Remember the Glorious 25th of May!

To all those who fought the Battle of Treacle Mine Road, we salute you on this 25th of May!

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you have a wonderful read in front of you!

 

For the Pratchett Fans

 Igor is one are some of my favorite characters! All the Igorinas, too...

 

Happy Hogswatch Eve!

Terry Pratchett released his Solstice origin story, Hogfather,  in 1996. Ten years later, the BBC got a delightful cast together and made a two-part mini-series based on the book, and over the years, it's become a Christmas/Solstice classic.

The story follows both Death and his granddaughter, Susan, on the Eve of the Solstice, as they try to find the missing Hogfather. Death, in the meantime, has stepped into the Hogfather's shoes in a hilarious attempt to fulfill the Hogfather's Hogswatch Eve duties.

If the Hogfather cannot be found and rescued from whatever mayhem has kept him away from his duly appointed rounds, the sun will not rise on Hogswatch Day, and there will be Hell to pay!

I've watched this every Christmas Eve for years now and love the tradition. Recently, I brought a couple of boxes of books home from storage and was ecstatic to find I still have the paperback I bought all those years ago.

Click on the big pic of Death in his clever Hogfather disguise to Amazon, where you can stream both episodes.

Happy Hogswatch Eve, everyone!

"Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably Priced Love! And a Hard-Boiled Egg!"

The glorious 25th of May. If you have to ask, you weren't there.

But I'll do you a solid and tell you where to look: Terry Pratchett's beautifully written Night Watch. 29th in the Discworld series, it remains one of my favorite books and is always a go-to comfort read. 

 From the synopsis:

For a policeman, there can be few things worse than a serial killer loose in your city. Except, perhaps, a serial killer who targets coppers, and a city on the brink of bloody revolution.

For Commander Sam Vimes, it all feels horribly familiar. Caught on the roof of a very magical building during a storm, he’s found himself back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing up in when the lightning struck. Living in the past is hard, especially when your time travel companion is a serial killer who knows where you live. But he must survive, because he has a job to do: track down the murderer and change the outcome of the rebellion.

The problem is: if he wins, he’s got no wife, no child, no future…

In writing about policemen Sam Vimes and John Keel back in 2002, Pratchett teaches us the difference between what is right and what is simply expeditious for the powers that be. He shows us the foolishness of mindlessly following orders and mindlessly following the rebellion, both.

In all honesty, This could have been written today, in the wake of the massive wave of police protests and the justifiable anger of Black Lives Matter. I only wish we here in Roundworld had a Sam Vimes to show us the way!

He even wrote "an old army song" for the rebels to sing. Beware, it is a soldier's song...

Click on the pic for a soldier's song...

And to all who wear the lilac and toast John Keel, it is my fervent wish you all rise up!

GNU Sir Terry Pratchett - And Another Friend

This post has links to Amazon and qualifying purchases could see me rolling in pennies. I mean, earn me a commission.

I think one of the things I love most about FB is that you can find your specific flavor of fandom fairly easily. And when you do, you can extend that mythical world into this one, and vice versa. People on the fan page just "get" the references, and you can have an inside joke run for miles! 

One of my very favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, has a well-deserved few fan pages on Facebook. I ran across both the Ankh-Morpork Times and the Discworld memes page a while back, to my delight. I've been a fan of his Discworld novels for probably thirty (*gasp!* thirty?!) years, now, and have run across very few people in person, in the roundworld, who know the books or the author, so finding the fan pages was like coming home.

A rendering of The Mended Drum, Ankh-Morpork's
most notorious watering hole.

Pratchett, you may remember, was a friend of and often a co-writer with Neil Gaiman (most recently of Good Omens fame). He had a strong grasp of the human condition, politics, and irony, and crafted them all into a shape of humor and love that the rest of us could easily relate to. His worlds and his characters are addicting.

The anniversary of Terry Pratchett's passing (by the Embuggerance, as he called it, of Alzheimer's) was a few days ago. The fandom on Facebook remembered him with a GNU on the clacks, which was spawned in the Discworld and lives on in our internet. I also ran across an excerpt from Pratchett's book, Going Postal (the screen adaptation can be purchased on Blu-Ray or streamed on Amazon and is well worth the money, if you love British humor), which I share below. 

