Unseen University

#Pratchat29 Notes and Errata

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These are the show notes and errata for episode 29, “Great Rimward Land“, featuring guest Fury, discussing the 1998 Discworld novel The Last Continent.

Iconographic Evidence

Feast your eyes on Fury’s glorious illustration of Trunkie!

Notes and Errata

  • This episode’s title puns on the Icehouse song “Great Southern Land“, a big hit in Australia which also featured on the soundtrack of Yahoo Serious’ 1988 Australian comedy film Young Einstein. In retrospect both the song and the film might have been expected to show up parodied in The Last Continent – especially the song, since Pratchett listed it as one of his tracks when he appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1997. (Thanks to Al of Desert Island Discworld for this fact!)
  • Our pre-show disclaimer uses the phrase “going off like a frog in a sock”. “Going off” on its own means to put a lot of energy or excitement into something, sometimes in anger, but in the frog idiom always in a fun way. Unusually for Australian slang, this isn’t ironic, just a straight-up metaphor; imagine you’ve caught a frog in a sock and it’s trying to get out, and you’ll get the idea. (And no, Australians don’t actually catch frogs in socks, this is strictly a thought experiment.)
  • The Kiwi-Aussie portmanteau is spelled “Kaussie“, whereas the slang for swimwear is “cossie“; it’s short for “swimming costume”.
  • The South Australian television personality who keeps getting in fights on the Internet is Cosi, host of South Aussie with Cosi, a travel show produced by Channel 9. (Not to be confused with Cosi, the play by Australian playwright Louis Nowra, previously discussed in #Pratchat23, “The Music of the Nitt“.)
  • “Swimming togs” comes from the British slang word “togs”, which just meant clothes. It’s one of a number of slang terms now archaic in the UK which have survived in some form in Australia.
  • Helen Zaltzmann is host of The Allusionist, a podcast about language, and one of Ben’s favourites. We’re sure she’d be the first to tell you that not every word – slang or otherwise – has a satisfying true origin story.
  • Stephen Briggs was a frequent collaborator with Terry, beginning with the original map of Ankh-Morpork. He also contributed to the diaries, The Discworld Companion and many other books outside the main novels. He adapted many of the books into plays, some of which have been published, and has read the audiobook versions of more than 30 of Terry’s novels. (Stephen Fry reads the UK editions of the Harry Potter audiobooks; if you’ve heard the US versions, those are read by Jim Dale.)
  • Mike Schur’s afterlife sitcom The Good Place set much of its third season in Australia, and copped much criticism from actual Australians for the quality of the accents. You couldn’t fault the jokes, though – or the punny names of the restaurants, shops and incidental characters in those episodes.
  • Pretty Little Liars is a teen mystery TV series based on the books by American YA author Sara Shepard. The UK accented character is antagonist Alex Drake, who shows up in season 7. We’d tell you more, but…spoilers.
  • The extreme Australian wizard slang originated in a reply to a tumblr post from about JK Rowling’s the introduction of the American term for muggle, “no-maj”; you can find the original here, but just in case it vanishes from Tumblr forever, we’ll immortalise the words of user edenwolfie here (and a quick warning – we haven’t censored the print version). We’d also like to point out that Australian wizards and witches would most likely spell it “muggo”.

I can just imagine the Australian word being some awful slang that’s derived from muggle, such as “mugo”.

Ah, I can imagine it now, wizards in thongs, drinking butter-VB yelling “You’re such a fucking mugo, you wandless cunt!”

