The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett [129]
*There’s a certain type of manager who is known by his call of “My door is always open” and it is probably a good idea to beat yourself to death with your own CV rather than work for him. In Ridcully’s case, however, he meant, “My door is always open because then, when I’m bored, I can fire my crossbow right across the hall and into the target just above the Bursar’s desk.”
*That is to say, she secretly considered them to be vicious, selfish and untrustworthy.
†Again, when people like Mrs. Whitlow use this term they are not, for some inexplicable reason, trying to suggest that the subjects have a rich oral tradition, a complex system of tribal rights and a deep respect for the spirits of their ancestors. They are implying the kind of behavior more generally associated, oddly enough, with people wearing a full suit of clothes, often with the same sort of insignia.
*Ponder had been that kind of child. He still had all the pieces for every game he’d ever been given. Ponder had been the kind of boy who carefully reads the label on every Hogswatch present before opening it and notes down in a small book who it is from, and has all the thank-you letters written by teatime. His parents had been impressed even then, realizing that they had given birth to a child who would achieve great things or, perhaps, be hunted down by a righteous citizenry by the time he was ten.
*Any seasoned traveler soon learns to avoid anything wished on them as a “regional specialty,” because all the term means is that the dish is so unpleasant the people living everywhere else will bite off their own legs rather than eat it. But hosts still press it upon distant guests anyway: “Go on, have the dog’s head stuffed with macerated cabbage and pork noses—it’s a regional specialty.”
*In fact it’s the view of the more thoughtful historians, particularly those who have spent time in the same bar as the theoretical physicists, that the entirety of human history can be considered as a sort of blooper reel. All those wars, all those famines caused by malign stupidity, all that determined, mindless repetition of the same old errors, are in the great cosmic scheme of things only equivalent to Mr. Spock’s ears falling off.
*There is such a thing as an edible, nay delicious, meat pie floater, its mushy peas of just the right consistency, its tomato sauce piquant in its cheekiness, its pie filling tending even towards named parts of the animal. There are platonic burgers made of beef instead of cow lips and hooves. There are fish ‘n’ chips where the fish is more than just a white goo lurking at the bottom of a batter casing and you can’t use the chips to shave with. There are hot dog fillings which have more in common with meat than mere pinkness, whose lucky consumers don’t apply mustard because that would spoil the taste. It’s just that people can be trained to prefer the other sort, and seek it out. It’s as if Machiavelli had written a cookery book.
Even so, there is no excuse for putting pineapple on pizza.
*This is why protesters against the wearing of animal skins by humans unaccountably fail to throw their paint over Hell’s Angels.
*It would be nice to say that this experience taught Ponder a valuable lesson and that he was a lot more considerate towards old people afterwards, and this was true for about five minutes.
*Although of course it’s not the most obvious thing and there are, in fact, some beguiling similarities, particularly the tendency to try to hide behind a big cloud of ink in difficult situations.
†The one on the first floor, with the curious gravitational anomaly.
PRAISE
THE LAST CONTINENT
“Amusing…enjoyable…very clever…What Pratchett seems to be doing, frequently, is commenting on the essential absurdity of life. He places his characters, who behave in a very [contemporary] everyday way, in the unlikeliest situations, juxtaposing the probable and improbable to provide a view from a new, usually humorous perspective…Just about every icon from