The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 78: The Last Continent Pt. 2 (Elephants Are Pollinated by Bees, Right?)

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 2 of our recap of “The Last Continent”. Driftbeans! Driftwood! Drifting towards destiny!Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretWant to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:Castlemaine XXXX Advert - YouTube#Pratchat29 – Great Rimward LandDesert Island Discs - Terry Pratchett - Radio 4Knifey Spoony Original Clip - YouTubeThe Man from Snowy River by AB Banjo Paterson - All PoetryTerry Pratchett Desert Island Discs transcript - L-SpaceAppendix:Australian English colloquial similes - Wiktionary Museum offers a toast to Vegemite as centenary looms for Australia's favourite spread - Good FoodAmanda Palmer - The Vegemite - YouTubeTime Travel - TV TropesTime Travel Tropes - TV TropesEternalism (philosophy of time) - WikipediaThe First Fifteen Lives of Harry August - GoodreadsWatchmaker Analogy – WikipediaDrift Seeds and Drift FruitsMusic: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

I'm making a lasagna, so that'll improve things. I've yet to find a problem that lasagna didn't improve at least somewhat. I want the crispy bits around the edges where the pasta kind of curls up and then there's the cheese sauce and it burns a little bit. That's a very important part of the universe. Yeah. Cool. Do we have anything that's like grumping about our lives to put in the soft open?

I used to put suggestions and I just haven't recently. Anything happened in the world of nerd culture that does not involve JK Rowling? Because I'm going to mute that word on Twitter now. I didn't for a while because I wanted it to be like, you know, not just ignore the problems that trans people have. But honestly, it is a third of my timeline now. Yeah, especially on International Women's Day. It was Twitter was so destructive for me on International Women's Day.

I don't know why I looked at it. Regular reassurance for our listeners that JK Rowling is a dick. We are very trans friendly. Turfs not welcome. Please don't don't listen to us. Nerd culture. Oh, the trailer for the new Obi-Wan series just dropped. That looks pretty good.

That's Star Wars. Yeah, no, I know that. What is it like a prequel? Yeah, it's like set around the time. So, you know, like, I know you're not a massive Star Wars fan, but you know, like the end of the three, like episode three. So the like prequel trilogy that came out in the 2000s. Just no, no, I don't know the end of that ends with Luke and Leia being born

and Luke gets left with his aunt and uncle on Tatooine. Cool. And then obviously, like episode four, old Ben Kenobi is there and Luke's grown up on Tatooine. This is like those intervening years of Obi-Wan like hanging out on Tatooine, I guess. But like, I'm not a big enough Star Wars nerd to be super into how this will fit in the canon. What I am is very into you and McGregor with a beard.

Oh, is it more you and McGregor? Yeah. Yeah, no, that's that's a good thing to have happened then. Yes, it's all I really care about is it's a lot of you and McGregor with a beard. I like you and McGregor a lot. That book I was on about, I don't I can't remember if I told you the just before sequel ones being put off till next year now. Yeah, I think you mentioned that.

Possibly not on audio. I mean, take your time, I guess. But I've really not taken enough time, sir. I am going to download a bunch of tabletop RPGs. There's lots of like fundraising bundles around at the moment. And next week, I'm going to have a massive tabletop RPG session and learn how they work and then possibly try writing some. How many of you play before like, fuck all to be honest, so you're going to have one

session and then go straight into writing. No, I'm going to have one session to get my head around them and give me some ideas. And then I'm going to read more about writing them. I'm not just going to like play one and be like, OK, I know how to do this now. No, I mean, it's not necessarily a bad thing is what I mean. If you come into it without being completely immersed into it, you might come in with like a very different idea. You might end up doing the same thing as someone else.

But on the other hand, you might come at it from a completely new place. It's like quite often things in various genres benefit from somebody who just goes, oh, I like this idea, but isn't like heavily into the genre. Actually, I saw quite an interesting discussion. Sorry, I'm bringing this back to Star Wars now, but I saw an interesting discussion about that on Twitter. I hate Star Wars. I hate it. Carry on.