edenwolfie, Tumblr, 11 November 2015
  • Minotaur is Melbourne’s biggest independent pop culture and science fiction bookstore. Many of Terry’s early Melbourne signings occurred at its original location on Bourke Street, but it moved to Elizabeth Street in 2000.
  • PhanCon ’98 was a one-off fan science fiction convention held in Sydney in 1998. Information on it is in short supply, but guests included Terry Pratchett and British fantasy author David Gemmell.
  • Comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 broke up in 1992 and smashed into the planet Jupiter in 1994, to much excitement (on Earth at least). It was named for astronomers Carolyn Shoemaker, Eugene M. Shoemaker and David Levy, who discovered it after it had been captured by Jupiter’s gravity into a decaying orbit.
  • English scientists did indeed doubt the reality of the platypus, which not only has a unique and wonderful anatomy, but is one of just two surviving monotremes – a group of mammals that lay eggs. (The other one is the echidna.) As well as its distinctive bill, it has sharp ankle spurs which in the male can inject venom, and the ability to sense electric fields as a way of locating prey.
  • The Dreaming is a sophisticated concept in the stories of Aboriginal cultures. It has a complex relationship to space and time, existing both long ago and now, but despite the name – which was coined by Europeans – it has nothing to do with dreaming. An older term, “dreamtime”, is generally no longer considered appropriate. We recommend reading up on the topic; one good place to start is this article at Common Ground.
  • Boomerangs bought in stores and thrown to return are, indeed, toys. Hunting and war boomerangs were generally much larger, sharpened, and often had one wing longer than the other.
  • The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a 1994 Australian comedy film which was a surprise box office hit often considered hugely significant in the history of queer cinema. It follows two drag queens (Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce) and a trans woman (Terence Stamp) as they travel from Sydney through the outback to perform in Alice Springs. Though initially praised for its queer-positive message, the portrayal of Filipino character Cynthia attracted widespread criticism for relying on racist stereotypes of Asian women common in Australia. Original writer and director Stephan Elliott adapted the film into a stage musical, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, in 2006; the musical retains the characters and plot more or less unchanged, but hasn’t been criticised nearly as much for the character of Cynthia.
  • The opal fossils gallery at the South Australian Museum is still there, and you can see the skeleton Ben mentioned. The web site is sketchy on details, so we can’t confirm if it’s an Elasmosaurus or another species of plesiosaur, but we still recommend you check it out yourself!
  • The protagonist wizard (or at least wizarding student) in Moving Pictures was Victor Tugelbend. Other wizards not part of the regular faculty include Drum Billet, Archchancellor Cutangle, Simon and Esk (Equal Rites); Igneous Cutwell (Mort); Alberto Malich (Mort and most other Death novels); and Ipslore the Red (Sourcery).
  • Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is more-or-less a mashup of two of Douglas Adams’ Doctor Who scripts: the unfinished Shada, and City of Death, which contributed the storyline about time-travelling aliens who crash on Earth in the distant past and spark life on the planet. There are other elements in it which are wholly original, perhaps most notably the Electric Monk. This description applies to the original novel; the television adaptations, especially the US one, are very different.
  • Mot was indeed a French cartoon series about a purple monster who could travel through time and space, taking his young friend Leo on various adventures. It was based on the French children’s comics created by Alfonso Azpiri. It was aired on Australian television in the late 1990s.
  • Thanks to listener and supporter Molokov, who pointed out that Rincewind’s magical ability to find “bush tucker” might be a reference to retired army Major Les Hiddins, aka “the Bush Tucker Man“. Hiddins researched Australian native foods as part of his army career by working with Aboriginal peoples, mostly in northern Australia. He came to national fame through The Bush Tucker Man television series on the ABC in the late 80s and early 90s. In each episode Hiddins, wearing his trademark larger-than-usual Akubra hat, visited a part of Outback Australia and introduced viewers to the local edible plants and animals. Hiddins wrote several books, and then disappeared onto a remote retreat he created in the bush for retired army service people, before returning to the public eye in 2019 with a new website: bushtuckerman.com.au
  • We discussed Interesting Times back in episode 21, “Memoirs of Agatea“.
  • Black Sheep was released in 2006, written and directed by Jonathan King with special effects by Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop. It seems the main way to watch it now is via the Amazon Prime Video streaming service, though it should also be available on DVD.
  • Terry has not always had kind things to say about Rincewind; he suggested the wizard’s job is “to meet more interesting people” than himself, lamented Rincewind’s lack of an inner monologue, and did indeed feel like he was running out of things to do with an eternally cowardly character. Agatha Christie’s negative feelings about Poirot are well-documented, from as early as 1930; in a notable quote from 1960 she describes him as a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. But she refused to kill him off because she felt she had a duty to keep writing about a character that was still so popular with the public.
  • Michael Moorcock was an English fantasy author who created a number of characters including Elric of Melnibone, one of several incarnations of “the Eternal Champion”, fated to be reborn through the ages and battle in the primeval war between the forces of Law and Chaos.
  • We discussed Only You Can Save Mankind in our previous episode, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
  • Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (aka Skippy) was an Australian family television series about an usually smart kangaroo who helped park ranger’s son Sonny have various adventures. It was very much in the mould of Lassie or Flipper. It ran from 1968 to 1970, and there was a brief sequel series in 1992 featuring Sonny as an adult. It was broadcast in most Commonwealth countries, as well as the US and many Spanish-speaking countries including Mexico, Cuba and Spain.
  • We’ve mentioned it before, but you can find the Annotated Pratchett File at the old L-Space Web site. Its successor is the L-Space Wiki.
  • The Moa is a large extinct flightless bird, similar to a Cassowary. Like many megafauna of Australia and New Zealand, they were hunted to extinction, in the Moa’s case by the Māori peoples.
  • “Jeremy Bearimy” is an explanation of how time works in the afterlife in the sitcom The Good Place. Rather than a straight line, the flow of time there resembles a curve which looks like a signature reading “Jeremy Bearimy”. The dot in the i (or tittle) is a weird separate bit of spacetime.
  • “Guzzaline” was the term used for petrol in Mad Max: Fury Road, the fourth Mad Max movie, released in 2015. It stars Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, a driver for a despotic warlord in post-apocalyptic Australia. Tom Hardy appears as Max Rockatansky, the titular character, who was the protagonist of the previous three films, where he was played by Mel Gibson.
  • When Liz refers to Darwin, she means the city, which is the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. It was named for Charles Darwin by John Clements Wickham during a subsequent voyage of the ship Darwin took on his famous voyage, the HMS Beagle.
  • In Jurassic Park, palaeontologist Alan Grant claims to know that the Tyrannosaurus rex – portrayed in the films as a ferocious predator – has vision “based on movement”. This is one of many things that make no sense in the film. Have a few drinks with Ben, or your local friendly palaeontologist, and they’ll tell you about some others.
  • Richard Dawkins is now best known for heavy-handed criticism of religion and, most recently, feeling the need to confirm that whatever you think of it, eugenics works. But he initially found fame for his pretty good books on evolutionary biology. In The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976, he popularised the idea that the gene is the basic and most important unit of evolutionary information, and also coined the term “meme”, meaning the behavioural or cultural equivalent of a gene.
  • Historians, archaeologists and anthropologists frequently find evidence that revise the likely length of Aboriginal culture’s existence in Australia about every six months – usually making it older. Current estimates range from 50,000 to 125,000 years.
  • You can read about the Sydney baboon escape from late February 2020 in this article at The Guardian – written by previous Pratchat guest, Stephanie Convery! (Steph was a guest in #Pratchat2, and later returned for #Pratchat42.)
  • You certainly used to be able to get tea-towels and such that were supposedly from “Didjabringabeeralong, The Outback”, but these days we’d like to think we’re a bit more culturally sensitive. The unique names of many Australian towns and cities – like Wagga Wagga, Geelong and Nar Nar Goon – are drawn from local Aboriginal languages, many of which have been lost as those peoples were displaced or massacred by Europeans.
  • Tank Girl is a punk-inspired comic book series by created by British writer Jamie Hewlett and artist Alan Martin. Tank Girl is the main character, who lives in a tank in post-apocalyptic Australia. She’s accompanied on her adventures by her mutant kangaroo boyfriend, Booga. The comic was adapted into the 1995 film Tank Girl, directed by Rachel Talalay and starring Lori Petty as Tank Girl and Naomi Watts as her friend Jet Girl (who has a jetpack), with Malcolm McDowell as the antagonist. It has a cult following but was not a big success.
  • Listener Ian Banks in our Discord pointed out that another, probably more likely inspiration for the anthropomorphic animals is The Magic Pudding, a 1918 children’s book written and illustrated by famous Australian artist Norman Lindsay. The story’s main characters are Bunyip Bluegum (a koala person), human sailor Bill Barnacle, and Sam Sawnoff (a penguin person). The titular pudding, Albert, has a face, arms and legs, and regenerates, so he can supply an infinite amount of food. The story also features “pudding thieves” Patrick and Watkin, a possum and wombat respectively.
  • We want to make it clear that despite Liz’s hangups, marsupial pouches are not dirty; kangaroos lick theirs clean before their joeys enter them.
  • Barry McKenzie, a creation of Australian comedian Barry Humphries, began life as a comic strip character in the pages of UK comic magazine Private Eye in 1964. A parody of the Australian abroad, he is a hard-drinking, womanising, simple-but-forthright “larrikin” who gets himself into various scrapes. He was played by singer and actor Barry Crocker in two films in the 1970s, which also introduced Humphrie’s long-running character Dame Edna Everidge, who is Barry’s aunt. The films nearly killed director Bruce Beresford’s career, but he later went on to find fame and success, with such big films as Driving Miss Daisy and Mao’s Last Dancer.
  • “Squids” in the book is almost certainly a pun on “quid”, slang for a pound sterling in the UK and pre-decimal Australia. It’s still used occasionally as slang for money in Australia, usually in the phrase “a few quid”.
  • In case you missed it, the shearing competition in the book is clearly inspired by the Australian folk song “Click Go the Shears“.
  • We cut the discussion for time but “something for the weekend” reminded Ben of ska band Madness’s song “House of Fun”, which is about a teenager who has turned sixteen and is using various euphemisms to try and buy condoms at his local chemist.
  • In The Man From Snowy River, the actual description of the hero’s horse is “something like a racehorse undersized”.
  • As alluded to in the book, drop bears are a fictional cousin of the koala, a horrible killer animal which waits in treetops to drop on and eat children. Inventing dangerous creatures has been a long-running prank played on visitors to Australia, playing on their fears of the real deadly animals that live here. A recent incidence of the drop bear was this prank played on a UK reporter visiting to report on the bush fires.
