The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

‘Ho ho ho’ a lot. Children who have been bad get a bag full of bloody bones (it’s these little details which tell you it’s a tale for the little folk). There is a song about him. It begins: You’d Better Watch Out.. .
    The Hogfather is said to have originated in the legend of a local king who, one winter’s night, happened to be passing, or so he said, the home of three young women and heard them sobbing because they had no food to celebrate the midwinter feast. He took pity on them and threw a packet of sausages through the window. †
    *
    Rats had featured largely in the history of Ankh-Morpork. Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats - and then people were suddenly queuing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: ‘Tax the rat farms.’

    Old shoes always turn up in the bottom of every wardrobe.
    If a mermaid had a wardrobe old shoes would turn up in the bottom of it.

    † The Reader had a theory that all the really good books in any building - at least, all the really funny ones - gravitate to a pile in the privy but no one ever has time to read all of them, or even knows how they came to be there. X The ones with cartoons about cows and dogs. And captions like: ‘As soon as he saw the duck, Elmer knew it was going to be a bad day.’
    † Badly concussing one of them, but there’s no point in spoiling a good legend.

 
    M IGHTY battles! Revolution! Death! War! (and his sons Terror and Panic, and daughter Glancy).
    The oldest and most inscrutable empire on the Discworld is in turmoil, brought about by the revolutionary treatise What I Did On My Holidays. Workers are uniting, with nothing to lose but their water buffaloes. War (and Clancy) are spreading throughout the ancient cities.
    And all that stands in the way of terrible doom for everyone is:
    Rincewind the Wizzard, who can’t even spell the word ‘wizard’…
    Cohen the barbarian hero, five foot tall in his surgical sandals, who has a lifetime’s experience of not dying…
    … and a very special butterfly.
    It was, as always, a matter of protocol …
    Lord Vetinari, as supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, could in theory summon the Archchancellor of Unseen University to his presence and, indeed, have him executed if he failed to obey.
    On the other hand Mustrum Ridcully, as head of the college of wizards, had made it clear in polite but firm ways that he could turn him into a small amphibian and, indeed, start jumping around the room on a pogo stick.
    Alcohol bridged the diplomatic gap nicely. Sometimes Lord Vetinari invited the Archchancellor to the Palace for a convivial drink. And of course the Archchancellor went, because it would be bad manners not to. And everyone understood the position, and everyone was on their best behaviour, and thus civil unrest and slime on the carpet were averted.
    *
    Many things went on at Unseen University and, regrettably, teaching had to be one of them. The faculty had long ago confronted this fact and had perfected various devices for avoiding it. But this was perfectly all right because, to be fair, so had the students.
    The system worked quite well and, as happens in such cases, had taken on the status of a tradition. Lectures clearly took place, because they were down there on the timetable in black and white. The fact that no one attended was an irrelevant detail. It was occasionally maintained that this meant that the lectures did not in fact happen at all, but no one ever attended them to find out if this was true. Anyway, it was argued that lectures had taken place in essence, so that was all right, too.
    And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.
    *
    ‘Round everyone up. My study. Ten minutes,’ said