Moving Pictures - Terry Pratchett [134]
9SUB-TITLE: “…I can’t help it. Hiya, big boy.”
10Mrs. Marietta Cosmopilite, former Ankh-Morpork seamstress until her dreams led her to Holy Wood, where she found her skill with a needle was highly prized. Once a darner of casual socks, now a knitter of fake chain mail for trolls and able to run up a pair of harem trousers in a trice.
11Camels are far too intelligent to admit to being intelligent.
12Some of them have clipboards.
13Trolls’ teeth are made of diamond.
14But were edited out of the finished production.
15Not for any particular religious reason. They just rather liked the effect when they grinned.
16All dwarfs have beards and wear many layers of clothing. Their courtships are largely concerned with finding out, in delicate and circumspect ways, what sex the other dwarf is.
17Trolls have 5,400 words for rocks and one for vegetation. “Oograah” means everything from moss to giant redwoods. The way trolls see it, if you can’t eat it, it’s not worth naming it.
18It was about a young ape who is abandoned in the big city and grows up being able to speak the language of humans.
19The Necrotelicomnicon was written by a Klatchian necromancer known to the world as Achmed the Mad, although he preferred to be called Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches. It is said that the book was written in one day after Achmed drank too much of the strange thick Klatchian coffee which doesn’t just sober you up, but takes you through sobriety and out the other side, so that you glimpse the real universe beyond the clouds of warm self-delusion that sapient life usually generates around itself to stop it turning into a nutcake. Little is known about his life prior to this event, because the page headed “About The Author” spontaneously combusted shortly after his death. However, a section headed “Other Books By the Same Author” indicates that his previous published work was Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches’s Book of Humorous Cat Stories, which might explain a lot.
20Apart from anything else, it gives brother a rather better excuse to fight brother than the normal one, viz, what his wife said about our Mam at Auntie Vera’s funeral.
2149,873, according to Numbers Riktor’s clockwork Celestial Enumerator.
22The ones living in stone buildings, anyway.
23By troll standards, this was Oscar Wilde at his best.
24In fact he called it “oook.” But probably, in translation, it meant “home.”
25Wizards who manage to avoid the ambitious attentions of other wizards tend to live for a long time. It seems even longer.
26On his part, that is. Their reluctance probably goes without saying.
27“We Can Rule You Wholesale.”
28He had a tidy mind.
29The trollish phrase is “Other maddened grizzly bears to stun.”
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