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Mustrum Ridcully

#Pratchat26 Notes and Errata

8 December 2019 by Ben 1 Comment

Theses are the show notes and errata for episode 26, “The Long Dark Mr Teatime of the Soul”, featuring guest Michael Williams discussing the 1996 Discworld novel Hogfather.

Iconographic Evidence

Michael’s story about his 2014 interview with Pratchett ended up on the cutting room floor, but you can watch the interview itself in its entirety on YouTube below. (Subscribers can also hear his behind the scenes story about it in the third episode of our bonus podcast Ook Club.)

Notes and Errata

  • We’ve previously mentioned the steam roller story back in episode 6, but in brief: Terry stipulated in his will that his hard drives containing unfinished manuscripts be destroyed by being crushed under a vintage steam roller. The request was carried out in August 2017 at the Dorset Steam Fair.
  • Liz has said “time is a flat circle” many times, beginning way back in episode 5. It’s a popular meme derived from a scene in the first season of True Detective, based on the idea of “eternal return”.
  • To put Douglas Adams‘ death in Internet context, he died two months after Wikipedia was launched, and a year or more before the arrival of Facebook, YouTube or Reddit.
  • The Watch TV series is a Narrative production for BBC America, currently filming in South Africa. It will launch in 2020.
  • Mary Poppins is the magical nanny protagonist of eight books by English-Australian author P. L. Travers, beginning with Mary Poppins in 1934. Mary arrives on the East wind and is characterised as being stern and vain, but her magic wins over the children of the Banks family. She was famously portrayed by Julie Andrews in the 1964 Disney movie musical, which Travers herself did not like. Emily Blunt took over for the 2018 sequel.
  • Back in January 2019, the official Wizarding World twitter account really did reveal that wizards used magic for sanitation before they had plumbing. You can find it here.
  • In Victorian England, governesses occupied a weird middle ground, being neither a member of the family nor a servant. So it’s possible a noblewoman might take up the role.
  • The phrase “unstuck in time” is used to describe the plight of Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Pilgrim experiences some of his life out of order.
  • We previously mentioned Hyacinth Bucket – who insists her surname is pronounced “bouquet” – in episode 24. Hyacinth is a wannabe socialite and the main character in the sit-com Keeping Up Appearances.
  • Dementors are magical creatures in the Harry Potter universe. They are soulless phantoms that suck the joy and sanity out of their victims. The wizard prison Azkaban employs them as guards.
  • Thanos, “the mad titan”, is an antagonist from Marvel Comics. He is famously the main villain in Avengers: Infinity War, based loosely on the Infinity War comic book series. In the film, Thanos seeks to destroy half of the life in the universe, ostensibly to restore balance and improve the quality of life for those who survive. An internet meme suggested he was right to do so.
  • “The Fat Man” is an alias used by Sidney Greenstreet’s character, Walter Gutman, in the archetypal 1941 film noir movie The Maltese Falcon.
  • Adam is a part-human, part-demon and part-cybernetic creature created by Maggie Walsh as part of the Initiative’s super soldier program in season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
  • In 1993, Sydney won the bid to host the 2000 Summer Olympics. At the announcement ceremony, IOC President Juan Antonia Samaranch firs fumbled with the envelope, and then uttered “The winner is Sydney“, his slightly accented pronunciation becoming almost as famous as the reaction of the NSW Premier (not least because of this segment on The Late Show).
  • Platform 9 3/4 is the magically hidden platform at Kings Cross Station in London that wizards use to board the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter universe.
  • The Death of Rats first appeared during Reaper Man though his first proper role was in Soul Music.
  • The original Helvetica T-shirt, featuring the names of the four Beatles, was designed by Experimental Jetset in 2001. They have been many, many parodies and homages since.
  • Pork products clearly don’t bother the Hogfather – as we failed to point out, he traditionally leaves them as gifts for everyone else!
  • Reindeer are eaten in many Scandinavian countries, as well as in Alaska, Finland and Canada. We don’t think they’re ever left out for Santa though.
  • Pigs can and have eaten humans, and this is a famous method of corpse disposal in fiction. Perhaps the most notable (and gruesome) explanation is by the character Brick Top in Guy Ritchie’s 2000 film Snatch, though it was also a method favoured by Al Swearengen in the television series Deadwood.
  • The phrase “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” comes originally from an 1897 editorial in The New York Sun newspaper, written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon. It is now the most reprinted editorial in the English language.
  • The Santa Clause is a 1994 comedy film starring Tim Allen as Scott Calvin, a divorced toy salesman who accidentally kills Santa and finds he is then obliged to take over his role.
  • ELIZA was created by Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid 1960s at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was meant as a parody of indirect psychology and to show the limitations of human-machine interaction, but instead became one of the first in a long line of “chatterbot” programs and was seen as very lifelike. You can easily google up a live online version and try it yourself.
  • Ridcully’s curses manifested during the events of Reaper Man, when Death’s temporary retirement causes an excess of life.
  • Titivillus is discussed in “Typo Demom“, episode 106 of Helen Zaltzman’s language podcast The Allusionist.
  • As Liz mentions, the “tittle” is a diacritic mark most commonly seen in English over the lowercase i and j.
  • As many listeners have now told us, YMPA stands for “Young Men’s Pagan Association”, as mentioned in a book we’ve not yet re-read for the podcast, The Light Fantastic. The longer acronym YMRCIGBSA appears later on towels stolen by Albert for use in Death’s Domain.
  • “Good King Wenceslas” is a popular English Christmas Carol written in 1853 by John Mason Neale, set to the music of a 13th-century Spring carol, “Tempus adest floridum”. The king – a martyr and saint who died in the 10th century – sees a poor man and decides to personally deliver food, wine and fuel to him.
  • The Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series was preceded by a film in 1992, starring Kirsty Swanson, Luke Perry, Pee Wee Herman and Donald Sutherland.
  • Boggarts are creatures from the Harry Potter universe that change shape into the thing their victims fear most.
  • In Tooth Fairy, The Rock plays a tough ice hockey player nicknamed “the tooth fairy” because he often knocks out rival players’ teeth, but his anti-social behaviour – especially towards his girlfriends’ son – leads to him being forced to serve community service time as a tooth fairy.
  • In our world, the idea that you should believe in a God just in case he’s real is known as Pascal’s Wager, after French philosopher Blaise Pascal.
  • We previously mentioned Diana Wynne Jones’ 1986 fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle in episode 17.
  • Klaus Terber’s The Settlers of Catan (now known as Catan), the most famous European-style boardgame and one of the first to succeed in English-speaking markets, was first published in Germany in 1995.
  • While William Hartnell does indeed address the Doctor Who audience in “The Feast of Steven” – coincidentally the feast day featured in “Good King Wenceslas” – it seems this may have been planned and a BBC tradition at the time for dramas broadcast on Christmas Day.
  • A “centurion“, as we’ve mentioned previously, is a drinking “game” attempted by Australian students in which participants drink one shot of beer every minute for 100 minutes. Since this equates to more than nine pints in less than two hours, we do not recommend it. (A half-centurion is 50 shots either in 50 or 100 minutes.)
  • A Country Practice was a popular soap about the fictional rural NSW town of Wandin Valley, focussing on the doctors and nurses who worked at the local base hospital. It ran on Channel 7 from 1981 to 1994.
  • Lift Off was a popular television program for young children on the ABC which ran from 1992 to 1995. It featured a mix of live action, animation and puppetry. “EC” was a magical rag doll with a wooden head intended to be a blank slate and thus relatable to “every child”, though the initials initially stood for “Elizabeth and Charlie”, the names given to the doll by two of the children in the show.
  • You can watch Graham Chapman’s funeral service on YouTube.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Death, Death of Rats, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, HEX, Hogfather, Michael Williams, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Susan, Unseen University, Wizards