  • The bush ballad “Waltzing Matilda” is thought by academics to describe the Great Shearer’s Strike of 1891, in which shearer’s killed a number of sheep and one of their number, being chased by police, killed himself rather than be taken alive. A lot of the slang in the song is never heard anywhere else anymore – including “jumbuck”, a term for sheep thought to have been derived from an Aboriginal language. There are many versions of the lyrics, but the most famous one was adapted by the Billy tea company. In some, Liz’s question becomes moot, as the troopers ask “Whose that jolly jumbuck”, rather than “Where’s“.
  • If you’re confused by Liz’s “cat in a bag” antics, you can read about Schrodinger’s Cat and other feline behaviours in our discussion of Pratchett’s non-fiction humour book The Unadulterated Cat. You’ll find it in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“.
  • The Domestic Blindness sketch was indeed part of vintage 1980s Australian sketch comedy show The Comedy Company; you can find it on YouTube here.
  • Listener and previous guest Avril (who you might remember from #Pratchat16, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Vorbis“) points out that the god’s love of beetles is likely a reference to English geneticist and evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane, perhaps most famous for writing about abiogenesis and the idea of “primordial soup”, among many other accomplishments. In response to being asked what his study of nature might reveal about the Creator, Haldane is perported to have said “that He is inordinately fond of beetles”, due to the phenomenal number and variety of beetle species. While this exact response might be apocryphal, he definitely said something equivalent many times, both in print and in speeches.
  • Gachnar the Fear Demon appears in the fourth season Halloween episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Fear, Itself”, from 1999.
  • Australian cockroaches are not actually Australian at all – they live all over the world, and probably originally come from somewhere in Africa.
  • White-tailed spiders are small spiders native to south-eastern Australia. They are not aggressive but might bite if disturbed, and like to hide among leaf litter. They were demonised in the media during the late twentieth century as their bite supposedly caused necrosis, but medical research in the early twenty-first century didn’t find evidence of any such symptoms. Instead, the spider’s venom caused only unpleasant but mild symptoms, especially by Australian standards.
  • The Stonefish is a real fish, one of the most venomous in the world. It disguises itself as a stone in order to catch smaller fish as prey, but has sharp spines on its back which deliver venom as a defence against predators. Four of the five species live outside Australian waters; their sting can be treated with hot water (which denatures the venom) and anti-venom.
  • Last Chance to See was a 1989 radio documentary following Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Cawardine as they travelled the world to visit nine different endangered species. Adams turned it into a book in 1990, and in 2009 Stephen Fry joined Cawardine for a sequel television series, accompanied by a new book.
  • Pauline Hanson is a right-wing populist politician from Queensland who rose to fame when she ran for federal parliament in 1995 as a member of the conservative Liberal Party. They dis-endorsed her after she made racist comments about Aboriginal Australians, and she formed her own party, One Nation, and won a seat. She was found to have committed electoral fraud and jailed, though the charges were subsequently overturned on appeal. She left her own party in 2002 over those charges, but remained a figure in the Australian media, aided by appearances on breakfast television and the reality show Dancing with the Stars. She returned to politics and One Nation in 2013, and was elected to the Australian Senate in 2016. She is famous mostly for various racist views that very much align with those of Fair Go Dibbler.
  • Lost is a TV series about a bunch of plane crash survivors who find themselves lost on a mysterious island. It famously makes no sense whatsoever and it’s generally considered that it’s creators, JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof, were making it up as they went along to stay ahead of the guesses of fans on the Internet about what was really going on.
  • The Galah (pronounced “ga-LAR”) is a large, loud pink and grey cockatoo (a type of parrot), common in many parts of Australia. “Galah” is also slang for a ridiculous or foolish person.
  • The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is a one of the largest pride parades in the world. It happens annually on the first Saturday in March, and started in 1978. It draws massive crowds from all over the world.
  • Intersex people are born with genetic and/or physical characteristics associated with both of the traditional genders. While the statistics are sometimes contested, it’s thought as many as 1.7% of people are born with some kind of intersex characteristics. The I in LGBTIAQ+ is for intersex.
  • The infamous Australian episode of The Simpsons, “Bart vs Australia”, is from the show’s sixth season in 1995.
  • The tough guy who appreciates art in Thief of Time is probably Newgate Ludd.
  • Damian Callinan’s The Merger started life as a one-man show, but was adapted in 2018 into a feature film. You can find it on the free streaming service Kanopy if you are a member of a library that subscribes to it, and its now on Netflix in many regions too.
  • The original Harry’s Cafe de Wheels started out in Woolloomooloo, a harbour-side inner suburb of Sydney, as a “caravan cafe” specialising in serving late night pies. It was founded by Harry “Tiger” Edwards in 1936. It’s been patronised by many international celebrities and there are now several Harry’s cafes around Sydney and New South Wales – though not, despite Ben’s later confusion, in Adelaide.
  • The word for the smell you get after it rains – specifically, the smell of earth after it rains – is “petrichor”. Hopefully it’s okay for us to use it as we’re not writing a poem.
  • Tropical areas – such as the northern part of Australia – are often described as having Wet seasons and Dry seasons. The Wet season is also known as monsoon season or the Rainy season in some parts of the world.
  • You can read about the six seasons described by the Kulin people of Melbourne on this web site.
  • To avoid any confusion: in Good Omens, it’s said that any cassette tape left in the glove box of a car transforms into Queen’s Greatest Hits. In Mort, it’s said that no matter what’s put into it during the day, a pantry raided in the middle of the night contains only some very specific and disappointing items.
  • “How to Make Gravy” is a 1996 song by Australian singer-songwriter (and national treasure) Paul Kelly. It was originally written and released as part of a Christmas charity album benefitting the Salvation Army, when Kelly found out the song he initially wanted to cover had already been picked by another band. In Kelly’s song the narrator, Joe, has been sent to prison; the lyrics are a letter he’s writing on December 21 (dubbed “Gravy Day” by some fans) lamenting that he won’t be home for Christmas, and giving his brother his gravy recipe, since that’s his usual contribution to the Christmas cooking. It became a surprise hit and was nominated for the APRA song of the year award in 1998. Below is the official video. (We’ll mention the song again in the Oggswatch Feast 2021 bonus Christmas episode.)
  • Captain Raymond Holt is the captain of police precinct 99 in the sitcom Brooklyn-99. He – like all the characters in the show – is wonderful.
  • Umami is the “fifth taste”, after the other basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty. The word comes from Japanese, and translates as “pleasant savoury taste”, being derived from the word umai, “delicious”. Other foods with an umami taste include various vegetables, mushrooms, shellfish, cured meats and green tea.
  • Barnaby Joyce is (as of March 2020) the current leader of the National Party, a conservative party popular in rural areas. They have a long-standing coalition with the Liberal Party; the Liberal-National coalition are currently in government. Tony Abbott is a former leader of the Liberal Party who was Prime Minister of Australia for a brief period, before being ousted in favour of the more moderate Malcolm Turnbull. He lost his seat at the last federal election. Both are pretty weird units, to use an Australian phrase, with their share of scandals, bizarre behaviour and controversy.
  • “Where the bloody hell are you?” was the key question asked by model Lara Bingle at the end of a largely ridiculed Australian tourism ad produced for the international market in 2006. It was controversially banned on release in the UK, despite costing 180 million Australian dollars, and despite its infamy was considered a failure. It was overseen by now Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who at the time was Managing Director of Tourism Australia; this led to some reprise of the question directed at him – including by Bingle herself on social media – when he was overseas on vacation during the beginning of the disastrous 2019-2020 bush fires. It was also part of the inspiration for his derisive nickname “Scotty from Marketing”. You can watch the original ad on YouTube here.
  • Paul Parker found internet fame after he angrily reacted to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s comments that members of Australia’s volunteer fire fighting organisations “want to be out there” fighting the unprecedentedly fierce bushfires that raged in late 2019 and early 2020. In a video that went viral, he leaned out of his firetruck and asked a Channel 7 news crew to tell the Prime Minister to “go and get fucked from Nelligen”. After there were (disputed) claims this got him sacked from the Rural Fire Service (a volunteer organisation), another video emerged of him saying that Pauline Hanson was the only politician who cared about Australia. The whole saga is covered by Jan Fran in her first “The Frant” video for The Guardian.
  • “I’m not here to fuck spiders” is a slang expression meaning “I’ve got serious work to do,” most often used in response to a question about one’s intentions. It is also used as a more emphatic version of “I’m not here for a haircut”, which is a sarcastic response to being asked if one has come to a place to do the obvious thing, like being asked in a car dealership if you want to buy a car. It’s been a matter of debate for some years whether “not here to fuck spiders” is a “real” expression, or if it was invented as a joke and since been embraced by Australians. Looking through Google’s trends tool, which goes back as far as 2004, the first and biggest spike in searches for the phrase is in November 2005; then there’s very little until it slowly increases in search popularity from 2010, with smaller spikes since 2018 where it has been mentioned by Australian celebrities. The only reference Ben could find from 2005 were a series of replies to a forum post asking about the phrase, many of which seemed to suggest straight up examples of having heard it years before that… It’s worth mentioning that one of the repliers had come to the thread because they heard it from an Australian comedian, which might mean it was made up as a joke, or it could just mean that was the first time people who didn’t get it were hearing it.
  • The Man From Snowy River television show is not actually related to the 1982 film starring Sigrid Thornton and Tom Burlinson. The TV series starred Andrew Clarke as Matt McGregor, the stockman from the poem, and is set 25 years after the events depicted in the poem. It ran from 1993 to 1996.
  • Bore water is water drawn from underground sources, usually by drilling a borehole into an artesian aquifer – a porous underground layer of the Earth’s crust in which water is stored or flows. In Australia, the source is most commonly the Great Artesian Basin, a huge artesian aquifer under large parts of Queensland and its neighbour states.
  • “Advance Australia Fair” has been the official Australian anthem since 1984, though it was written far earlier, in the late 1870s. It was chosen in a plebiscite attached to the 1977 referendum about voting and political reforms. It beat “Waltzing Matilda”, “The Song of Australia”, and the previous anthem “God Save the Queen”. (For more on this, see #Pratchat53, “A (Very) Few Words by Hner Ner Hner“, in which we compare the Australian and Ankh-Morpork national anthems.)

