen months after this episode when we discuss The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch in #Pratchat59, “Charlie and the Whale Factory“.
Disinfectant in the nineteenth century was still pretty new, since germ theory was still catching on. We’ve been unable to find any historical substance that might have inspired the dripping red substance, though it probably smelled much worse than crushed up roses. (If you know, please tell us!)
A tsunami is a series of huge waves caused by displacement of large amounts of water in a sea, ocean or other large body of water. They are primarily caused by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Pratchett was initially inspired by the aftermath of the Krakatoa eruption, but not long after he had the idea for Nation there was a tsunami in the Indian ocean which killed more than 20,000 people on Boxing Day, 2004. He postponed work on the story. The name tsunami is Japanese, and means “harbour wave”. It is the preferred scientific term, rather than the older term “tidal wave”, since tsunamis are not caused by tides.
Daphne’s father, Henry Fanshaw (later King Henry IX), is Governor of Port Mercia in the Rogation Sunday Islands.
Survivor guilt – the feeling that one has done something wrong by surviving when others have died – is a common expression of post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Tattersalls Club Charlotte mentions is a private gentlemen’s club founded in Brisbane in 1865 by, in their own words, “a group of gentlemen who were prominent in both business and in the thoroughbred horse racing industry”. In December 2018, after some public protest that they still only allowed men as members, a vote was held which passed by a margin of only about 1% to allow women to join, but a group of members were so against this they appealed to the Brisbane supreme court, asking for a recount thanks to some rules technicalities. Their appeal was denied in February 2019, and the club now accepts women as members.
In case you’ve been living in one, an “echo chamber” refers to any situation in which a group of people only listens to others who agree with their own views, amplifying their belief that they are right and shielding them from criticism or debate. It is especially applied to social media, where one’s curated list of who you follow can create a “bubble” of only like-minded opinions.
To answer Liz’s question, no, Terry didn’t draw the illustrations for Nation. They are by children’s book illustrator and author Jonny Duddle, who is credited as the sole illustrator for the UK edition of the book. Duddle drew everything, including the maps, the chapter illustrations and the in-character drawings by Mau and Daphne. (He also did extra endpaper designs featuring a hermit crab for the “Special Numbered Collectors’ Edition”.) As far as we can tell he also illustrated the original cover, though his art was not used in the US edition, which has a cover by Bill Mayer. We’re not sure if the US edition has any of Duddle’s art – not even the bits that seem important to the plot! The current UK edition of the book has a new cover by Laura Ellen Anderson, but we think it still has Duddle’s art inside. We don’t have access to those editions, so we’d love to hear from you with details if you do!
It is indeed true that right up until the 19th century most sailors did not know how to swim. This was both because there was little chance a ship could turn around fast enough to get them if they fell overboard, even if the captain chose to try, and because very few of them were professional sailors anyway – they were temporary hires, or drafted or press-ganged into service. Also, in the time before fast travel and public swimming pools, only people who lived near the sea or a lake would swim recreationally, so it wasn’t a common skill.
The history of bathing suits goes back to the 16th century, when they were actually used for bathing in public baths, but even when they started to be used for swimming their initial purpose was to hide women’s bodies. By the time more form-fitting styles were desired, the only material that could really be used was wool, since synthetic materials hadn’t yet been invented and everything else sagged or became too heavy in water. This article at Swim Swam covers the history of wool swimsuits in great detail.
Sweary parrots turn up in lots of places, including Tintin, the film Deep Blue Sea, the videogame Neverwinter Nights 2, and real life – including (and we checked this with a few sources) US President Andrew Jackson’s pet parrot, Poll, who had to be removed from Jackson’s funeral because it was swearing too much.
Pratchett not only had the comedy parrot in Eric, but in Moving Pictures the directors abandon using parrots to add sound to their clicks because the dialogue always ended up naughty. We covered Eric in #Pratchat7, “All the Fingle Ladies“, and Moving Pictures in #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick“.