#Pratchat63 Notes and Errata

8 January 2023 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 63, “Decline by Committee“, discussing the 2005 Discworld short story “A Collegiate Casting-out of Devilish Devices”, plus some extra discussion of the novel Thud!, with special guest Matt Roden.

Iconographic Evidence

Here’s the “Explaining a Board Game” sketch from Australian sketch group Aunty Donna, which Ben has indeed been sent many, many times – including by Matt, shortly after we recorded this episode.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is a pun on the phrase “Design by Committee”, which refers to a situation where no-one is in charge of the design of a product, leading to a lack of direction.
  • “Trilogy in four parts” is borrowed from Douglas Adams, who described The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy book series this way after publishing the fourth novel, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. It later became “The Increasingly Innacurately Named Hitchhikers Trilogy” with the publication of the fifth book Mostly Harmless.
  • You can find the first three parts of our trilogy here:
    • #PratchatPlaysThud – “The Troll’s Gambit”, about Thud the board game, with Dr Melissa Rogerson
    • #Pratchat61 – “What Terry Wrote”, about Thud!, with Matt Roden.
    • #Pratchat62 – “There’s a Cow in There“, about Where’s My Cow?, with Jo and Francine from The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret.
  • “Nepo baby” was a buzz-term in late 2022. It’s short for “nepotism baby”, a new name for the concept of getting a leg up via a family connection. That’s as old as…well, a very old thing, but discussion of it really took off as younger social media users learned to their surprise that many Hollywood stars and influencers have parents or other relatives they’d never heard of who are also in show business. Matt asks Ben if he read “the article” – Ben hadn’t, but we think Matt meant “What is a Nepotism Baby, Anyway? How a ‘Nepo Baby’ is Born” by Nate Jones for Vulture, which was also a cover story for New York magazine.
  • Ridcully’s snooker table covered in paperwork appears not in Lords and Ladies, but in Soul Music. A footnote reveals that a wizard’s trick shots can include temporal spin, and that Ridcully once bounced a ball off the Bursar’s head “last Tuesday”.
  • We’ve listed below the senior faculty members of Unseen University who appear in most of the Wizards books. (We’ve tried to avoid any spoilers here for books not yet covered on the podcast.)
    • Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor
    • Ponder Stibbons, Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic, Reader in Invisible Writings, and Praelector. (He later acquired more titles, including Reader in Non-Volatile Intelligence, Cantoride Speaker in Slood Refurgance and at least one it would be a spoiler to reveal here.)
    • A. A. Dinwiddie (aka “The Bursar”), Bursar. His name is revealed in The Truth.
    • Henry (last name not revealed), the Dean of Pentacles, known as “the Dean”. (His name is revealed in a later book.)
    • The Lecturer in Recent Runes.
    • The Chair of Indefinite Studies.
    • The Senior Wrangler.
  • Ponder Stibbons and Victor Tugelbend were students taking final exams at the time of the rediscovery of Holy Wood, as chronicled in Moving Pictures. (See #Pratchat10, “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Broomstick”.) This was indeed also the first appearance of Archchancellor Ridcully, though he doesn’t play a major part in a novel until Reaper Man, which also introduces the rest of the faculty we know best.
  • We discussed our theories about Rincewind’s entry into Unseen University in #Pratchat55, “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon”.
  • The “National Interest Test” (NIT) was a requirement added to the grant application process for the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2018 by the previous Liberal/National coalition government. The ARC is the independent body which assesses university grant applications for research, and recommends which projects should get grants to the Minister, who generally approves all of them. But the NIT was part of an increasingly commercial agenda of the conservative government to restrict research, and in 2021 further recommendations were given to the ARC to make this more stringent. In late December 2021, Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert rejected six grants which had been approved and recommended by the ARC on the grounds that they were not “good value for taxpayers’ money” or in the national interest. The timing of the announcement – just before Christmas – and the nature of the projects removed (which included subjects like climate change and political activism in China) suggested a political motive for the rejections, which was met with .
  • The wizard who knows about stories is most likely Ladislav Pelc, Prehumous Professor of Morbid Bibliomancy, whom Moist goes consults about the Post Office’s letters in Going Postal. He has very large ears and no beard, but out of deference to wizarding tradition he wears a false one when in view of the public.
  • The incident with Windle Poons is in Reaper Man; the other wizards attempt to bury him at the corner of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way, described as two of the busiest streets in Ankh-Morpork.
  • There are many schools in Ankh-Morpork, aside from Unseen University itself:
    • The Assassin’s Guild school appears most prominently in Pyramids and Night Watch.
    • The Clockmaker’s Guild – which seems to provide more of an apprenticeship – appears in Thief of Time. It’s implied the Thieves’ Guild has a school or apprenticeship program as well.
