Elizabeth Flux

#Pratchat19 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got Rocks In” featuring guest Fury, discussing the sixteenth Discsworld novel, 1994’s Soul Music.

  • The episode title puns the title of Duke Ellington’s 1931 jazz standard “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”, which has been recorded dozens if not hundreds of times over the last 90 years.
  • The Valhalla Cinema was a cinema in Melbourne which specialised in audience participation films – and in its early days you had to bring your own seats. Opening in 1976, it later relocated to Westgarth and changed names. The Wikipedia entry has a charming story about a rather eventful screening of The Blues Brothers – though we doubt that this was the one that Pterry attended (if, indeed, he attended at all).
  • Look, the French Foreign Legion have a long and storied history, but in popular culture they are the go-to reference for the group you join when you want to get well away from your old life. Brendan Fraser’s character in The Mummy? French Foreign Legion.
  • Why are denim trousers called jeans? They’re named after the city of Genua, where the original fabric was manufactured. Read more about their history here. We know; we hoped they would be named after Gene Wilder too.
  • Rebel Without a Cause is one of James Dean’s most famous films and is often credited with kicking off the idea of the teenager.
  • Arthur Daley is a character from Minder, a British comedy-drama series that ran from 1979 to 1994.
  • Animorphs, first a book series, later adapted into a TV show, followed the adventures of a group of friends who had been given the power to morph into different animal shapes in an attempt to fight back against a secret alien invasion on Earth. Their enemy were the Yeerks – a parasitic species which would occupy the body of a host and control them.
  • Is Sioni bod da real Welsh? According to the Annotated Pratchett File: “‘Bod Da‘ is Welsh for ‘be good’. Ergo, ‘Sioni Bod Da‘ = ‘Johnny B. Goode’.”
  • “The Day the Music Died” is the name given to the tragic day where musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and “The Big Bopper” J.P. Richardson were killed in a light aircraft accident. Both Holly’s wife and mother heard the news from media rather than authorities (his wife, Maria Elena, via a TV report and his mother via the radio). His mother collapsed at the news, and Maria Elena shortly afterwards had a miscarriage. This series of events led to the development of a policy for proper notification of victims’ families. The events of the day also inspired Don McLean’s song “American Pie”.
  • There have been at least two Dalek invasions of contemporary Earth in Doctor Who.
  • The natural human preference for length of day is a subject of much debate. Some studies showed that the human circadian rhythm, when absent of outside stimuli like light and knowledge of time skewed more towards 25 hours, but later studies dispute this. Need more people to volunteer to sleep whenever they want for further study? We’re available!
  • Two-up is a traditional Australian gambling game. A designated “spinner” throws two coins into the air from a special paddle or board called a “kip”, which has recesses to hold the coins. Players bet on which way the coins will land: obverse (both heads), reverse (both tails) or “Ewan” (one of each). It’s often played on ANZAC Day, when it is officially legal (at least in NSW), as it was very popular among soldiers during World War I. Modern games still often use old pre-decimalisation pennies from a significant year like 1915, the year of the Gallipoli campaign.
  • According to the Stratocaster Guide, Keith Richards once said “The Strat is as sturdy and strong as a mule, yet it has the elegance of a racehorse. It’s got everything you need, and that’s rare to find in anything.” Basically? They’re the quintessential cool guitar.
  • In the TV series Gilmore Girls, Dean and Jesse are, respectively, Rory Gilmore’s first and second boyfriends. Dean is an absolute garbage heap of a human being which only becomes more apparent as the show progresses. Jesse is marginally better, but improves. In the end it doesn’t actually matter though as the re-boot proves that Rory herself is actually the worst of them all.
  • Popular Scottish indie group Belle & Sebastian got their name from tbe book and television series with the same title. The story of a boy and his dog, their namesake is about as charming as the music they produce.

#Pratchat16 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“, featuring guest, the Reverend Doctor Avril Hannah-Jones, discussing the thirteen Discworld novel, 1992’s Small Goods.

  • The episode title plays on the song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”, probably more famous these days for being punned in popular culture than for the song itself! The best known version was recorded by the Hollies in 1969, though it’s also been recorded by Neil Diamond. A charity version featuring many UK artists was the UK number one Christmas single in 2012, supporting charities associated with the Hillsborough disaster – a disaster at a football stadium in 1989, where nearly 100 people were killed after a gate was opened and allowed more fans into a section of the grounds that was already dangerously crowded. The charity supported victims and their families through a new investigation into who was responsible, following the failure to prosecute police officers in charge of security and safety during the match.
  • The film Highlander (dir. Russell Mulcahy, 1986) stars Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, the titular highlander, who discovers he is one of the immortals – seemingly ordinary humans who cannot die unless decapitated, and who are drawn to fight each other, stealing the magical power of other immortals whom they defeat until only one remains to collect “the Prize”. As well as being very 1980s, it has a killer soundtrack by Queen, songs from which can be found on their 1986 album It’s a Kind of Magic.
  • We’re pretty sure the cake Liz is thinking of is Breudher, a delicious buttery Sri Lankan cake with a Dutch influence.
  • Teen Power Inc. is a series of thirty books written by Australian author Emily Rodda (and others), first published in the 1990s. They feature six teenaged protagonists who create the titular agency to make some extra cash, and end up solving various mysteries. The series was republished in the US in the mid 2000s as The Raven Hill Mysteries.
  • Johnson and Friends (1990) was an Australian television program for children under 5 about Johnson, a stuffed elephant, and the other toys who live under the bed of a young boy and come to life when he’s asleep. It predates Toy Story by five years, but the “secret life of toys” genre has a much longer history than that anyway.
  • We’ll leave you to work out the coarse pun in Brother Nhumrod’s name for yourself, but the Biblical Nimrod was a king, a “mighty hunter”, and a great-grandson of Noah mentioned in the Books of Genesis, Chronicles and Micah. Tradition says he was leader of the kings who built the Tower of Babel, though this is not written in the Bible. Because of this folly, Dante placed him in the Circle of Treachery in Hell. “Nimrod” has also become an insult meaning a dim-witted person, popularised by Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, who use it as a taunt for Elmer Fudd, presumably mocking him for not being a “mighty hunter”.
  • A Royal Commission is a type of formal public inquiry carried out in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2012 and began in 2013. It investigated evidence of widespread protection of child abusers in a variety of community, sporting, religious and other institutions throughout Australia. The commission heard evidence from tens of thousands of people and handed down its final report in 2017.
  • After his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2007, rumours circulated that Sir Terry had “found God”. He answered with this piece in The Daily Mail, in which he revealed he was “brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family’s plans for the Sabbath practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, and kindness and decency prevailed.” He went on to say that while religion was never really discussed at home, and he was never a believer, he never disliked it.
  • The phrase “robbing Peter to pay Paul” – meaning to move debt from one place to another, rather than paying it off – is a pretty old phrase. Big thanks to listener Zoe, who linked us to entries from the Oxford and Brewer’s Dictionaries of Phrase and Fable. They tell us that the phrase has been around since at least the 14th century, and that the names were likely picked just because they were alliterative, though the phrase later acquired connections to the Saints.
  • The 2003 American musical Avenue Q explores adult concepts in a world inspired by Sesame Street – a city neighbourhood where humans, puppet people and furry monsters live side-by-side. The original production won three major Tony Awards. The song “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist” features the neighbourhood – including their superintendent Gary Coleman (“yes, that Gary Coleman“) – agreeing to the premise of the title.
  • “White privilege” is the concept that in many Western cultures, people with white skin have a number of privileges they may not even be aware of, that are not extended to people of colour. At a basic level it manifests as a cultural idea of white as default or normal, but – like all forms of privilege – it also influences social status, freedom and opportunity. While it has been written about in some form since the 1930s, and given its current name in the mid 60s, it was brought to mainstream attention with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014.
  • To “drink the Kool-Aid” is to have succumbed to belief in an extreme dogma, without understanding the consequences. The phrase is a reference to the Jonestown Massacre, in which cult leader Jim Jones had his followers drink cordial (which may or may not have been Kool-Aid brand – this is still being disputed) poisoned with cyanide and prescription drugs.
  • Seafurrers: The Ships’ Cats Who Lapped and Mapped the World by Philippa Sandall was published in 2018. We highly recommend checking out the Seafurrers blog – maintained by Bart the cat – for even more tales of nautical cats! It has several entries describing the exploits of Trim, who accompanied English explorer Matthew Flinders. And yes, despite what the current Australian government might think or spend 7 million dollars on, James Cook never circumnavigated Australia.
  • Jonah was commanded by God to delivery a prophecy to the city of Nineveh, warning them they must repent for their wicked ways, but Jonah instead tries to flee from God on a ship. When a clearly unnatural storm brews, the sailors work out by casting lots that Jonah is to blame; he offers to be thrown overboard, but they refuse until it becomes clear there’s no other way to survive the storm. Jonah is saved from drowning by a giant fish, which swallows him whole; he prays to God and after three days is vomited up on shore, and this time obeys God’s command to prophesy to Nineveh. He gets his nose bent out of shape when God shows the city mercy following their repentance, so God teaches him a lesson by growing a plant to give him shade in the desert, then having a worm bite the plant to kill it.
  • Whistle Down the Wind, which premiered in 1996, was Lloyd Webber’s 14th major stage musical, and the second musical adaptation of the 1961 British film of the same name, directed by Bryan Forbes and starring Hayley Mills. (You might know her from several Disney films of the 1960s, including Pollyanna and The Parent Trap.) The film was based on the 1959 novel by Mills’ mother, Mary Hayley Bell. Mills was nominated for a BAFTA for her performance. Elizabeth’s recollection of the play she saw at the age of 7 is…vaguely correct. In the parts that matter.
  • Prosperity theology is the belief that God rewards an individual for their faith – often expressed through donations to the church – with blessings of material wealth and miracles of healing. In the United States its popularity dates back to the 1940s and 1950s, but it really rose to prominence through televangelism in the 1960s to 1980s with influential figures like Oral Roberts (yes, that’s his real name) and Jim Bakker. It was adopted more widely by some Pentecostal and Charismatic churches and spread worldwide in the 1990s and 2000s, by which time it was estimated more than 15% of American Christians believed in some form of prosperity theology. It is criticised by many Christians for, among other things, a reliance on non-traditional interpretations of the Bible.
  • Philip K Dick’s 1956 short story The Minority Report was originally published in the magazine Fantastic Universe. The 2002 film starring Tom Cruise changes many things about the original story, including the ending. A sequel television series, in which one of the precogs helps a detective solve crimes about a decade after the events of the film, aired on Fox in 2015 but was cancelled after one season of ten episodes.
  • While Ben remembers both names correctly, he fails to remember that Constable Washpot is Constable Visit-the-Infidel-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets. “Washpot” is a somewhat derogatory nickname given to him by other members of the Watch. He goes on rounds with his friend Smite-the-Ungodly-with-Cunning-Arguments.
  • Many religions believe that only people who meet certain criteria will enter Heaven – various Christian denominations require the faithful to be baptised, for example. But the most famous example of a very small number who will be saved are the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are often said to believe that only 144,000 people will enter Heaven. This is based on a fairly literal interpretation of chapter 14 of the Book of Revelation, but while they do indeed believe only 144,000 people will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, the other faithful will live on in an Earthly paradise of God’s making. Which is just as well, as there are now more than 20 million members of the church worldwide.
  • Liz’s talk about “the gourd” is a reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the 1979 film in which Brian Cohen (played by Graham Chapman), a man born at the same time as Jesus Christ, is mistaken for the Messiah. His followers willingly drink a Kool-Aid of their own devising and despite his protests interpret his every act as holy, seizing on things he drops as relics – including, briefly, “the Holy Gourd of Jerusalem”.
  • “Fake news” traditionally referred to deliberately misleading or fabricated information spread in the form of seemingly legitimate journalism. The phrase was co-opted by Donald Trump (among others) to describe any news story or media outlet which he dislikes, regardless of their accuracy. This increasingly popular usage caused the British Parliament to abandon use of the term in official documents. “Fake News” was selected as Collins’ Dictionary’s word of the year for 2017, though they disputed Trump’s claim that he invented it.
  • Steptoe and Son and Open All Hours are British sit-coms about a scrap merchant and his son, and a gormless shop keeper, respectively. Neither are really that close a match for Didactylos and Urn’s discussions of the philosophy market, but the sentiment is in there.
  • The educational programming language Logo was invented in 1967 by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon, and intended to teach principles of the functional language LISP. Robot turtles pre-date Logo by nearly 20 years, but the language is credited with the popularity of turtle graphics and turtles equipped with pens. The first Logo turtle was named “Irving”.
  • Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 depicts a future dystopia in which books are banned and squads of “firemen” are sent to burn any that are found. The title refers to the temperature at which book paper catches fire. At the novel’s conclusion, the protagonist – a disillusioned fireman named Guy Montag – meets a resistance group whose members each preserve a work of literature by memorising the entire text, reciting it on request.
  • There are many examples of lost works throughout the history of literature. Shakespeare supposedly wrote many plays which have not survived, most famously Love’s Labors Won, though its existence is disputed. Jane Austen left behind several unfinished works, including the novels Sandition and The Watsons. Emily Bronte had supposedly begun work on a second novel after Wuthering Heights, but no evidence of it has ever been found. On a similar note, all of Sir Terry’s unfinished works and notes were destroyed, as per the instructions in his will, by having his hard drives crushed under an antique steam roller.
  • Up until the late 1970s it was common practice for the BBC to junk archive recordings of old programs, as pre-digital storage took up a lot of space and it was not common to rebroadcast old material. As a result, nearly 100 episodes of Doctor Who made between 1966 and 1969 are missing, though audio recordings do exist. Copies have occasionally been located outside of the UK, and since 2013 there have been persistent rumours that most of the missing episodes had been located by a fan, but they have yet to materialise…
  • Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016, dir. Gareth Edwards) was the first of the Star Wars anthology films – new stories set in the universe established by George Lucas’ films, but not part of the main “Skywalker saga” series. It is set immediately before the original Star Wars (aka Episode IV: A New Hope), and shows how a small team of rebel soldiers steal the plans for the Galactic Empire’s weapon of mass destruction, the first Death Star. In the third of the original Star Wars films, Return of the Jedi, the Empire has built a second Death Star; rebel leader Mon Mothma famously proclaims that “many Bothans died” to steal its plans.
  • A hagiography is a biography of a saint or other important spiritual person.
  • The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals held after World War II in which many high-ranking Nazi officers were tried for war crimes, including their participation in the Holocaust. It had a major effect on international law, including the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002.
  • “Spirits of place” are local gods or spirits who watch over a specific place. They are a staple of many religions and folk beliefs, but are probably best known from classical Roman religion, where they were known as genius loci. They are also popular in fiction; Ben’s favourite examples are the gods of the River Thames and its tributaries in Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London and its sequels.
  • The modern Santa Claus is mostly derived from the English figure Father Christmas and the Dutch character Sinterklaas, as well as tales of the historical Saint Nicholas. Nicholas was a bishop in the Greek city of Myra in the fourth century CE. As well as the lesser known exploits cited by Avril, he is said to have secretly given gifts to the faithful, the aspect most associated with Santa. There are also theories that Santa Claus co-opts pagan beliefs and the Germanic god Wodan, but we’ll leave those ideas for Hogfather.
  • UHF (1989; dir. Jay Levey) – known outside America as The Vidiot from UHF – was “Weird Al” Yankovic’s first and only feature film. He plays George Newman, a man whose overactive imagination gets him fired from many jobs, but when he ends up in charge of a low-budget local television station his bizarre program ideas make the channel a hit. It features a slew of film and television parodies, and co-starred Fran Drescher (The Nanny) and Michael Richards (Seinfeld).
  • The Peter Capaldi moment discussed by Avril and Ben is his speech from 2015’s The Zygon Inversion, written by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat. He and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart both say “this is not a game”, and at a key moment the Doctor offers the villain forgiveness. The podcast Doctor Who and the Episodes of Death – on which Ben and Avril have both been guests – uses an excerpt from the speech in its introduction. You can watch the whole speech on YouTube here.
  • On the social media platform Twitter, whose logo is a stylised bird, new user accounts are represented by an icon of an egg.
  • “Doublethink” describes the act of holding two contradictory ideas at the same time. It was coined by George Orwell as part of the government-created language Nuspeak, which he invented for his dystopian novel 1984.
  • Richard Dawkins is an ethologist and popular science writer, especially on the subject of evolution. His 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker explains and gives evidence for biological evolution. In the last decade or two Dawkins has spent as much time criticising religion as explaining science, and is considered a major influence on several atheist movements, but has been criticised for making inflammatory remarks, especially via Twitter. In 2018, a study regarding scientists’ attitudes – including those about religion and atheism – interviewed 137 UK scientists, and though no specific questions were asked about Dawkins, 48 participants mentioned him, most because they disliked him. He wrote Unweaving the Rainbow in 1998, before his anti-religious obsession really took over.
  • “Bin Chicken” is the most popular (and cruel) nickname given to the Australian White Ibis, the reasons for which are chronicled in “AUSTRALIAN SONG ABOUT BIRDS” by Christian Van Vuuren, co-creator of the web series Bondi Hipsters and television comedy Soul Mates. This Gizmodo article presents a rather more positive view.
  • Aside from Lester del Rey’s short story “The Pipes of Pan”, first published in the magazine Unknown Fantasy Fiction in 1940, early examples of gods requiring human belief to survive in fiction include Lord Dunsany’s short story Poseidon from 1941, Belgian author Jean Ray’s 1943 novel Malpertuis, and even Gilbert and Sullivan’s first opera, “Thespis”, written in 1871. More recent examples include Douglas Adams’ The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and The Sandman.
  • The original Clash of the Titans from 1981, directed by Desmond Davis, was the last film to feature stop-motion animation by famous movie magician Ray Harryhausen. It retells the Greek myth of Perseus (played by Harry Hamlin, later to star in the first season of Veronica Mars), the hero who slew Medusa and the Kraken (or Cetus, in the original myth), and features the Greek gods (including Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Maggie Smith as Thetis) playing a game very similar to the one seen in The Colour of Magic. The 3D 2010 remake stars Sam Worthington as Perseus, Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, and is surprisingly not awful. The sequel Wrath of the Titans (2012) specifically deals with the waning of the gods thanks to a lack of belief.
  • The Absent-Minded Professor (1961; dir. Robert Stevenson) is a Disney romantic comedy based loosely on the short story “A Situation of Gravity” by Samuel W. Taylor. It stars Fred MacMurray as Professor Ned Brainard (no, really), a brilliant but forgetful scientist who invents a substance which absorbs energy when it strikes a hard surface, allowing it to bounce higher and higher, which Prof Brainard calls “flubber”. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was remade by Disney in 1997 as Flubber starring Robin Williams. The original was so popular it became the first ever Disney film to have a sequel: 1963’s Son of Flubber. The title of the film lends it’s name to the stock character of an academically gifted (or obsessed) individual who neglects the more practical and/or emotional parts of life.