I fully aware. Well, no, someone was making the point that like when George Lucas made it, he was really into like Westerns and sounds like a lot of Westerns. Like Westerns and Samurai films and that really inspired it. Whereas the people making Star Wars now are really into Star Wars. Yes. And Hayao Miyazaki was quoted as saying a similar thing about like anime culture in Japan.

He was like, he used to be made by people who were into all those different genres and now is made by fucking weebs. He did not use the phrase fucking weebs. He used it at Haku, which basically means fucking weeb. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, because like anime is a way to tell a story. You want to tell or anime to make an anime. Yeah. Agree.

Hard agree. So yes, this is why media ends up becoming super fucking homogenous. Yeah, it's the race to the middle, isn't it? And Jack always goes on about not always goes on about that is very anti Marvel universe because it's just the same fucking mediocre quips again and again and again. But that's mug, Joss Whedon humor, I honestly agree. I like it.

It feels like it's moved on a bit from that. There's variety in some of the TV shows have been really good. Yeah, we've talked about this before, haven't we? I feel like it makes more sense that the TV shows are good because they've got a bit more room to play with something other than the crowd pleaser. Yeah, that's very true. They can take a bit of a risk with at least some of the episode. Yeah, I bring in other people to.

Yeah, they seem to vary who's on it a bit more. There's like a variety of writers and also like I'm just more into TV is storytelling than I am film. Yeah, same. I mean, it's not really surprising. I'm not into the Marvel movies because there are a million of them and they're so long. And Chris Pratt's face just irritates me now. Yeah, I'm really upset.

I used to enjoy a constant disappointment. Yeah, definitely Chris Pratt is one of the most disappointing celebrities. I would just prefer a very crisp rat. Ha, rats. Speaking of people who do not disappoint me, there's a TikTok creator who is a zoologist, maybe. Definitely a scientist who's into animals. And she has some really funny videos

and including one about rats and the way she says rats just makes me very happy. Rats, very angrily. I love rats. They're such good things. Link rat's video, maybe I'll know what I'm on about. I'm not going about it. I think I did all right putting the links in last week's considering my notes were scrawled without looking at them. Yeah, I mean, maybe not.

Maybe I just added things that were totally irrelevant. Who can say? Your fascination looks more comfortable today. Yeah, I put it at the back so it's like behind my headphones, which also means I can see it's now is literally on backwards. It's not meant to be worn like this, but we're going with it like it. It's still festive. It's still there. We weren't charity shop shopping yesterday.

Listeners, you know you had. Yeah, you had a lot more success than I did. You look really good in everything you bought. Thank you. I'm wearing the cardigan now, which is not really flattering as on its own as a podcast tog, but I don't care. I've turned the heating off. That's it now. I'm done with it. Done with heating.

I'm pretty much done with heating now. And don't worry about us listeners. It's warmer now as well as expensive. Yeah, let's not talk about that. I finished my C++ course. That's a fun thing. You did, didn't we talk about? No. Because I said that was Monday.

Yeah. And I finished it on Wednesday, two days ahead of schedule. And I just brag about that a bit more. Unreal Engine next. Unreal Engine. Fighting triangles. Going to make triangles, throw stuff at each other. The most contentious of shapes. Well, they're so pointy.

Yeah, exactly. Like once you get to the bigger shapes with points, the points kind of themselves spread out a bit. Like once you get to like a dodecahedron, it's barely a point, but at a triangle it's like. Yeah, that's a good point. Sorry. Is that like a rift between the isosceles and the equilaterals,

do we think? I'm at third type. Scaling. Scaling. Like I'm remembering GCSE maths. I do not remember GCSE maths. Speaking of international women's day. Yes, which we definitely were.

Some time ago. Sorry, my brain's working in a very non-linear fashion today, which works, we'll be talking about time travel. I did like a, the group that owns our company did like a, answer some questions on video about international women's day and like we'll put it in like a compilation thing. Yeah. Which I did months ago when they did this and they did put out.

