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The Luggage

#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

#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

#Pratchat47 Notes and Errata

8 September 2021 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the episode notes and errata for episode 47, “A Finite Number of Shakespeares“, featuring guest Alanta Colley, discussing the second collaboration between Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen: 2002’s The Science of Discworld II: The Globe.

  • The episode title is a reversal of the “infinite monkey theorem”, which states that an infinite number of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters will “almost surely” eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. In this book, a single Shakespeare eventually (after much tampering with history) produces a species descended from monkeys that can invent and use typewriters – modern, storytelling humans.
  • The most recent Sci Fight, “Should we upload our brains into the cloud?”, was held online on Thursday, 12 August 2021. The debate is available on YouTube, and was part of Melbourne Science Gallery‘s exhibition “MENTAL“.
  • You can find out more about Alanta’s comedy shows, including Parasites Lost, at alantacolley.com.
  • Melbourne’s six lockdowns began with two in 2020 – March 29 to May 12 and the big one, from July 9 to October 26. There have been four in 2021: from February 12 to 17; May 28 until June 10; July 16 to 27; and the current one, which began on August 5 and is not expected to end until the Victorian population reaches an 80% vaccination rate, estimated to happen by December.
  • We covered The Science of Discworld a year ago in #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“, with guest Anna Ahveninen.
  • Alanta makes the reasonable assumption we’ve had “forty-six prior guests” – but, thanks to a few repeat offenders and some double-guest episodes, the actual count to date is forty (including Tansy Rayner Roberts in our first live bonus episode).
  • Douglas Adams’ famous love of long baths was a trait he passed on to the Captain, a character who appears at the end of most versions of The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, commanding his starship from the bath. You can read about his bath habit – er, Adams’, not the Captain’s – in this great piece by his friend Jon Cranter for The Guardian.
  • The photo of Pratchett with Jack and Ian was taken at Warwick University – where Jack and Ian were both researchers – on July 14, 1999, just after he made them honorary wizards of Unseen University, and the University made him a Honorary Doctor of Letters. (The photo from the book is different, but you can see another one in this article from the time on the Warwick University website.) This was the first of Pratchett’s ten honorary degrees, which we listed in the notes for #Pratchat27.
  • The History and Philosophy of Science is a distinct humanities discipline, combining the study of both…er…the history and the philosophy of science. It arose from the fact that the philosophy of science has been primarily studied from an historicist perspective: deducing what it is and how it works by studying the history of its development.
  • Mustrum Ridcully famously has no time for meetings or long explanations; in Reaper Man it is explained this way:

…it took him several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn’t have been bothering you with in the first place.

Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man (1991)
  • On another look, Ben isn’t really sure why he was confused about how the wizards end up on Roundworld; Ridcully explains to Ponder in Chapter 5 that the elves passed through Discworld to get into Roundworld, and he and the faculty were caught up in the “trans-dimensional flux” (Ponder’s words, obviously). They landed in London because Dee had made a magic circle – Hex further explaining that while magic doesn’t work in Roundworld, it can create “passive receptors” for outside magic to connect to, as with the crystal ball he uses to communicate.
  • The other Discworld element (or substance, at least) Ben couldn’t remember the name of is “deitygen“, which Ridcully says is known to be produced by intelligent beings. While Narrativium is the most important element on Discworld, the world itself is said in The Truth to be composed of Air, Earth, Fire and Water – though there is also an important fifth element: Surprise.
  • Mind-body dualism is the idea that the mind is a non-physical substance, i.e. that mind and matter are not the same kind of thing. There are several different flavours of this philosophy. Cartesian dualism, more generally known as substance dualism, is the one discussed in the book; others are subtly different, suggesting that while there are the mind is distinct, it is not a different type of substance to ordinary matter. (Note that when we say “substance” here, we mean it in the philosophical sense that encompasses all things.)
  • Spontaneous Human Combustion is the idea that sometimes humans just burst into flames without any apparent external cause. It’s not taken very seriously these days, and critics and researchers – most notably science investigator Joe Nickell and forensic analyst John F. Fischer – have found that in most cases there were likely sources of flames near victims which were overlooked and not reported in popular accounts.
  • The bit in the book about humans being unable to imagine being a dog or a bat is in Chapter 26, “Lies to Chimpanzees”.
  • Liz read about the babbling baby bats in this article from the New York Times, though many new outlets picked up on this research about greater sac-winged bats (Saccopteryx bilineata), published in Science by Dr Ahana Fernandez and her team. This video from Science magazine gives you the short version.
  • That birds learn songs from their parents was first observed (in scientific terms at least) in the 1950s, when British ethologist Peter Marler noticed that chaffinches sang different songs in different parts of the country. His work showed that some birds are innate singers, while others learn their songs from their parents, creating regional differences or dialects. This has since been observed in many bird species.
  • Jack and Ian have written many other books, separately and in collaboration. Ben mentioned What Does a Martian Look Like? (aka Evolving the Alien) in #Pratchat35. On a related note, Ben spotted that in his first edition of The Science of Discworld II, in chapter 10, the authors introduce the idea of an elf visiting Earth in the distant past and observing our ancestors; this visitor is mistakenly referred to as a Martian several times afterwards, leading Ben to wonder if this was text originally written for the other book…
  • Ben previously mentioned Flatland and Ian Stewart’s sequel, Flatterland, in #Pratchat35. The science that Ben thought Ian did a particularly good job of explaining was string theory – the branch of physics that seeks to explain discrepancies between classic and quantum physics by saying that fundamental particles are not actually tiny points, but strings which exist in higher dimensions, and we only see the point that pokes into our three. (That’s a lie-to-Pratchat-listeners, but it’s on the right track; see chapter 16 of Flatterland, “No-Branes and P-Branes”.)
  • Dr Randolph M. Nesse is currently a Research Professor of Life Sciences at The Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, and Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology, and the Institute for Social Research, at the University of Michigan. You can read a summary of his views on altruism and social selection – another kind of “group selection” in biology, where social groups who may not be closely related work together to survive – on his website here, with links to his articles on the subject, though he does not include the 1999 Science and Spirit piece cited in chapter 20 of The Science of Discworld II, “Small Gods”. He also wrote a book about commitment (as discussed the book), Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment, in 2001. Notably, though, he seems to have concluded that commitment offers only “a limited explanation for some special kinds of altruism … it did not offer the more general kind of explanation I wanted.” He refers to the work of Mary Jane West-Eberhard, who has studied altruism in animals, when discussing where his own work is heading.
  • Evolutionary medicine (including evolutionary psychiatry) is the scientific use of evolutionary biology to understand and treat diseases. It complements the standard “proximate” approach of looking for problems in an individual by looking at evolutionary explanations for why all humans have the potential to develop certain diseases. Randolph Nesse is a recognised leader in this field; his books on the subject include Why We Get Sick and Good Reasons for Bad Feelings. Evolutionary psychology is a similar approach to psychology, but while the idea behind it is sound, it suffers many of the testability and ethnocentric problems as regular psychology. Shallow interpretations of evolutionary psychology have also been used to prop up many harmful ideas, especially in terms of gender roles. Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and political activist, thinks evolutionary psychologists often ignore evidence that doesn’t support the political status quo.
  • The “Galaxy Song” – not “Universe Song”, though to be fair the name of the song is only mentioned in album liner notes – was originally written by Eric Idle and John du Prez for the 1983 film Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. In the film, a medic (John Cleese) trying to convince a woman (Terry Jones) to donate her liver for a “live organ transplant” opens a door and a man (Eric Idle) steps out to accompany her through the universe while singing the song, making her feel small and insignificant enough that she agrees to the transplant. An updated version (“The Galaxy DNA Song“) was used for astrophysicist Brian Cox’s TV series Wonders of Life in 2012, and in 2016 another updated version appeared in the two-hour television program The Entire Universe Show, also hosted by Cox. It wasn’t included in any of the Python stage musicals, but an updated version did appear in the stage show Monty Python Live (Mostly) in 2014, including a video cameo by – you guessed it – Brian Cox, but also…someone else whose appearance we won’t spoil. The original is actually pretty good for the time – if you assume facts are rounded to the nearest singable number, then it gets several figures pretty close to correct. Liz may have quoted the speed of light to her teacher: the song gives this as “twelve million miles a minute” – not far off an accurate figure of 11.16 million miles per minute, though scientists would normally express it in round numbers as a bit under 300 million metres per second (299,792,458 m/s, to be more precise).