    • The Fool’s Guild school is important in Wyrd Sisters and Men at Arms.
    • The Musician’s Guild may also offer more of an apprenticeship, but they raised and taught Keith, Maurice’s “dumb kid”, as he mentions in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.
    • By the time of Thief of Time, Susan (who herself went to Quirm College for Young Ladies) is teaching at Madam Frout’s Learning Through Play School.
  • We previously brought up the issue of copaganda – the bias towards showing police in a positive light in news media and popular culture – in #Pratchat52, “A Near-Watch Experience”, though we never quite got around to discussing it. Ben’s not sure we’ve done the discussion justice here, either – he’s had more thoughts since the episode – but the concept pre-dates the word, going back to at least the 1950s and the publicity stunt puff pieces in newspapers about police officers rescuing cats and early friendly neighbourhood policemen characters on television. Indeed, the concept has been used to criticise exactly the friendly English bobby image we talk about in this episode, so perhaps we have some more thinking to do. The origins of the word aren’t easily traceable, and probably it was coined more than once; it definitely dates back to before 2015, but has seen a resurgence in use and popularity in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased public awareness of the failings of the police system.
  • We mention quite a few cop shows this episode, though Ben would like to say he realises we may have been unconsciously cherry picking to support our idea about the difference in pop cultural depictions of cops in the UK and Australia compared to the US (and see also the note above about copaganda). Here are the police films and television shows we mentioned:
    • The Bill was a British police drama about the life and work of beat officers at the fictional Sun Hill Police Station in metropolitan London. It was broadcast on ITV for 26 series between 1983 and 2010, and was also popular in Australia. A reboot is apparently in the works. The show’s title comes from the slang term for police, “the Old Bill” or just “the Bill”.
    • Blue Heelers was an Australian drama about the fictional rural Victorian town of Mount Thomas, told from the perspective of the local police officers. It ran for twelve years on Channel 7 from 1994 to 2006, and made stars out of Australian actors Lisa McCune (who left after the seventh series) and John Wood (who was the lead character for all twelve years). Blue heelers are an Australian breed of working dog, and also slang in some parts of Australian for a police officer or the police in general (Australian police uniforms are generally blue).
    • Police Rescue was an Australian police drama which began life as a 1989 feature film before spawning a television series which ran for five series between 1991 and 1996. It focused on the NSW Police Rescue Squad, who travelled all over the city and the state attending accidents, disasters and other emergencies. It starred Gary Sweet and Sonia Todd.
    • Water Rats was an Australian police drama focussed on the Sydney Water Police, whose bear is Sydney Harbour. It ran for six seasons on Channel 9 between 1996 and 2001, and featured Colin Friels, Gary Bisley, Aaron Pederson and Jay Laga’aia (who soon after appeared in the Star Wars prequel trilogy as Captain Typho).
    • Hot Fuzz (2007) is the second of Edgar Wright’s “cornetto trilogy” of comedy action films which began with Shaun of the Dead. It stars Simon Pegg as Sgt. Nick Angel, a hotshot London police officer whose colleagues resent his success and get him reassigned to a small town in Gloucestershire, where he is initially bored before a series of bizarre murders begins. The film also stars Nick Frost as local constable Danny Butterman.
    • Heartbeat was a British police drama which ran for 18 years between 1992 and 2010 on ITV. It was based on the “Constable” novels written by ex-cop Peter N Walker (using the pseudonym Nicholas Rhea). It was set in mid to late 1960s in fictional Yorkshire village of Aidensfield, and had a number of main characters over its run, but is probably best known for the original pair: young police officer Nick (played by ex-EastEnders heartthrob Nick Berry) and his wife Kate (Niamh Cusack), the town doctor. Other notable characters were Sergeant Blaketon (Yes Minister’s Derek Fowlds), older constable Alf Ventriss (William Simons), a war veteran – partial inspiration for Fred Colon, perhaps? – and local “lovable rogue” Claude Greengrass (Bill Maynard).
  • Bernard “The Cunning Artificer” Pearson, of Clarecraft and The Discworld Emporium fame, was indeed a police officer in his youth. He was also one of Pratchett’s closest friends and often consulted on various matters, including “his policing “the more arcane policing arts”, as Rob Wilkins puts it in Terry Pratchett: A Life in Footnotes.
  • Regarding Pratchett’s attitude towards Agatha Christie, Ben mentions this interview for the Bookwitch blog from 2010. (Interestingly he mentions several times that he’s working on I Shall Wear Midnight, and insists it will be the last Tiffany Aching book…) On Agatha Christie, he says: “Well, Agatha Christie; you have to get her out of your system sooner or later. Same with James Bond. And then you realise that not all murders happen in one house containing seven people.” He also describes her work as fantasy in his pieces “Whose Fantasy Are You?” (1991) and “Let There Be Dragons (1993)”, which can be found in A Slip of the Keyboard.
  • You can find A’Tuin Sneezed’s great, long Twitter thread about Thud! by starting with this tweet:

