Lords and Ladies - Terry Pratchett [121]
*i.e., far enough so’s not to look like you’re intruding on the conversation, but close enough to get a pretty good idea of what is going on.
*Carrots so you can see in the dark, she’d explain, and oysters so’s you’ve got something to look at.
*The Librarian, an ape of simple but firmly held tastes, considered an episode with custard pies, buckets of whitewash, and especially that bit when someone takes someone else’s hat off, fills it with something oozy, and replaces it on the deadpan head while the orchestra plays “WHAH…Whah…whah…whaaa…” to be an absolutely essential part of any theatrical performance. Since a roasted peanut is a dangerous and painful item when hurled with pinpoint accuracy, directors in Ankh-Morpork had long ago taken the hint. This made some of the grand guignol melodramas a little unusual, but it was considered that plays like “The Blood-Soaked Tragedy of the Mad Monk of Quirm (with Custard-Pie scene)” were far better than being deaf in one ear for five days.
*Made it up.**
**Had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.
*“He’s just an old soppy really”—from the Nanny Ogg Book of Cat Sayings.
*He knew this because the previous month’s issue of Popular Armor had run a feature entitled “We Test The Top Twenty Sub-$50 Helmets.” It had also run a second feature called “Battleaxes: We Put The Ten Best Through Their Paces” and had advertised for half a dozen new testers.
*The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.
*Although this is a phallusy.
*Which, no matter how carefully coiled, will always uncoil overnight and tie the lawnmower to the bicycles.
*There are many recipes for the flat round loaves of Lancre dwarf bread, but the common aim of all of them is to make a field ration that is long-lasting, easily packed, and can disembowel the enemy if skimmed through the air hard enough. Edibility is a kind of optional extra. Most recipes are a closely guarded secret, apart from the gravel.
*Hence the term “wholesale destruction.”
*The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo,**my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And the correct answer is: Hey, whatever I select.
**Cool, but not necessarily up to date.
*Nanny Ogg was also a great picker-up of unconsidered trifles.
*When Hwel the playwright turned up with the rest of the troupe next day they told him all about it, and he wrote it down. But he left out all the bits that wouldn’t fit on a stage, or were too expensive, or which he didn’t believe. In any case, he called it The Taming of the Vole, because no one would be interested in a play called Things that Happened on A Midsummer Night.
*This happens all the time, everywhere in the multiverse, even on cold planets awash with liquid methane. No one knows why it is, but in any group of employed individuals the only naturally early riser is always the office manager, who will always leave reproachful little notes (or, as it might be, engraved helium crystals) on the desks of their subordinates. In fact the only place this does not happen very often is the world Zyrix, and this is only because Zyrix has eighteen suns and it is only possible to be an early riser there once every 1,789.6 years, but even then, once every 1,789.6 years, resonating to some strange universal signal, smallminded employers slither down to the office with a tentacle full of small reproachful etched frimpt shells at the ready.
*He lived on his nerves.
*The study of invisible writings was a new discipline made available by the discovery of the bi-directional nature of Library-Space.