  • We’ve previously mentioned the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption many times. The most significant discussions of it appear in #Pratchat14 and #Pratchat28, but we most recently talked about it in #Pratchat38 – so Ben is way off when he says we haven’t talked about it for “about 30 episodes”. (Though, given how long the last year or two has felt, we’ll give him a pass on this one.)
  • The history of the idea that storytelling makes humans unique goes back to at least the 1967, when the name Homo narrans was coined by German ethologist Kurt Ranke. American communications scholar Walter R Fischer used it in his later work, in which he also codified the “narrative paradigm” – the idea that all significant communication occurs through storytelling. (Pan narrans seems to be a unique contribution from Jack and Ian.)
  • Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was first performed in 1993 at the Royal National Theatre in London, with a cast that included Rufus Sewell, Felicity Kendall, Bill Nighy and Emma Fielding. It is set in an English manor house belonging to the Coverly family, and happens in two time periods: in the present, two rival academics are researching the mysterious history of the house’s previous inhabitants at cross purposes, while one of the Coverly siblings is doing biology research. In the past of 1809, young lady of the house Thomasina Coverly has some advanced ideas about science and mathematics, while her tutor is caught up in drama with the house’s visiting poets. (Ben played the modern-day scientist, Valentine Coverly.)
  • The book Ben read about chaos theory was Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. It should also be clarified that it was the play that was about complexity not chaos; the book is definitely about chaos.
  • The Luggage’s legs were the subject of much discussion in previous episodes; way back in #Pratchat14, when we discussed its debut in The Colour of Magic, we wondered if anyone had tried drawing it with non-human legs. It is described in the first two books only as having “little legs”, without any reference to them being human-like, or their colour, leading us to make a callout for fan art depicting them as…well, anything else! Josh Kirby has always drawn them as human-like, and made them white-person flesh coloured, despite the fact that the Luggage’s wood is a darker colour. We suspect this influenced Pratchett’s own image of the Luggage, and its next appearance in Sourcery is the first time it has “little pink legs”.
  • Hobbits, also known as halflings, are a kind of people found in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. They look like humans, but grow only to about three feet tall (hence the name), with slightly pointed ears. Aside from their size, their main difference from humans is their feet: they have extremely tough soles, and the ends of their legs from their ankles down, as well as the tops of their feet, are covered in thick curly hair to keep them warm. As a result, hobbits do not wear shoes. Clearly these sort of feet would suit the Luggage well!
  • John Dee (1527 – 1609) was, as described in the book, a real historical figure. An English mathematician, occultist, astronomer and astrologer (the two being far more closely linked back then), he advised Queen Elizabeth I, and is – unfortunately – credited with coining the term “British Empire”. He had one of the biggest libraries in England in his day, giving the wizards a handy portal into L-Space. In his later life, he found public opinion turning against sorcery, and while he was abroad much of his library and possessions were stolen, destroyed or burned. Once Elizabeth was dead, her successor James I had no interest in helping Dee, and he died in poverty in 1608 or 1609 at his home in Mortlake. He has been a popular character in works of fiction, though Ben is mistaken to think he has often been a villain; he’s perhaps confusing him with Doctor Destiny, a supervillain who appears in the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman, and whose real name is John Dee, but is not meant to be the same person.
  • Stephen Pinker – a long-time defender of evolutionary psychology, it turns out – published The Language Instinct in 1994, well before The Science of Discworld II. The book not only argues that language is an innate trait possessed by humans, but also tries to debunk many commonly-held beliefs about language. It has been criticised for presenting too strong a view about how much of human behaviour can be explained by innate, biologically evolved instinct.
  • Swedish supergroup Abba reunited for performances in 2016, in the wake of the smash hit Mama Mia, a stage and film jukebox musical featuring their songs. They announced that year that they were working on new music, and a new “digital entertainment experience” featuring “ABBAtars” of the band – digital avatars of the group which would look like their 1970s selves, and which would somehow appear in concert. Two announced singles, and the ABBAtar experience, were delayed multiple times, but in August 2021 they announced Voyage, their first new album since 1981’s The Visitors. The album was released on September 2, 2021, and pictures of the band in motion capture suits – the lycra numbers with little ping-pong balls attached – accompanied many articles and made the rounds on Twitter. (Here’s the BBC one.)
  • Ponder and Ridcully argue about evolution in The Last Continent and The Science of Discworld, and to be fair, evolution only seems to work on the Disc on one island in its distant past, where is it the work of the God of Evolution. (See #Pratchat29 for our discussion of that!)
  • When Liz says “We’ve gotta Back to the Future this“, she is specifically speaking of the scenario in Back to the Future: Part II, where Marty’s carelessness allows villain Biff Tannen to go back in time and give his young self a book containing future sports results, allowing him to take over the town and run a hugely successful (and, it’s implied, criminal) business empire out of a casino. Marty and Doc have to go back in time and set history on its proper course.
  • Thief of Time (to be discussed in #Pratchat48) was published on the 1st of May, 2001 – a year and a day before The Science of Discworld II! It wasn’t the most recent Discworld book at the time of the latter’s release: in between, Pratchett published The Last Hero (a large-format illustrated book, published in October 2001) and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (the first younger readers Discworld novel, published in November 2001; see #Pratchat33). But Thief of Time was the most recent “regular Discworld novel for adults”, and in fact its first paperback edition was published one year after the original hardcover – the day before The Science of Discworld II.