 

#Pratchat60 Notes and Errata

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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:
  • 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:
  • 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.

#Pratchat44 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for episode 44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“, featuring guest Joel Martin, discussing the 2nd Discworld novel, 1986’s The Light Fantastic.

Iconographic Evidence

You can listen to the State Swim jingle right here:

The ridiculous fight between Xander and cheerleader-turned-vampire Harmony, occurs in Buffy: the Vampire Slayer‘s fourth season, in the seventh episode “The Initiative”. But you can see it on YouTube:

Notes and Errata

  • The episode title is references Joel’s comments that this book is the “primordial soup” of the Discworld books yet to come, the analogy of the “cosmic ocean” put forward by Carl Sagan in his book and television series Cosmos, and of course Great A’Tuin the World Turtle himself.
  • The term “hat-trick” does indeed originate with cricket, where it means taking three wickets (i.e. getting the batter out) on three consecutive deliveries (i.e. a single bowl of the ball). It has since spread to other sports and to mean more generally three successful attempts in a row. (In football, it specifically refers to a player scoring three goals in one game.) The term dates back to 1858, when English cricketer Heathfield Harman Stephenson performed the first recorded hat-trick; fans collected up money for him and used it to buy a hat, which they presented to him to commemorate the achievement. While this story seems well-documented, if Helen Zaltzman (see below) has taught Ben anything, it’s to be suspicious of neat etymological explanations…
  • The custom of throwing hats in the air to celebrate a victory or achievement is said by multiple sources to be a military tradition: cadets graduating to officer status would be given new hats, or at least no longer need to wear their old cadet ones, and they would symbolically throw them away. At least one story says this started specifically at the US Naval Academy with the class of 1912.
  • Helen Zaltzman is a comedian, writer and podcaster best known for the long-running comedy podcast Answer Me This? with fellow comedian Olly Mann, and her more recent show, The Allusionist, which explores language in as many different ways as possible. The Allusionist started out as part of the Radiotopia Network, but went fully independent in 2020 as part of Helen putting her money where her mouth was in backing diversity and inclusion in podcasting. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting The Allusionist via Patreon. Oh, and we nearly forgot: Helen also makes a Veronica Mars recap podcast called Veronica Mars Investigations! Helen is the best.
  • “Commitment to the bit“, or “commit to the bit“, is a common phrase in comedy circles. It means to stick with a joke or comic premise all the way to the end, rather than shy away from it because it it doesn’t immediately work, or is impractical or uncomfortable. It’s obviously not always a good tactic, as seen recently during Eurovision 2021. Iceland employed actor Hannes Óli Ágústsson to relay their jury’s points in character as Olaf Yohansson from the comedy film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. Olaf’s whole shtick is that he only likes one song, “Ja Ja Ding Dong”, which he awkwardly and angrily demands at every opportunity. At the contest, he tried to give Iceland’s 12 points to the song – twice. Few things are as hated at Eurovision as a country’s jury announcer talking too long before delivering the points, so this over-commitment to the bit did not go down well.
  • The Colour of Magic was first published on the 24th of November, 1983 (one day after the 20th anniversary of Doctor Who!), and so its 35th anniversary was two weeks before #Pratchat14, published on December 8, 2018. It originally had cover art of Great A’Tuin swimming through space painted by Alan Smith; the Josh Kirby art first appeared on the first UK paperback edition, published in March 1985. The Light Fantastic was first published on the 2nd of June, 1986, so we’re a bit closer to the anniversary this time around!
  • Liz’s “double book” is the combined edition of The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic published in 2008, to tie in with The Mob’s two-part television adaptation The Colour of Magic, which also combined both books. They had previously been collected as a single volume in 1999 as The First Discworld Novels.
  • Liz’s annoyance with the “cosmic turtle business” at the start of many of the earlier Discworld books is well documented in many previous episodes.
  • In The Colour of Magic, Krull’s spaceship the Potent Voyager is only vaguely described as being made of bronze and looking “like a great flying fish”. The graphic novel depicts it as fish shaped, but without the wing-fins of a flying fish.
  • The Rocket Clock is one of the clocks used by the Australian version of Playschool to help tell the time in the 1980s. (The other famous one is the Flower Clock.) As you might expect, it resembles a space rocket, with a clock on the top section, and a bottom section which rotates to reveal a small diorama connected to a theme explored in that episode. The original version of the clock, used from 1966 to at least the 1980s, is now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia.
  • Mr Squiggle was a long-running Australian children’s program starring puppet character Mr Squiggle, “the Man in the Moon”. It ran for forty years between 1959 and 1999. Mr Squiggle, who would arrive in “Rocket“, his smoke-belching impatient rocket ship, had a pencil for a nose. He would use it to turn “squiggles” – scribbles sent in by children – into pictures. Because he was a marionette, puppeteer Norman Heatherington was watching upside down from above, so a lot of his drawings were upside down. This led to him having to tell his assistant, who was holding the puppet’s hand to keep him still, that “Everything’s upside down, Miss Jane”. He would later inspire the title of #Pratchat55: “Mr Doodle, the Man on the Moon“.
  • In the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, players create characters whose power is measured in “levels”. As they accumulate experience, they gain levels of power and new abilities. In the current edition all characters can reach up to level 20, with wizards learning more and more powerful spells as they level up. Ben has mentioned Dungeons & Dragons many times, as far back as #Pratchat4; his article “What Even Is Dungeons & Dragons?” is a good primer for the novice, though note it’s a little sweary.
  • The Necrotelicomnicon is mentioned in several books, including The Colour of Magic, Sourcery and Moving Pictures. It’s a pun on the Necronomicon, a fictional book of evil magic written by the “Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred” that appears in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft.
  • “Vancian magic” is the sort used in older editions of Dungeons & Dragons, in which a wizard must study their spell book and memorise a spell, fixing it in their mind, before they can cast it. Once cast, the spell leaves their mind entirely, and they must memorise it anew to cast it again. The name comes from the source that inspired this form of spellcasting, the “Dying Earth” books by American writer Jack Vance.
  • The comic with several different Joker origin stories is probably 2020’s Three Jokers, by Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok, which reveals that three of the stories are correct – there have been more than one Joker all along. But he’s had many other origin stories; this article from Screen Rant runs through many of them.
  • In case the pun is lost on you, timber is wood that’s been prepared for building, usually by being sawn into planks. Timbre is the quality of tone of a sound, especially a voice or musical instrument. You can think of it as all the things that distinguish two sounds of the same frequency from each other.
  • The Tooth Fairy – well, one of them at least – plays a major part in Hogfather (#Pratchat24). Buggy Swires is a gnome exterminator living in Ankh-Morpork; he returns in several books, starting with Feet of Clay (#Pratchat24). The pictsies known as the Mac Nac Feegle first appear in Carpe Jugulum (#Pratchat36).
  • Toadstool houses are the traditional homes of Smurfs, small blue creatures invented in 1959 by Belgian cartoonist Peyo. We previously talked about them in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“, about Pratchett’s second tiny people book, Truckers; and in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“, about the book that introduced the Nac Mac Feegle, Carpe Jugulum. (There’s more detail about the Smurfs in the show notes for #Pratchat36.)
  • Lonely Planet is a prominent publisher of travel guides for tourists on a budget. In the pre-smartphone days every backpacker bought a Lonely Planet guide to the country where they were headed, but in recent years – especially since the global pandemic – their business has waned. The company was started in Australia by Maureen and Tony Wheeler in 1972, but was later sold to the BBC and is now owned by Red Media, the company behind CNET, Metacritic and GameSpot, among other prominent online media outlets.
  • Pratchett writes about tiny people many times, including in his first novel The Carpet People, the Bromeliad trilogy (Truckers, Diggers and Wings), and the various tiny denizens of the Discworld, most prominently gnomes and pictsies.
  • While houses made of food or confectionary date back further, the gingerbread cottage appears in the fairytale of “Hansel and Gretel”, collected and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. “Hansel and Gretel” is the archetypal story of Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 327A. Pratchett returns to the idea in the witches books, especially Wyrd Sisters (#Pratchat4). The witches refer to Aliss Demurrage, aka “Black Aliss”, as a witch who worked some of the greatest magic, but also as a cautionary tale: she built a gingerbread cottage, a sure sign she’d gone to the bad, and by the end was making poisoned apples before she was pushed into her own oven by children she was trying to eat. (Her cottage is also said to be in Skund, leading some Pratchett fans to suggest that Granny Whitlow was an alias she used to lure children.)
  • The Rite of AshkEnte is performed here, and also in Mort (when it summons Mort as well as Death), Reaper Man, and Soul Music (where it summons Susan). Death tends to show up without needing to be asked in later books.
  • We have a play with the famous “you have my sword” sequence from the film Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which doesn’t appear in the book. (Frodo does say “I will take the Ring to Mordor!” and then “Though I do not know the way” in the book, but Elrond decides who will accompany him after the council is over.) Here’s the dialogue from the movie:

Frodo: I will take it. I will take it. I will take the Ring to Mordor. Though… I do not know the way.
Gandalf: I will help you bear this burden, Frodo Baggins, as long as it is yours to bear.
Aragorn: If by my life or death I can protect you, I will. You have my sword.
Legolas: And you have my bow.
Gimli: And my axe!

