Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett [107]
* Many songs have been written about the bustling metropolis, the most famous of course being: “Ankh-Morpork! Ankh-Morpork! So good they named it Ankh-Morpork!”, but others have included “Carry Me Away From Old Ankh-Morpork,” “I Fear I’m Going Back to Ankh-Morpork” and the old favorite, “Ankh-Morpork Malady.”
* It would say, for example, that you would shortly undergo a painful bowel movement.
* Mrs. Cake was aware that some religions had priestesses. What Mrs. Cake thought about the ordination of women was unprintable. The religions with priestesses in Ankh-Morpork tended to attract a large crowd of plain-clothes priests from other denominations who were looking for a few hours’ respite somewhere where they wouldn’t encounter Mrs. Cake.
* A song which, in various languages, is common on every known world in the multiverse. It is always sung by the same people, viz., the people who, when they grow up, will be the people who the next generation sing “We Shall Overcome” at.
* The only building on the campus less than a thousand years old. The senior wizards have never bothered much about what the younger, skinnier and more bespectacled wizards get up to in there, treating their endless requests for funding for thaumic particle accelerators and radiation shielding as one treats pleas for more pocket money, and listening with amusement to their breathless accounts of the search for the elementary particles of magic itself. This may one day turn out to be a major error on the part of the senior wizards, especially if they do let the younger wizards build whatever that blasted thing is they keep wanting to build in the squash court.
The senior wizards know that the proper purpose of magic is to form a social pyramid with the wizards on top of it, eating big dinners, but in fact the HEM building has helped provide one of the rarest foods in the universe—antipasta. Ordinary pasta is prepared some hours before being eaten. Antipasta is created some hours after the meal, whereupon it then exists backward in time, and if properly prepared should arrive on the taste buds at exactly the same moment, thus creating a true taste explosion. It costs five thousand dollars a forkful, or a little more if you include the cost of cleaning the tomato sauce off the walls afterward.
* People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water’s fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory.
* Vermine are small black-and-white rodents found in the Ramtop Mountains. They are ancestors of the lemming, which as is well known throws itself over cliffs and drowns in lakes on a regular basis. Vermine used to do that, too. The point is, though, that dead animals don’t breed, and over the millennia more and more vermine were descendants of those vermine who, when faced with a cliff edge, squeaked the rodent equivalent of Blow that for a Game of Soldiers. Vermine now abseil down cliffs, and build small boats to cross lakes. When their rush leads them to the seashore they sit around avoiding one another’s gaze for a while, and then leave early to get home before the rush.
* The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.
* It is traditional, when loading wire trolleys, to put the most fragile items at the bottom.
* It is generally thought, on those worlds where the mall lifeform has seeded, that people take the wire baskets away and leave them in strange and isolated places, so that squads of young men have to be employed to