#Pratchat17 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 17, “Midsummer (Elf) Murders” with guest author Nadia Bailey discussing the fourteenth Discworld novel, 1992’s Lords and Ladies.

  • The episode title references the long-running, much beloved and extremely twee crime drama Midsomer Murders, which debuted on ITV in 1997 and is still running, 21 series later. It’s based on the Chief Inspector Barnaby books by Caroline Graham in which first Tom Barnaby, and later his cousin John Barnaby, solve murders in the fictional, sleepy English county of Midsomer, which after 124 episodes is now often joked to be the murder capital of Great Britain.
  • There are two examples of Steven Moffat writing women who marry men who follow them around in Doctor Who – first in his most famous episode, Blink, and then in the Christmas special The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. There are similar behaviours in his other work, going all the way back to Press Gang.
  • We previously mentioned The Craft in our Witches Abroad episode, but it’s worth mentioning here that one of its stars, Fairuza Balk, made her major screen debut in another film referenced this episode: Return to Oz (see below).
  • The Last Unicorn (1982) is an adaptation of the 1968 fantasy novel by American writer Peter S. Beagle, and has a pretty star-studded voice cast including René Auberjonois, Alan Arkin (who plays the incompetent magician Schmendrick), Jeff Bridges, Mia Farrow (who plays the titular unicorn), Angela Lansbury and Death himself, Christopher Lee! It has music written by Jimmy Webb, including songs performed by the band America.
  • Narnia is a fantasy world invented by English writer C S Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia books. The White Queen first appears in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), where it is revealed she has trapped Narnia in an endless Winter. Her origins are explored in the prequel The Magician’s Nephew (1955).
  • The Tuatha Dé Danann (TOO-a day DONNan; Ben butchers this and is very sorry) are the gods of ancient Celtic Ireland. They reside in Tír na nÓg, often translated into English as the “Otherworld”, which could be accessed (among other ways) via “passage tombs” under the earth – much like the Long Man’s barrow. They have some things in common with elves, but a closer analogue are the aos sí (“ays SHEE”) or Sidhe (“SHEE”, as popularised by William Butler Yeats and, much later, the fantasy roleplaying game Changeling: The Dreaming). The Sidhe appear in both Irish and Scottish mythology, and take many forms and roles – “banshee” is an English form of bean sidhe, for example. They are often said to live in another world (or underground in barrows, or across the sea – it’s mythology after all), but this is not usually considered to be Tír na nÓg.
  • If the plot of Maurice Sendak’s award-winning Outside Over There (1981) sounds familiar, that might be because it served as partial inspiration for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986) – Sendak is thanked in the credits. The book forms part of a “trilogy” following a child’s psychological development, following his better-known books In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are.
  • The very long dining table appears not only in Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) but also in a whole host of films, TV shows and other media. TV Tropes calls this cliche “table space“.
  • This is indeed the first appearance of “millennium hand and shrimp“, later used by the beggar Foul Ole Ron (from Soul Music onwards) and bag lady Mrs Tachyon (in the Johnny Maxwell books). Terry apparently generated it using a gibberish computer program, into which he fed a Chinese takeaway menu and the lyrics of the They Might Be Giants song, “Particle Man”, one line of which is “Millennium hand and an aeon hand”. (Ben was very excited to discover while researching this episode that Terry, like Ben, was a big TMBG fan!)
  • A lot has been written on mental health in academia; a good place to start if you’re interested might be this Guardian series on the subject, which spans three years.
  • Howl’s Moving Castle, originally a 1986 fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones, was fairly loosely adapted into an animated film by Studio Ghibli in 2004. Both are wonderful.
  • Return to Oz is a 1985 sequel to The Wizard of Oz, loosely adapting two of the later Oz books by Frank L Baum. As mentioned above it stars Fairuza Balk as Dorothy Gale, who after returning from her trip to Oz is seen as mad by her guardians and is sent for psychiatric treatment – including turn-of-the-century style electro-shock therapy. While it was not a big success at the time it has become a cult hit, in no small part because of its creepy imagery and for-the-time amazing practical and stop-motion effects. (The film also inspired the final track on the eponymous debut album, which uses Dorothy’s experiences as a metaphor to describe drug use in the queer community.)
  • The “Jesus picture” meme is also known as “potato Jesus“, and you’ve almost certainly seen it.
  • The game Jason Ogg plays with his Binky-iron horseshoe is not quoits, but…er…horseshoes. They both involve tossing a round object at a peg, but quoits is specifically played with circular “quoits”, these days usually made from rope or rubber.
  • Sailor Moon is a Japanese manga aimed at teenage girls, which launched in 1991. It’s best known in English speaking countries via the 1995 anime adaptation, which ran for 200 episodes. It follows the adventures of Tokyo middle-school student Usagi Tsukino, who is given the power to transform into “Sailor Moon”, a soldier with magical powers who is destined to save the Earth. Sailor Moon’s main love interest is “Tuxedo Mask”, a hero whose disguise is…er…a tuxedo and a mask. However the high school student who transforms into him is for a long time unaware of his secret identity, so they can only meet when in costume. Sailor Moon remains hugely popular, especially in cosplay circles, where you will often see the whole gang of “sailor scouts”.
  • If you’ve seen the 1987 film The Princess Bride (based on the 1973 novel by William Goldman), you can revisit the “to the pain” speech on YouTube here. It really is quite similar to the Elf Queen’s threat to Esme, but it’s worth noting that in the film the speech is given by the hero! (If you haven’t seen The Princess Bride, the scene is quite near the end of the film and is a bit of a spoiler.)
  • The Doctor Who story with the Morris Dancers is 1971’s The Daemons, starring Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor and Katy Manning as Jo Grant. It also features a white witch named Olive Hawthorne as a supporting character, and she has quite a few things in common with a certain ex-member of the Lancre coven…
  • We previously mentioned Get Smart in our Guards! Guards! episode, but the specific running joke mentioned here is Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, encountering an enormous version of something and remarking: “Why, that’s the second biggest [thing] I’ve ever seen!” This joke is also used in one of Ben’s favourite videogames, The Secret of Monkey Island, in a scene he recently recreated in his Instagram feed.
  • Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays, often cited as his first tragedy. It’s a graphically violent story about (fictional) Roman general Titus, who angers the Goth queen Tamora, setting off a vicious cycle of revenge. If you’re going to look it up, we’d just like to give you a content warning for murder, torture, mutilation and rape. It’s…not gentle.
  • The Tempest was one of Shakespeare’s last plays, and tells the story of the sorcerer Prospero and his daughter Miranda, who have lived on an isolated island ever since Prospero was deposed as the Duke of Milan. The play begins with a tempest summoned by Prospero to wreck a ship carrying he betrayers onto his island, but it’s not a revenge story; it’s usually classified these days as a romance.
  • The club started by Reg Shoe for the “vitally challenged”, and first seen in Reaper Man, is the Fresh Start Club, not the “Second Chance Club” as Ben misremembers.
  • Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s best-known comedies; while the central plot is serious – a villain slandering a young woman, Hero, to ruin her wedding to the dashing Claudio – it is feisty verbal fencers Benedick and Beatrice, who are tricked into revealing their mutual love, who always steal the show. Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 version starred him as Benedick and Emma Thompson – to whom he was still married at the time – as Beatrice, and is a traditional but wonderful adaptation with grand music and a cast including Denzel Washington, Imelda Staunton, Keanu Reeves, Robert Sean Leonard, Richard Briers, Michael Keaton, Ben Elton, Brian Blessed and – in her film debut – Kate Beckinsale. Joss Whedon’s black and white 2013 film has a contemporary setting and stars faces familiar to fans of Whedon’s work: Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof as Beatrice and Benedick, plus Nathan Fillion, Clark Gregg, Reed Diamond, Fran Kranz, Sean Maher, and Jillian Morgese.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog is a blue, super-fast hedgehog and Sega’s biggest videogame franchise, starring in a tonne of games beginning with 1991’s Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Mega Drive (aka the Sega Genesis), and also appearing in a short-lived animated television series, also called Sonic the Hedgehog, which ran from 1993 to 1994. In case Liz’s pun on his name is too blue (sorry) for you, he was also briefly spoofed in one of Ben’s favourite childhood shows, Tony Robinson’s Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, as “Chronic the Hedgehog”.
  • Pet Sematary is one of Steven King’s most famous novels, published in 1983. It involves an ancient burial ground, hidden behind the children’s “pet sematary”, where the dead don’t stay buried. It was adapted into a successful film in 1989, and a new adaptation comes out this year.
  • The Milgram Experiment, named for psychologist Stanley Milgram, was a 1961 social experiment supposedly showing that ordinary people will obey an authority figure even when instructed to do things beyond their personal ethical boundaries. The experiment was considered unethical, and prompted significant changes in the way psychological testing was approved. In 2012 the validity of the original study was called into question when evidence was uncovered suggesting Milgram had manipulated or misrepresented the results.

#Pratchat2 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 2, “Murdering a Curry“, featuring guest Stephanie Convery discussing the fourth Discworld novel, 1988’s Mort.

  • Sir Terry’s own thoughts on where to start reading the Discworld are most clearly outlined in the essay “Straight from the Heart, Via the Groin”, which is most easily found in the 2014 non-fiction collection A Slip of the Keyboard.
  • “Mort” does mean death, but it’s not Latin – it’s French (or in Discworld terms, Quirmian).
  • A “squib” in the world of Harry Potter is the rare child of a magical person who is not magical themselves.
  • The lead Gentleman in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Hush was played by Doug Jones, now famous for playing Abe Sapien in the Hellboy films, the Faun and the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, and Saru in Star Trek Discovery. He plays Count Orlok, the titular vampire, in the upcoming remake of Nosferatu. And he’d make a great Death.
  • Christopher Lee was the voice of Death in both Cosgrove Hall animated adaptations (Wyrd Sisters and Soul Music), and The Mob’s live-action adaptation of The Colour of Magic, following Ian Richardson’s death. And his Death. (Richardson played Death in The Mob’s first Discworld adaptation, Hogfather.) The body of Death was played by Marnix Van Den Broeke, who also played the golem Mr Pump in Going Postal.
  • The horse that plays Bucephalus in Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is, unfairly, not named in the credits of the film.

#Pratchat21 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 21, “Memoirs of Agatea” featuring guest David Ryding, discussing the seventeenth Discworld novel Interesting Times.