The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001, dir. Peter Jackson)
  • You can find Fury’s drawing of the Luggage as Trunkie from The Last Continent in the notes for #Pratchat29, “Great Rimward Land“.
  • The Last Continent was published twelve years after The Light Fantastic, in 1998, so Liz was pretty close with her guess of ten years.
  • Liz suggests the Luggage might have “a chamber full of pigs?” in reference to the “having your enemies’ corpses eaten by pigs” method of getting away with murder. This features prominently in the television series Deadwood and Guy Richie’s film Snatch. You can find a list of uses as the “Fed to Pigs” trope on TV Tropes. Ben also mentions a bath full of (Hollywood style) acid, most famously used by Walter White in Breaking Bad.
  • Pratchett uses the Megalith pun in Lords and Ladies: “It was always cheaper to build a new 33-MegaLith circle than upgrade an old slow one.” This is a pun on MegaHertz (MHz), the unit used to measure the clock speed or clock rate of computer processors – in simple terms, how many instructions they execute per second. In the 1980s, home computers used chips like Intel’s 386, which had speeds of between 16 and 40 MHz. While it was used heavily in marketing, clock speed was not a sure measure of computer performance.
  • Pratchett moved to Broad Chalke in Wiltshire in 1993, seven years after The Light Fantastic was published. Before that he lived in the village of Rowberrow, Somerset, about 67 kilometres (or about 42 miles) to the northwest. He was never very far from many sites of ancient interest, but Broad Chalke was only a stone’s throw (sorry) from Stonehenge.
  • There are several stone circles better than Stonehenge, depending on who you ask and how you define “better”, but the one at Avebury is about 30km to the north and much, much bigger. Longtime British YouTuber Tom Scott made this video about it.
  • The Small Faint Group of Boring Stars is mentioned again in The Last Continent; the wizards travel quite far back in time, to an age when the stars were much closer and less faint (though possibly just as boring).  
  • The Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán is one of the 52 states of Mexico. There are several theories behind its name, and there are two versions of the “Your Finger You Fool” type: one involves the Mayan phrase Ma’anaatik ka t’ann, or “I do not understand you”, and the other uh yu ka t’ann, or “hear how they talk”. Another involves the casava plant, known locally as yuca (see #Pratchat41, “The Adventures of Crab Boy and Trouser Girl” for more on this plant) which was cultivated in the area, the name Yucatá meaning “land of yucas”. A third one suggests the name comes from the local Chontal Maya people, who call themselves the Yokot’anob or Yokot’an, meaning “the speakers of Yoko ochoco“.
  • Cohen is not in fact mentioned in The Colour of Magic; this is the first time we meet him.
  • The famous “What is best in life?” dialogue was made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, based on the Conan stories of Robert E Howard. The lines in full are below; they don’t appear in Robert E Howard’s stories, but are instead inspired by words attributed to Genghis Khan himself…

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good but what is best in life?
Mongol Soldier: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Conan the Barbarian (1982, dir. John Milius)
  • The people around the breakfast table in The Truth are Mr Windling and the other lodgers at Mars Arcanum’s guest house, where William de Worde lives. He doesn’t tell them he’s the editor of The Ankh-Morpork Times. (We covered The Truth in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
  • The cover art we’re talking about is the Josh Kirby art for the Corgi edition, still mostly in use today. You can find it on the official Josh Kirby website.
  • The “uncanny valley” describes the discomfort felt at seeing an artificial creature that is very like, but not mistakable for, the real thing. It can apply to anything living but is strongest – and most often used – to refer to the effect produced by androids and computer-generated representations of faces. There are many theories that try and account for why these things creep it out.
  • In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel, a pair of creepy twins appear as ghosts. The “Grady twins” are not twins in the book, but sisters aged 8 and 10, and are only mentioned, rather than appearing as ghosts. In the film, they appear to the young psychic Danny Torrance, dressed identically and speaking to him in unison saying “Come and play with us” – now a famous classic line of horror cinema. Though Kubrick denied it was intentional, many have pointed out that the look of the twins in the film resembles the photograph Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967 by American photographer Diane Arbus.
  • Mort was published in November 1987, so about seventeen months after The Light Fantastic. Liz’s guess of seven months is spot on for the third Discworld book, though – Equal Rites was published in January 1987!
  • It was announced on the 28th of April, 2020 that Narrativia had made an exclusive new deal with Motive Pictures and Endeavour Content to produce “definitive” and “absolutely faithful” Discworld adaptations for the screen. So far no actual productions have been announced, but the Narrativia website now has sections for all of the major Discworld screen projects of the last decade or so. The page about the new Discworld deal still lists only the initial agreement.
  • The extra space in Death’s House is described near the start of Soul Music, when Death watches Albert flit from the edge of his impossibly large office to the edge of the carpet around his desk:

Death gave up wondering how Albert covered the intervening space when it dawned on him that, to his servant, there was no intervening space…

Pratchett, Soul Music (1994)
  • By season three of The Good Place, the humans who are at the centre of the show have been exposed to a lot of the weirdness that exists beyond the material world. Near the end of the season, an accident in the “Interdimensional Hole of Pancakes” sends Chidi briefly to another realm, and when he returns he describes it like this:

Chidi Anagonye: I… I just saw a trillion different realities folding onto each other like thin sheets of metal forming… a single blade.

Michael: Yeah yeah, the Time-Knife. We’ve all seen it.