  • Night Watch is the twenty-ninth Discworld book, and the sixth of the eight City Watch books. It remains one of the most popular of the entire series. Our current plan is to discuss it for #Pratchat50 – unless you have a better idea!
  • Liz’s speech referencing free will (or the lack of it) was given at the last Sci-Fight she participated in, on the 20th of May, 2021. The topic was “Scientists Go to Heaven”, and Liz was (perhaps surprisingly) on the affirmative team.
  • Liz has said “Time is a flat circle” on a number of occasions, beginning way back in #Pratchat5; this is Ben’s first time. It refers to the idea of “eternal return” – i.e. that time repeats itself – and is specifically a reference to the first season of the television series True Detective.
  • Loki is a Disney+ series and part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the series, a version of the trickster god Loki – as seen in the films Thor, The Avengers and others – is lifted from existence when he becomes a “variant” – a version of someone who strays from the single set of events enforced as the “sacred timeline” by a mysterious organisation known as the Time Variance Authority.
  • “A Bathing Ape” – or BAPE for short – is a fashion brand from Japan founded in 1993, now owned by Hong Kong fashion conglomerate I.T Group. You can see the kind of stuff they sell on their website.
  • The aquatic ape hypothesis is, at best, highly controversial among anthropologists. It was first suggested by marine biologist Alistair Hardy in 1960, though he described it as a “rough guess” rather than a serious theory, and according to some accounts was mortified at the sensational media attention it received at the time. It was popularised in part by Welsh television writer Elaine Morgan in her 1972 book The Descent of Woman, which challenged the highly gendered stories of human evolution – in particular the focus since the 1950s on early humans hunting and gathering, excluding the previously thought just as important activity of fishing. After receiving general acclaim for the book but criticism for the aquatic ape portion, she later published an entire book devoted to the idea, 1982’s The Aquatic Ape. The theory has been defended by many, including philosopher Daniel C Dennett (who has also suggested that both Morgan and her opponents go too far) and David Attenborough. The later seafood theory of human brains, espoused by Michael Crawford and David Marsh in their 1989 book The Driving Force: Food, Evolution and The Future (as mentioned in Chapter 8, “Planet of the Apes”), was not taken especially seriously either. All that said, there’s always room to challenge the status quo, especially if the dominant stories it supports seem to suspiciously uphold modern ideas about gender roles. So far, though, the fossil record doesn’t support the idea that early humans spent most of their time on the beach, so at best, the jury is still out.
  • It’s worth noting that the updated 2002 edition of the first The Science of Discworld also talks about the aquatic ape hypothesis and the importance of seafood in brain development – and goes another step further. In chapter 42, “Anthill Inside”, they mention that the savanna hypothesis is also in trouble from evidence that some areas where early human fossils are found weren’t savanna back when those humans died – they were woodlands. This is an ongoing question, and the savanna hypothesis – while still the dominant idea in the public consciousness – is described as controversial by some palaeoanthropologists and palaeobotanists, with interpretation of the habitat at that time seemingly still a bit in question.
  • The so-called “paleo diet” – short for palaeolithic diet – is, like most diets, a fad, in this case supposedly emulating the diet of our palaeolithic ancestors. Though versions of the idea go back at least as far as 1890s, gastroenterologist Walter L. Voegtlin really made it popular with his 1975 book The Stone Age Diet, which claimed humans ate very little other than meat up until 10,000 years ago and recommended modern humans do the same. It saw a revival at the start of the 21st century – when The Science of Discworld II was published – and the new name was seized by health scientist Loren Cordain with her 2002 book The Paleo Diet. (She also owns the copyright on that name.) While some of the recommendations of the diet probably are good for you, there’s not much in the way of proper research into the amazing health benefits Cordain and other proponents claim – and, for that matter, there’s not that much detail available about what our ancestors actually ate, either.
  • Neanderthals were a sister species to (or perhaps a subspecies of) modern humans; they are given the name Homo neanderthalis (or Homo sapiens neanderthalis if you think of us as Homo sapiens sapiens). They are named after the Neandertal valley in Germany, where their first fossils were found, and lived mostly in Europe until around 40,000 years ago. In the last few years, evidence has been found in Spain that Neanderthals – who lived there before modern humans – made forms of cave art, suggesting they may have been more sophisticated than the unflattering ideas given of them via the “Ugs” in Science of Discworld II.
  • Tool use in animals has been observed in many species, including monkeys, dolphins, birds (especially crows), and yes, octopuses. There’s some debate about what counts as a “tool”, but some animals do modify objects they find in the environment to suit their purposes; this includes crows and octopuses.
  • Octopuses can indeed get out of jars, as evidenced by this viral video from 2010 which did another round of the Internet in 2014. Though it should be noted that while the octopus does unscrew the lid from inside the jar, she seems perfectly happy to stay inside it.
  • We haven’t yet found a good source for the idea of fish returning to the location of their ancestors every four generations, but don’t confuse it with the four-generation cycle of history, which is another name for Strauss–Howe generational theory.
  • Robust and gracile are terms mostly used to describe two broad groups of species of our ancestor genus Australopithecus. While the concept does appear more broadly in biology, it seems much less common.
  • The three kinds of elephant are the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant (referred to in the book as the Indian elephant). Genetic analysis suggests that the two African elephant species diverged more than 2.5 million years ago – the same kind of timeframe as the divergence between woolly mammoths and Asian elephants.
