The Last Continent

for any misunderstanding. The quiet hours with Hex were often a picnic after five minutes with the senior wizards.
    * The Lecturer in Creative Uncertainty, for example, held rather smugly that he was in a state of both in-ness and out-ness until such time as anyone knocked on his door and collapsed the field, and that it was impossible to be categorical before that event. Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn’t always beat actual thought.
    * Wizards also enjoy a bit of fun but never have much of a chance to develop the appropriate vocabulary.
    * This isn’t magic. It is a simple universal law. People always expect to use a holiday in the sun as an opportunity to read those books they’ve always meant to read, but an alchemical combination of sun, quartz crystals and coconut oil will somehow metamorphose any improving book into a rather thicker one with a name containing at least one Greek word or letter (The Gamma Imperative, The Delta Season, The Alpha Project and, in the more extreme cases, even The Mu Kau Pi Caper ). Sometimes a hammer and sickle turn up on the cover. This is probably caused by sunspot activity, since they are invariably the wrong way round. It’s just as well for the Librarian that he sneezed when he did, or he might have ended up a thousand pages thick and crammed with weapons specifications.
    * The Senior Wrangler had once walked past Mrs. Whitlow’s rooms when the door was open, and he’d caught sight of the bare, headless, armless dressmaker’s dummy that she used to make all her own clothes. He’d had to go and lie down quietly after that and, ever since, had thought about Mrs. Whitlow in a special way.
    * Wizards lack the HW chromosome in their genes. Feminist researchers have isolated this as the one which allows people to see the washing-up in the sinks before the life forms growing there have actually invented the wheel. Or discovered slood.
    * 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