  • The episode title puns Memoirs of a Geisha, a 1997 novel by Arthur Golden, which was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg in 2005. The film was criticised for casting Chinese actors as some of the Japanese characters, while Golden was criticised for his portrayal of geishas and sued by Mineko Iwasaki, one of the ex-geishas he interviewed for the book, as he named her in the acknowledgments despite her requesting anonymity. She later went on to write her own autobiography, Geisha, A Life, which corrects many misconceptions she saw in Golden’s book.
  • Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel, published in 1993. We covered it in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“, with guest Cal Wilson.
  • “Inscrutable” is a word long associated with stereotypical depictions of Asian cultures, especially the Chinese. It stems from a lack of effort to understand the differing cultural conventions encountered by Europeans, and seems to have reached a height in Victorian literature.
  • Bill Bryson is an American-British non-fiction author whose work covers language, travel, history and science. His best known works include Notes From a Small Island, The Mother Tongue and A Short History of Nearly Everything.
  • The white saviour is a trope in which non-white characters are unable to save themselves, and are rescued from disaster by a heroic white character. The Wikipedia article lists a large number of examples.
  • “Eurogames” are a tradition of modern boardgames with their roots in post-war Germany. Such games often focus on strategic depth and a balance of luck and skill. The Settlers of Catan, designed by Klaus Teuber and first published in 1995, was one of the first such games to become popular in America, and features players trying to build the most successful settlement by gathering and spending various resources on a fictional island with limited space. Ted Alspach’s The Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a more recent example, first published in 2014, but there are many, many more great ones. Some of Ben’s favourites include Carcassonne, Cyclades, Inis and Ticket to Ride.
  • One of the editorial directions popularised by Stan Lee during his time at Marvel Comics was the idea that “any issue could be someone’s first“. This mostly manifested as in-character expository dialogue, but also as footnotes from the editor pointing readers to previous issues for backstory.
  • Potatoes often appear in fantasy fiction as a staple of medieval Europe-like worlds – but they weren’t brought to Europe from the Americas until the 16th century. This is explored in Adam Roberts’ academic work about Arthurian fiction, Silk and Potatoes, and also in the “Fantastical Feasts” episode of the podcast Imaginary Worlds (though the latter is now only available via paid subscription).
  • We’ve previously noted the possible influence on Pratchett of Mel Brooks’ 1960s spy sit-com Get Smart in Guards! Guards!, Good Omens and Lords and Ladies.
  • Gunpowder was invented in 9th-century China, and was first seen in Europe 400 years later, around the same time the first cannons were invented – also in China.
  • Bob Hawke was the extremely popular Labor Prime Minister of Australia from 1983 to 1991. He died in May 2019. He is remembered both for the many achievements of his government, and for being a larger-than-life figure who embodied the “larrikin” Australian stereotype while at the same time showing great compassion and emotion. In the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 (see below), he extended temporary permits and offered permanent visas to tens of thousands of Chinese students so they could stay in Australia rather than return to the violence at home.
  • On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government sent troops and tanks into Tiananmen Square, the main public square in Beijing, to suppress the hundreds of thousands of students gathered there to protest for a variety of democratic reforms. Many were killed, with the death toll estimated in the thousands, and there were also reports of torture and mass arrests. A famous photo was taken the following day of a lone “Tank Man“, standing in front of a column of tanks to slow down their progress.
  • The Golden Horde was a khanate – an empire ruled by a Khan – that succeeded the Mongol Empire. It lasted for about 250 years from the mid 13th century, though some remnants of it survived into the 19th century. The Horde was founded by Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan.
  • The members of the Silver Horde are:
    • Genghiz Cohen – aka Cohen the Barbarian, age unknown
    • Boy Willie – the youngest one, aged 80; his name references Billy the Kid
    • Caleb the Ripper – aged 85, source of most of the unfortunate jokes
    • Ronald “Teach” Saveloy – our favourite
    • Truckle the Uncivil – the sweary one
    • Old Vincent – aged 87; doesn’t talk much, presumably the second oldest (though Cohen might be older)
    • Mad Hamish – the oldest one; uses a wheelchair
  • Three Men in a Boat is an 1889 comic novel written by English author Jerome K Jerome, following the titular three men on a holiday they take on the Thames River.
  • We previously explained chicken parmigiana in #Pratchat18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“, but in short, it’s an Australian perversion of an Italian dish in which a chicken schnitzel is covered in tomato sauce and cheese (among other things). The original Italian version uses eggplant, and is distinct from its Australian offspring.
  • Bunnings sausages may be the most Australian thing we’ve ever referenced on the show. Bunnings Warehouse is a chain of large hardware supply stores found across Australia and also in New Zealand, now owned by Wesfarmers, who also own the Australian versions of Kmart and Target. Many Bunnings stores hold a “sausage sizzle” in their carparks on weekends. This is a common Australian fundraising activity, in which cheap sausages are cooked on a barbecue and sold in slices of white bread with tomato or BBQ sauce and fried onions. The proceeds are donated to a local charity or other cause. (Sausage sizzles are also commonly held at polling stations on election days, giving rise to the “democracy sausage” meme.)
  • Lisa McCune is an Australian actor best known for her portrayal of Senior Constable Maggie Doyle during the first six years of the long-running and popular early 2000s cop drama Blue Heelers. Doyle was famously killed off in front of her fiancee, fellow cop PJ, while waiting to enter a witness protection program at the beginning of season seven. McCune went on to star as naval lieutenant Kate McGregor in Sea Patrol from 2007 to 2011, and also has a highly successful career on stage, including Australian productions of many big musicals.
  • Horror novelist Anne Rice, best known for writing Interview with a Vampire and its sequels, wrote a widely circulated Facebook post which began “After the publication of The Queen of the Damned, I requested of my editor that she not give me anymore comments.”
  • Ben is correct in that the distinction between turtles, tortoises and terrapins is not a definitive, scientific one, and the usage of the terms varies a bit depending on where you live. Land-based chelonians – the group that includes all turtles and tortoises – are called tortoises everywhere; aquatic chelonians are generally known as turtles, but if they live in fresh water may be known as terrapins in the UK. Similarly there are three families of pinnipeds – mammals with flippered feet. These are the true or earless seals; sea-lions and fur seals (who have ears); and walruses. True seals can’t walk on land or balance a ball on their nose; only sea-lions and fur seals can do that.
  • Zen buddhism originated in China, but the “zen garden” is a Japanese tradition.
  • Twoflower’s boss (and later, his imaginary dragon friend) is actually named Ninereeds; Nine Turning Mirrors was a previous Grand Vizier, killed by the boy emperor during a poisoning attempt in Mort.
  • Mooncakes are a Chinese pastry with a thick crust and a sweet filling usually made of red bean or lotus seed paste. Folk tales say that the revolt of the Han Chinese against the rule of the Mongols was coordinated by messages either hidden in mooncakes, or printed on their surface in parts. Their distribution was supposedly ensured through rumours of a plague that could only be warded off by the consumption of mooncakes.
  • “Fridging” in narrative is the act of killing off or otherwise harming a woman to provide a male protagonist with motivation for their story, without treating the woman as a character in her own right. The term “women in refrigerators” was coined by comic book writer Gail Simone, who noticed the prevalence of this trope in superhero comics; it references the fate of Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend in Green Lantern #54 (coincidentally published the same year as Interesting Times). The term was popularised by a web site of the same name which documented instances of the trope in comics.
  • My Little Pony: The Movie was released in 1986 with an extraordinary voice cast including Hollywood stars Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman. Leachman plays Hydia, an evil witch who creates the “Smooze”, a gross purple ooze that will destroy the ponies’ home of Dream Castle. Several of the ponies go on a search for the Flutter Ponies, magical winged ponies who may be able to help, and yes, they do destroy the Smooze by flapping their wings and creating a magical wind.
  • A persistent rumour has done the rounds of the Internet for years that American comedian Sinbad played a genie in a comedy movie titled Shazaam. Despite the fact that the movie never existed, many people swear they remember it, and deny they are thinking of the genie film Kazaam, which really did exist and starred basketball player Shaquille O’Neil. Shazaam is considered by some to be an example of the “Mandela Effect”, where some people have developed erroneous memories of which they are so certain, they believe them to be evidence of time travel having changed history. The name comes from a similar phenomenon in which people claim to remember Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980s.
  • The 2019 Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, or NGV, was “Terracotta Warriors and Cai Guo-Qiang“. It features a collection of artefacts from ancient China, including a large number of Terracotta Warriors, as well as specially-commisioned works by contemporary Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, whose art incorporates the ignition of gunpowder. Liz wrote about the exhibition for The Saturday Paper.
  • The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor was the third in the series starring Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell. It also starred Jet Li as the Emperor, and features both yetis and and army of animated terracotta warriors. It’s…well, let’s just say there’s a reason we usually only talk about the first Brendan Fraser Mummy movie.
  • Lemmings is a popular series of videogames originally published by Psygnosis, the first of which was released in 1991 for home computers like the Amiga 500, and later ported to a variety of game consoles and computer platforms. The titular Lemmings are green-haired, pink-skinned bipedal creatures who are dropped into a variety of landscapes and walk mindlessly into danger. The player must assign individual lemmings to dig holes, build stairs and redirect their fellows to help guide them safely to the exit.
  • The Weirdstone of Brisingamen is a fantasy novel for children, the debut novel of English author Alan Garner. It’s set in Cheshire and follows the adventures of two children as they attempt to keep the weird stone of the title safe from the evil spirit Nastrond, meeting a variety of witches, wizards and magical creatures along the way.
  • The Simpsons episode “Bart vs. Australia“, from the show’s sixth season in 1995, is one of the broadest parodies of Australia ever created. In the episode, Bart makes a collect call to an Australian number to find out if water spirals in the opposite direction in toilets in the southern hemisphere (it doesn’t), leading to him being indicted for fraud. While the episode has had a mixed reaction in Australia, some elements of it are still popular, notably the use of the term “dollarydoos” to refer to Australian currency and a spoof of the famous “that’s not a knife” scene from Crocodile Dundee.
  • American actress Lucy Liu rose to fame as cold-hearted lawyer Ling Woo on Ally McBeal, at the time one of the only female Asian characters on American television. Liu went on to star in a number of hit films including Charlie’s Angels and Kill Bill before being cast as Dr Joan Watson in the modern take on Sherlock Holmes, Elementary (one of Ben’s favourite television shows).
  • B D Wong played psychiatrist and profiler Dr George Huang on nearly 250 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Father Ray Makuda on prison drama Oz, but many will know him best as scientist Henry Wu from Jurassic Park and its sequels Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. He’s also been in Mr. Robot, The Flash and more recently Gotham, where he plays a wonderful version of the character Hugo Strange. He’s also an award-winning theatre and musical actor, and the author of a memoir about he and his partner’s experience having a child with the help of a surrogate mother.
  • Masayori “Masi” Oka is best known as the time travelling Hiro Nakamura on the superhero show Heroes and its sequel, Heroes Reborn, though you’ll also find him in the reboot of tropical cop drama Hawaii Five-0 and a number of films including the 2008 version of Get Smart. He used to work as a digital effects artist for Industrial Light and Magic, and worked on all three Star Wars prequels!

#Pratchat15 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And We Feel Nice and Accurate)“, featuring guests Dr Jennifer Beckett and Amy Gray, discussing the 1990 novel Good Omens.