  • Let’s talk about that claim about the huge number of illegitimate children. In chapter 12, “Edge People”, Jack and Ian say “In English society, about one child in seven” are in the position that their “legal and biological parentage differ”. This is based on Elliott Philipp’s analysis of blood groups in the late 1960s, published in 1973. Blood typing was the standard form of paternity testing before DNA fingerprinting techniques were refined in 1980s, and it is pretty good at determining that someone can’t be someone’s parent – you have to get the genes for your blood type from your parents, after all. Unfortunately we have no way of checking these numbers because we can’t find the study, or any writing about it (or similar ones in the United States, for that matter). It doesn’t instil us with confidence that the book’s authors seem to have misspelled the author of the study’s name – they name “Elliott Philipp”, who we think is probably Elliot Elias Philipp (1915 – 2010), a gynaecologist and obstetrician from Stoke Newington in London, though his official biography doesn’t mention this study. In any case, the figure of “one in ten” is popularly accepted, and was the result of the surveys they cite, but they correct for the fact that an unknown father has a reasonable chance of having the same blood type as the supposed father, leading to their figure of 13-17%, or roughly one in seven. There are other figures; while there’s not as much literature about this as you might expect – or at least not any that’s easily accessible to a lay researcher – we found that a study by University of Leicester in 2009 using a survey of genetic markers in nearly 1,700 British men suggested the real figure is probably closer to one in twenty-five. Here’s a BBC article from the time – note that the Leicester researchers don’t seem to be aware (or at least, don’t mention) Philipp’s study as a possible source of the one-in-ten assumption.
  • Mitochondria are the “organelles” responsible for most of the generation of Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the main source of chemical energy in cells. They are found in most cells of eukaryotic lifeforms on Earth. (An organelle is a distinct sub-structure that fulfils a specific function – so the cellular equivalent of an organ in the body.) The dominant theory is that they were once separate single-celled organisms that were absorbed and incorporated into the body of our single-celled ancestors millions of years ago. Supporting this is the fact that mitochondria have their own DNA. It’s been long thought that children only inherit the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of their mothers, hence the idea of “mitochondrial Eve” – the woman from whom all modern humans inherited their mitochondria. As the book points out, this doesn’t mean there was only one woman, only the others alive at the time do not have any surviving direct female-line descendants (they could have direct descendants, but if they or their following generations only had male children, then they would have inherited another line’s mtDNA). And, as modern lines end – i.e. as women now live and have no daughters – the specific woman in question would change. More recent genetic studies from 2013 have suggested the most recent mitochondrial Eve would have lived around 155,000 years ago, about twice as far back as the estimate current at the time of The Science of Discworld II. Of note is that since at least 2018, researchers have discovered that humans can inherit some of their mtDNA from their fathers, though this seems very rare and doesn’t seem to have left a significant mark on the human genetic map.
  • The Richard Dawkins book Ben mentions is The River Out of Africa, which uses the metaphor of a river to represent the flow of humans – or at least human DNA – out of Africa and across the world.
  • The Biblical story discussed in the book, in which the Israelites agree to let the Hivites join their tribe if they get circumcised but then murder them all, is the story of Dinah and Schechem, from the book of Genesis, chapter 34.
  • The early version of “Sleeping Beauty” to which Liz alludes is known from its earliest written version, “Sun, Moon, and Talia”, by Italian author Giambattista Basile in his 1634 book, the Pentamerone. Rather than being waken by a handsome Prince, the magically cursed princess Talia is discovered by a king, who…look, we’ll let you look it up. It’s not okay.
  • Cinderella’s slippers might be described as being made of “fur” in earlier versions, but this doesn’t seem to be an allusion to what Jack and Ian are talking about. Rather “squirrel fur” was one of a number of luxury materials that a common would never be able to afford or allowed by the conventions of status to wear. Many sources we found about this debunk the idea that it’s a mistranslation of an earlier version. The famous source of the modern version, Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre” (“Cinderella; or, the Little Glass Slipper”) uses the unambiguous phrase “pantoufles de verre” (“glass slippers”) many times. We will also note that Ben is wrong about the story always being about shoes – sometimes the item that helps identify the mystery woman is a ring. The earliest written version, in Chinese, does feature gold shoes.
  • The name Rumpelstiltskin actually derives from the German name Rumpelstilzchen. As Ben mentions, this is the name of a type of goblin – a noisy one who walks with a limp, in fact – and loosely translates as “little rattle stilt”. It seems to come from the old German children’s game, Rumpele stilt oder der Poppart, which one source described as “like duck-duck-goose except instead of a goose there’s a goblin, and instead of a duck there’s a man with a limp”. The goblin player would rattle and bang on things. (Sadly it seems others also think there’s a phallic interpretation for the story, though it doesn’t seem to be an explicit part of the tale in any version we can find.)
  • Ilona and Peter Opie published many books; the ones relevant to this discussion are 1959’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, and 1974’s The Classic Fairy Tales, which contained twenty-four stories as they first appeared in English, with a literary history.
  • We’ve mentioned the various folk tale indices in our show notes on previous occasions; the big one Ben usually refers to is the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index), though there are others. Like the Dewey Decimal System, the idea is that stories with closer numbers are more similar, or at least share significant traits. Both Rumpelstlitskin and Cinderella are in the 500s, the grouping known as “Supernatural helpers”. Rumpelstiltskin is the main example of ATU type 500, and Cinderella is the “persecuted heroine” subtype of 510A, “Cinderella and Cap o’ Rushes”.
  • The high school physics experiment Ben mentions is still done in high schools today. It uses a “ticker timer”, which is basically an electromagnet which, when attached to an AC power supply, turns on and off, causing a metal strip with a point on it to vibrate up and down at a fixed speed. It has a bit of carbon paper under the metal strip, so when the strip moves down it will make a mark with the carbon on paper underneath. In the experiment, you feed a strip of ticker tape through some guiding holes under the metal strip; by attaching one end of the tape to a block of wood with wheels on it, it can be dragged through, and by measuring the distance between the dots on the tape you can measure the speed at which the truck is moving. Ben was happy to discover that searching for “ticker timer” on YouTube brought up a number of high school physics teachers (many of them in Australia) explaining the demonstration to their students – some of them even from the Before Times!