I’m rereading Thud by @terryandrob for @PratchatPodcast so this will be quite a long thread. I’m only 6 pages in but the book has an almost epic feel to it already. Important Things Are Going To Happen. pic.twitter.com/67FoMoaOR0

— A’tuin Sneezed (@damethelog) October 17, 2022
  • Thomas the Tank Engine is an anthropomorphic steam locomotive – basically a regular train, but with a human-like face on the front – who is the star of the Railway Series books by Wilbert and Christopher Awdry, written between 1945 and 1972. While the books were very successful, it was the television series adaptation Thomas & Friends that really cemented Thomas’ popularity. The series ran from 1984 to 2021, and used live-action model train versions of Thomas and his friends with narration by Ringo Starr. The human characters – including the “Fat Controller”, who was in charge of the railway system on Thomas’ home, the Island of Sondor – were portrayed by wooden models.

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Matt Roden, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Short Fiction, Vetinari, Wizards

#Pratchat60 Notes and Errata

8 October 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

Watch out for some photos here soon!

Notes and Errata

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

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

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Dr Kat Day, Elizabeth Flux, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Rincewind, Roundworld, Science of Discworld, The Luggage, Unseen University, Wizards

#Pratchat11 Notes and Errata

8 September 2018 by Ben 2 Comments

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

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

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

— Darude's Sandworm (@SalacticaActual) August 17, 2018
  • Meet Joe Black (1998), loosely based on the film Death Takes a Holiday (1934), stars Anthony Hopkins as a billionaire whom Death decides to visit because of the impassioned speech he gives his daughter (Claire Forlani) when it becomes clear she’s not all that keen on the man she’s about to marry. Father and daughter, by the way, are named Bill and Susan! The Brad Pitt body Death decides to inhabit rather inconsiderately belongs to a man with whom Susan was flirting, moments before he was violently hit and killed by two cars.
  • By contrast, Mighty Joe Young (1998), a remake of Mighty Joe Young (1939), stars Charlize Theron as a woman who has raised the titular gorilla, both of whom were orphaned by the same poacher when they were young. Joe is no longer accepted by others of his kind, probably because he is inexplicably three times the normal size for a gorilla. The plot revolves around Theron and Bill Paxton trying to protect Joe from the poacher who wants revenge as Joe bit off two of his hands in their original encounter. It’s…well, it’s no Meet Joe Black, that’s for sure.
  • The episode of 99% Invisible about the history of shopping malls is “The Gruen Effect“. While looking up the link for that one, we also found this great article about the birth of the shopping trolley: “Shopping Around: How Folding Basket Carriers Became Modern Nesting Carts“.
  • Ben mixes up his Sylvester Stallone characters during the discussion of the Dean; the one who ties a strip of cloth around his forehead is not Rocky Balboa from Rocky (1976) and its many sequels, but John Rambo, from First Blood (1982) and its sequels.
  • In Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), the suprisingly non-bogus sequel to the surprisingly excellent time travel slacker comedy Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), teenage rocker wannabes and future saviours of the world Bill S. Preston esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) are killed by future despot Chuck D Nomolos (Joss Ackland) before they can fulfil their destiny. They first “Melvin” Death and end up in Hell, but then challenge Death, beating him in games of Clue, Twister and Battleship until he finally agrees to help them return to life, eventually joining their band Wyld Stallyns as a bass player (shades of Soul Music there!). Joss Ackland later played Mustrum Ridcully in the TV adaptation of Hogfather, and reportedly regretted appearing in Bogus Journey, claiming he only did so because he was a workaholic. One more Bogus Journey connection with this novel: both feature characters named Rufus who are significant to the protagonist’s backstory and future!
  • ZZ Top play the “band at the party” in Back to the Future Part III (1990), performing a “hillbilly version” of their song “Doubleback” from their 1990 album Recycler. The version we remember is probably the orchestrated one played – repeatedly – during the town festival, and the album version plays over the credits. The music video uses footage from the film. While we may have forgotten the single, it was in fact a pretty big hit in the US at the time, reaching #1 in the rock charts for five weeks. 
  • Once and For All is currently on hiatus, but you can find all five released episodes at the link. Ben appears not only in episode five, “Death Vs Death”, but the very first episode, “Indiana O’Connell and The Kingdom of the Mummy’s Skull”, in which he goes to bat for Brendan Fraser’s character from The Mummy, Rick O’Connell, in a battle against Indiana Jones.
  • In the Sandman comics created by Neil Gaiman, Death is one of the Endless, seven beings who personify fundamental metaphysical concepts: Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Delirium and Despair. While they are immortal in some circumstances they can die, though they are then replaced in their role by someone else. Dream is the titular Sandman of the original comics, but Death has also proven popular enough to have her own separate stories, notably Death: The High Cost of Living and Death: The Time of Your Life.
  • It should be noted that Azrael appears not just in Islamic lore, or The Smurfs, but in other Abrahamic traditions, including Hebrew mysticism, though he is rarely mentioned in Christian writing. The version of Azrael with millions of eyes is only one of many varying depictions.
  • You can see the full range of currently in print Collector’s Library editions of Discworld novels at the Discworld Emporium. We note that since our last visit, the Emporium now also stocks new printings of early editions of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic…
  • You can see Paul Kidby’s “Lancre Gothic” in this BBC article collecting some of the best Discworld illustrations. Kidby’s “Death with Kitten II”, a newer version of the illustration from The Last Hero, can be found in the gallery on his web site and on his Instagram. “The Imaginarium of Professor Pratchett”, originally drawn for the cover of the “Discworld Imaginarium” book, is in Kidby’s online store, and you can also see Ben’s favourite version of this concept – from the cover of the HisWorld exhibition book – on Instragram. (You’ll need to get your hands on a copy of The Last Hero to check who A’Tuin is looking at.)
  • The Pratchett Armorial Bearings (the formal name for this kind of heraldry), which can indeed be seen on Pratchett’s Wikipedia page, are formally described thus:
    Blazoned:
    Arms – Sable an ankh between four Roundels in saltire each issuing Argent.
    Crest – Upon a Helm with a Wreath Argent and Sable On Water Barry wavy Sable Argent and Sable an Owl affronty wings displayed and inverted Or supporting thereby two closed Books erect Gules.
    Motto – “noli timere messorem”
    The motto is rather more accurate Latin for “Don’t fear the Reaper” compared to Mort’s Latatian “non timetis messor”.