The Good Place, season 3 episode 12, “Chidi Sees the Time-Knife” (2019)
  • The Untempered Schism is “a gap in the fabric of reality from which can be seen the whole of the Vortex” of space and time. It’s introduced at the end of the third season of the revived Doctor Who in the penultimate episode, “The Sound of Drums”. The Doctor explains that it’s an initiation rite for young Gallifreyans, who at the age of eight must stare into it; according to him, “some would be inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad.” He says he ran away; the Master instead went mad, constantly hearing “the drumming”, though this is later revealed to be more than it seems.
  • The Doctor Who universe influencer jokes refer to the city of New New York, as introduced in the episode “New Earth”; the “EarPods” used by alternate universe Cybermen to control and convert humans, as seen in the two-part season two story “Rise of the Cyberman”/”The Age of Steel”; and the Adipose, a species of creatures whose cute babies could be incubated in a human body by accumulating fat tissue, under the guise of a diet pill, as seen in the season four opening episode “Partners in Crime”. The idea of influencers in the Whoniverse isn’t a million miles away from the later BBC fiction podcast Doctor Who: Redacted, published in April 2022, which features a gang of podcasters who follow a conspiracy theory about a blue box associated with mysteries throughout human history.
  • Icelandic names are subject to some fairly strict conventions, overseen by the Icelandic Naming Committee. There’s a list of around 4,000 traditional Icelandic names which can be used freely, but new names must be approved by the committee. In addition, by convention Icelandic people take either their father’s or mother’s name as a surname, appended with -son, –dottir or (since 2019) –bur for son, daughter or child, respectively. Episode 87 of The Allusionist podcast, “Name v. Law”, covers some of this in detail, though note it was released in 2018, before the change allowing non-gendered suffixes. The Allusionist returned to Icelandic names in December 2021 for episode 147, the second of the two-part story, “Survival: Today, Tomorrow” about trying to change the Icelandic language.
  • “That bit in The Hobbit” is Chapter II, “Roast Mutton”, when Bilbo is scouting ahead of the company of dwarves and comes upon three trolls named William, Bert and Tom. Bilbo is caught picking a troll’s pocket (Tolkien trolls wear trousers!), and he and the dwarves are caught. Gandalf manages to keep all three trolls arguing with each other, distracting them until the sun comes up and turns them to stone.
  • 5G, short for fifth-generation, is the name given to the newest mobile communications network technology being rolled out around the world. 5G is capable of far greater data transfer speeds than its predecessor 4G, at least at short range. It has been the subject of many conspiracy theories that claim it causes health problems in humans, despite a lack of any evidence that this is true. These theories mutated during 2020 to suggest that 5G caused or spread COVID-19, and they were believed enough that 5G towers in several countries were vandalised.
  • Lackjaw does indeed describe himself as “of the dwarfish persuasion“.
  • The magic shop trope can be traced back as far as H. G. Wells’ stories The Crystal Egg (1897) and The Magic Shop (1903). TV Tropes lists it as “The Little Shop That Wasn’t There Yesterday” and has many other examples. Pratchett revisits it in a more traditional way in Soul Music (discussed by us in #Pratchat19, “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got Rocks In”), where Buddy buys his guitar. It’s not the same shop, though – the proprietor is an old woman who seems quite happy with her lot, and she seems to sell only musical instruments.
  • We keep mentioning Howl’s Moving Castle, so it’s probably a good idea for us to do that Diana Wynne Jones episode we keep talking about. Previous episodes where this book have been mentioned include #Pratchat17, #Pratchat26, #Pratchat30 and #Pratchat43. In a nutshell: Howl is a wizard who lives as a recluse in a castle that not only can move from place to place, but has a magical front door that can open in one of several fixed locations.
  • Cane toads, Rhinella marina, are native to the Americas and were introduced to Australia from Hawaii in 1935 for purposes of pest control on sugar cane farms. We previously talked about them in #Pratchat22, “The Cat in the Prat“, where we recommended in the episode notes the documentaries Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) and its sequel, Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010). You can indeed still get various souvenirs made from dead toads; you can see examples at the website Souvenirs Australia (though it’s not a pretty sight).
  • The “critical Black Mass” pun is not about wizards or gods, but rather books of magic. It comes up in a description of the library as Trymon heads there to bribe the Librarian while the wizards are still speaking to Death.
  • Bethan is not mentioned in Interesting Times. Rincewind does mention in Sourcery that he was a guest at Cohen’s wedding to “a girl of about Conina’s age”, but Bethan isn’t mentioned by name and Rincewind gives no indication that he knows how the marriage went.
  • We looked up Echidna penises for #Pratchat12, “Brooms, Boats and Pumpkinmobiles“.
  • Rincewind will return in The Last Hero, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch and The Science of Discworld IV: Judgment Day. He’s also a minor character in Unseen Academicals, and mentioned briefly in Raising Steam.
  • Michael Moorcock’s “Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy” is less an essay, and more of a book, first published in 1987. An expanded edition, now 206 pages long, was released in 2004.
  • Blades in the Dark is a tabletop roleplaying game written and designed by John Harper and published in 2015. It’s set in an “industrial-fantasy” world, and players form a company of criminals who try to stake a claim for themselves in the inescapable city of Duskvol, surrounded by horror and haunted by deadly ghosts. Among its distinctive features are a system of retroactively planning heists and packing gear, which gets you into the action quicker. If industrial-fantasy isn’t your thing the system has also been used to make several other games in other genres.
  • Campaign settings are the various fantasy worlds used for Dungeons & Dragons and other games which aren’t tied too much to a specific universe. D&D has a large number of these covering various sub-genres of fantasy, from the post-apocalyptic sword and sorcery of Dark Sun to the gothic horror of Ravenloft. There are too many to list them all, since aside from the dozens of official ones there are many more published independently. (Ben’s favourite is probably Planescape, which both ties together all the others in a weird multiverse, and introduces an interdimensional hub city on the inside of a ring in the theoretical centre of everything.)
  • Mage: The Ascension, first published in 1993, was the third game in the World of Darkness series of modern horror roleplaying games, following Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse. Mage is also effectively a sequel to the earlier game about medieval wizards, Ars Magicka, but in the modern world the rise of science and rational thought means magic doesn’t work like it used to.
  • Cavaliers of Mars by Rose Bailey is the latest in a fine tradition of games that seek to emulate the “planetary romance” genre of fiction. These were science fiction or fantasy stories from around the turn of the twentieth century in which the fantastic adventures take place on other worlds – either in our own solar system as in A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (adapted as the hugely underrated film John Carter), or in other galaxies entirely – for example, James Herbert’s Dune is sometimes classified as a planetary romance.
  • The Old-School Renaissance or Revival – usually abbreviated to OSR – is a movement in roleplaying game communities which prefers the early versions of Dungeons & Dragons and similar games from the 1970s and 1980s. There are now many games that seek to recapture the feel of those games, either by re-implementing the original rules (a genre known as “retro-clones”) or writing games with more modern rules but the old-school philosophy in mind. Exactly what that philosophy is varies according to who you ask, but it usually means a smaller set of rules, and more reliance on both player skill (as opposed to rules which emulate the skill of the characters being played) and rulings by the Game Master (who OSR games often call the referee). Famous examples include Torchbearer, The Black Hack, Dungeon Crawl Classics, the Old School Reference and Index Compilation (OSRIC) and Old-School Essentials. Dungeon World isn’t usually counted as an OSR game, but it has many similarities. (It’s a translation of D&D-like fantasy into the now super popular “Powered by the Apocalypse” framework, created by Meguey & Vincent Baker for their post-apocalyptic RPG Apocalypse World.)
  • The six flavours of quarks are up, down, charmed, strange, top and bottom. “Flavour” is the name given to unique combinations of other characteristics like spin and charge; it’s sometimes also called “species”. Quarks form other particles, like neutrons and protons, when three of them are combined in different flavour combinations.
  • The World War II realtime Twitter account is @RealTimeWWII. It tweets “on this day” war events from the years 1939 to 1945, and is currently up to 1943 on its second time around.
  • In Chinese numerology, four – 四 (Anglicised as sì or sei) – is inauspicious because it sounds like the word for “death”, 死 (sǐ or séi). This causes as serious an aversion as Europeans traditionally have to the number thirteen, and just as some might have triskaidekaphobia, in China and other parts of East Asia, tetraphobia is common enough that buildings do not number floors using the digit 4.

#EeekClub2021 Notes and Errata

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These are the episode notes and errata for the bonus episode Eeek Club 2021, answering questions from our Eeek tier subscribers.