  • The horse galloping photography experiment was to determine whether a horse always has one foot on the ground when trotting. It was undertaken by famous American photographer Eadweard Muybridge for Leland Stanford, former Governor of California, as mentioned in the book in chapter twenty-two, “The New Narrativium”. While the story of this settling a substantial bet is popular, some historians say there’s no evidence it’s true. The two men later had a falling out when Stanford published a book about horse movement containing illustrations based on Muybridge’s photographs but giving him no credit, costing Muybridge some research funding.
  • Rincewind’s deep love (or indeed lust) for potatoes was first explored while he was marooned on an island at the beginning of Interesting Times.
  • We’ve previously mentioned Jasper Fforde in #Pratchat25 (Equal Rites), #Pratchat31 (The Long Earth) and #Pratchat35 (The Science of Discworld), as well as the second episode of our subscriber bonus podcast, Ook Club. Thursday Next is the star of his most famous series of novels, beginning with The Eyre Affair; she works for the Special Operations Network department 27 ((or SpecOps, or specifically SO-27, for short), the Literary Detectives or “LiteraTecs”. Not only is literature incredibly important in her alternate history 1985 – “WillSpeak” machines are common coin-operated vending machines which recite lines from his plays and poems – but the lines between fiction and reality are very thin, allowing her to pass into the “BookWorld” and enter the plots of well-known novels. Her father has long since disappeared, but he worked for SO-12, the ChronoGuard, tasked with protecting the timeline from paradoxes and other tampering. As a result, Shakespeare and time travel are at least minor elements (an often much more significant ones) in most of the Thursday Next novels.
  • Liz claims no-one knows when Shakespeare was born, or what his life was like, or who he was…some of which is true. We don’t know when he was born, but we do know he was baptised on the 26th of April, 1564; his birthday is usually celebrated on April 23, which is also the date on which he died in 1616, aged 52. We also known he was married to Anne Hathaway on the 27th of November 1582, but there’s little detail recorded of his life until he begins to make his mark on the theatre scene in 1592, when he was roasted in print by rival playwright Robert Greene. As to his identity, while no end of scholars have made themselves famous with alternative theories about his identity and very existence, at least half of the Pratchat team subscribes to the simplest theory: that he was just one guy, named William Shakespeare.
  • Doctor Who featured Shakespeare in the 2007 episode “The Shakespeare Code”, when the Tenth Doctor and his companion Martha Jones visit the Globe to see an original Shakespeare production and discover alien witches are influencing both Shakespeare’s play and the Globe theatre for their own ends. Doctor Who had mentioned Shakespeare several times in the classic series, implying (but never showing) that the Doctor had met him on more than one occasion.
  • Ben makes an unintentional pun when he says that “Shakespeare is kind of your biggest Touchstone” – Touchstone is the name of a fool, one of the major characters in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It.
  • The author who suggested Western-style science requires monotheism, which is why it didn’t develop in China was British biochemist, historian and sinologist Joseph Needham (1900-1995). A noted scholar of Chinese history and philosophy of science, he wrote many books, but Jack and Ian specifically mention “his truly gigantic History of Science in China“. His work was so influential that in history circles, the question of why China had been overtaken by the West in scientific terms, despite being centuries ahead with many of the most important inventions, is known as “the Needham Question”. Needham has been criticised for being perhaps biased in China’s favour, however, and there are many other hypotheses that have been put forward to answer the Needham Question.
  • We hope you enjoy the seeming non-sequitur when Liz says “On the space elevator, on the way to the banana planet“; this is a result of a previous bit where Ben gave an entirely incorrect (and thus cut) account of how banana plants move up hills, and Liz deciding that when they get to the top they build a space elevator and leave the planet.
  • The Milgram experiment, conducted by Yale University psychologist Dr Stanley Milgram in 1961 and published in The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology as “Behavioural study of obedience” in 1963, remains one of the most famous psychology experiments of all time. As the subjects were filmed – and that footage used by Milgram to capitalise on his fame by using it in a 1974 film titled Obedience – it has been shown to students of psychology and the history and philosophy of science for decades. But like many similar experiments from the time, it has since come under a great deal of scrutiny. In 2013, Australian psychologist Gina Perry published Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments; with access to all Milgram’s original papers and documentation, she felt that his methodology and the the quality of the experiment was highly questionable. Even those who think the experiment holds up – and it has, despite ethical objections, been repeated in various forms, even as recently as 2007 – many others question the conclusions that have been drawn from the results. This great piece by Cari Romm for The Atlantic from 2015 is a great primer on the legacy of the experiment, and more recent criticism.
  • As Ben mentions, if you’re a subscriber, keep an eye out for the next episode of the Ook Club bonus podcast – he has a few more things to say about this book!
  • The expression Bojack Horseman has ruined for Liz is “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Many sources trace its origin back to a version found in The Court and Character of King James, written by Anthony Weldon in 1650, though some suggest a similar sentiment appears in “The Embassy to Achilles” in Homer’s The Iliad – or at least its English translation by Alexander Pope, published between 1715 and 1720. (Having had a look, that latter attribution seems a bit of a long bow.) Bojack Horseman is a Netflix original animated series about depressed and self-hating anthropomorphic horse actor Bojack Horseman. In the first season’s fourth episode, a number of characters are unable to recall the expression correctly. This echoes former US President George W Bush, famous for his “Bushisms”, who also mangled it; here’s a little collection of his gaffes that includes that one, from a speech given on September 17, 2002 in Nashville.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Alanta Colley, Ben McKenzie, collaboration, Elizabeth Flux, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Mustrum Ridcully, Ponder Stibbons, Rincewind, Roundworld, Science of Discworld, The Luggage, Unseen University, Wizards