Bridgerton is Netflix’s wildly successful 2021 series about the Regency-era Bridgerton family and their daughters’ quests for love and marriage. The series is an adaptation of the Bridgerton novels by American author Julia Quinn, which begin with 2000’s The Duke and I. The series contains a great deal more sex than anything written by Jane Austen – none of the Bridgerton sisters are likely to vaporise in their rooms! Well…probably not while alone, and certainly not quietly.
Spoiler alert: Ben is talking about the character Mrs Landingham, who dies in the penultimate episode of The West Wing‘s second season, “18th and Potomac”. The scene Ben recalls with President Jed Bartlett in the church is in the following season finale episode, “Two Cathedrals”. Both were originally broadcast in 2001.
We’ve previously mentioned 1970s Swedish pop sensations ABBA back in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation“, which came out the same month as the band’s reunion single “I Still Have Faith in You”. The song “Waterloo” was their winning entry for the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest, and the start of their rise to international fame. “Nina, Pretty Ballerina” was from their pre-Eurovision first album Ring Ring, released in 1973 under the name Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid (or, in Austria, Björn & Benny, Anna & Frida).
Studies in 2017 and 2020 concluded that regardless of culture or language, babies recognise and prefer baby talk (or “Infant Directed Language”) to regular speech.
In Mort the two prominent female characters are Death’s adopted daughter Ysabell, and Queen Keli of Sto Helit. Mort is instantly infatuated with Keli, but eventually marries Ysabell, with whom he has bickered for the entire book. You can hear our thoughts about all this in #Pratchat2, “Murdering a Curry“.
The Wee Free Men (discussed in #Pratchat32, “Meet the Feegles“) was published in 2003, five years before Nation. The later Tiffany Aching book Wintersmith, published a couple of years before Nation in 2006, has the now 13-year-old Tiffany deal with her first real boy trouble.
We know you’re wracking your brain to think of it too, but the “motorcycle dominos” appear in so many films and television series that they are a trope. Ben probably saw it in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985, dir. Tim Burton), but you’ll also find it in the Clint Eastwood movie Every Which Way But Loose, 80s slasher film Friday the 13th Part III, and even an episode of Scrubs.
How long has the Nation existed? Daphne counts 102 dead Grandfathers in the cave by the time they can no longer see the entrance, and later loses count after “hundreds”; the prose mentions “hundreds and thousands” – possibly a thought of Daphne’s – but that’s inconclusive. But even assuming there are only 1,000 of them, and that a handful of Grandfathers are put in the cave per generation, using the general estimate of one generation per 25 years tells us the Nation’s history goes four or five thousand years, if not tens of thousands. Not at all far-fetched when we consider that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures stretch back at least 50,000 years, and that they were likely the first peoples to ever cross an ocean.
Ben is using the term “cargo cult” a little loosely. It comes from World War II, when Japanese and then Allied forces visited places in Melanesia – the nations and islands of the southwest Pacific Ocean, northeast of Australia, many of which had had little contact with other peoples. The soldiers brought with them goods and technology that had never been seen by the locals before, sometimes trading with them, but left after the war ended. In the hopes that the visitors and their cargo might return, some local peoples developed rituals in which they imitated the soldiers, integrating stories of their visitation into their existing beliefs. Many earlier examples have been found, and some still persist today.
Despite that fact that only Charlotte can remember its title, Liz and Ben discussed The Fifth Elephant only a month earlier, in #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“.
Ben refers to the “Battle of Wits” between the Man in Black (Cary Elwes) and Sicilian kidnapper Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) in the 1987 film The Princess Bride, directed by Rob Reiner and adapted by William Goldman from his 1973 novel. In the scene, Vizzini has Princess Buttercup at knifepoint, but cannot resist when challenged to a battle of wits to the death. After Vizzini pours two glasses of wine, the Man in Black pours a deadly poison, “iocane powder”, into one of the glasses; Vizzini will decide which one, and then they will both drink. The scene is the basis for one of Ben’s favourite party boardgames, one of several games based on the film published by Game Salute. We previously mentioned The Princess Bride in #Pratchat17 and #Pratchat36.