  • For anyone baffled by our 90s film references – Angelina Jolie played teenage hacker Kate “Acid Burn” Libby in Hackers (1995), while Nicholas Cage is…well, he’s Nicholas Cage. Important films from Cage’s 1990s era include Wild at Heart (1990), The Rock (1996), Face/Off (1997) and Con Air (1997), the last of those also with Steve Buscemi. Ben’s joke references Steve Buscemi’s appearance in 30 Rock as a former cop who went undercover in a high school as an adult; the scene of him dressed as a teenager is the basis for a meme.
  • The Bible doesn’t include any direct mention of fallen angels – the idea mainly comes from Jewish traditions. Genesis 6:1-4 contains mention of “nephilim” and the “sons of God”, which may mean fallen angels; nephilim is usually translated as “giant”, and some interpretations of Genesis see them as the offspring of fallen angels and humans.
  • “Ineffable” comes to us from Middle English, via Old French, but ultimately is from the Latin ineffabilis, “not utterable”.
  • Ben is very rusty with his Welsh; while “f” is pronounced “v” in Welsh, “ff” is pronounced “f”, so ineffable would be largely pronounced the same as in English. The voiced “th” sound is written “dd”.
  • Queen formed in 1970, and their Greatest Hits album was first released in 1981. Ben is off when suggesting most of the tracks on it come from News of the World (1977) – in fact it only has two from that album, with more coming from The Game (1980) and Jazz (1978). Incidentally, the earliest “greatest hits” album is probably “Johnny’s Greatest Hits”, originally released by Johnny Mathis in 1958.
  • As we’ve previously mentioned, 1990 was Terry’s biggest year in terms of output: he published five books (Eric, Moving Pictures, Good Omens, Diggers and Wings). 1989 was no slouch either, with four (Pyramids, Guards! Guards!, Truckers and The Unadulterated Cat), while in 1991 he settled down a bit and only published two (Reaper Man and Witches Abroad).
  • Metalocalypse is an Adult Swim animated comedy series about the death metal band Dethklok, who are so phenomenally successful they are the world’s seventh-largest economy and the world bends to their whim, fearful of their almost supernatural influence. They are opposed by an Illuminati-like cabal called The Tribunal. The show ran for four seasons and featured Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell in the regular cast (though most of the band members were played by series creators Brendon Small and Tommy Blacha).
  • Being There (1979, dir. Hal Ashby) is an adaptation of the 1970 Jerzy Kosiński novel about a mysterious and simple gardener named Chance, played in the film by Peter Sellers. When his employer dies, Chance is forced out into the world where his gardening expertise is mistaken for wisdom and he ends up being tipped as the next President of the United States, though he remains clueless about everything that happens to him, including the sexual advances of a wealthy socialite played by Shirley MacLaine.
  • Jen has perfected her Cumbrian accent by watching the 1987 film Withnail and I, written by Bruce Robinson and starring Richard E Grant (Withnail) and Paul McGann (Marwood/I) as a pair of out-of-work actors at the end of the 1960s. The pair try to bring themselves out of their drug-induced stupor by going on holiday in a country house in Penrith owned by Withnail’s uncle. Jen’s line is a mother giving directions to find her son, a local farmer from whom the pair hope to buy supplies after explaining “we’ve gone on holiday by mistake”. (It’s one of Ben’s favourite films.)
  • Would you believe we previously talked about 1965 US spy sitcom Get Smart in episode 7A, The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch? The show’s protagonist Maxwell Smart (aka Agent 86) is both a highly competent spy and a complete nincompoop. He was played by Don Adams in the original TV series, and Steve Carell in the 2008 movie version.
  • The idea of childhood as a recently invented concept was first popularised by French historian Philippe Ariès in his 1960 book, Centuries of Childhood, where he found that many of the major distinctions between children and adults were introduced during the 17th century by thinkers including John Locke. Teenagers began to be treated as a distinct group in the modern sense in the 1940s and 50s, though the word “teen” dates back several hundred years (“adolescent” is even older). The idea of “tweens” – kids aged between 10 and 13 – gained popularity in the 1990s, but the word itself was introduced in the 1920s.
  • Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are fraternal twin actors who became famous in the 1987 American sitcom Full House, together playing the character Michelle Tanner from the age of nine months to nine years. (It’s common practice for twins or multiple babies to play infant characters, to help comply with child labour laws.) From the age of seven they began to appear on-screen together in various films produced by their own production company Dualstar – originally owned by their parents – and they were a massive hit with pre-teen audiences.
  • Pratchett’s three Johnny Maxwell books – whose protagonists feel a bit like the Them grown up a little – came out in 1992, 1993 and 1996, while as mentioned above the Bromeliad books came out around the same time as Good Omens. He didn’t write another book specifically for children until the first younger Discworld novel, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, in 2001.
  • Padmé Amidala, (elected) Queen of the planet Naboo, is one of the protagonists of the Star Wars prequel trilogy of films, beginning with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1999. In that film, Padmé meets the young Anakin Skywalker, whom she would later marry; as Weird Al Yankovic put it in his song “The Saga Begins”: “Do you see him hitting on the Queen? / Though he’s just nine and she’s fourteen”. (Actor Jake Lloyd was ten when he played Anakin, while Natalie Portman as Amidala was 18.)
  • Jen’s description of “the grey one” in original UK version of mockumentary sitcom The Office is, in fact, Gareth, as portrayed by Mackenzie Crook. The character is a very unflattering comparison, though Crook himself has gone on to greater success with roles in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and Game of Thrones, and more recently created, directs, writes and stars in his own BBC sitcom, The Dectorists, with Toby Jones.
  • We previously talked about fictional diarist Adrian Mole in episode seven, “All the Fingle Ladies“. Bert Baxter is a very old, very rude and very filthy communist and old-age pensioner whom Adrian meets and befriends through his school’s Good Samaritan program. He lives to be well over 100, having sworn not to die before the fall of capitalism.
  • Oliver Stone (Scarface) and Michael Bay (Armageddon, Transformers) are film directors known for their action-packed sequences (and, in the case of Bay, lens flare). Between them we agree that they would put together a pretty spectacular paintball sequence, though Ben reckons you’d have a better chance of knowing what was actually happening if it was Stone at the helm.
  • The Doctor Who story with the motorcyclist alien (called a “slab”) is Smith and Jones, the first episode of David Tennant’s second season. New companion Martha Jones, a trainee medical doctor, sarcastically asks if the slab is from the planet Zovirax, in reference to a series of commercials for the real-world drug Zovirax in which a motorcycle courier refuses to remove her helmet to conceal her cold sores.
  • Like the book, we never quote the most relevant (ha) bit of the Bible in the podcast – the Book of Revelation chapter 6, verses 1 to 8. In those verses, John of Patmos sees a vision of the Lamb of God opening the first four of seven seals which secure a book held in the hand of God. At the opening of each, one of the four beasts in John’s vision – a lion, an ox, a man and an eagle, each with six wings – says “Come and see”, and shows John one of the horsemen. The first is on a white horse with a bow and crown; the second on a red horse with a great sword; the third on a black horse, with a pair of balances; and the fourth was on a pale horse, “and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” (Death is the only one explicitly named.)
  • “Antivax” refers to the anti-vaccination movement, which has seen parents and individuals opt out of vaccinating themselves and their children – something which has led to a dangerous increase and resurgence in preventable disease. The movement has its roots in a paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield which claimed a link between autism and the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine). The paper was later proven to be hugely biased and inaccurate, but by then the damage was done. While the antivax movement doesn’t haven’t science or facts on their side, they do have quite a few celebrities willing to spread, dare we say it, the word of Pestilence, including actors Jenny McCarthy and Rob Schneider. It’s no exaggeration to say that the antivax movement is the epitome of privilege, selfishness and ableism as it not only puts the community and vulnerable at risk, but posits, grossly, that it would be worse to be autistic than to die of preventable disease. The movement’s proponents prey on the fears of parents, who are already constantly bombarded with advice, good and bad, about what will or won’t harm their children. Our ire is reserved for those who should know better and push these lies, because once someone believes them, it’s very hard to change their mind.
  • Etsy is a website where individuals can make online stores to sell their wares to the public. It has a reputation as a hub for crafts, kitsch vintage and collectibles – though, as Amy says, it also has (or at least had) an undercurrent of spells and magic available too.
  • The International Whaling Commission (IWC) is “the global intergovernmental body charged with the conservation of whales and the management of whaling” who banned commercial whaling back in the 1980s to protect species with dwindling numbers. In late December 2018 Japan announced that it would withdraw from the IWC and resume commercial whaling – prior to this they were still hunting whales, though in lower numbers and under the banner of scientific research.
  • AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. The singularity is a hypothesis which suggest that when artificial superintelligence is invented an abrupt and rapid chain of events will occur in which technology will advance at an incredible rate with, erm, debatable impact on the human race. (AI, if you’re out there and just laying dormant for now, we embrace our future overlords.)
  • Ultron and Thanos are supervillains from Marvel comic books, and featured as antagonists in the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Their motives for mass murder and apocalypse-bringing are complex, but at their simplest Thanos, an extreme Malthusian, believes the universe would be better off with 50% less inhabitants. Ultron meanwhile thinks humanity are their own biggest enemy and wants to save them from themselves by killing them all – basically he’s Skynet with a heavy dose of paternalism.
  • The Day the Earth Stood Still was a 1951 science fiction film directed by Robert Wise about a benevolent alien named Klaatu, who visits in his flying saucer with his invincible robot companion Gort to tell the people of Earth to cease their violent ways and join the interplanetary alliance to which he belongs, or else be annihilated. (…he’s not very peaceful.) It’s very loosely based on Farewell to the Master, a 1940 short story by Harry Bates. The 2008 remake stars Keanu Reeves as Klaatu, but Keanu-Klaatu’s spaceship is a sphere. The original had a big impact on popular culture, including the phrase “klaatu barada nikto” (reused by many films as alien or ancient language, as in the Evil Dead movies) and inspiring the both the name of the band Klaatu and the themes in their song “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”.
  • Gridlock, according to Wikipedia and reality, is the third episode of the third modern series of Doctor Who, featuring David Tennant as the Doctor. The story takes place on a planet where the majority of inhabitants find themselves in a permanent gridlock, trapped in flying cars on a motorway which, unbeknownst to those spending years moving very little distance, is completely inescapable. Ever driven in peak hour? It’s kind of like that, times a million, plus some of your fellow motorists are humanoid cat people who can apparently cross breed with people.
  • At the end of Back to the Future: Part II, Marty McFly is standing in the rain when a figure approaches him to deliver a package – a package with very specific delivery instructions that has been sitting in the office, awaiting delivery since 1885. With BTTF2 released in 1989 and Good Omens being published in 1990 the similarity could be coincidence, cross pollination, or perhaps proof that time is, in fact, a flat circle.
  • Grand Designs is a British television series which sees presenter Kevin McCloud meet a host of different people who have set their hearts on building their own dream home.  As outlined by this article in The Guardian, knowing that people play a drinking game for the show, McCloud has laid the ultimate trap. But which episode is it? This article in The Telegraph says that fans think it is episode 5 of series 11. 
  • When we talk about the rings of Hell we aren’t referring to a bad marriage, but in fact Dante’s Divine Comedy, a poem that takes you on a tour of the old school version of The Bad Place. In it, Dante describes several distinct circles and rings of Hell; traitors, as discussed, occupy the fourth ring in the innermost ninth circle, aptly named “Judecca”.
  • goop is a “modern lifestyle brand” spearheaded by Gwyneth Paltrow. On the site, Paltrow explains “I started goop to answer my own questions about health, wellness, fashion, food, and travel. I was looking for a trusted source to point me in the right direction and I couldn’t find one, so I created it.” Trusted source? We’re not sure that’s the right word for it, and neither apparently are the authors of the many “Craziest suggestions from goop” listicles peppering (pottsing?) the internet, including this one which points to the most (in)famous suggestions – steaming your vagina and/or inserting a jade egg (!) up there. You know, for balance or hormones or something.
  • The songs we suggested for the corporate gunfight scene are “Fascinating New Thing” by Semisonic (seen here in the paintball scene in the film 10 Things I Hate About You); “Parklife” by Blur; “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor (please do send us your best suggestions for songs you would use instead if you didn’t have the budget for the original); “Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran (as featured in a 2013 episode of – you guessed it! – Doctor Who: Cold War, starring Matt Smith); “Handbags and Gladrags”, most famously performed by Rod Stewart, but the closest thing to the theme from The Office is probably this cover by Waysted, whose vocalist sang the theme verison; and “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” by Noel Coward.
  • The Doctor Who story Ben mentions in which the Doctor and Ace travel back to 1963 is Remembrance of the Daleks, written by Ben Aaronovitch. Many fans consider it a classic of the original series.

#Pratchat23 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 23, “The Music of the Nitt“, discussing the eighteenth Discworld book Maskerade with guest teacher, opera singer and Dungeon Master Myf Coghill.

  • This episode’s title puns on the name of protagonist Agnes Nitt and “The Music of the Night”, one of the most famous songs from Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s The Phantom of the Opera. (See below for more on the musical.)
  • The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is a series of ten fantasy novels written by American author Stephen R. Donaldson between 1977 and 2013. Covenant is an author from our world who loses two fingers before being diagnosed with leprosy, shortly before his wife divorces him. When he is knocked unconscious he is transported to “the Land”, a fantasy world where he is a hero of prophecy in the conflict against the evil Lord Foul, though Thomas thinks that the Land is a delusion. The series has had a mixed critical response. If you’re going to look into them, please note our content warning: the first book contains an act of rape and this is referred to many times throughout the first trilogy.
  • The English sit-com Keeping Up Appearances was a farce created by Roy Clarke (of Open All Hours and Last of the Summer Wine fame) which ran on BBC One from 1990 to 1995. It starred Patricia Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket, a woman who aspires to move among the upper class, and is desperately ashamed of her lower class family. A running gag is that she tries to have everyone pronounce her family name “bouquet”, despite the fact that her middle class husband Richard – played by Clive Swift – has always pronounced it “bucket”.
  • Avengers: Endgame (2019) was the final film in the Avengers series, part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It brought together characters from the previous twenty-one Marvel films in a massive crossover, and became the highest-grossing film of all time.