#Pratchat14 Notes and Errata

8 December 2018 by Ben Leave a Comment

These are the show notes and errata for episode 14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-wide Vacation“, featuring guest Joel Martin discussing the 1990 novel Good Omens.

  • A note on this episode’s title: we’ve opted to parody a parody in order to name a discussion of a parody. (Does that make it a parodyox?) The film in question is National Lampoon’s Vacation, which was released in 1983 – the same year The Colour of Magic was published! (Though you might argue our title is closer to the sequel, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, from 1985.)
  • The Morning Bell is recorded live at the Brunswick Street Bookstore. Liz has been a guest a few times, most recently on episode 46 (February 2017), while Ben has been on just the once, for episode 63 (November 2017).
  • Joel is director of Melbourne’s new speculative fiction writing festival Speculate, returning in 2019 for its second year; Liz and Ben were guests the first time around and will be again in 2019. You can see both of them in the short film made for the 2018 festival here, or visit specfic.com.au to find out more about what’s in store for 2019.
  • Liz’s comment about eye anatomy refers to the fact that as well as the structures found in regular human eyes which are sensitive to light – rods for dim light, and cones for bright light and (normal) colour vision – wizards also have octagons, which can detect octarine. This suggests that there is a genetic (or otherwise biological) component to being a wizard, and since Rincewind can see octarine, it seems inarguable that he really is a wizard.
  • Time Team began in 1994, making it much younger than The Black Adder, the first of the four series of Blackadder sit-coms, which was produced in 1983 (there’s that year again!). It also comes slightly later than Tony Robinson’s abridged audiobooks, the first of which – The Colour of Magic, of course – was first released on cassette in 1993. The unabridged versions, initially read by Nigel Planer, are harder to pin down, but seem to have begun a little later in 1997.
  • The ethos that “every issue could be someone’s first” is said to be the reason that Marvel comics had so much dialogue explaining stuff the characters already knew – often with accompanying editor’s notes (the asterisked, comic book equivalent of a footnote) pointing the reader to the previous issue in which the thing being explained took place!
  • ABBA is a Swedish pop group comprising two couples: Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad (the band’s name is an acronym of their first names). They shot to world-wide fame in 1974 after winning the Eurovision Song Contest, but the band and their marriages broke up by 1982, as their staggering popularity caused their personal lives to suffer. They remain incredibly popular in Australia and around the world, with their music being adapted into the hit musical Mama Mia! and its filmic sequel. They announced in April that they had recorded their first new music in more than 35 years, and the new single, “I Still Have Faith in You”, is due to be released this month (December 2018)!
  • Japanese avant-garde artist, peace activist, musician and filmmaker Yoko Ono was long blamed by disappointed fans for the break-up of The Beatles in 1969 because of her marriage to John Lennon. These days this is generally recognised as a grossly unfair and simplistic explanation, but her name is still synonymous with the idea of an outside relationship catalysing the end of a creative partnership.
  • In cosmology, the steady state model is an alternative to the now generally accepted Big Bang theory. It states that the universe would continue to expand forever, but remain in a “steady state” of density as new matter is constantly created. By contrast, in the Big Bang model, the amount of matter is fixed, and the universe becomes less dense as it expands, so the expansion will slow down either to the point where it reverses and matter contracts into another singularity – the Big Crunch – or keep going long enough for all the stars to burn out and leave nothing behind but black holes – the Big Freeze. Feel free to write your own pun versions of these for Great A’Tuin, but they’ll probably be more depressing than Pratchett’s originals.
  • The story about translating Pratchett’s puns appears in various editions of The Discworld Companion, and definitely in the most recent (as of this writing), Turtle Recall. Ruurd Groot, who translated Pratchett into Dutch, ended up tweaking an alternate name for the Big Bang theory so that it could be interpreted as “the Making Love Outwards Model”, a name Terry loved!
  • As Ben mentions, the film Krull is one of a crop of cheap Star Wars rip-offs, and it was released the same year as Return of the Jedi – 1983 again! Critics were not kind to Krull, and it was a huge financial flop (the massive budget blowout caused by huge alterations to the sets didn’t help), but it’s found a cult audience of fans who appreciate its weird mix of fantasy, swashbuckling and sci-fi, outlandish ideas, and ambitious production, as well as early film roles for Robbie Coltrane and Liam Neeson. (Ben had a lot more to say about it, but the episode was already running long!)
  • Edgar Rice Burroughs, best known as the author of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars and The Land That Time Forgot, also wrote the Pellucidar series of novels set inside a hollow Earth full of dinosaurs and psychic pterodacyl-men. The first book, At the Earth’s Core, was adapted into another favourite film from Ben’s youth, starring Doug McClure and Peter Cushing.
  • You too can enjoy the video posted to Twitter of “Inside Earth Girl“.
  • The Monty Python sketch starring John Cleese and a hovercraft full of eels (mentioned only) is usually referred to as “Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook”. It first appeared in the twelfth episode of the second series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1970, and was adapted as part of the film And Now for Something Completely Different the following year.
  • While continuity among Discworld books is generally pretty good, Terry’s “don’t worry about it too much” attitude has produced a surprisingly difficult to pin down chronology – in no small part because of the time travel magic employed by Granny Weatherwax halfway through Wyrd Sisters. The most widely-accepted timeline puts the events of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic about two years before those in Equal Rites, three years before Mort, nine years before Sourcery, twelve years before Pyramids and twenty-one years before Guards! Guards!. Assuming Rincewind is 33 when we first meet him, which seems the most likely age, this means he is 41 when he is cast into the Dungeon Dimensions in Sourcery, and that three years pass on the Disc before he escapes in Eric!, though it’s unclear how much he’d have aged in that time. By the time we’ll meet him again in Interesting Times, the timeline has him wandering the Disc for another six years, making him at least 47, and possibly as old as 50 – but still considerably younger than David Jason, who was 68 when he played Rincewind at the beginning of his adventures in The Colour of Magic.
  • The Great Fire of London started in a bakery in Pudding Lane and destroyed most of the City of London over four days in September 1666, burning down over 13,000 houses and hundreds of larger structures, including St Paul’s Cathedral. Many older buildings survived the fire, including the Tower of London and several pubs and churches.
  • The idea of going on holiday goes back at least as far as the Roman Empire, where wealthy citizens would travel for as long as two years at a time. The more modern version dates back to the “Grand Tours” undertaken by wealthy young European men from the 17th century onwards. By the late 19th century, the innovations of the industrial revolution like steam trains and ocean liners made travel for pleasure more affordable for workers, but just like the other things he brought from the Agatean Empire, Twoflower’s brand of tourism seems a twentieth century idea, rooted in the culture of the 1950s and 60s.
  • It’s amazing we didn’t mention this, but Rincewind appears without his signature pointy hat. Well…he has one, of some sort, but he quickly loses it and it’s clearly not the one with “WIZZARD” written on it sequins which is later so dear to him. (It might also seem odd that someone with such a talent for languages is unable to spell his own job description in his mother tongue, but then again spelling on the Discworld is at best described as “informal”.)
  • Elric VIII, 428th Emperor of Melniboné – Elric of Melniboné for short –  is the most famous creation of fantasy author Michael Moorcock. Physically frail and sickly, Elric is an anti-hero, reluctant ruler of his people and the only one among them to have a conscience. He is also an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, a doomed pawn in the battle between the cosmic forces of Law and Chaos across the multiverse. Early in his adventures he finds the magical black sword Stormbringer – a clear inspiration for Kring – which gives him strength, but consumes the souls of others – including many of those for whom Elric cares most.