Atlantis is a fictional island nation invented by Plato for his books Timaeus and Critias. The Atlantean civilisation was described as powerful, and the Atlanteans themselves as “half gods”, but they grew too proud and the gods sunk their island beneath the sea in the space of a single day. The myth has proven popular for centuries, with versions since the twentieth century often imagining Atlantis as possessing advanced technologies – and perhaps causing their own demise, rather than it being a punishment of the gods.
We didn’t end up coming back to the map, but of note is Terry’s decision to split Australia in half, as Nearer Australia and Further Australia. It’s not mentioned in the novel, so we’ll have to decide for ourselves whether this is accurate and thus representative of some unknown alternate universe calamity, or is a reference to the fact that early European maps of Australia were often very incomplete, since they rarely sailed around the entire continent. (None split it in two, but many leave a big gap in the middle where South Australia is, as if to say: “who knows?”)
The Mythbusters team did indeed test what happens when shooting into water, in episode 34, “Bulletproof Water“. They listed the myth as “partly confirmed” – high velocity sniper rifle rounds disintegrated in less than a metre of water, but bullets from smaller guns needed more water to slow down enough to be safe; the Mythbusters said at least 8 feet. Firing at an angle into the water means the target doesn’t need to be as deep to be safe, though, so Mau being safe stands up until Cox is right on top of him at the end.
Mutant superhero Quicksilver, played by Evan Peters, has epic super-speed sequences in the films X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), both written and directed by Bryan Singer. Quicksilver moves so fast that everything else appears to him to be in slow motion, so he easily redirects bullets fired at his allies so that they miss. Charlotte was miming the famous sequence from the original The Matrix (1999, dir. the Wachowskis) in which protagonist Neo, now aware he is inside a complex computer simulation, breaks the rules of physics and dodges bullets. The technique used to film this, now known as “bullet time”, involved still cameras being activated in sequence, allowing a slow-motion sequence in which the point of view moved around.
We’ve previously explained the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is quite something considering we’re a book club podcast. Check out the show notes for #Pratchat37, “The Shopping Trolley Problem“.
“A shrubbery!” is the first of many ludicrous demands made by the imposing Knights Who Say “Ni” as tribute, in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Mau’s list of demands is very reasonable by comparison.
The tree-climbing octopus may have been inspired by the sadly fictitious “Pacific Northwest tree octopus”, an Internet hoax dating back to 1998. It was said to live in the Olympic National Forest in Washington State, right in the northwest corner of the USA, and that its main natural predator was the sasquatch. The original spoof site Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, created by “Lyle Zapato”, has been used to teach children Internet literacy.
Sadly it seems that no octopuses have learned to count. If you want to see the adorable and very smart things they do learn, Ben recommends you check out OctoNation, the world’s biggest octopus fan club.
The character with the coffin in Moby Dick is Queequeg, who is the son of a Polynesian chief. After he becomes friends with the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, Queequeg joins him on Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, where he becomes a harpooner under the First Mate, Starbuck. When a casting of runes predicts his death, he has a coffin made for himself and refuses to eat or drink. When the whal Moby Dick sinks the Pequod, Queequeg goes down with the ship, but Ishmael survives by clinging to the floating coffin until he is picked up by another ship. It seems pretty clear Cookie’s previous shipmate is a nod to the character in Herman Melville’s book.
The Pratchett interview excerpt about fantasy that’s lately been doing the rounds is from an interview he did with The Onion in 1995. This is before The Onion went online, of course, but a few months after Pratchett’s death in 2015, fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss transcribed it on his blog as part of his tribute to Terry.