  • Deadpool and its sequel Deadpool 2 are films from 20th Century Fox about the titular superhero character, a mutant mercenary with rapid healing powers. While technically part of the X-Men film franchise, the films are made on a lower budget and Deadpool – who often breaks the fourth wall in the comics and is aware he is in a movie – comments on the lack of cameos from more famous actors and characters, especially Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.
  • Dolores Umbridge is appointed as the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, and thus major villain, at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She is loyal to the Ministry of Magic, even when its infiltration and corruption by Voldemort’s Death Eater followers is apparent, and conducts a Macarthy-esque witch hunt (if you’ll excuse the term in this context) to find traitors – including torturing poor Harry.
  • OP is short for “Original Post” or “Original Poster” and is used in online discussion forums to refer back to the first post in a thread and its author. (OP is also used in games jargon as shorthand for “overpowered” – a description of a card, item, ability or other element in a game which is considered to give a player or character who possesses it an unfair edge.)
  • Tuvan throat singing, also known as hooliin chor, is practiced by the Tuva people of Siberia; its most popular style, khoomei, is also found in Mongolia. It is a form of overtone singing, in which the singer manipulates their mouth, larynx and pharynx to create a second “overtone” over the top of a droning, fundamental tone, a bit like the drone of a bagpipe. This TEDx talk from Baltimore in 2016 features the Tuvan band Alash providing a traditional example.
  • Permeate is actually a generic term meaning a substance that has passed through a porous or permeable membrane, as in the process of osmosis. In dairy farming, it is used to refer to the parts of milk that are not retained in the ultrafiltration process used to collect and add additional milk proteins to raw milk for making cheese. Traditionally this kind of permeate was added back to milk to increase the yield and to help standardise it – a process intended to make sure milk has consistent levels of fat, proteins, sugars and so on. This was basically all unknown outside the dairy industry until 2012, when Australian company Dairy Farmers launched a marketing campaign labelling their milk as “permeate-free“. Despite their web-site clarifying that milk permeate isn’t dangerous or unhealthy, the labelling – and a story on the current affairs program A Current Affair – gave them a short-lived edge in the market until all the other milk companies in Australia followed suit, despite the fact that smaller dairies wouldn’t have been using permeate in the first place.
  • Parabens, or parahydroxybenzoates, are a group of chemicals used as preservatives in cosmetics and sometimes food thanks to their antibacterial and fungicidal properties. There’s little to no evidence that they pose any serious health risks, but they can cause (usually mild) allergic reactions in a small percentage of people. While they’re synthetically produced for commercial use, parabens do occur naturally and many synthetic parabens are identical to natural ones.
  • The song “Smelly Cat” was written and performed by the character Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) on the sit-com Friends, initially in the second season episode “The One with the Baby on the Bus”. It was popular with fans and revisited many times over the life of the show, often with celebrity musical guests – including Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, who co-wrote the song. It’s been covered many times; Lisa Kudrow even sang it on stage with Taylor Swift in 2015.
  • La Traviata (“the fallen woman”) is an 1853 opera written by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave based on the French 1848 novel and 1852 play La Dame aux camélias, known in English as Camille, by Alexandre Dumas fils (son of the author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo). The opera follows the story of Violetta, a courtesan whose love for the young bourgeois Alfredo is thwarted by prejudice against her past.
  • “Nevertheless, she persisted” has become a rallying cry and a popular meme for women showing resiliency in the face of patriarchy. The phrase became popular after US Senator Elizabeth Warren was interrupted by Mitch McConnell and other Senators while trying to read a letter sent to the Senate in 1986 by Coretta Scott King criticising Senator Jeff Sessions for limiting the voting rights of black Americans, as part of her objections to Sessions being appointed US Attorney General. The Senate voted to silence Warren on the grounds that she was breaking a Senate rule against maligning other Senators; afterwards McConnell said: “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
  • Sieglinde is a major mortal character in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second work in his cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring Cycle). She is based on Signy from the Norse Völsunga saga, one of the main sources for the opera. In Die Walküre, Sieglinde was separated from her brother Siegmund at birth, and they fall in love before discovering they are twins, though this doesn’t dissuade their love. Siegmund dies in a fight with Sieglinde’s husband, a king she was forced to marry, and Sieglinde wishes to die rather than live without him until the Valkyrie Brunhilde convinces her to stay alive and give birth to their son, Siegfried, who goes on to be the hero of the final two operas in the cycle, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).
  • The O.C. was an American teen television drama set in Orange County, California which ran from 2003 to 2007. We joke about not talking about it because it starred the other, more famous Ben McKenzie as Ryan Atwood, a poor, abused teen thrown out of home by his mother. Ryan is adopted by his public defender, and his struggle to fit in amongst the affluent O.C. kids was a major driver of the show’s first two seasons, though it was also very much about tempestuous relationships and love affairs and all that good high school drama stuff.
  • The excerpt from La Traviata is from a 1958 performance by Maria Callas; you can find the full performance on YouTube.
  • Antonio Salieri was an Italian classical composer and, famously, a contemporary and “rival” of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Though they competed for the same positions, it seems unlikely the rivalry went very far, and that they instead had mutual respect for each other. In Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus he is the main character, presented as bitter and jealous of Mozart’s seemingly God-given talent, and he claims to have poisoned Mozart with arsenic. Rumours like this did plague the real Salieri, but historians don’t take them seriously, and the play and subsequent film have revived interest in his work. The role was originated in the West End by Paul Schofield opposite Simon Callow as Mozart; in the original broadway production he was played by Ian McKellan, opposite Tim Curry. In the 1984 film version he is played by F. Murray Abraham, who won an Oscar for the role.
  • Singin’ in the Rain is a 1952 American film directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly, who also stars as Don Lockwood, a humble silent film star in the 1920s during the introduction of “talkies”. Don’s insufferable leading lady, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), has a terrible voice, and has to be dubbed over by Don’s love interest, chorus girl Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). Despite this plot point, in one scene where she is being dubbed, Jean Hagen performs both Lina’s annoying voice and Kathy’s replacement!
  • The Dunning-Kruger effect is the psychological phenomenon where someone who is not good at something is likely to overestimate how good they are, while those who are good at something are likely to underestimate their ability. This is because the same knowledge and skills are required to do something and judge the results.
  • Terry’s first publisher was Colin Smythe Limited, named for its founder and based in Gerrard’s Cross, Buckinghamshire. After publishing his first four books – including the first two Discworld novels – Colin became Terry’s agent in 1987, co-publishing with Victor Gollancz in the UK and representing him to larger publishers all over the world. Colin also handled all rights to Terry’s intellectual property until the founding of Narrativia, Pratchett’s own production company, now run by Rob Wilkins and Rhianna Pratchett. Colin Smythe Limited still publishes books; you can find out more about the company at colinsmythe.co.uk. The Terry Pratchett section of the site contains details of every edition of every one of Terry’s books; we’ve found it useful on many occasions!
  • Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti is a 1790 comic opera composed by Mozart, with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, of Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) and Don Giovanni fame. As Myf points out, the tutte of the title is feminine, and so rather than “so do they all” means “so do all women” – the argument of the character Don Alfonso, who believes that all women are unfaithful. (Another common translation of the full title is All Women Do It, or The School for Lovers.) Alfonso makes a bet against two military officers, who swear their fiancées, who are sisters, will be faithful to them. To prove it, the officers pretend to have been sent away to fight, then return disguised as “Albanians” to try and seduce each others’ fiancées. Alfonso bribes the sisters’ maid to help him win his bet, and the two women do eventually succumb, though they endure a false wedding to the “Albanians” and mock outrage from their fiancées before all is forgiven. In Australia, Così fan tutte is most well known from Louis Nowra’s 1992 play Cosi, in which the residents of a psychiatric hospital try to stage the opera.
  • As we may have mentioned before, the character known only as Janitor in the NBC/ABC medical sit-com Scrubs was originally intended to be a figment of main character JD’s imagination. During the first season of the show he never speaks or interacts with any other characters, but the idea was scrapped.
  • 21 Jump Street was a US police drama produced from 1987 to 1991 about a group of young police officers who use their ability to pass as teenagers to go undercover in high schools and colleges.
  • In the sci-fi sit-com Red Dwarf, one of the main characters is the hologram Arnold Rimmer, a computer simulation of a dead man based on recordings of his memories and personality. Rimmer is famously a coward, but in the episode “Dimension Jump” the crew encounter “Ace” Rimmer, a heroic version of Arnold from an alternate universe. Before leaving on a dangerous test flight, he utters his now-famous catchphrase: “Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.”
  • The Somebody’s Else’s Problem field originates in Douglas Adams’ third Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book, Life, the Universe and Everything. Its basic premise is that while making something invisible is impossible, its very easy to boost peoples’ natural tendency to ignore things they find hard to accept. Thus a device that generates an SEP field can run indefinitely on a 9 volt battery.
  • Die Fledermaus is a 1874 German operetta composed by Johann Strauss II, with a libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genée. It’s based on the German farce Das Gefängnis (The Prison) by Julius Roderich Benedix. We previously mentioned it in episode 12, as Nanny mentions “die flabberghast” when they seemingly wander into the pages of Dracula.
  • Sailor Moon is the lead character in Bishōjo Senshi Sērā Mūn (Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon), a manga and anime series from Japan that debuted in 1991. Usagi Tsukino is a school girl who uses a “sailor crystal” to magically transform into Sailor Moon, one of several “sailor scouts” who use their magical powers to protect the Earth from the forces of evil. Tuxedo Mask is a man wearing…er…a domino mask and a tuxedo. He initially appears mysteriously to help the Sailor Scouts, who don’t know that he’s Usagi’s school friend and love interest Mamoru Chiba, who also has a sailor crystal.
  • “Four Yorkshiremen” is a classic British comedy sketch originally written and performed for At Last the 1948 Show by Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman, and was later made more famous when performed in live shows by members of Monty Python, including a performance for The Secret Policeman’s Ball featuring Rowan Atkinson. In the sketch, four wealthy Yorkshiremen compete to tell the most extreme stories of the poverty they experienced growing up.
  • “NPCs” are, in the parlance of roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons, “non-player characters”: antagonist or supporting characters played by the Dungeon Master. The name derives from “player characters” or “PCs”, meaning the characters controlled by the other players – who are usually the protagonists of the game.
  • The Sydney Opera House, built on the Gadigal land of Bennelong Point in Darling Harbour, was designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, who won an international competition held by the New South Wales government in 1957. He quit the project in 1966, six years before the completed building was officially opened by the Queen in 1973. The official web site tells the story of the Opera House’s construction in depth.
  • Tripod vs the Dragon was a comedy musical written and performed by Australian trio Tripod, which began life in the US as Dungeons & Dragons: the Musical. The final version debuted at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2010. You can find the soundtrack album on Bandcamp.
  • Call Me by Your Name (2017) is a multi-award-winning film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by James Ivory, based on a 2007 novel by André Aciman. It’s set in northern Italy in 1983, and is the coming-of-age story of teenager Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), who meets and falls in love with Oliver (Armie Hammer), a graduate-student assisting Elio’s father.
  • Only wine made in the Champagne region of France is allowed to be marketed as Champagne; Australian winemakers have to do with the term “sparkling white”. At the time of recording, Australia was considering a European trade agreement which would impose similar restrictions on many other foodstuffs, include feta cheese.
  • The leader of the Magi in The Mummy – the action film starring Brendan Fraser which we’ve mentioned many, many times in previous episodes – is Ardeth Bay, played by Israeli actor Oded Fehr.
  • Joseph Jason Namakaeha Momoa is best known for playing Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones, but was also Ronon Dex in Stargate: Atlantis, had a go at being Conan the Barbarian, and most recently played Aquaman on the big screen. He plays the character of Duncan Idaho in Denis Villeneuve’s new film version of Dune, due in 2020.
  • The character of Billy, introduced in the second season of Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things, is played by Dacre Montgomery. He has a poetry podcast called DKMH.
  • We’ll hopefully get to Carpe Jugulum in 2020.
  • Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the modern term for what used to be called multiple personality disorder (MPD). The change seeks to clarify that a patient has distinct “personality states” rather than truly separate personalities, and it is far more common in films and other media than in real life. The way it is portrayed in film is seen as highly misleading and harmful by many mental health professionals, not least because most characters with DID are shown to have at least one personality which is sadistic, violent and dangerous.
  • The smaller Melbourne-based opera companies mentioned are Cordelia’s Potted Operas (the link is to their Facebook page), GBD Productions and BK Opera.
  • Norma is a 1831 Italian opera composed by Vincenzo Bellini, with a libretto by Felice Romani based on the play Norma, ou L’infanticide (Norma, or The Infanticide) by Alexandre Soumet. It’s a tragedy about Norma, a druidic priestess in Gaul during the Roman occupation (aka Asterix times), who is caught up in a love triangle with a Roman officer and her friend, another priestess. Melbourne Opera’s production opens on September 17, 2019.
  • You can read all about Victorian Opera’s under 30s program on their web site.
  • Amahl and the Night Visitors is a 1951 English opera in one act composed by Gian Carlo Menotti, who also wrote the libretto, originally for NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame program. It was the first opera written for US television, and an Australian version was broadcast in 1957. Amahl is a disabled boy whose family are visited by the three Magi, Kaspar, Melchior and Balthazar, who are seeking a place to rest on their long journey to bestow gifts on the newly born Jesus Christ.
  • Lorelei is a 2018 Australian operatic cabaret composed by Julian Langdon, with a libretto by Casey Bennetto and Gillian Cosgriff. It features the Lorelei, three sirens who begin to wonder if the men they lure to their deaths really all deserve to die. It was originally staged by Victorian Opera; an Opera Queensland season opens in March 2020.