  • In Ankh-Morpork, the “Glorious 25th of May” is the date of the “Glorious Revolution”, commemorated only by a small number of people who were there. They wear lilac in memory of those who died. It is covered in much detail in Night Watch, which we’ll be reading for our December 2021 episode. On Roundworld, Pratchett fans have adopted the date as a celebration of Discworld and Terry Pratchett, often wearing lilac (the flower or the colour), and sometimes raising money for Alzheimer’s research. May 25th is also Towel Day, a celebration of Douglas Adams, which began two weeks after his death in 2001, and “Geek Pride Day”, which was started in Spain in 2006. That the Ankh-Morpork revolution shares a date with the former may not be a coincidence, since Night Watch was published in 2002.
  • We did indeed start offering subscriptions in January 2019; we announced them in #Pratchat15, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Nice and Accurate)“.
  • Our big open slather questions episode was #Pratchat30, “Looking Widdershins“, released on the 8th of April, 2020.
  • James Spader provides the voice of robot protector-turned-exterminator Ultron in the 2015 Marvel superhero film, Avengers: Age of Ultron.
  • The lockdown-related Discworld questions in #Pratchat30 begin around 1 hour, 5 minutes and 41 seconds in.
  • The first lockdown in Melbourne – and the rest of Australia – began on March 29, 2020. Melbourne had subsequent lockdowns from July 9 to October 26 2020, February 12 to 17 2021, and from May 27 until – at the time of last update – at least June 10, 2021.
  • Dragon King of Arms appears in Feet of Clay, which we discussed in #Pratchat24, “Arsenic and Old Clays“.
  • We also discussed the difference between vaccination and variolation in the notes for #Pratchat43, “Big Wee Hag: Far Fra’ Home“.
  • Ben says The Truth, but means The Times, as in The Ankh-Morpork Times, the first newspaper on the Discworld. It features in the novel The Truth, which we discussed in #Pratchat42, “Truth, the Printing Press and Every -ing“.
  • The Sto Plains – which occupy the area directly hubwards of Ankh-Morpork, on the opposite side to the Circle Sea – include many city-states, like the kingdom of Sto Lat (ruled by Queen Keli), the Duchy of Sto Helit (as in Duchess Susan Sto Helit), and the protectorate of Sto Kerrig. Sto Lat is probably closest, only about 20 miles from the Hubwards Gate of Ankh-Morpork. Their populations aren’t known, but it seems likely the plains’ residents don’t outnumber the million people who live in Ankh-Morpork. The various kingdoms and smaller towns and cities of the plains are all independent of the city, but most of them use Ankh-Morpork dollars as their currency, and certainly look to Ankh for guidance in matters of culture, technology and commerce.
  • The Trans-Tasman Bubble is the quarantine-free travel arrangement between Australia and New Zealand, countries with similarly low COVID-19 cases, separated by the Tasman Sea. It was announced as a possibility early on in the pandemic, but officially took affect on April 19, 2021. The day this episode was released (May 25, 2021), new cases were announced in Melbourne, leading to the reinstatement of some restrictions and a 72-hour pause on the bubble for travel from Melbourne.
  • “Young Igor” is our affectionate name for the Igor who joins the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in The Fifth Elephant; he is the nephew of the Igor who worked for the Morporkian embassy in Überwald. We last saw him in The Truth, where he was tending to the wounds suffered by the Patrician and his clerk, Drumknott.
  • Rincewind’s age isn’t definite, but a good guess is that he was 32 during the events of The Colour of Magic, and 57 by the time of The Last Hero, so Ben is probably right about him “pushing 60”.
  • Melbourne’s second lockdown lasted 112 days, from July 7 to October 28, 2020. During most of that time, residents were only allowed to leave their homes under very limited conditions, and restricted in how far they could travel from home. It’s probably stretching it a bit to say these were some of the harshest lockdown conditions in the world, but it was reported that way at the time.
  • Liz’s comment about “trips to Aspen” refers to multiple incidents from March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, when wealthy Australians returning from a skiing holiday in Apsen, Colorado tested positive for the virus but did not self-isolate, causing a cluster of new cases.
  • Though he does walk with a cane, the Patrician is not as old as he seems; clues from various books (primarily Night Watch) place him as somewhere between 50 and 55, but it seems the assassination attempts of Men at Arms, Feet of Clay and The Truth have taken their toll and he’s not as strong as he used to be. Or at least, that’s what he’d like his opponents to think…
  • The Bubonic plague is a disease caused by infection of the lymphatic system with the bacteria Yersinia pestis. Usually a human is infected by a flea bite; several flea species can carry the bacteria, and spread among human populations via rats. The plague is responsible for three major pandemics: the plague of Justinian in the 6th century, which killed around 25 million people; the Black Death of the 14th century, which may have killed as many as 200 million people in Europe – about a third of the population; and the plague of the mid-19th century, which caused the deaths of around 15 million people in mainland Asia. (For comparison, as of May 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic has officially caused 3.6 million deaths, though the estimated total death toll is 7.7 million.) Untreated, Bubonic plague is very deadly, killing half or more of those infected. Thankfully it can be treated effectively with antibiotics, reducing its mortality rate to 15% or much lower. These days cases are very rare, though the disease has not been entirely eradicated.
  • Here are some links to the very excellent The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret head canon Twitter threads:
  • Aunty Donna are an absurdist sketch comedy group based in Melbourne and formed in 2011. Their latest work is the Netflix series Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun. You can find out more about them at auntydonna.com.
  • Equal Rites is the third Discworld novel, and the first to feature Granny Weatherwax. It tells the story of Eskarina Smith, a girl based in (large) part on Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna, who becomes the Disc’s first female wizard. We discussed it in #Pratchat25, “Eskist Attitudes“. The subject of the gender split in magical society comes back in the later Tiffany Aching books.
  • Ben mentions VCAL, which is the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning. This is a more practical alternative to the standard Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE), a qualification which is more likely to lead to a university degree; VCAL is instead intended to prepare students for an apprenticeship, TAFE course or similar directly vocational training.
  • Most of the captains depicted in the numerous Star Trek television series go on “away missions“, i.e. missions in which they leave their ship (or equivalent). This is especially true of Captain James T Kirk of the original Star Trek, though it’s hinted that this practice is frowned upon by the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Captain Picard’s first officer, Riker, leads most away missions. Mind you, Picard’s contemporary captains Janeway (Star Trek: Voyager) and Sisko (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) go on plenty of missions too…
  • Speaking of Star Trek, the episode Ben is thinking of is indeed called “The Measure of a Man“. It’s the ninth episode of season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation, originally broadcast in February 1989. It’s frequently cited as one of the show’s early greats, even if the legal proceedings are a bit suspect. The book The Metaphysics of Star Trek, which uses Star Trek scenarios to illustrate various metaphysical concepts, was later republished as Is Data Human?, as one of the chapters of the book deals with the issue of “personhood”.
  • We discussed The Science of Discworld back in #Pratchat35, “Great Balls of Physics“.
  • Final Death is the term used in the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade (and its cousin, Vampire: The Requiem) for the ultimate destruction of a vampire, who is already undead. They are not nearly as impossible to kill as the vampires of the Discworld; see for example our discussion of Carpe Jugulum in #Pratchat36, “Home Alone, But Vampires“.
  • The Sesame Street song about being alive – or at least the one Ben is thinking of – is “You’re Alive“, first broadcast in 1980. It’s not quite how Ben remembered it, but Sesame Street has tackled the topic several times, always using the measures of eating, breathing and growing.
  • Alan Alda, best known for his years playing trauma surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in the Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H, established the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science in 2009. The Flame Challenge launched in 2012, with the aim of answering the question “What is flame?” in a way that an 11-year-old could understand, as judged by actual 11-year-olds – all because Alda himself received an uninspiring answer from his sixth grade teacher when he was eleven. The winner was announced at the World Science Festival, and the competition was successful enough to inspire several more over the next few years. Each answered a new question picked by 11-year-olds, including “What is time?” and “What is colour?” Sadly the websites for the challenge and the Alan Alda Center no longer exist, but you can find the winners on YouTube with a bit of effort.
  • We’ve previously talked about Beauty and the Beast villain Gaston and his fate, perhaps most significantly in #Pratchat28, “All Our Base Are Belong to You“.
  • The Beast’s age can be worked out from two bits of evidence. First, the enchanted rose, which will only bloom “until his 21st year”; this implies he is aging during his curse, and the rose is wilting during the events of the film. Second, Lumiere – the maître d’ of the house, transformed into a candelabra – says that they’ve been waiting for “ten years” since being cursed. Why the curse affected the servants is not clear, but muddying the waters is the portrait Belle finds of the Beast, in which he looks exactly like his 21-year-old self. Regardless of the Beast’s true age, Chip’s birth remains a mystery.
  • The original Beauty and the Beast was written in 1740 by Parisian novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Her version is long, detailed and contains and many characters, including Belle being one of twelve children. Most later retellings are based on a greatly pared back version rewritten by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and first published in 1756. These originals draw on the story of Cupid and Psyche, and do not include an equivalent of Gaston, who was added in some later versions. Assuming the Disney version happens around the time the oldest stories were written, Liz is right that they would have lived to see the French Revolution in 1789.
  • Anti-racism is is active opposition to racism, and can take many forms. While the idea has gained more visibility in recent years, with books like Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Anti-Racist and renewed momentum behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement, it’s certainly not a new idea.
  • The Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness appears in Men at Arms, which we discussed in #Pratchat1, “Boots Theory“. We revisited Men at Arms in #PratchatNALC, “Twice as Alive“, a live appearance at The Lost Con online event run by the Australian Discworld Convention.
  • Diggers is the second of the three books of the Bromeliad, Pratchett’s trilogy about the diminutive Nomes. We covered Truckers in #Pratchat9, “Upscalator to Heaven“, Diggers in #Pratchat13, “Don’t Quarry Be Happy” and Wings in #Pratchat20, “The Thing Beneath My Wings“.
  • We discussed The Long Earth and (briefly) The High Meggas in #Pratchat31, “It’s Just a Step to the Left.”
  • Thanks to listener Steve Leahy, who reminded us that there is at least one alien on the Discworld: Tethys, the sea troll, who crash-landed there after falling off his own watery world of Bathys. He appears in The Colour of Magic, which we discussed in #Pratchat14, “City-State Lampoon’s Disc-Wide Vacation.” (We discuss the sequel, The Light Fantastic, in #Pratchat44, “Cosmic Turtle Soup“.)
  • “Literary fiction” is basically a synonym for “high brow”, “serious literature” or “worthy of awards”, and is used to distinguish supposedly more sophisticated and “important” writing from so-called “genre fiction”. As we discuss, it can get in the bin.
  • Ben finally found a source for the story of the student with the Terry Pratchett book who was dismissed by a lecturer, only to turn things around by revealing they’d written a thesis on his work. It was related on Tumblr by the user thebibliosphere in a comment on this post about “people I still want to stab more than a decade later”. We’ve embedded that exchange below.
https://fistinginferno.tumblr.com/post/187226941007/people-i-still-want-to-stab-over-a-decade-later

#Pratchat59 Notes and Errata

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

Iconographic Evidence

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

Notes and Errata

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

More notes coming soon!

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

#Pratchat59 – Charlie and the Whale Factory

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Scientist, writer and editor Dr Kat Day joins Liz and Ben on a timey-wimey to Roundworld, as the wizards once again try to save humanity in Pratchett’s third collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen: 2005’s The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch.

Roundworld – the impossibly non-magical universe in a bottle which runs on rules – has gone wrong again, and the wizards feel duty-bound to set it right. Humanity’s survival depends on the publication of a specific book, but something is trying very hard to make sure its author writes a different one…or gets eaten by a giant squid. With the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, the wizards go to war – but who is their hidden enemy? And why is there one beardy fellow too many in the Great Hall?

In the (short) fiction chapters, the wizards must once again travel into Roundworld history, this time with a clear mission: to get Charles Darwin onto the Beagle so he can write The Origin of Species. In the science chapters, Jack and Ian have a focus – the importance of the theory of evolution – but they also feel free to use the time travel plot to explain infinity, DNA, the nature of science and history, and much more besides. They’ve learned to stay away from the cutting edge – but have they come entirely out of the “philosopause” they didn’t seem to know they were in last time?