Liz and Ben’s differing opinions on Lord of the Flies go all the way back to #Pratchat7A and #Pratchat9.
Heart of Darkness is a 1899 novella by Joseph Conrad. Protagonist Charles Marlow becomes a steamboat captain for an ivory trading company and travels up the Congo river, where he becomes obsessed with another employee of the company, Kurtz. Kurtz, now sick and close to death, is revered as a success, but his habits and methods are extreme. It was most famously adapted by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now, with the setting relocated to the Vietnam war and the US Army replacing the ivory company.
The Blue Lagoon (1980, dir. Randal Kleiser, of Grease fame) is an adaptation of the 1908 romance novel written by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. In the story, two young American cousins – Richard (Dicky in the novel) and Emmeline (you’ll see in a moment why Daphne rejects the name) – are marooned on a South Pacific Island island with the ship’s cook. The cook dies, and the two grow up on the island alone, eventually “falling in love” and having a child together before being rescued. The movie, which starred Brooke Shields as Emmeline, was critically panned but did very well at the box office. There were two previous film adaptations in 1923 and 1949, and once since in 2012, as well as a 1991 sequel to the 1980 film, Return to the Blue Lagoon, starring Milla Jovovich and Brian Krause; it’s basically a retelling of the original story, with the twist that Krause plays the son of Richard and Emmeline, and he and Jovovich’s character decide to stay on the island after they encounter a crew of sailors.
Is mother of beer a real thing? Sort of! Listeners Felix and Elizabeth both contacted us about masato, a drink made in the Amazonian basin from the yuca plant, also known as cassava or manioc root. In traditional preparation, the yuca is peeled and soaked or boiled in water, then chewed by women who spit the juice into a bowl. Their saliva converts the starch in the juice into sugar, and wild yeast or bacteria ferments the sugar into alcohol. Raw yuca is poisonous, but it’s not the spit that makes it safe to drink – the soaking or boiling does that. Masato is basically a form of chicha, a drink made through similar means throughout Latin America from less poisonous vegetables, most often corn.
Beer is made from cereal grains, most often barley which has been malted (soaked in water to make it germinate, then dried out with heat to stop it growing, and usually mashed into a powder). The malt is mixed with warm water, and usually hops (the flowers of the hop plant) to add bitterness and flavour, before yeast is added. The yeast ferments the sugars in the malt into alcohol. Beer is one of the oldest documented foods, and has been made by humans for around 13,000 years or more.
To put Charlotte’s comment that “where humans exist, grains are” in context, evidence found in the last decade or so makes it pretty clear that grains have been part of the human diet for probably at least 100,000 years.
Kava is a plant that grows in the pacific islands; its root is made into a drink with a sedative effect. It’s hugely important in many places, drunk for medicinal, religious, political, cultural and social reasons. It’s effect is described as very different to that of alcohol, caffeine or nicotine.
It was guest Myfanwy Coghill who said anyone can learn the skill of singing; you can hear this and many other amazing insights from her in our Maskerade episode, #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
Our Llamedos Holiday Camp on the Clacks panel, “Podcasting Discworld”, was held online at 3 PM UK time on Sunday, March 7 (which was 2 AM Monday the 7Ath, Australian Eastern Daylight Time). As well as Liz and Ben, the panel featured Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel of The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, Colm Kearns of Radio Morpork, and Al Kennedy of Desert Island Discworld.
The Answer, in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, is shorthand for “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”. It is revealed by hyper advanced supercomputer Deep Thought to be…42. This doesn’t make sense, but Deep Thought also solves that problem: no-one actually knows what the Question is. Hence he builds another computer to figure it out, and causing no end of trouble for one Arthur Dent.
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:
Slice the tofu quite thinly then dab as much moisture away as possible with paper towels
Marinate slices in soy sauce
Sprinkle smoked paprika on both sides, rub into the soy sauce
Fry until a little crisp
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Dwellerin 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 booksOnly 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.)
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.)