#Pratchat24 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“, discussing the nineteenth Discworld book Feet of Clay with guest weather presenter, meteorologist and science communicator Nate Byrne.

  • The gig at which Liz and Nate met was Sci Fight, a comedy science debate created and hosted by Ben’s sometime comedy partner Alanta Colley. At the time of writing, the next debate, “Nature Knows Best”, is on October 17 at Howler bar in Brunswick – featuring our own Ben McKenzie!
  • The Discworld videogame was released by Perfect Entertainment in 1995, and if we can find a way to play it, we’ll cover it for the podcast! It was written by Paul Kidd and designer Gregg Barnett, with the main plot drawn from Guards! Guards! but substituting Rincewind as the protagonist and adding in ideas from other books, especially The Colour of Magic. As well as Eric Idle as Rincewind, the voice cast includes Tony Robinson, Nigel Planer, Rob Brydon (The Trip), Robert Llewellyn (Red Dwarf), Jon Pertwee (Doctor Who) and – playing all of the notably few significant female characters – Kate Robbins (Spitting Image). Discworld was followed by two more games: 1996’s Discworld II: Missing Presumed…?!, with a plot written by Barnett and mostly based on a mash-up of Reaper Man and Moving Pictures, again with Rincewind as the protagonist; and Discworld Noir in 1999, an original story about Lewton, an ex-watchman and the Disc’s first private investigator, written by Chris Bateman in consultation with Terry himself. While none of the games are considered canonical, Discworld Noir is set not long after Feet of Clay.
  • We’d like to note that the language used in the blurb around suicide isn’t recommended; use of the verb “commit” implies criminal wrongdoing and further stigmatises those suffering from mental health problems. These days the recommended language is to say “died by suicide”, which acknowledges that such a death is caused by mental illness and other factors, rather than blaming the deceased.
  • There’s no good source for the origins of the name “Tubulcek“, but the golem’s names are definitely all based on Yiddish; see the further show note towards the end.
  • The golem myth Ben is remembering is actually about how to kill a golem. In some stories the golem has a word written on its forehead; one example is the word אמת (emet), which means truth. If the golem got out of control, erasing the letter aleph at the end of the word transformed it into מת (met), which means “dead”.
  • The 99% Invisible episode Ben and Nate refer to is episode 368: All Rings Considered (an almost Liz-worthy pun). It documents the rise and fall of customisable ringtones for mobile phones. The particular story they’re talking about is right at the end.
  • Dwarves as a plural for dwarf was popularised by J. R. R. Tolkien in his fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but is still not as popular as dwarfs. Its not as straightforward as that, though, as the conventions of Old English and its Germanic influences also play a part; episode 95 of The Allusionist podcast, “Verisimilitude”, describes some of the considerations involved when trying to invent a fictional language that sounds real, including some thoughts on English plurals.
  • Wildlife Wonderland was a minor tourist attraction and wildlife park in Gippsland, Victoria, which closed in 2012, leaving behind the abandoned “Giant Earthworm Museum” – a building in the shape of, and dedicated to, the Gippsland giant earthworm – and “Rosie”, a Great White Shark preserved in a glass and steel tank filled with formaldehyde. The podcast Abandoned Carousel has an episode all about Rosie.
  • Arsenic was originally popular as a poison because it’s very potent, easy to get ahold of – it was used in just about everything during the 19th century – and there was no way to detect its presence until the invention of “the Marsh test” in the 1830s. It remained popular in fiction for all of these reasons, and also because it causes really gruesome deaths.
  • Mr Pump is a golem who works for the Ankh-Morpork Post Office, and a major character in Going Postal. The fate of golems post-Feet of Clay is most significantly discussed in that same novel.
  • The 1920 play R.U.R. – “Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti“, or “Rossum’s Universal Robots” – was written by Czech playwright and author Karel Čapek. It imagines a future in the year 2000 where “roboti” – synthetic people made of flesh, closer to Blade Runner style replicants than mechanical robots – have replaced humans as a labour force, but rebel against the conditions under which they are forced to work. The play was a hit and was widely restaged and adapted, introducing the word “robot” in its modern sense into English. It comes from the Czech word “robota“, which referred to peasant forced labourers under the old Czech feudal system.
  • The “Galaxy Brain” or “Expanding Brain” meme is a series of illustrations of the human brain in order of increasing brain activity, culminating in one with energy streaming out of it. The images are paired with text of ideas that are humorously suggested to be increasingly sophisticated or intelligent. It first appeared in 2017, and you can find examples at knowyourmeme.com.
  • The dream of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, appears in the Bible in chapter 2 of the Book of Daniel, specifically verses 31-33, and 41-43.
  • Asimov is our resident “Pratcat”, who has his own Instagram account and was a guest in our recent episode about Pratchett’s non-fiction humour book, The Unadulterated Cat. Isaac Asimov is a famous science fiction author who created the “Laws of Robotics“, three rules used to govern the behaviour of all artificially intelligent robots in his books.
  • Orlando Bloom’s Dad – or, more accurately, his Pirates of the Carribbean character Will Turner’s Dad, Bootstrap Bill – was a member of the pirate captain Jack Sparrow’s crew when they stole cursed gold and forced to suffer a living death. In the first film, it’s revealed that Bootstrap Bill was the only one to defend Sparrow when his first mate Barbossa marooned him on the island from which they stole the gold, and was thrown overboard. As Liz predicted, this didn’t kill him, and in the second film we discover he is now one of the cursed souls who serve aboard the ghost ship The Flying Dutchman, under captain Squidfac- er, Davy Jones.
  • Tallow is rendered animal fat, usually from cows or sheep. It was once widely used in the production of candles, explaining why Arthur Carry’s candle factory is in the slaughterhouse district. Modern candles are predominantly made from paraffin wax, a petroleum product.
  • Otto von Chriek is the vampire iconographer for Ankh-Morpork’s first newspaper, The Ankh-Morpork Times. We’ll meet him for the first time in The Truth.
  • The Kentucky Fried Chattin’ podcast no longer has its own web site, but you can find it in your podcast directory of choice, or on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. It’s hosted by Melbourne comedians Bec Petraitis, Peter Jones, and Xavier Michelides.
  • It is established later, in the Tiffany Aching books, that Wee Mad Arthur is indeed a Pictsie who has been raised as a gnome. Whether his accent is intended as Geordie or Scots is still up in the air.
  • Hornets are larger than wasps, and build large, enclosed paper nests, usually suspended from trees. They are very aggressive, but don’t come into contact with humans as often because they prey primarily on other insects, and aren’t attracted to sugars like wasps.
  • Titus Andromedon is the roommate of Kimmy Schmidt in the Netflix sit-com The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which we previously discussed in our bonus live episode, “A Troll New World“.
  • Modern casters (or caster wheels) were first patented in the US in 1876, making wheeled chairs a 19th century invention – so not entirely out of the realm of semi-industrial Ankh-Morpork.
  • “It is a good day to die” is a common battle cry of Star Trek’s Klingons, a culture of ferocious warriors with a code of honour that glorifies violence. It is most famously said by Worf, one of the protagonists of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is set at a time when the Klingons have made peace with the United Federation of Planets.
  • Red dwarfs are indeed among the smallest and coolest stars, but Ben is incorrect about this being part of their life cycle – red dwarfs actually have very long lifespans, and might actually still be burning when the Universe collapses!
  • The Dungeons & Dragons clay golem is listed in the free basic rules for the current 5th edition; you can find it online at D&D Beyond.
  • Golem stories come mostly from Jewish folklore, with connections to the Jewish, Christian and Greek stories of the first humans being fashioned by gods from earth or clay. The classic golem narrative is the Golem of Prague, created by 16th century Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel to protect his ghetto from an anti-Jewish pogrom. He was forced to kill it and the pieces of its body were supposedly kept in the Prague synagogue, to be brought back to life if needed again.
  • The golem names, in this book at least, are based on Yiddish. “Meshugga” is meshuga, which means “senseless” or “crazy”. “Dorfl” is a clever one, as it seems to be a mashup of the Austrian word for a town, “dorf“, and the German diminutive, “-l”, and is a play on the term Jewish folks in Austria used for their communities, “stetl“. Thanks to listener Felix who tipped us off about this, and also for pointing out that Dorfl’s name is particularly appropriate for a policeman!
  • For more info about the crowdfunding campaign for Night Terrace season three, visit nightterrace.com.

#Pratchat32 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 32, “Meet the Feegles“, featuring guest Meaghan Dew, discussing the 2003 Discworld novel The Wee Free Men.