#GNU_Sir_Terry_Pratchett

28 April 1948 - 12 March 2015

She was known as Princess to the men on Tower 181, although she was really Alice. She was thirteen, could run a line for hours on end without needing help, and later on would have an interesting career which . . . but anyway, she remembered this one conversation, on this day, because it was strange. Not all the signals were messages. Some were instructions to towers. Some, as you operated your levers to follow the distant signal, made things happen in your own tower. Princess knew all about this. A lot of what travelled on the Grand Trunk was called the Overhead. It was instructions to towers, reports, messages about messages, even chatter between operators, although this was strictly forbidden these days. It was all in code. It was very rare you got Plain in the Overhead. But now . . .

‘There it goes again,’ she said. ‘It must be wrong. It’s got no origin code and no address. It’s Overhead, but it’s in Plain.’

On the other side of the tower, sitting in a seat facing the opposite direction because he was operating the up-line, was Roger, who was seventeen and already working for his tower-master certificate.

His hand didn’t stop moving as he said: ‘What did it say?’

‘There was GNU, and I know that’s a code, and then just a name. It was John Dearheart. Was it a—’

‘You sent it on?’ said Grandad. Grandad had been hunched in the corner, repairing a shutter box in this cramped shed halfway up the tower. Grandad was the tower-master and had been everywhere and knew everything. Everyone called him Grandad. He was twenty-six. He was always doing something in the tower when she was working the line, even though there was always a boy in the other chair. She didn’t work out why until later.

‘Yes, because it was a G code,’ said Princess.

‘Then you did right. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Yes, but I’ve sent that name before. Several times. Upline and downline. Just a name, no message or anything!’

She had a sense that something was wrong, but she went on: ‘I know a U at the end means it has to be turned round at the end of the line, and an N means Not Logged.’ This was showing off, but she’d spent hours reading the cypher book. ‘So it’s just a name, going up and down all the time! Where’s the sense in that?’

Something was really wrong. Roger was still working his line, but he was staring ahead with a thunderous expression.

Then Grandad said: ‘Very clever, Princess. You’re dead right.’

‘Hah!’ said Roger.

‘I’m sorry if I did something wrong,’ said the girl meekly. ‘I just thought it was strange. Who’s John Dearheart?’

‘He . . . fell off a tower,’ said Grandad.

‘Hah!’ said Roger, working his shutters as if he suddenly hated them.

‘He’s dead?’ said Princess.

‘Well, some people say—’ Roger began.

‘Roger!’ snapped Grandad. It sounded like a warning.

‘I know about Sending Home,’ said Princess. ‘And I know the souls of dead linesmen stay on the Trunk.’

‘Who told you that?’ said Grandad. Princess was bright enough to know that someone would get into trouble if she was too specific. ‘Oh, I just heard it,’ she said airily.

‘Somewhere.’ ‘Someone was trying to scare you,’ said Grandad, looking at Roger’s reddening ears.

It hadn’t sounded scary to Princess. If you had to be dead, it seemed a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground. But she was bright enough, too, to know when to drop a subject.

It was Grandad who spoke next, after a long pause broken only by the squeaking of the new shutter bars. When he did speak, it was as if something was on his mind. ‘We keep that name moving in the Overhead,’ he said, and it seemed to Princess that the wind in the shutter arrays above her blew more forlornly, and the everlasting clicking of the shutters grew more urgent. ‘He’d never have wanted to go home. He was a real linesman. His name is in the code, in the wind in the rigging and the shutters. Haven’t you ever heard the saying “A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken”?’

 

Another friend of mine passed away last week. He was ripe in age and experience, and his passing was expected, but even so, he'll be missed.

Out of respect for the privacy of those he left behind, I won't share his name here, but if you're a certain age, you probably know at least one or two of his works, whether you realize it or not. He was a family friend, an associate of my dad's and someone I knew for pretty much the entirety of my life. I will miss him and his dry humor.

I like to think his name will live on in the clacks. 

GNU, my friend. GNU.