Pick up the Pieces / Terry Pratchett Wisdom (VII)

Over the last few days I’ve managed to pick up the pieces of a lot of friendships I’ve let sort of fall to the wayside the way I seem to always do. It becomes a test of two people not calling or talking to each other ever and being fine with it. I’m always the one to break, but at least I break I suppose. And when I pick up the pieces, they always seem to be happy to hear from me again.

I’m calling Marie again. I’m going to go visit Jess. I got a hold of Sarah Clare and we talked for a while, I recieved an email from Jennie Schrottky today which was great, and I noted Nikki, maybe we’ll start chatting more, too. I hope so. Maybe not.

I haven’t heard from Nate for weeks or Casey. I’m going to try and get a hold of them sometime soon. That leaves two more hurdles which I’ve still got to decide to call: Angie and Ashley. Angie moved to Tennessee, I think. I don’t even know where she is anymore. I know she graduated, but that’s about it. It would be nice to hear from her, too, but I don’t know….I suppose I’ll eventually get around to it. I wonder if her cell phone even works anymore.

As for Ashley…well Ashley Clark is a stranger to me now, but I feel like I should try at least to call her again. She and I really shared some great days in St. Louis, and I don’t want that to just fade away as a one moment thing.

But it’s hard knowing that they’ve never called searching for you either. That’s a difficult thing to confront. Really, in the end, when someone doesn’t seem to care to call you or talk to you for long periods of time, you’re stamped as not worth spending time on. I know I tried to maintain these links, but they always fell apart. Ugh. I don’t know.

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From “Men at Arms”

Edward had been sent to the Assassins’ Guild because they had the best school for those whose social rank is rather higher than their intelligence. If he’d been trained as a Fool, he’d have invented satire and made dangerous jokes about the Patrician. If he’d been trained as Thief, he’d have broken into the Palace and stolen something very valuable from the Patrician. — But no gentlemen would dream of being trained as a Thief.

There were a great many books in the Assassin Guild library, and a whole portrait gallery of kings and queens — often with discreet plaques under them modestly recording the name of the person who’d killed them. This was the Assassin’ portrait gallery, after all.

It had been speculated that its habit of exploding violently when angry, excited, frightened, or merely plain bored is a developed survival trait — from the point of view of the species as a whole. Not from the point of view of the dragon now landing in small pieces around landscape.

Fingers Mazda, the first thief in the world, stole fire from the gods. But he was unable to fence it. It was too hot. He got really burned on the deal.

The Battle of Koom Valley is the only known to history where both sides ambushed each other.

If people went around noticing everything that was going on all the time, no one would ever get anything done. This is another survival trait.

He had dissected a few, but only after they were dead, because he was an early form of free-thinking scientist, and did not believe that human beings had been created by some sort of divine being. Dissecting people when they were still alive tended to be a priestly preoccupation; they thought mankind HAD been created by some sort of divine being and wanted to have a closer look at His handiwork.

The Guard seldom drank in Ankh-Morpork’s more cheerful taverns when they were off duty. It was too easy to see something that would put them back on duty again. Suicide, for example. Murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was a suicide. Saying “Got rocks in your head?” to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren’t careful.

A survey by the Ankh-Morpork Guild of Merchants of tradespeople in the dock areas of Morpork found 987 women who gave their profession as “seamstress.” Oh….and two needles.

In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three…many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don’t realize that many can be a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS.

Retrophrenology. It works like this. Phrenology, as everyone knows, is a way of reading someone’s character, aptitude and abilities by examining the bumps and hollows on their head. Therefore — according to the kind of logical thinking that characterizes the Ankh-Morpork mind — it should be possible to mould someone’s character by giving them carefully graded bumps in all the right places. You can go into a shop and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection and a side order of hysteria. What you actually get is hit on the head with a selection of different size mallets, but it creates employment and keeps the money in circulation, and that’s the main thing.

Rat and cream cheese is only one of the famous discworld dishes available in cosmopolitan Ankh-Morpork. According to the Guild of Merchants’ publication Wellcome to Ankh-Morpork, Citie of One Thousand Surprises: “Also to be bought in its well-stuffed emporia are Slumpie, Jammy Devils, Fikkun haddock, Distressed Pudding, Clooty Dumplings and, not to be forgotten, the Knuckle Sandwich, made from finest pig knuckles. Not for something is it said, For a True Taste of Ankh-Morpork, Try a Knuckle Sandwich.”

Clootie Dumplings should not be confused with the Scottish Clootie Dumpling, which is a kind of suet pudding full of fruit. The Ankh-Morpork version sits on the tongue like finest meringue, and on the stomach like a concrete bowling ball.

Vimes didn’t travel much except on foot, and knew little of the Lancre Suicide Thrush, for example, or the Shadowing Lemma, which exists in only two dimensions and eats mathemeticians, or the quantum weather butterfly. But it is possible that the strangest, and possibly saddest, species on Discworld is the hermit elephant. This creature, lacking the thick hide of its near relatives, lives in huts, moving up and building extensions as its size increases. It’s not unknown for a traveller on the plains of Howondaland to wake up in the morning in the middle of a village that wasn’t there the night before.

The axiom “Honest men have nothing to fear from the police” is currently under review by the Axioms Appeal Board.

Probably no other world in the multiverse has warehouses for things which only exist in potentia, but the pork futures warehouse in Ankh-Morpork is a product of the Patrician’s rules about baseless metaphors, the literal-mindedness of citizens who assume that everything must exist somewhere, and the general thinness of the fabric of reality around Ankh, which is so thin that it’s as thin as a very thin thing. The net result is that trading in pork futu

res — in pork that doesn’t exist yet — led to the building of the warehouse to store it in until it does. The extremely low temperatures are caused by the imbalance in the temporal energy flow. At least, that’s what the wizards in the High Energy Magic building say. And they’ve got proper pointy hats and letters after their name, so they know what they’re talking about.

Mysterious caves and tunnels always have luminous fungi, strangely bright crystals or at a pinch merely an eldritch glow in the air, just in case a human hero comes in and needs to see in the dark. Strange but true.

Orangutan lingo — “Oook”: can mean…well…meanings include “Pardon me, you’re hanging from my rubber ring, thank you so very much”, “It may be just vital biomass oxygenating the planet to you, but it’s home to me”, and “I’m sure there was a rain forest around here a moment ago.”

Detritus had gone critical, and had sworn in a further two men, another troll, and a wooden dummy. And was the origin, long after the events chronicled here were over, of an Ankh-Morpork folk song scored for tin whistle and nasal passage: As I was walking along Lower Broadway/The recruiting party came picking up people by their ankles and saying they were going to volunteer to join the Watch unless they wanted their goohuloog heads kicked in/So I went to Peach Pie Street and Holofernes instead/ Singing: Too-ra-li, etc. — It never really caught on.

And another entry done! Good night!