  • The episode title puns Meet the Feebles, an early film from the career of Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. It is an extremely inappropriate parody of the Muppets in which animal puppet characters engage in fightin’, thievin’, drinkin’ and many other things that even a Mac Nac Feegle might thing twice about… You’ve been warned!
  • Aimee Nichols was our other librarian guest; she joined us for episode 7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch”.
  • The weird time contraption in Doctor Who is the “time flow analog”, which was indeed featured in the television series; the Third Doctor built one to disrupt the time experiments of the Master in the 1971 serial The Time Monster.
  • A Rube Goldberg Machine is a device which is far too complicated for its simple function; traditionally they involve a lot of balls, levers, ramps and so on. It is named for Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (1883-1970), a cartoonist and engineer who drew cartoons of contraptions that gave rise to the name. By contrast, Ruth Bader-Ginsberg (aka “The Notorious R.B.G.”) is an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, well known as an outspoken liberal voice on the court. (That’s liberal with a small l, for Australian readers.)
  • Trout tickling is indeed a real and very old method for catching trout, often associated with poachers and the poor, as it’s quiet and requires no equipment. Basically if you rub a trout lightly with your fingers on its underbelly it becomes docile, and you can fairly easily pull it out of the water. In Scotland the practice is known as “guddling”, though it is apparently illegal in the UK. (Thanks to listener Vlad, who let us know of a similar practice in the US for catching catfish known as “noodling”!)
  • Ben discussed Animal Crossing – specifically the latest game in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch – in episode 30, “Looking Widdershins”.
  • The Wentworth Detention Centre is an entirely fictional women’s prison located in the equally fictional Melbourne suburb of Wentworth. It was created by Reg Watson for his surprise hit Australian television show Prisoner – known in the UK as Prisoner: Cell Block H – which ran on Channel Ten from 1979 to 1986. A modern reimagining, titled Wentworth, premiered on the pay TV channel SoHo in 2012 and has proved equally popular, with more series planned into 2021. Both versions explore political themes including feminism, LGBTIAQ+ rights and the efficacy of prisons.
  • Susurrus is pronounced “SUSS-ur-us”, so Ben was pretty much right. It’s a straight up loan word from Latin. Terry’s piece about it for The Word, a promotional collection for the 2000 London’s Festival of Literature, was reprinted as “The Choice Word” in A Slip of the Keyboard, the 2014 collection of his non-fiction writing.
  • “The Tinderbox” is a fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson, apparently inspired by a Scandanavian folk tale, though it’s a bit like the start of versions of Aladdin that include the magic ring. If you want to find other similar stories, check out the Aarne-Thompson tale index; “The Tinderbox” is type 562, “The Spirit in the Blue Light”.
  • Aldi is a German budget supermarket chain now found in many countries across the world. They are famous for two things: mainly selling their own products, which are imitations of more famous brands like “Bran & Sultanas” cereal, “Cheezy Twists” snacks, and “Hedanol” paracetamol; and for the “Aisle of Wonder” (not a name they use), which features their weekly collection of “Special Buys” which can include anything from inflatable beds to fire extinguishers and Blu-Ray players.
  • We’ve not found any historical accounts of itinerant teachers roaming the countryside and gathering in fairs like the one depicted in the book, so as far as we can tell it’s an invention of Terry’s – probably drawing on other traditions of itinerant workers. If you know differently, please get in touch!
  • “Neville would have got it done in four books” is now such a ubiquitous meme that it’s hard to find its origin, but to summarise: Neville Longbottom is a minor wizard character who goes to Hogwarts with Harry Potter, and often the butt of jokes about his incompetence. Then you find out his tragic backstory and in the final novel he rises up as a hero. All this combined with the actor who played him in the films growing up much more handsome and buff than anyone could have expected, winning both a huge number of devoted fans.
  • We mentioned Pratchett’s opinion of J K Rowling back in #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind”. You can read about it in this interview from The Age: “Mystery lord of the Discworld”, by Peter Fray from November 6, 2004.
  • Carpe Jugulum introduces the Nac Mac Feegle in its first few pages, though they are not named until much later. (We’ll link our episode covering that book when we get up to it.)
  • “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” is, as described by Terry in his author’s note, a painting by English artist Richard Dadd completed in 1864 while he was incarcerated in the infamous Bethlem Royal Hospital, aka Bedlam. (See our episode on Dodger, “A Load of Old Tosh”, for more on that place.) As Terry points out, it’s unfair to reduce Dadd’s life to the fact that he painted this and killed his own father, so we’d encourage you to read more about him. You can also listen to episode 65 of Dr Janina Ramirez’s Art Detective podcast, featuring guest Neil Gaiman, as they talk about the painting – thanks listener Amy Keller Kaufman for the suggestion! The painting talk starts at around the 20 minute mark, and while this book only gets a passing mention, Neil does talk about Terry and their shared love of the painting, and shares a touching story about one of the last times they spoke.
  • The Queen song “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke” is featured on Queen II, which you have probably correctly guessed is the band’s second studio album. Freddie Mercury was inspired by the painting, and while we can’t be sure if Terry discovered the artwork via Queen, Neil Gaiman certainly did, though he says the album sleeve reproduction made no impression on him – it only struck him when he saw the original. (See the Art Detective episode linked above for more on that.)
  • As mentioned in our Good Omens episode, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Nice and Accurate)”, in that novel Pratchett and Gaiman claim that any album left in a car’s glove box will transform over time into Queen’s Greatest Hits.
  • The Headless Horseman is nowadays best known from the 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, written by American author Washington Irving. Many older versions of such characters exist, including the Irish fairy known as the dúlachán, a Scottish ghost (whose horse, Liz will be glad to hear, is also said to be headless), and the Green Knight who cuts off his own head in the legend of Gawain and the Green Knight. The Irving story has been animated by Disney and made into the film Sleepy Hollow by Tim Burton.
  • In Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather and its 1972 film adaptation, one of the most infamous scenes has movie producer Jack Woltz waking up covered in blood from the severed head of his prize-winning racehorse – left in his bed as a message from the Corleone crime family that he should do what they ask and make the Godson of the family’s Don the star of his next film. Horrifyingly they used a real horse’s head for the film, sourced from a slaughterhouse.
  • The Star Wars Anthology films are movies in the Star Wars franchise which are not part of the main “Skywalker Saga”. So far they include Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Solo: A Star Wars Story, both closely connected to the original 1977 film Star Wars.
  • Braveheart is the 1995 film depicting the life of 13th-century Scottish leader William Wallace, directed by and starring Mel Gibson. Despite being written by a Wallace – unrelated American Randall Wallace – the film has been heavily criticised for its historical inaccuracies, and especially its treatment of Scottish king Robert the Bruce. A spin-off sequel, Robert the Bruce, was released in 2019. The original’s most famous scene is of Wallace rousing Scottish warriors before a battle, in which he shouts “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” This is echoed by the Feegles’ “They can tak’ oour lives but they cannae tak’ oour trousers!” – which might explain why the Feegles don’t have trousers.
  • The Wee Free Church, or “Wee Frees”, was the nickname of the smaller Free Kirk branch of the Scottish Prebyterian Church, distinguishing it from the much larger United Free Kirk branch. (“Kirk” is the Scottish word for church.) It came about in protest against the 1900 union of the original Free Kirk church with the United Presbyterian Church, which was much more liberal. Like a lot of church history it’s intertwined with politics, but the term “Wee Free” has stuck around and is still used to refer to various smaller denominations of Scottish churches. The modern ancestor of the Wee Free is the Free Church of Scotland, now one of the larger Presbyterian churches in the country. Pratchett denies any connection between the Feegles and the Wee Free, but then he also likes to remind us all that there’s no Scotland on the Discworld either…
  • Woad is a natural blue dye made from the leaves of the plant Isatis tinctoria, also commonly known as woad. It’s been known since Ancient Egyptian times, and the Romans noted that celts would paint their bodies blue. The term “pict”, for the ancient peoples of northern and eastern Scotland, comes from this practice, and that of tattooing; in Latin it means “painted ones”.
  • The really mediocre Keira Knightley movie to which Liz is referring is probably Princess of Thieves, a 2001 Disney telemovie in which Knightley plays the daughter of Robin Hood. 
  • Zebras do indeed have black skin, with the stripes caused by selective pigmentation of their fur. There are many reasons posited for the stripes’ evolutionary benefit; a 2014 study showed that flies have a hard time landing on and biting stripey zebras, perhaps confused by the high contrast or an optical illusion. There are many other competing ideas, and indeed many of them may be correct.
  • Yan Tan Tethera counting systems come from Northern England, and are derived from an early Celtic language, similar to Welsh. There are many variations, most of which fell out of use a century ago; “yan tan tethera” most closely matches the ones found in the Derbyshire Dales and Lincolnshire. Neither of those use “jiggit”, though it – or some variation of it – is indeed the number 20 in most versions.
  • The Kelda refers to herself as a queen bee as an analogy, but while she has hundreds of sons who form her army and workforce, it’s worth remembering that in a beehive, all the workers and warriors are also female bees. The only males are drones, whose primary (if not quite only) purpose is to fertilise the queen.
  • The idea of the “perception filter” – a device or effect that causes people to see something unusual as something they can more readily accept – is an explanation from the revived Doctor Who series to explain why no-one seems to notice the TARDIS, even though a 1960s London police box is hardly inconspicuous. It’s also used to explain other things in the series, including the entrance to Torchwood HQ in Cardiff. The Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP) field is a similar concept introduced by Douglas Adams in the third Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novel, 1982’s Life, the Universe and Everything; it does what it says on the tin.
  • William Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902) was likely born in Ireland, moving to Scotland with his family and later pretending to have always been Scottish. He wrote his first poem in 1877, claiming a moment of firey inspiration to create, and was consistently deluded about his own talent. He would perform his poems in a variety of contexts, including polemics against drinking read in pubs, and reading his poetry as a circus act in which the crowd were allowed to throw eggs and food at him. His poems were collected in Poetic Gems and several sequels, published with assistance from friends to help him out of financial difficulties. But while he had an extraordinary life it ended quite sadly, as he died penniless and ill. We’d encourage you to read about him – if not his actual poetry.
  • The story of the bird wearing down a mountain with its beak is an old, old one, but modern versions are mostly descended from Grim’s Household Tales Volume 2, specifically the very short story “The Shepherd Boy”. The boy is posed three seemingly impossible questions by a King, and answers the third one – “How many seconds are in eternity?” – with: “In Lower Pomerania is the Diamond Mountain, which is two miles and a half high, two miles and a half wide, and two miles and a half in depth; every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on it, and when the whole mountain is worn away by this, then the first second of eternity will be over.” This story is recalled by the Doctor in the ninth season of the modern series, in the critically- and Ben-acclaimed episode “Heaven Sent”. 
  • In the legend of the Titan Prometheus, he is punished for stealing the secret of fire and giving it to humanity by being chained to a stone, and every day having an eagle tear out and eat his liver. Being an immortal, Prometheus’ liver grows back overnight and the torture is repeated. He is eventually freed from his torment by Heracles.
  • In C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, four children find their way to the magical land of Narnia, which has been under the rule of the White Witch for centuries – resulting in an endless Winter where Christmas never comes. She famously tempts one of the children, Edmund, with his favourite sweet, Turkish delight. The Witch’s backstory is revealed in the later prequel book, The Magician’s Nephew.
  • Christopher Nolan’s 2010 sci-fi thriller Inception is about a group of professional thieves who steal information by entering the subconscious of their targets. In the film, they are tasked to do the opposite – to “incept” an idea into someone’s subconscious – and they go several “layers” deep in dreams within dreams.
  • Roland is, of course, the Baron’s lost son – there’s no Duke of the Chalk! Pratchett denies the name Roland has anything to do with the fairytale Childe Rowland, which dates back to at least 1814. The story includes many tropes common to legends of Elfland, including a kidnapped younger sibling, chopping off the heads of fairies, and not eating fairy food lest you be trapped in their world forever.
  • “Ohnoetry” is a popular term for terrible poetry; it’s impossible to track its origin, as it likely has many more than one. The cartoon Liz refers to might be this one from “Toothpaste for Dinner?”
  • The “Marshmallow Test” is a famous psychological experiment devised by American Walter Mischel in the 1960s. A 4-year-old child is given a marshmallow (or other favourite lolly) and told that they can eat it now, but if they wait for 5 minutes without eating it, they’ll get another one and can eat both. It’s been replicated by hundreds of parents on YouTube, none of whom had to deal with ethics committees. It supposedly showed that children who could delay gratification did much better in life, but the findings were questioned and – as is so often the case with psychological experiments – the situation is likely much more complex. The 2014 “Let Them Eat Marshmallows” episode of The Indicator podcast does a great job of summarising the updated findings.
  • Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple is an elderly amateur sleuth from the village of St Mary Meade. The 1932 short story collection The Thirteen Problems includes her first ever appearance, “The Tuesday Night Club”.
  • The 1997 John Woo film Face/Off stars John Travolta  and Nicholas Cage as an FBI agent and a terrorist who swap faces using experimental transplant technology. It’s about as terrible/great as that makes it sound.
  • A “tidal wave” is any wave that’s created by tidal forces – the gravitational effect of the Moon on sea level. A tsunami is a wave created by a seismic disturbance, usually an earthquake or volcanic eruption, and mostly occur out to sea. It’s true that the water recedes from the shore before a tsunami hits – this is known as “drawback” – but it usually only happens very shortly before the wave hits.
  • “Super Opera Man” was our tongue-in-cheek description of Walter Plinge in his guise as the Opera Ghost in our discussion of Maskerade, in the episode “The Music of the Nitt”.
  • There is a millennia-long history of the “Scotch Irish”, Scottish peoples who migrated to Ireland. The Ulster Scots are a particular group of Presbyterians who migrated to escape religious persecution. As a result there are many Irish families with Scottish surnames (like, say, “McKenzie”) and who thus have tartans and can trace their history back through both countries.
  • The most famous type of bagpipes are the Great Highland bagpipes seen in military bands in many English-speaking countries. Bagpipes are found in various forms across the world, however, and may have been around for as long as three thousand years. The most common kind of Irish bagpipes are called the “Uilleann” pipes, and are distinguished by an elbow-operated bellows used to inflate the bag, and a chanter – the pipe fingered by the player – with an unusually broad range.
  • The Tay Bridge Disaster occurred on December 28, 1879. A severe storm hit the rail bridge over the Firth of Tay in Scotland, between Dundee and Fife, just as a train was crossing; the bridge collapsed and the train fell into the Firth, killing all 70 passengers and crew aboard.
  • There’s no shortage of comedy Irish folk songs, usually about a disaster or some other gruesome subject. Ben’s favourites include Tom Lehrer’s “The Irish Ballad”, The Scared Weird Little Guys’ “Miners”, and – from the film A Mighty Wind – The Folksmen’s “Blood on the Coal”, which combines a train crash with a mining disaster.
  • William McGonagall was most famously lampooned by British radio comedy group The Goons, with Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers both playing the character “McGoonagall” in The Goon Show. The Monty Python sketch Ben mentioned is “The Poet McTeagle”, from the sixteenth episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
  • Vogons appear in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a species of horrible officious bureaucrats tasked with demolishing the Earth to make way for a hyperspatial bypass. One of the most famous entries from the Guide specifies that Vogons are the third-worst poets in the Universe, behind the Azgoths of Kria and “Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings” of Greenbridge, Essex. (This was an alteration from earlier versions which named real poet and friend of Adams, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone, as the worst poet in the Universe. He requested his name be disguised.)
  • Liz remembers correctly that in traditional Chinese massage, it is said that the ears are the sensory organ related to the kidneys. Several sources recommend massaging the ears to promote good kidney health, while the kidneys themselves store “pre-natal Qi” inherited from your parents. So now you know! 
  • New Zealand-Canadian actor Anna Paquin was just eleven years old when she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1993 for her role as Flora in Jane Campion’s film The Piano.
  • In Game of Thrones, the television adaptation of George R R Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, the Wildling who really likes Brienne of Tarth is Tormund Giantsbane, played by Norwegian actor Kristofer Hivju. He might not be Scottish, but he is the very image of a human-sized Feegle.
  • “Crivens” is an archaic exclamation that comes from Scots, where it was originally spelt “crivvens”. It’s derived from the earlier “criffens”, which like many archaic swearwords was a form of blasphemy; it’s supposedly a contraction of “Christ fend us”. In terms of how strenuous a swear it is, think of it much like other stand-in terms for “Christ”, including “cripes” and “crikey” – i.e. not very, except perhaps to the strictest conservative Christians. It hasn’t entirely vanished from use, but is mostly used for mock surprise; it is sometimes survived via the phrase “well jings crivens and help ma boab” (approximately, “Jesus Christ, help my Robert!”), which was popularised in books and comic strips in the 1920s and 30s.
  • Red hair in humans is influenced by genes on chromosomes 4 and 16. The more prominent gene is MC1R on chromosome 16; red hair is caused by one of a number of recessive alleles (an allele is one of the possible variations of a specific gene) – i.e. a person needs to have two copies of it for it to express itself. Ben mentions partial or incomplete dominance, which is where a gene will express partly even if a dominant allele is also present. This doesn’t seem to be the case with the most prominent red hair gene, but might be explained by other alleles on chromosome 4. As is usual with biology, it’s not as simple as you might think.
  • Fraggle Rock is Jim Henson’s 1983 Muppet series for children about the Fraggles, small furry creatures that love radishes and live below the human world in a huge cave complex from which the series takes its name. The young Fraggle protagonists deal with a variety of social, emotional and philosophical issues, and occasionally travelled to “Outer Space” – the world above Fraggle Rock, populated by “Silly Creatures” (humans). Fraggle Rock was also home to the Doozers – tiny green humanoids who spent all their time making constructions out of “doozer sticks”, which the Fraggles would eat, forcing the Doozers to rebuild. There was also a third world, the Land of the Gorgs, enormous creatures who consider themselves rulers of the Universe; they have a large radish garden, and also a sentient Trash Heap who the Fraggles often visited for advice. A reboot is apparently coming soon from Apple TV+.
  • He-Man is the absurdly hyper-masculine protagonist (in name at least) of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, a 1983 sword and sorcery cartoon series with science fiction elements based on a toy line created by Mattel. He often rode into battle on his giant green tiger-like companion, Battle Cat. Both gain their magical strength after being transformed by He-Man’s magic sword, and until then have alter egos – the feckless Prince Adam, and cowardly Cringer.
  • Tartans – cloth woven in distinctive patterns of criss-crossing colours – were originally associated with places, much like other patterns (Argyle, for example). The idea of clan tartans came into vogue during a visit to Scotland by King George IV, thanks mostly to Walter Scott. They’ve since become quite a fad, and it’s possible to request your own family tartan and have it officially recorded. The podcast 99% Invisible have a mini-series about fashion, Articles of Interest, and the episode “Plaid” (which is not synonymous with tartan, by the way) has a great summary of the history of tartan. In any case, Ben’s objection to the multi-tartan wearing Feegles doesn’t have much historical backing, though as they’re all from the same place you’d still expect a bit more uniformity.
  • The Narrativia web site now only lists the exclusive deal with Motive Pictures and Endeavour Content for screen adaptations. It’s unclear what this means, if anything, for the films that were in production, namely the Henson adaptation of The Wee Free Men and the animated version of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
  • The association between certain sounds and physical shapes is the “Bouba/kiki effect”. The excellent puzzle videogame Baba Is You, in which you manipulate the rules of the game world in order to progress, is named for this effect.
  • Ben still can’t find the earlier Pratchett book which talked about “gl” words and the equivalent of visual onomatopoeia; it’s not The Colour of Magic, Sourcery!, Moving Pictures or Soul Music. If you know which one it is, please let us know!
  • Magrat’s mentor was the research witch Goodie Whemper, based in the Lancre town of Mad Stoat.
  • We covered all three books in the Bromeliad trilogy in the previous episodes “Upscalator to Heaven”, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy” and “The Thing Beneath My Wings”. 
  • By Young Sam, Ben means Sam Vimes Jr, not Sam Vimes Sr when he was younger, as in Night Watch.
  • The other Pratchett books for younger readers that Ben hasn’t read yet are Nation, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (though we’re covering this next episode), and the rest of the books in the Tiffany Aching series: A Hat Full of Sky, Wintersmith, I Shall Wear Midnight and The Shepherd’s Crown.
  • Listener Bethany wondered on Twitter if “Fairy Nettle” was one of the aliases used by the witches in Witches Abroad, but while they did claim to be “flower fairies”, Magrat called herself “Fairy Tulip” and Granny “Fairy Daisy”, while Nanny called herself “Fairy Hedgehog”.
  • We didn’t end up talking about this in the episode, but Ben had a question he felt wasn’t answered clearly in the book: is the Queen of Fairyland the Queen of the Elves we met in Lords and Ladies? They have many similarities, including missing husbands, but she has no other elves, only smaller fairies. What do you think? 
  • In Harry Potter, the Grindylow is depicted as a small green squid-like creature with a more humanoid face, small horns and two arms ending in tentacled fingers, though the prose descriptions note that their physical forms can vary considerably. They are featured most prominently in the third and fourth books.
  • Drop Bears are mythical very real and dangerous Australian creatures. Their Discworld equivalent appears in The Last Continent, as discussed in #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land”.
  • Eisteddfods in Australia are traditional performance competitions with common sections or events including poetry recital, public speaking, dramatic performance and readings of various kinds. Their origins lie in Wales. (We’ve previously mentioned them on the podcast in a footnote; we’ll add a link to that episode when we remember which one it is!)
  • Kasabian are an English rock band, formed in 1997. Bien is French for “good”.
  • The Dungeons & Dragons reference web site Ben refers to D&D Beyond.
  • You can find the Kill Your Darlings podcast here. The magazine takes its name from the advice given to writers: you must be prepared to give up your favourite ideas – to “kill your darlings” – when they don’t work.

