Soul Music - Terry Pratchett [129]
*The Senior Wrangler had a theory that long food—beans, celery, and rhubarb—made you taller, because of the famous Doctrine of Signatures. It certainly made him lighter.
*And, of course, one that misfires. Deafness doesn’t prevent composers hearing the music. It prevents them hearing the distractions.
*It wasn’t the taste. Plenty of hot dogs taste bad. But Dibbler had now actually managed to produce sausages that didn’t taste of anything. It was weird. No matter how much mustard, ketchup, and pickle people put on them, they still didn’t taste of anything. Not even the midnight dogs they sell to drunks in Helsinki can quite manage that.
*Troll beer is ammonium sulfide dissolved in alcohol and tastes like drinking fermented batteries.
*Not with very good results, however. Stibbons spent weeks grinding lenses and blowing glassware and had finally produced a device which showed the tremendous number of tiny animals there were in one drop of water from the river Ankh.
The Archchancellor had taken a look and then remarked that anything in which that much life could exist had to be healthy.
*All right—all dwarf songs. Except the one about Hiho.
*Troll gambling is even simpler than Australian gambling. One of the most popular games is One Up, which consists of throwing a coin in the air and betting on whether it will come down again.
*Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork. Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”
*From the Old wys-ars, lit: one who, at bottom, is very smart.
*Or, at least, onto the river.
*A very grammatical half an hour, however.
*Old shoes always turn up in the bottom of every wardrobe. If a mermaid had a wardrobe, old shoes would turn up in the bottom of it.
*Although, strictly speaking, humans feel it all the time.
*’PLUGGERS
They’ve Got Soles
FEEL THE NALES!
*He’d still got the nugget somewhere.
About the Author
Terry Pratchett is one of the most popular living authors in the world. His first story was published when he was thirteen, and his first full-length book when he was twenty. He worked as a journalist to support the writing habit, but gave up the day job when the success of his books meant that it was costing him money to go to work.
Pratchett’s acclaimed novels are bestsellers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and have sold more than thirty million copies worldwide. He lives in England, where he writes all the time. (It’s his hobby, as well.)
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Praise
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Acclaim for Bestselling Author
Terry Pratchett
“Superb popular entertainment.”
Washington Post Book World
“Unadulterated fun…witty, frequently hilarious…Pratchett parodies everything in sight.”
San Fransisco Chronicle
“Pratchett continues to distinguish himself from his colleagues with clever plotlines and genuinely likable characters.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
“If I were making my list of Best Books of the Twentieth Century, Terry Pratchett’s would be most of them.”
Elizabeth Peters
“Truly original…Discworld is more complicated and satisfactory than Oz…Brilliant.