All taken from posts to alt.fan.pratchett
A true beanie should have a propellor on the top.
This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.
I mean, I wouldn’t pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I’m me.
I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It’s generally a better bet. There’s more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say “it was god’s will” when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.
I have to admit that I drive past Bridgwater quite regularly. And fast.
What you have here is an example of that well known phenomenon, A Bookshop Assistance Who Knows Buggerall But Won’t Admit It (probably some kind of arts graduate).
I staggered into a Manchester bar late one night on a tour and the waitress said “You look as if you need a Screaming Orgasm”. At the time this was the last thing on my mind…
Never trust any complicated cocktail that remainds perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.
In Reading [England] there is this thing called the IDR, short for “Inner Distribution Road”, which is bureaucratese for “Big thing that cost a lot of money and relieves traffic problems, provided all your traffic wants to orbit the town centre permanently”. It’s a 2-3 lane dual carriageway that goes round the town centre. It has lots of roundabouts, an overhead section, a couple of spare motorway-like exits (that’s British motorways — y’know, the roundabout with the main road going under it), and a thing called the Watlington Street Gyratory, where you have to get in lane for your intended destination about three years and two corners before you get there with no signposting. I used to cycle along it every day to get to school, before I fell off at 35 mph. [Kids! Don’t try this at home!] I know it well. I believe it is impossible to leave Reading heading west.
I didn’t go to university. Didn’t even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: “I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with me?” An American says: “I can’t understand this, what’s wrong with him?”
“Out of Print” is bookseller speak for “We can’t be hedgehogged”.
AFPer: We’ve missed you, did you miss us? TP: Yes, but I think I have time to reload. 🙂
Terry returns to a.f.p. after a temporary absence.
I was thinking of ‘duh?’ in the sense of ‘a sentence containing several words more than three letters long, and possibly requiring general knowledge or a sense of history that extends past last Tuesday, has been used in my presense.’
Oh, come on. Revelation was a mushroom dream that belonged in the Apocrypha. The New Testament is basically about what happened when God got religion.
‘Educational’ refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.
I once absend-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce.
Well, they asked me in February, and I said it was coming out in November. When they asked in March, I said it was coming out in November. In April I pointed out that November, in fact, was going to be when the next book came out. In May, when asked on many occasions about when Maskerade was coming out, I said November. In November, it will be published. The same November all the way through, too.
So Terry, when is ‘Maskerade’ coming out, then?
Bognor has always meant to me the quintessential English seaside experience (before all this global warming stuff): driving in the rain to get there, walking around in the rain looking for something to do when you’re there, and driving home in the rain again…
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil…prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon…
You can’t make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago “Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world’s music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don’t have to die of dental abcesses and you don’t have to do what the squire tells you” they’d think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say ‘yes’.
I must confess the the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occured to him.
I’m referred to, I see, as ‘the biggest banker in modern publishing’. Now there’s a line that needed the celebrated Guardian proof-reading.
I save about twenty drafts — that’s ten meg of disc space — and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there’s a cry here of ‘Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!’ and the rest are wiped.
I always thought Detritus would be good at: “I bet you’re wondrin’ how many time I fired dis crossbow–“
Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
I reckon that Stonehege was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.
Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.
Terry defending his solution to the Monty Hall problem.
Currently there’s five machines permanently networked here. They all contain the serious core stuff. A couple of the machines are pensioned off 486s, with little other value now. Plus there’s two Jaz drives in the building and the portable also carries a fair amount of stuff. Plus every Friday a man comes around and carves all the new stuff onto stone slabs and buries them in the garden… I think I’m okay.
TBC
Loading comments...