  • To clarify Ben’s description of who’s keeping Twoflower alive, the Boy Emperor of the Agatean Empire sent the message asking for protection for Twoflower; the message calling for his assassination is from the Emperor’s Vizier. Both of them appear briefly in the fourth Discworld novel, Mort.
  • Pratchett had published three novels – and numerous short stories – prior to The Colour of Magic. The Carpet People (1971), for younger audiences, was originally written when he was 17; he later revised it, describing it as a collaboration with his younger self. The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) and Strata (1981) are comedy sci-fi novels, and contain the first appearances of a disc-shaped world – no turtle though! – and Hogswatch.
  • A mimic is one of a number of classic monsters from Dungeons & Dragons which appears as something innocuous – in the mimic’s case, it can change shape to resemble an inanimate object, most commonly a treasure chest. It first appeared in the original edition of the Monster Manual in 1977, and so was almost certainly an inspiration for the Luggage.
  • The Shawshank Redemption (1994, dir. Frank Darabont) is an award-winning film based on a novella by Stephen King. It stars Tim Robbins as a banker who is wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, and forced to use his accountancy skills to aid the corrupt prison warden’s money laundering scheme.
  • The Kanes mentioned by Joel are Solomon Kane, a Puritan witch hunter created by Robert E Howard, and Kane, Karl Edward Wagner’s reimagining of the Biblical Caine, red-headed son of Adam and his first wife Lilith who is cursed by God to walk the Earth for eternity as punishment for committing the first murder. Neither are traditional sword and sorcery heroes, and Wagner’s Kane has much in common with Moorcock’s Elric. As far as we can tell, there’s no-one named Kane on the Discworld.
  • If you want to know more about the Winchester Mystery House, episode 162 of the 99% Invisible podcast is a great place to start.
  • Australian spiders – and other deadly venomous animals like snakes and jellyfish, in Australia and elsewhere – probably got so deadly because they need to guarantee a kill when they use their venom. As in so many areas of evolution, there’d be an arms race between predator and prey, forcing venom to become more and more deadly over time. And that’s a race we humans aren’t even in, since we’re so rarely killed by venomous creatures that we’ve not evolved any kind of immunity to them. Evolution thus overcompensated on its potency, because it’s better to expend more energy than strictly necessary on creating super venom to make sure 100% of predators or prey to die, than it is to make a weaker venom which might leave some victims alive, meaning they leave the creature hungry, and also gives the victim a chance to pass on their resistance to their offspring. The BBC article “Why some animals have venoms so lethal, they can’t use them” by Josh Gabbatiss from 2016 is a great exploration of all of these ideas.
  • Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice was a collaboration between Bakshi and fantasy artist Frank Frazzetta, best known for his comic book, book cover and album cover art – including a version of Conan the Barbarian which redefined the character from the 1960s on. The film used the rotoscoping technique, in which actors were filmed and then traced to lend realistic movement to the animated characters; Bakshi also used this technique for his other films, Wizards and Lord of the Rings. Fire and Ice was released in – surprise! – 1983.
  • The other movie that Ben thought Joel was talking about was The Flight of Dragons, a Rankin/Bass production based on a book by Peter Dickinson, which deals largely with the question of whether magic and science are compatible. It was released in 1982, though, so clearly it was the wrong film.
  • The Doctor Who story with people who are naked under their holograms is the 2013 Christmas special The Time of the Doctor, in which the Church of the Papal Mainframe requests that visitors do not wear clothes while visiting. It’s the final story for Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, and occurs soon after the events of the fiftieth anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor.
  • Pete’s Dragon is a 1977 live-action Disney musical in which a young boy, Pete, escapes an abusive foster family with the help of Elliott, a friendly, animated fire-breathing green dragon who can make himself invisible. He befriends a lighthouse keeper and his daughter while pursued by his cruel foster parents, and a travelling snake oil salesman plots to capture Elliott and use his organs for potions that might actually work. It was remade in 2016, though in the new version Pete is orphaned in a car crash in the woods and survives there for six years with Elliott’s help before being found by a park ranger. The new one has a fancy CGI dragon that probably resembles Twoflower’s, but no songs.
  • Death by the Books is a fortnightly podcast about mystery, crime and other someone-dies books. In episode 9, Death by Pratchett, hosts Kirsti and Lianne out themselves as massive fans of you know who. It’s a great introduction to Pratchett and the Discworld as a whole, and they might cover some of the individual books in the future – after all, someone dies in most of them… They’re also on Twitter at @deathbythebooks.
  • Zweiblumen is, in fact, German, and literally translates as “Two Flowers”. (Twoflower would be “Zweiblume”, but presumably Pratchett thought Zweiblumen sounded better.)
  • Rincewind is clearly channelling an inspiration particle when he says “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” though as usual the particles have got it slightly wrong: the famous catchphrase of Hardy, the larger half of comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, was actually “this is another nice mess you’ve gotten us into”, though the confusion is understandable since they titled one of their films Another Fine Mess.
  • CW’s The Flash, now in its fifth season, is itself a spin-off of Arrow, both shows based on superhero characters from DC Comics. Along with later addition Supergirl, they started out with just the one main superhero character but have since brought many fan favourites from the comics to the small screen, albeit often with a twist. Case in point: the Elongated Man, who shows up in The Flash’s fourth season, is a lesser known superhero with stretching powers, though the television version draws more on Jim Carrey’s performance in The Mask than anything from the comics.
  • A “backronym” is a phrase crafted to turn a specific word into an acronym, as opposed to a real acronym in which the phrase comes first. They are often associated with words that are not normally acronyms, e.g. “Something Posing As Meat” is a backronym for Spam.
  • In Greek mythology, Tethys is a Titan, a daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and – as is the way with Greek myths – sister and wife of the sea Titan Oceanus. One of the moons of Saturn is named for her, which makes more sense when we recall that Saturn is the Roman equivalent of Kronos, one of Tethys’ brother Titans.
  • Waterworld is a famously terribly 1995 post-apocalyptic action film starring Kevin Costner as the Mariner, a mutant uniquely suited to life on a future Earth drowned under the melted polar ice caps. A trader played by Kim Coates offers the Mariner a paper page from a book as a valuable commodity, repeating the word “paper” over and over; the scene has been parodied and recreated many times as one of many things people find ridiculous about the film.  
  • The contestants from each district in The Hunger Games novels by Suzanne Collins (and their film adaptations) are given lavish quarters before being forced to fight each other to the death; the winner is also treated to a luxurious lifestyle when the games are over.
  • When he says we never meet wizards who aren’t inept, Ben means as major protagonists; The Light Fantastic contains numerous wizards who are extremely ept, but most of them are out to kill Rincewind (and each other). Ipslore the Red in Sourcery is likewise an antagonist, and few of the faculty of Unseen University in that book are trustworthy.
Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Joel Martin, Rincewind, Tethys, The Colour of Magic, The Luggage, Twoflower

#Pratchat21 Notes and Errata

8 July 2019 by Ben Leave a Comment

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

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

Posted in: Episode Notes Tagged: Ben McKenzie, David Ryding, Discworld, Elizabeth Flux, Genghiz Cohen, Mustrum Ridcully, Rincewind, The Luggage, Twoflower, Wizards
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