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

#Pratchat35 Notes and Errata

8 September 2020 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

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

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

#Pratchat57West5 Notes and Errata

8 July 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Notes and Errata

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

More notes coming soon!

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

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

#Pratchat59 Notes and Errata

8 September 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Since I was chatting to @PratchatPodcast about it yesterday, here’s my ridiculously long Terry Pratchett shelf 😄 pic.twitter.com/qVXigRlKk2

— Dr Kat Day 🏳‍🌈 🧪🐙 🇺🇦 (@chronicleflask) August 25, 2022

Notes and Errata

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

More notes coming soon!

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Dr Kat Day, Elizabeth Flux, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Rincewind, Roundworld, Science of Discworld, The Luggage, Unseen University, Wizards

#Pratchat50 Notes and Errata

8 December 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for Pratchat episode 50, “Salt Rat Arsenic Heat“, featuring guest Cal Wilson, discussing the 1999 Discworld companion book, “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook“, by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Briggs and Tina Hannan, and illustrated by Paul Kidby.

Iconographic Evidence

To prove we really did cook these things, here are some photos! Be warned: the last one is not for the faint of heart…

  • Stage one of Rincewind’s Potato Cakes: mashing the potatoes!
  • The potato mixture with sage and fried onions added. (It’s already delicious.)
  • Frying up the cakes – these ones are waaaaay too big.
  • A couple of more reasonably-sized potato cakes. They turned out great!
  • The “brinner” meal with scrambled eggs made in the same pan.
  • Liz’s Wow-Wow sauce, artfully drizzled on a plate!
  • You can use it on an omelette…
  • …or on meat!
  • We apologise for this highly upsetting image…but we think you’ll agree Cal did an amazing job of making Sticky Toffee Rat Onna Stick.