Does the plot rely too much on prior knowledge of the Discworld? Is that really a problem, given the nature of the book? Did you follow the explanations of Minkowski spacetime and the different kinds of infinity, or were you happy coasting across the science chapters? Do they completely miss the point in that last non-fiction chapter – and does it really matter, when the end of the fiction part is so satisfying? Join in the conversation using the hashtag #Pratchat59 on social media!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:37:00 — 44.8MB)

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Guest Dr Kat Day is a chemist, a former teacher, a medical editor and a writer of both science and fiction. Kat became well known via her chemistry blog The Chronicle Flask, which is currently on hiatus; you can also find her fiction at the fiction phial. Kat is also an assistant editor for Pseudopod, the horror fiction anthology podcast from Escape Artists. Kat recommended the story “Celestial Shores” as a possible entry point for Pratchett fans, as well as “Let the Buyer Beware” from Pseudopod’s sister podcast for young adult speculative fiction, Cast of Wonders. Over on Twitter you can follow Kat at @chronicleflask, and Pseudopod at @pseudopod_org.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Next episode Pratchett turns sixty! As promised back in #Pratchat30, we’re doing another all-questions episode. This is your chance to send in questions about books you missed first time round, pitch your wild Discworld theories, and ask us pretty much anything you like that doesn’t fit into the usual book-focussed episode. We’d also love you to answer our questions: what are do you enjoy most about the show? What kind of episodes do you wish we’d do? Which of our opinions have you most disagreed with? And have you learned anything from us? (Ben sure has!) Send us your answers, and questions, using the hashtag #Pratchat60, or via email to chat@pratchatpodcast.com.

Oh, and in November, get ready for a double-header: not only are we reading Thud! with educator Matt Roden for #Pratchat61, but we’re cooking up a bonus crossover episode! Yes, we’re teaming up with Jo and Francine from The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret, another great Pratchett podcast, to discuss Where’s My Cow?, the hottest children’s book in Ankh-Morpork. We thought we’d let you know a little early, since it might be tricky to track down a copy…

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

Eeek Club 2021

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Welcome to a new tradition: the Pratchat Eeek Club! Each year, on the Glorious 25th of May, we will release a bonus episode discussing topics selected by our Eeek tier subscribers.

This year, the topics are:

  • How would Ankh-Morpork deal with COVID-19?
  • What would happen if Granny Weatherwax was head of Unseen University – or if Angua commanded the Watch?
  • Are golems alive? (For that matter, is fire alive?)
  • How has Pratchett and/or the Discworld informed our personal philosophies?
  • If Pratchett had kept writing the Discworld series, would it have evolved into science fiction?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:39:27 — 46.0MB)

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A big thank you to all our subscribers for making Pratchat possible, but especially to our Eeek Club contributors: Karl, Catherine, Soren, Jess and David, and Frank!

You’ll find detailed notes and errata for this episode on our website.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book – or even choose a topic for next year’s Eeek Club? You can support Pratchat by subscribing for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat47 Notes and Errata

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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.

#Pratchat47 – A Finite Number of Shakespeares

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Science comedian and public health nerd Alanta Colley joins Liz and Ben on their second trip through Discworld into Roundworld, as they join Rincewind and the wizards of Unseen University in Pratchett’s second collaboration with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen: 2002’s The Science of Discworld II: The Globe.

While on a team-building exercise in the woods near Unseen University, Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully and his faculty are accidentally swept along when something makes its way through the Discworld into Roundworld. That something turns out to be elves – nasty, parasitic lifeforms who feast on the imagination and emotions of others. Roundworld – the universe in a bottle created by the wizards’ experiments, which somehow runs without any magic – has been altered by their presence. Now the wizards – including Rincewind, the long-suffering Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography – have to find a way to get rid of them without dooming the local human population in the process…

Having entirely missed humankind in The Science of Discworld, the wizards are back for another go! And so are science writers Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen – but this time, they don’t want to explain cosmology, basic physics and the history of the Earth, but instead sell you on the idea that storytelling is the essential ingredient that makes humans…human.

Are we really Pans narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee, rather than Homo sapiens, the “wise man”? Is it wise to write a popular science book with an author who will guarantee the book will be read again twenty years later – and to include some “cutting edge” science, no less? What do a debunked psychological experiment, the term “overcommitment”, and filthy explanations of fairytales have to do with it? And who’s this shrewd and world-wise street wizard named Rincewind, and can we have some more of his adventures please? Let us know what you think using the hashtag #Pratchat47 on social media, and join in the conversation!

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Guest Alanta Colley is a comedian, science communicator and storyteller whose solo shows include Parasites Lost (about parasites), Days of Our Hives (about beekeeping) and The Origin of Faeces (you can probably work that one out yourself). She also wrote and performed the “comedy experiment” You Chose Poorly with our own Ben McKenzie. Since 2017 Alanta has also been the host and producer of Sci Fight, a series of comedy science debates; both Ben and Liz have been guest speakers, along with previous Pratchat guests Anna Ahveninen (#Pratchat35) and Nicholas J Johnson (#Pratchat38). You can hear Ben and Anna’s last appearance on Sci Fight in this episode of the Climactic podcast, or see the first online debate for Melbourne Science Gallery on YouTube here. Visit scifight.com.au to sign up to the mailing list, and you can find Alanta as @lannyopolis on Twitter and Instagram, via Facebook or at alantacolley.com.

You can find out more about what Liz has been writing by following her as @ElizabethFlux on Twitter or Instagram.

As usual, you can find notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Next episode we read one of the few precious Discworld novels left to us, though luckily we got a little preview this time around; yes, we’re joining up with Susan, Death and the history monks for the very timely Thief of Time, which we’ll be discussing with journalist Ben Riley! Send us your questions using the hashtag #Pratchat48, or get them in via email: chat@pratchatpodcast.com

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.

#Pratchat29 – Great Rimward Land

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In episode 29, Liz, Ben and guest Fury join Rincewind on a journey to a strangely familiar land in Pratchett’s 1992 loving Discworld parody of Australia, The Last Continent. (A quick content note: this one has more swearing than usual, but we bleeped the c-bombs out.)

The Librarian of Unseen University, long ago turned into an orang utan, is suffering from a magical illness. Archchancellor Ridcully and his faculty could help him – if only they knew his original human name. Unfortunately the only person likely to remember is former Assistant Librarian Rincewind, and the wizards sent him to Agatea – and then accidentally propelled him across the Disc. He ended up in XXXX – aka Fourecks, aka the Last Continent, aka “that place far away full of deadly animals” – but he’s managed to survive. The locals out in the desert seem friendly enough, at least until he asks when it will rain. But something isn’t right. The land needs a hero. What it’s got is the Eternal Coward…

Pratchett came to Australia many times, and his experience of the country seems to have rubbed off. Fourecks affectionately parodies Australian music, slang, politics and culture, including Mad Max, The Man From Snowy River, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, thongs, corks on hats, the cultural cringe, Vegemite, pie floaters and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. It’s quite the ride for the Australian reader… Rincewind is moulded into the stereotypical “bush hero”, but his touchstones aren’t entirely post-invasion – Pratchett also tries for a nuanced and deep Discworld interpretation of Aboriginal culture and beliefs, even if he doesn’t include any actual Aboriginal characters. Do you think he makes it work? Could you follow all the Australian references? Is there enough of a plot, or is it just an excuse for a bunch of jokes? Use the hashtag #Pratchat29 on social media to join the conversation!

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Guest Fury is a writer, illustrator and performer who previously appeared on Pratchat in episode 19, discussing Soul Music. They were recently seen in Gender Euphoria, a touring multi-disciplinary show celebrating trans experiences which has played in Melbourne and Sydney. Fury’s book I Don’t Understand How Emotions Work is available online now. You can also find out more about them at their web site furywrites.com, or follow them on Twitter as @fury_writes.

Next month’s episode was going to cover Pratchett’s 2012 sci-fi collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth, but we’ve had a change of plan! Instead, we’ll be taking a month off from book discussion to answer your questions about how to get into Pratchett, about past episodes, and about his work in general. Listen out for a special announcement with more information, and get your questions in via the hashtag #Pratchat30 by April 3rd.

You’ll find the full notes and errata for this episode on our web site.

Want to make sure we get through every Pratchett book? You can support Pratchat for as little as $2 a month and get access to bonus stuff, including the exclusive supporter podcast Ook Club! Click here to find out more.