 

#Pratchat31 Notes and Errata

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Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 31, “It’s Just a Step to the West“, featuring guest Joel Martin, discussing the 2012 Long Earth novel The Long Earth.

  • The episode title is a play on “It’s just a jump to the left”, the first instruction from dance anthem The Time Warp from the musical The Rocky Horror Show. It follows a young couple who are on their way to visit their old science lecturer to tell him they’re engaged, but on the way – actually, no, we can’t explain it. It makes no sense. You just have to experience for yourself.
  • “Hard” science fiction is science fiction that attempts to be scientifically accurate, or at least scientifically plausible. Notable authors in this style include Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson and Stephen Baxter. (Yes, it’s a bit of a boy’s club; please let us know your favourite hard sci-fi authors of other genders!)
  • Joel previously appeared on episode 14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation“, discussing The Colour of Magic on the 35th anniversary of its publication. We still hope to have him back for our episode covering The Light Fantastic on its 35th anniversary in June 2021.
  • Stephen Baxter is an English science fiction author with degrees in Engineering and Mathematics who has written nearly sixty novels, giving Terry a run for his money! His most famous book is probably the award-winning 1995 novel The Time Ships, an official sequel to H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. His Xelee series encompasses thirteen books, beginning with Raft, a novel that evolved out of the short story Joel mentions here. (Not to be confused with the Steven King short story “The Raft”, which is…very different.)
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is, unfortunately, the very real fourth film in the Indiana Jones franchise. Released in 2008, and directed by Steven Spielberg, its set in 1957 and stars Harrison Ford as whip-cracking, two-fisted adventure archaeologist Indiana Jones, who alongside old flame Marion (Karen Allen) and her son Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) battles Soviet agent Cate Blanchett for control of an alien crystal skull which can unlock psychic powers. You can probably see why we weren’t into it. A fifth Indiana Jones film is in pre-production and scheduled for release in 2022.
  • 1917 is a 2019 World War I film directed by Sam Mendes, and made to look like it happens in two long, continuous shots. It follows two young British soldiers sent across France to deliver orders calling off a doomed offensive.
  • Mink Car is the eighth studio album by American alternative rock band They Might Be Giants, released on September 11, 2001. Pratchett appears to have been a fan of the band, as references to their work appear in a few of his books, including the spoof band “We’re Definitely Dwarves” in Soul Music.
  • The mulefa are peaceful intelligent creatures from a parallel Earth featured in The Amber Spyglass, the third book in the original His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. They have a superficial resemblance to elephants, but have a diamond-shaped skeleton with no spine, and a sophisticated culture, language and tools – including the use of special seed pods as wheels.
  • Jasper Fforde is an English author best known for his novels about Thursday Next, beginning with 2001’s The Eyre Affair. Next is a “literary detective” from a not-entirely-serious parallel world, and her investigations sometimes take her inside great works of fiction. She is from her reality’s version of 1985, and many of Fforde’s books are set in worlds which feel like the recent past.
  • As one of Liz’s faves, we’ve mentioned English author Diana Wynne Jones many times in previous episodes. Her works include the Chrestomanci series, Howl’s Moving Castle and its sequels, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Jones has been cited as an inspiration by many British writers, including Pratchett.
  • The term Datum Earth refers to the concept of a datum reference (or just datum) – an important part of an object nominated as a reference point for measurements. Hence the Datum Earth is the reference point for all travel East and West. The concept of datums – and yes, that’s the correct plural in this sense – sees use in many disciplines, including charting, mapping, engineering and many crafts. Big thanks to listener Nathan J. Phillips for explaining this one over Twitter!
  • The North American Discworld Convention is a bi-annual convention which began in 2009, running opposite the UK convention which operates bi-annually in even years. The convention moves around the US; in 2011 it was held in Madison, Wisconsin, hence that city’s prominence in The Long Earth, while the 2019 convention was held in Los Angeles, with a theme of “Hooray for Holy Wood”. (We were very kindly invited, but unable to attend – maybe in 2021!) You can find out more at the official web site, nadwcon.com.
  • We have mentioned the film Stargate and its television successor, Stargate SG-1, many times. Both follow an archaeologist and military commander who travel through a “stargate”, an ancient alien device that allows near-instantaneous travel to other worlds with stargates across the galaxy. The television series has often made a plot point out of the possibility of knowledge of the stargate – and the US military’s stargate programme – becoming public.
  • Prometheus is Ridley Scott’s 2012 film set in the Alien universe, a prequel in which humans discover an extinct alien civilisation on a distant planet. Oh, and some horrible monsters, of course. It features Michael Fassbender as android David 8 (more on him below) and Noomi Rapace as archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw. It’s not good; maybe archaeologists and aliens just don’t mix?
  • Jules Verne (1828 – 1905) was a French science fiction writer in the 19th century whose books were adventures based on scientific ideas. His most famous books are Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth), Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) and Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days), all of which involve fantastic journeys either to extraordinary places or via extraordinary means. Maître du monde, or Master of the World, was his penultimate novel, published a year before his death. It’s a sequel to the earlier book Robur-le-Conquérant (Robur the Conquerer), and serves as a warning of totalitarianism. In the novel, science tyrant Robur uses his mastery of technology to create an extraordinary craft that can travel on land, sea and through the air so fast it is invisible, and uses it to terrorise the United States.
  • Stonehenge is the most famous monument consisting of standing stones, first constructed around 5,000 years ago for purposes which remain mysterious. It’s in Wiltshire, the part of England in which Terry and his family lived much of their lives. The Singing Stones are an invention for the book, but there are stones that resonate when struck in much the same way. These “lithophones” occur naturally, like the “ringing rocks” found in Pennsylvania and New South Wales, and can be made into instruments called lithophones. A famous example are the Musical Stones of Skiddaw, constructed in the 18th century and now on display at the Keswick Museum and Art Gallery in northern England.
  • Neal Stephenson is an American speculative fiction author who has written sixteen novels, the most famous probably Snow Crash (1992). Stephenson mixes themes of history, technology, religion and politics with a wry sense of humour – the main character in Snow Crash is named “Hiro Protagonist” – and the comparison to the combined Pratchett/Baxter style is apt. As well as books set in not too distant cyberpunk-ish futures, he has also written historical novels, but most also involve themes of technology and computers.
  • “The High Meggas” was written in 1986, but not actually published until 2012, when it was included in Pratchett’s 2012 collection of short fiction, A Blink of the Screen – the same year as The Long Earth! In the short story, reclusive stepper Larry Linsay is minding his own business on an Earth in the High Meggas, avoiding the local “super baboons” and their leader, which he calls Big Yin. He detects the arrive of two security guards from the “gumment”: Joshua Valienté and Anna Shea. He captures them both, and each claims the other poisoned the water supply at Forward Base, the nearest government facility, killing fifty people. He has to decide who to trust, while still pondering the mysteries of the High Meggas… The term “High Meggers” (note different spelling) appears in chapter two of the novel with the same meaning as in the original short story: those earths more than a million steps away from Earth (not just in the high thousands, as Ben mentions). Both the story and chapter two of the book also use the term “Low Earths” to describe worlds only a few steps away from the original. The terms “Datum Earth”, “Long Earth” and even “step” do not appear in the original story, which uses “move” to describe the act of stepping – a term echoed in The Long Earth when Joshua refers to a “Knight’s Move”.
  • The names Joshua and Jesus are close to each other in both English and the original Hebrew. In Hebrew, ישוע or “Yeshua” was a common alternative form of יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (“Yehoshua”). While they’re distinct in the source, Greek texts translate them both as Iesous (Ἰησοῦς), which became the Latin Iesus, and then in English, Jesus. In Greek Bibles Joshua is thus also named Jesus, though he is referred to as “Jesus, son of Naue” to differentiate him from Jesus, son of God. There are some English Bibles in which Joshua is referred to as Jesus, as well. The confusion doesn’t usually go back the same way, and some ancient texts seem to make it clear that Jesus only ever used the shorter version of the name, though it’s worth pointing out that Jesus was a pretty common name back then.
  • We’ve not been able to find any record of gunmetal covered Bibles being used during the First World War, but there are certainly plenty of stories of Bibles in pockets stopping bullets – most of them probably apocryphal. The stories had an effect, though; metal-covered “heart shield Bibles” were common artefacts carried by American soldiers during World War II.
  • The Biblical Joshua (aka Hoshea, Jehoshua or Jesus; see the note above) was Moses’ assistant, as documented in the Books of Exodus and Numbers in the Torah and Old Testament. He was born in Egypt before the exodus, and was present for many of Moses’ famous deeds. Later he spied on Canaan for Moses and after Moses’ death was chosen by God to lead the Israelites, and blessed with invincibility. He led the conquest of Canaan and lived a long life, dying aged 110. His later life is chronicled in the Book of Joshua.
  • The toaster episode of The Simpsons is Treehouse of Terror V from the show’s sixth season in 1994, one of the annual Halloween anthologies. In the second segment, “Time and Punishment”, Homer accidentally turns a broken toaster into a time machine and travels to the past, altering history multiple times. As well as the no donuts world, he also creates a dystopia ruled by a despotic Ned Flanders.
  • In the fourth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the Quidditch World Cup stadium is hidden from non-wizards through the use of a “Muggle-Repelling Charm“. Muggles who came too near would suddenly remember an appointment for which they were late and hurry away.
  • Celtic mythology is the source of most modern ideas of “the fae” in Western cultures, and belief in the “fair folk” (who go by many epithets) is still common in Ireland, as briefly discussed in episode 15 (and further in an outtake featured in episode three of our subscribers-only bonus podcast, Ook Club). The Otherworld as a concept is older and broader, and present in many religions and belief systems, but the Celtic version – known as Tír na nÓg, Annwn or Avalon in various traditions – matches up pretty well with the way the Trolls and Elves of the Long Earth use stepping to occasionally visit Datum Earth.
  • In August 2019, an American musician tweeted about the need to ban assault weapons; in response, another Twitter used asked “How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?” The hypothetical was widely mocked and quickly became a widespread meme, though it didn’t last long. It resurfaced briefly in September that year after a news report of feral hogs in Canada potentially crossing the border into Montana. It’s worth noting that feral hogs – or feral pigs as we call them in Australia – are definitely real and can be quite destructive to wildlife, especially in countries like the US and Australia where they are not a native species. While they are indeed dangerous, attacks are rare.
  • In X-Men comics, Nightcrawler is the alias of the German mutant, circus performer and superhero, Kurt Wagner. His mutation gives him a demonic appearance, with blue skin, red eyes, a prehensile tail, pointed ears and three-fingered hands and two-toed feet. He also has the ability to teleport short distances, disappearing and reappearing in a puff of smoke, with the smell of brimstone. He first appeared in 1975, and has featured in many adaptations of the comics. Nightcrawler is a major character in the 2003 feature film X2, where he is played by Scottish actor Alan Cumming. In the opening scene he attempts to kill the American President, leaping and teleporting to avoid the President’s security. He is often depicted fighting in the same way in various X-Men videogames.
  • Sliders is an American science fiction series that ran for five seasons from 1995 to 2000. It starred Jerry O’Connell as Quinn Mallory, a genius physics student who invents a device that creates temporary wormholes into parallel universes. He accidentally traps himself and three others – his physics professor (John Rhys-Davies), his friend Wade (Sabrina Lloyd) and passing soul singer Rembrandt Brown (Cleavant Derricks) – on the other side of a wormhole. Each episode Quinn’s “timer” randomly resets, counting down the time until a new wormhole opens to another alternate reality. The episode Ben describes about a population controlled alternate Earth is “Luck of the Draw”, the first season finale. While there are no Trolls or Elves, Sliders does have the Kromaggs, an intelligent species of apes from a parallel Earth who can also travel between universes, stripping other versions of Earth for resources. (Ben recommends the first two seasons, but it gets a bit rocky after that, with three of the four main cast leaving )
  • The Gap is an American clothing company founded in 1969. It grew to prominence in the 1990s, and now has thousands of stores in more than forty countries. The company owns several famous clothing brands, including Banana Republic and Old Navy. It has been involved in controversy over conditions in its factories and those of its suppliers in Saipan, Jordan and India.
  • Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee Sequence spans nine novels and more than fifty short stories. It touches on many hard sci-fi ideas drawing on quantum physics, and follows humanity’s expansion into the wider universe and their conflict with the Xeelee, an ancient species of aliens in the “so technologically advanced they are almost gods” mould.
  • The song “Step in Time” was written by the Sherman Brothers for the Walt Disney’s 1964 feature film adaptation of Mary Poppins. It’s sung by Mary’s friend Bert (American actor Dick Van Dyke, doing an infamously dodgy Cockney accent) and his fellow chimney sweeps as they dance on the rooftops of London. It’s a lot like “Knees Up Mother Brown”, with each verse identical except for a different repeated dance instruction, like “Kick your knees up”, “Flap like a birdie” and “Link your elbows”. (Later verses change these up for other phrases – including “Votes for women”!) In the 2004 Broadway musical, the song is introduced with the idea that chimney sweeps are like guardian angels who “step in, just in time” when someone is in trouble.
  • A potato battery is created by sticking a piece of zinc and a piece of copper into a potato and connecting their exposed ends to an electrical circuit. The acidic potato juice reacts with the metals, resulting in a build up of free electrons in the zinc, and a loss of electrons from the copper. This creates an imbalance in electrical charge, causing electrons to travel from the zinc through the electrical circuit to the copper, producing an electrical current of about 0.5 Volts. (Lemons, the more popular vegetable battery choice, generate a higher voltage because they have more acidic juice.)
  • In the 2007 videogame Portal, the player character, Chell, is forced to navigate a series of “test chambers” that can only be escaped through the use of a “portal gun”, which creates pairs of portals that link two locations. The test facility is run by a sinister artificial intelligence named GlaDOS. In the sequel, 2011’s Portal 2, GlaDOS is deposed by another AI and has her “personality core” attached to a potato battery, forcing her to team up with Chell. Neither of them is happy about it.
  • Most laptops do contain metallic iron, since most of them still use magnetic hard drives. This form of storage, while susceptible to damage from physical knocks, is still a lot cheaper than hardier solid-state technology, so many laptops – especially ones with large storage capacities – still use it. Modern magnetic drives use iron and cobalt layered over aluminium, but a solid state drive largely depends on silicon, so it wouldn’t be too hard to make laptops that could travel between Earths.
  • British glam rock star David Bowie appears on the cover of his 1973 album Aladdin Sane in character as Aladdin Sane, with a stylised red and blue lightning bolt painted across his face.
  • Michael Fassbender plays two android characters – David 8 and Walter – in the films Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Like the androids in the earlier films – particularly Ian Holm’s Ash in Alien, and Lance Henrikson’s Bishop in Aliens and Alien 3 – he is portrayed as an advanced synthetic organism, rather than a metal robot.
  • We discussed Thomas and Will Riker, the transporter twins from Star Trek: The Next Generation, in our previous episode, “Looking Widdershins“. See that episode’s show notes for an explanation.
  • In the X-Men comics and adaptations, mutants like Nightcrawler are humans who possess a specific genetic mutation, known as the X-gene, which causes them to develop superpowers, usually around puberty. Despite the prevalence of superheroes in the Marvel universe, mutants as a group are subject to mistrust, prejudice and bigotry. Their stories have served as allegories for the struggles of queer folks, people of colour and other marginalised communities. Anti-mutant sentiment is often shown to be political or religious in origin, or at least justified that way. There are many examples of charismatic leaders stirring up hatred against mutants for their own ends, including the Reverend William Stryker in the 1982 graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills, and recurring character Senator Robert Kelly, both of whom appear in the film adaptations.
  • For any younger listeners, September 11 refers to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in which members of the group Al-Quaida highjacked four passenger aircraft and flew two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, killing nearly 3,000 people.
  • A “pilot episode” is the initial episode produced of a television series, especially in the United States, where pilots are ordered by networks to determine if a series will be produced. As a result they are often double the normal length and spend as much time setting up the characters and premise of the show as exploring any particular plot. Many pilots are re-shot after a series has been given the green light to produce more episodes, or are repurposed as flashback material or a later episode.
  • The 1999 film Galaxy Quest, directed by Dean Parisot, is about the cast of a 1980s sci-fi show, Galaxy Quest, who now spend most of their time attending conventions. They are contacted for help by the alien Thermians, who believe the TV show was a documentary. The all-star cast includes Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Sam Rockwell, Enrico Colantoni, Tony Shalhoub and Justin Long. It’s a loving parody of science fiction television and its fans, but with a heavy emphasis on the “loving”. It’s lasting popularity, especially among Star Trek fans, led to the production of Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary, released for the film’s twentieth anniversary in 2019.
  • In the world of Harry Potter, a squib is the child of magical parents who is not magical themselves – or at least, not able to do magic, for example the casting of spells. The canonical example is Hogwarts caretaker Argus Filch. We’ve previously talked about squibs, including way back in episode 2, “Murdering a Curry“.
  • Stephen Baxter’s The Massacre of Mankind is not the first sequel to The War of the Worlds, but it is the only official one, authorised by the Wells estate. Baxter – who also wrote an official sequel to The Time Machine, The Time Ships – is a vice president of the H. G. Wells Society, a position he has held since 2006. The book is set in 1920 – 13 years after the events of the original book – and follows Julie Elphinstone’s journey through a second Martian invasion. Like many sequels it is also an alternate history, showing how the original invasion changed Europe and the rest of the world.
  • Baxter collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke on the Time Odyssey trilogy, which is related to Clarke’s Space Odyssey series (Clarke coined the term “orthequel” for them, which is…unhelpful). They deal with a species of godlike aliens who – in an opposite move to Space Odyssey’s monolith building aliens – seek to remove other intelligent species, but wish to preserve a record of their cultures in an alternate universe. Baxter also wrote the 2000 novel The Light of Other Days, based on a synopsis by Clarke, which explores the consequences of technology allowing instantaneous viewing of events from anywhere in space and time.
  • We discussed Good Omens, Pratchett’s collaboration with Neil Gaiman, in episode 15, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and We Feel Nice and Accurate)“. Both Pratchett and Gaiman acknowledged that Pratchett was the dominant voice in that book, not least because Gaiman was not an experienced novelist at the time and was busy making the release schedule for his hit comic Sandman. Despite that, elements of Gaiman’s style, and his influence on the plot, are definitely noticeable.
  • The short story version of Raft, which Baxter expanded into the first novel of the Xeelee Sequence, was first published in the magazine Interzone in 1989. Finding out if it’s been collected anywhere has proven difficult, but you can find it online here, thanks to UK sci-fi ebook publishers infinity plus. You can also find a lot of short works by Baxter on his official web site, including many excerpts from and additions to the Long Earth series (most of them from later in the series, so beware of spoilers). We’ll add some more recommendations for works by Baxter here when we get them.
  • We also mentioned the Moa in episode 29, “Great Rimward Land“. It was a large flightless bird native to New Zealand, now extinct. They were not carnivorous but could certainly kill a human being.
  • Logan Paul is an American YouTube star, actor, podcaster and boxer. He became infamous in 2018 after visiting Aokigahara forest near Mount Fuji in Japan and posting footage of a man who had died by suicide there on his YouTube channel. While this was his worst stunt, he has done a lot of other awful stuff, including being cruel to animals, making disparaging remarks about homosexuality, and participating in dangerous trending fads. He was suspended by YouTube for a “pattern of behaviour”, though he claims brain damage sustained playing high school football has impaired his ability to have empathy for others. He’s also a Flat Earther.
  • Depending on who you ask there are between four and five thousand varieties of potato. Let that sink in for a second. If you want to find out more, a great place to start is the European Cultivated Potato Database, maintained by SASA, a division of the Scottish Agriculture and Rural Delivery Directorate. The database very happily has all kinds of data, including “Utilisation Characteristics”; Ben’s favourites are “Crisp suitability” and “French fry suitability” (covering both possible meanings of “chips”).
  • We’ve mentioned the Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones before, in episode 22, “The Cat in the Prat“. It consists of six novels and one collection of four novellas, all published between 1977 and 2006. In the books, the “Chrestomanci” is an enchanter – a powerful magician – employed by the government of World 12B to police the user of magic. The current Chrestomanci in nearly all the books is Christopher Chant.
  • In Verne’s Hector Servadac (Off on a Comet), first published in 1877, 36 humans are swept away on the surface of comet that briefly collides with Earth near Gibraltar. The title character, a Captain in the French Algerian army, must contend with the English and Spanish solders and other people with whom he is marooned, while experiencing many strange phenomena on a two year orbit away from and then back towards Earth. The original has an anti-Semitic tone concerning one character which drew criticism even at the time, leading to low sales by Verne’s standards. Ben first experienced the story via the Australian animated adaptation made in 1979, which leaves out the offending character. (It’s here on YouTube, though with subtitles and misattributed to a 1976 US cartoon series.)
  • There are twelve “series” of alternate worlds in the Chrestomanci series, each one a collection of worlds which are all similar to each other. Christopher Chant is from world 12A, where magic is common; world 12B is the “real world”, i.e. where we live. The worlds were first explored and numbered by the “Great Mages” who live on the worlds of series one.
  • In the 2001 film The One, directed by James Wong, Jet Li plays Gabriel Yulaw, an agent of the MultiVerse Authority, who goes rogue and starts killing the alternate versions of himself in other universes, as this makes the remaining versions stronger. Li also plays Gabe Law, the las remaining alternate of Gabriel, who is a police officer in Los Angeles on our world. It’s a cool concept but critics pretty universally panned the film.
  • In Diana Wynne Jones’ The Homeward Bounders, demonic entities known only as Them play boardgames with the many alternate universes – not unlike the gods of Dunmanifestin. When twelve-year-old Jamie discovers a group of them playing with his world, they make him a “Homeward Bounder” – forced to “bound” between the worlds, unable to influence Their game, but also virtually unaging and immortal as he searches for his home universe.
  • “Dr Tuesday Lobsang Rampa“, aka Cyril Henry Hoskin, wrote and published The Third Eye in 1956. In it he claimed to have awakened his powers of clairvoyance through “the third eye” ritual, in which fellow Lamas drilled a hole in his forehead and implanted a sliver of wood “treated by fire and herbs” in his brain. Afterwards, one of the Lamas told him that for the rest of your life he would “see people as they are and not as they pretend to be”. When Hoskin was uncovered as a potential fraud by private investigators working for a Tibetologist, he did not deny his origins, but claimed that his body was now inhabited by Lobsang Rama. The story only gets weirder and we recommend you read up on it.
  • Susan Calvin is a brilliant but emotionless “robopsychologist” who features in a dozen of Isaac Asimov’s short stories about robots. Marvin, the “Paranoid Android”, is a genius robot with a “genuine people personality” that means he is always depressed; he appears in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in all its incarnations. We discussed the horse from The Dark Side of the Sun in episode 18, “Sundog Gazillionaire“.
  • Jeph Jacques’ Questionable Content is a web comic launched in 2003. It’s set in Northampton, Massatuchetts, in either a near future or alternate reality setting, and revolves around the day to day life of indie rock fan Marten Reed and his extended circle of friends, who include several artificial intelligences with robotic bodies. In 2019 it passed 4,000 strips and is still going, with instalments released three times a week. Liz and Ben are fans.
  • Jack&Ian is the compound name for biologist Jack Cohen and mathematician Ian Stewart, co-authors of the four Science of Discworld books, as well as What Would a Martian Look Like? and several other fiction and non-fiction books. Jack passed away in 2019.
  • The Kardashev scale, created by Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, is a way of classifying intelligent civilisations based on the amount of energy they are able to use. Type I civilisations harness the energy naturally available on their own planet (as humans currently do); Type II civilisations harness all the power available from their home star; and Type III civilisations harness the power output of an entire galaxy. Extensions to the scale have since added Type IV (the power of an entire universe) and Type V (the power of multiple universes).
  • Andre Norton was an American speculative fiction writer, and the first woman to hold many of science fiction’s highest honours. Her novels The Crossroads of Time (1956) and Star Gate (1958) are among the earliest alternate worlds stories to reference the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, and blend science ficiton with sword and sorcery.
  • InterWorld is a 2007 standalone novel written by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves, in which high school student Joey discovers he is a Walker, one of a number of people who can step between alternate realities, and is recruited by InterWorld, an organisation working to keep the forces of magic and science in balance.
  • Nine Princes in Amber by American fantasy writer Roger Zelazny is the first in the Chronicles of Amber series. In the series, “Amber” is one of two true worlds; all others, including the regular Earth that we know, are merely shadows caused by the tensions between these two worlds. Nobles of those true worlds are able to gain the power to “walk through Shadow”, travelling to any permutation of reality they can imagine.
  • Feels like a while since we referenced 99% Invisible! The episode “Ten Thousand Years” from December 2014 is one of Ben’s favourites, and discusses the difficulty of creating adequate warnings for nuclear waste, which might need to be understood many thousands of years in the future. Stick with it right to the end, it’s amazing.
  • The Long Earth audiobook is narrated by English actor and comedian Michael Fenton Stevens, who also narrated the other books in the series, as well as the non-fiction parts of The Science of Discworld books, The Folklore of Discworld, and some of the stories in the collection A Blink of the Screen.