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is reference to the famous 2017 cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking, by American chef Samin Nosrat. Nosrat also had a Netflix cooking show of the same name, which appeared in 2018. We’re sure you’ll work out how the rat comes into it, but we may not have mentioned Lord Downey’s contribution to the book: a recipe for mint humbugs which includes the ingredient “arsenic to taste”…
  • Cal’s previous episodes were #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory” from November 2017 and #Pratchat3, “You’re a Wizzard, Rincewind” from January 2018.
  • Cal’s Tiktok username is @calbowilson; look for the hashtag #baristacats.
  • To avoid any confusion:
    • The “Baristacats” are Cal’s cats, Pirate and Barnacle, who like to sit on top of the coffee machine in her kitchen, leading her to create a series of videos in which she tries and fails to get them to serve her coffee.
    • The Aristocats (1970, dir. Wolfgang Reitherman) is a Disney animated musical about a family of aristocratic cats who get into trouble and must turn to an alley cat and his friends for help.
    • “The Aristocrats” is a famous dirty joke in which a family of performers try to get a job by describing to a theatre manager the incredibly depraved and taboo-breaking things they do in their performance – usually a long list, improvised by the comedian – before being asked the name of the act; they respond with “The Aristocrats!” While it dates back to the vaudeville era, it continues to be popular in private among American comedians, with the point being to improvise the most transgressive and offensive description of the act. It was the subject of a documentary film in 2005, The Aristocrats, directed by Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza.
  • Liz’s cats are named after Isaac Asimov and Aldous Huxley. There have been recent prestige television adaptations of their best-known works: Asimov’s Foundation for Apple TV+ in 2021, and Huxley’s Brave New World for the NBC streaming service Peacock in 2020. Brave New World was cancelled after the first season, but Foundation is getting a second season.
  • The Great British Bake Off – known as The Great British Baking Show in the US – is an extremely wholesome reality television show that started in 2010. Contestants are (usually amateur) bakers, who compete in a series of challenges to impress a panel of judges, all for the glory of being crowned the best baker (there’s no prize money). It’s produced by Love Productions, originally for the BBC, where it grew to be so successful on BBC Two that it was moved to BBC One. Despite commissioning Love Productions to make other shows about sewing and pottery using the same format, the BBC made an in-house program about hair styling, Hair, in 2014. This led to a legal dispute over copyright that eventually led to Love Productions taking the show to Channel 4, where it’s been since 2017. Many countries have their own version, including Australia.
  • Bridgerton is a 2021 Regency-era period drama made for Netflix, adapted from the Bridgerton novels by American author Julia Quinn. It’s known for its racy sex scenes. We previously mentioned it in #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl“.
  • J H C Goatberger – publisher of the Disc-famous Almanack – and his chief printer Mr Cropper both appear in Maskerade. We discussed it in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.
  • The Encyclopædia Britannica is probably the most famous English-language encyclopaedia, which is a compendium of knowledge. The Britannica was first printed in 1768 in the United Kingdom, and most of its editions span multiple large volumes. In 1901 it was taken over by American managers, who shortened and simplified its language and began selling it via door-to-door salesmen. It still exists, though the last print edition was published in 2012; it’s now exclusively online at britannica.com.
  • Where Did I Come From? is the 1973 classic children’s book about sex and reproduction. It was originally subtitled “The Facts of Life Without Any Nonsense and with Illustrations”, and is the first of many similar books by Peter Mayle, an English businessman who became an advertising copywriter and then author. Mayle went on to write the Wicked Willie series of risqué cartoon books about a talking penis, which might sound familiar: they were illustrated by Gray Joliffe, the same person who drew the cats for Pratchett’s The Unadulterated Cat! More about that in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“.
  • We’re pretty sure the “sexy origami” book mentioned by Cal is 2015’s The Amazing True Story of How Babies Are Made, by Australian cartoonist and illustrator Fiona Katauskas. She was inspired to create it because when having the talk with her own son, she found she was using the same book her parents had used – Where Did I Come From? – and thought it could use an update.
  • If you’d like to know about Ken’s underpants area, we recommend this delightful piece from Jezebel, “The Strange, Sad Story of the Ken Doll’s Crotch” from 2019, by Rich Juzwiak.
  • In Kevin Smith’s 1999 film Dogma, Alan Rickman does indeed play Metatron, the angel who is the voice of God. If you’re curious to know what his underpants area looks like, there’s a great photo of him showing it off while holding a Ken doll in this piece for Digital Spy in which Kevin Smith pays tribute to Rickman after his death in 2016.
  • Ben’s very silly quip here is a reference to Patrick Stewart’s appearance in the Ricky Gervais sitcom Extras. Like all the other big name actors who appeared in cameo roles, he plays a weird parody of himself, who tells Gervais’ main character about his idea for a facial comedy film in which he has the power to make women’s clothes fall off. His refrain is that by the time they put them back on, “It’s too late, I’ve seen everything.“
  • The recipe book plagiarism scandal we discuss is about Elizabeth Haigh’s book Makan. Singaporean-born Haigh was a contestant on the 2011 series of reality cooking show MasterChef in the UK; while she didn’t win, the experience cemented her love of cooking and she went on to great success as a chef, even opening her own restaurants, one of which – Pidgin – was awarded a Michelin star in 2017. Her book Makan was published in October 2021, but soon Sharon Wee, author of Growing Up in a Nona Kitchen, made allegations that many passages relating stories of learning to cook from a grandmother were paraphrased or directly taken from her book. Comparisons of passages where posted online by New Zealand cookbook store Cook the Books, and other authors discovered Makan seemed to “borrow” from other other books and recipe blogs too – both in the anecdotes and personal stories, and some of the recipes. You can read more detail about the scandal in this piece from Eater magazine by James Hansen, though it seems no further information has been officially disclosed, pending the outcome of legal action.
  • The introductory text that Ben reads at around the 14:30 mark is for the entire fictional book, not just the cookery section as he suggests.
  • We discussed Carpe Jugulum in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
  • Ben mentioned some cookbooks for other fictional worlds, specifically 2012’s A Feast of Ice and Fire: The Official Game of Thrones Companion Cookbook, 1999’s Star Trek Cookbook – co-written by Ethan Philips in the persona of Neelix, the character he played on Star Trek: Voyager! – and two cookbooks based on Doctor Who. Ben was thinking of the original one from 1985, The Doctor Who Cookbook, but a newer one inspired by the revived series was published in 2016: Doctor Who: The Official Cookbook. It’s worth noting there are plenty of unofficial cookbooks for recipes based on various fictional worlds, too.
  • The character Liz mentions from Game of Thrones is Hot Pie, who appears in the second and third novels in the series, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, and the first four seasons of the television show.
  • Schnapps – from the German schnaps – isn’t a specific kind of alcohol. The original German word is used generically for any kind of strong alcoholic drink. In English it usually means one that is flavoured and sweetened with fruit, but there aren’t any rules – it’s sort of the opposite of Champagne.
  • The famous English Twitter user who grows big vegetables is 72-year-old ex-butcher Gerald Stratford (@geraldstratfor3). He’s not a farmer, but an avid vegetable gardener, and after amassing a huge following on social media published a book in 2021, Big Veg. You can read of Gerald’s rise to fame in this lovely article from Eater magazine by Jenny G Zhang. [We promise we’re not sponsored by Eater, they just seem to write the best articles about English food-related stuff! – Ben]
  • Ben would just like to clarify that when he says Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook is “a real fan’s book” (at around 23:40), he means it’s really a book for fans, not a book that’s for “real fans”. We don’t go in for that sort of gatekeeping around here – and neither did Pratchett, as evidenced by the way that he expressly tells readers where to find out more if they’re lacking context. There’s no wrong way to be a fan, except for hurting other folks with how you go about it.
  • Bergholdt Stuttley “Bloody Stupid” Johnson is first mentioned in Men at Arms, as the designer of the gardens surrounding the Patrician’s Palace, which are said to be the “high spot” of his career. His proper given names are revealed in Maskerade, in a footnote about the organs used by the Opera House and University.
  • Speaking of B S Johnson, the “pie bird” is indeed a real thing. They’re an evolution of the originally quite dull ceramic pie funnels stuck into pies to allow some of the steam to vent, preventing fruit pies from bubbling over and helping to ensure a crispy crust. In the earlier twentieth century manufacturers started making them in all kinds of animal shapes, though birds were most popular. Read all about the history of pie birds in this article by Baileyberg at Food52. (See? Not all our sources are Eater this month…)
  • We also discussed the “humour” genre of books in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“, in relation to The Unadulterated Cat. The primer example mentioned by Ben was Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, though there are thousands to choose from, and they continue to be published, if in smaller numbers. Modern such books are often compilations of social media accounts, like The Midnight Society, the (entirely fictional) minutes of the meetings of of club made up of famous horror, fantasy and sci-fi authors.
  • Spotted dick is indeed a real dish, also known as “spotted dog” and “railway cake” (the latter name especially common in Ireland). The English version is a baked pudding made from suet and dried fruit – most often plums, sultanas or raisins – which are the eponymous “spots”. (For more about this, see the Hogswatch Feast bonus episode.)
  • Ben did indeed research the various kinds of fat mined in Überwald for #Pratchat40, “The King and the Hole of the King“. You can find his list of them in the episode notes for #Pratchat40.
  • Vegetable suet is made from refined vegetable oils. Like animal suet it’s only readily available in the UK, and not all varieties are gluten free, so check the fine print if you’re buying some and that’s a consideration for you. Nigella Lawson’s website also recommends grated vegetable shortening as a substitute; the most easily found form of this in Australia is Copha, which is made from coconut oil. (See the link for instructions on how to grate it.)
  • As it turns out, the difference between lamb and mutton varies depending on where you’re from. In the UK sheep meat (and indeed the sheep) is called lamb in its first year, and mutton if the sheep is two or more years old. In Australia, a sheep’s age is measured instead by how many teeth – specifically permanent incisors – it has (or rather had): Australian lamb comes from a sheep with no permanent incisors; mutton is from a sheep with more than two. (Sheep usually grow a pair of new ones each year, so it works out mostly the same.) Meat from sheep in between lamb and mutton age is called “hogget”, though apparently in the UK plenty of “lamb” is actually hogget in disguise – a step down from mutton dressed as lamb, we suppose. Organic and rare breed farmers in England’s North are known to sell hogget, though. Sheep typically live for around ten to twelve years (when not eaten by foxes, wolves or humans), so seventeen year old mutton isn’t something you need to worry about.
  • The Discworld mainstay “sausage-inna-bun” first appears alongside its most famous vendor, Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, in Guards! Guards!, discussed in #Pratchat7A, “The Curious Incident of the Dragon and the Night Watch“. He shows up to hawk food to the crowd watching the hero attempt to slay the dragon, though he never says “sausage-inna-bun”; instead he describes them as “hot sausages”, and shouts “inna bun!” as one of their many attributes. On this occasion he is also selling peanuts and figgins alongside the sausages, all cooked in a tiny frying pan on his tray.
  • We previously discussed Bunnings sausages in #Pratchat21, “Memoirs of Agatea“. In brief: a “sausage sizzle” is a traditional way to raise money for charity by selling cheap (and possibly donated) sausages cooked on a barbecue in slices of bread, usually with fried onions and tomato sauce or mustard. It’s common – or it was, in pre-pandemic times – for ubiquitous hardware store chain Bunnings Warehouse to have a sausage sizzle outside its stores, usually in a carpark.
  • Roundworld drop scones are not siege ammunition, but rather small pancakes made by dropping a dollop of batter onto a frying pan. Depending on where you grew up in Australia, drop scones might be better known as pikelets. We won’t get into the discussion of what constitutes a “regular” scone, as this varies considerably around the world. (Australian ones are generally similar to English ones, though we have pumpkin and date varieties less popular elsewhere.)
  • The French word for bread is indeed pain, but Ben does not pronounce it remotely correctly. The French word uses a neutral vowel sound, not either of the “a” sounds Ben uses. Sorry French speakers.
  • We were unable to confirm it, but it does seem that Paul Kidby’s illustrations for Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook are all originals, done for this book. Certainly the ones of the imps and the various dishes don’t appear anywhere else that we know of.
  • Malicious compliance is when someone follows instructions given to them to the letter, knowing that it will cause harm or problems. It’s often described as a form of passive-aggression, though it is sometimes used as an effective form of protest against ridiculous or draconian demands from managers or officials.
  • “The Sea and Little Fishes” is the third of five published Discworld short stories. We discussed it in #Pratchat39, “All the Fun of the…Fish?” While it does introduce the Witch Trials, and names the scarecrow used for the Cursing “for several hundred years”, no further information about Unlucky Charlie is given; this section is mostly new.
  • Carved wooden lovespoons are a tradition that dates back to at least the seventeenth century. Welsh ones may be the most well known, but they’re also found in Germany, Scandanavia and Eastern Europe. While the “Lancre Loveseat” may well be inspired by them, it should also be noted that Nanny lists “Llamedosian spoon” as the appropriate gift for a fifteenth anniversary.
  • The tweet advising that women may be “fascinated” by giving them cheese was an image of a page from the 1971 book The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft by Kathryn Paulsen. You can read more about the history of cheese in witchcraft in this article from The Conversation, inspired by the original tweet by Gavin Wren, which we’ve included below. (Pratchat would like to note that we do not condone the use of witchcraft or any other kind of coercion when making advances toward folks of any gender.)

Pro dating tips pic.twitter.com/t0agf7JrgN

— Gavin Wren (@GavinWren) January 12, 2021
  • We’ll learn more about the Discworld’s Moon – and Leonard da Quirm – when we cover The Last Hero, but it is considerably closer to the Disc than our Moon is to the Earth. It has to be, as it appears about the same size, but is only about eighty miles (or 130km) across. The Earth’s Moon is over 2,150 miles across (3,475km), and about 238,855 miles (or 384,400km) away, so for the Disc’s Moon to appear about the same size, it must be a bit under 9,000 miles from the surface of the Disc. (For simplicity we’re going to ignore the likely difference in lensing effects of the Earth’s atmosphere and the Disc’s intense magical field.) For context, that’s a bit more than a third of the distance around the Earth! The Disc’s Moon likely passes much closer to the Rim, so a supermoon is probably a weekly event for places like Krull.
  • The Moon being a giant egg was a weird plot used by Doctor Who in the 2014 episode Kill the Moon.
  • Branston Pickle is a chunky, pickled chutney that’s made from diced vegetables pickled in a sauce made from vinegar, tomatoes, apples, sugar and spices. It’s been made since 1922 and continues to be hugely popular in the UK. In March 2020, manufacturer Mizkan Euro recalled some of their products as they may have been contaminated with pieces of plastic packaging. This recall affected jars with use-by dates of 2022; you can check if you have any affected jars here, but any you find in stores now will be fine.
  • Massel is an Australian brand which makes vegan stock and other vegetable-based food products. They’ve been around since 1982. Ben only ever buys the vegetable kind, but now realises that their other flavours are labelled “Chicken Style” and “Beef Style”, so they’re a good vegetarian substitute for the real deal.
  • Marzipan is made from honey, sugar and almond meal. There are different kinds but they don’t seem radically different, though when its used on fruit cakes it is usually glazed and, as Cal says, more traditional icing goes on top.
  • The Overlondon Project’s question with the emojis was as follows:
    Most practically edible and least edibly practical… 🧙‍♀️🍆🥕🍌🥒🍑🥭 and possibly 🦑
  • The restaurant in Going Postal is Le Foie Heureux – “the happy liver” in Quirmian. There isn’t a description of the food beyond how much it costs, sadly, but we can dream. The restaurant in Hogfather isn’t named, but its dishes include Mousse de la Boue dans une Panier de la Pâte de Chaussures (“mud mousse in a basket of shoe pastry”) and, as featured in this cookbook, Brodeuin Rôti Façon Ombres (“man’s boots in mud”).
  • Biers is the Ankh-Morpork bar where nobody asks your name; it’s frequented by the undead and other creatures of the night who want a place where they can escape the pressures of being normal. It makes its most notable appearances in Feet of Clay (see #Pratchat24) and Hogfather (see #Pratchat26).
  • It turns out that while you can make alcohol from cabbages, it doesn’t seem a popular choice – partly because cabbages don’t contain much sugar, so they don’t ferment into alcohol on their own. Cabbages are more usually fermented into the non-alcoholic food sauerkraut. There is, though, a cabbage wine made in Narusawa prefecture in Japan, an area which like the Sto Plains grows mainly cabbages. (Narusawa wine is also 40% grapes, though.)
  • You can buy commercial beef spreads, but the brands Ben names are beef-extract based drinks, sold in paste form similar to yeast extracts like Vegemite and Marmite. Bovril has been made in the UK since the 1870s, while Bonox is Australian, first sold in 1919 by the same company who invented Vegemite. (For more on that, see the notes for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“.)
  • Fairy bread is an Australian children’s party staple: buttered white bread sprinkled with small bits of sugar confectionary, usually spherical “hundreds and thousands” (in Ben’s opinion the superior option), or sprinkles.
  • For more on the great potato cakes vs potato scallops debate, see this survey of regional variation in Australian language conducted by the the Linguistics Roadshow in 2015. (It’s the first response.) For the record, “potato cake” won the bigger vote, but neither cake nor scallop had a clear majority.
  • You can hear an extract from Sven’s podcard in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“. Note though that the bit Ben describes about the ads for Maggi noodles only appears in the full podcard, which is included in the fourth episode of our subscriber-only bonus podcast, Ook Club, from April 2020.
  • The Australian SF (“Ditmar”) Awards, or just Ditmar Awards for short, are the Australian national awards for achievement in speculative fiction and fandom. Any eligible works can be nominated by members of the Australian fan community; the awards are then voted on by members of the Australian National SF Convention (or “NatCon”) for that year. The established Australian cons take it in turns to be the NatCon; in 2021, it was Conflux in Canberra. You can see a list of all the 2021 Ditmar nominees and winners in Locus Magazine. Pratchat was also nominated for the “Best Fan Publication in Any Medium” award in 2019.
  • The Coode Street Podcast, the winner in our category this year, is a long-running bi-weekly show which describes itself as “an ongoing casual conversation between two friends about the nature of science fiction (among other things).” It launched in 2010. The two friends who host it are publisher and editor Jonathan Strahan, and editor, critic and humanities Professor Gary K. Wolfe. Prior to this win, The Coode Street Podcast had been nominated for seven Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, the BSFA Award, and six Ditmar Awards…but not won any of them! (Sounds like we have a few more award nominations to rack up before we win anything…)
  • You can find out more about the cancellation of the 2022 Australian Discworld Convention on the official website at ausdwcon.org.
  • Ben is correct: Garth Nix won the Ditmar for Best Novel for his 2020 book, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. It also won the 2020 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was nominated for the 2021 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Cal Wilson, Dwarfs, Elizabeth Flux, Mustrum Ridcully, Nanny Ogg, Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, Photos, Rincewind

#Pratchat54 Notes and Errata

8 April 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Notes and Errata

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

More notes for this episode coming soon!

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

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

#EeekClub2022 Notes and Errata

25 May 2022 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ankh-Morpork, Ben McKenzie, Carrot, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Georgina Chadderton, Leonard da Quirm, Librarian, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Last Hero, The Watch, Vetinari, Wizards
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#Pratchat84 - Ankh-Morpork Archives & Discworld Almanak8 April 2025
Listen to us discuss the in-universe Discworld books The Ankh-Morpork Archives volume I and II, collecting the Discworld diaries, and The Discworld Almanak. Join the discussion using the hashtag #Pratchat84.

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