And my minute, except it's just the one bit like that I stuttered through. I'm like, oh no. They had to pick that bit. It's a really nice video and they made such an effort for like, obviously they liked my answer for this one and picked that, but except it's the one bit. I remember I was like, I don't have time to do this again on December. It's fine.

Oh, very nice. What was the bit you were talking about? They would just say, what was it? It was what was your highest achievement in your career? And I said, honestly, I don't have any accolades or anything. I'd say my highest achievement is making the career I have without any higher education. And then like, who helped you in it?

And I think I said, what part of my answer? And they picked it out, obviously, because it was a woman, was my mum didn't push me into studying things I didn't want to study and just left me alone with piles of books, basically. And that's what I started through. Yeah. Oh, I love your mum. Yeah, she's great.

She's good people. Books and books, that's how you grow up to be interested in too many things at once. Yes. I don't know what you're talking about. You and I both have a reasonable number of interests. I didn't even have time to look into all the cool map websites I found in support of what I vaguely mentioned last week. So hopefully before next week, I will.

How much of our podcast is us just saying we will eventually remember to talk about things? Because I'd say probably about 3.5%. Oh, that's good. That's not too bad. Yeah, it's all right. Oh, right. I've got a shit ton of follow up. So should we make it a short open and a long follow up?

Yeah, let's make a podcast. All right, let's make a podcast. Wait, now you have to ask me the question or it feels wrong. Do you want to make a podcast? Yeah, let's make a podcast. Hello and welcome to the Treeshow Make You Fract, a podcast in which we are reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series one at a time in chronological order.

I'm Joanna Hagen. And I'm Francine Carroll. And this is part two of The Last Continent. Yay. We're in the middle. We're in the middle. It's hard to tell with this book, to be honest. There's no great rise and fall plotline kind of thing.

But physically, these are the middle pages. I am mostly wandering towards the Danumont. But in the meantime, now on spoilers, we are a spoiler light podcast. Obviously, heavy spoilers for the book, The Last Continent. But we will avoid spoiling any major feature events in the Discworld series. And we're saving any and all discussion of the final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, until we get there. So you dear listener, can come on the journey with us.

Pinging on for dear life on a tiny, tiny horse. Follow-up. We have things to follow up on. I did not come up with any funny motivational posters because I put it in the notes and then promptly forgot. Excellent. I didn't do motivational posters either. I did get Professor names, Professor faculty decisions, did you?

What did you come up with? No, my brain has not done anything but code this week. And Doomscroll. And Doomscroll. Terrible combination. So I got, well, first of all, special mentions. I thought, because on our subreddit, there are a couple of people who spend a long time finding it's really good annotations.

Yes. There are a couple as well I haven't got to yet. But Zinc Stoat and Sonda Vogel, I thought, just deserved subreddit flair, which is a small thing I'm going to do to say thank you. But so Zinc Stoat is now a protein annotator in tangential studies. Sonda Vogel is a cyclopedic annotator in multifarious studies. Beautiful. Also, our new faculty members, I think,

are the lecturer in inscrutable spheres, the professor of haphazard analysis, the professor of interminable calculus, the reader in perfunctory omens, and the professor of unorthodox dendrology. I would personally like to claim professor of unorthodox dendrology as my title. Sounds great. That is Trees, right?

Yes. I think I might go for haphazard analysis. Yeah, I think that's good. That's easy. I like perfunctory omens, but I do want to be a professor. And I'm not sure what a reader is. Fuck knows. That's one of those fancy university things that we didn't get another lecture.

We didn't get none of that fancy learning. No, no. Yeah, other follow-ups? Forex. Forex, it's a beer. It's a beer. I knew that. I served it.

I was going to say you did work in a bar in Sydney for a decent chunk of time. I mean, it's not a Sydney beer, but we definitely sold it. A couple of our listeners now have sent us pictures of that same Forex brewery building. I would say that's nice. But also there's Castle Main Forex, which was an Australian beer sold in the UK and had a popular series of adverts in the late 90s, which Sam on Twitter reminded me of. Do you remember them? I don't remember them, but I'm aware of them in pop culture, if that makes sense.

So I looked up a couple. I'll link to one on YouTube. But the idea was that it was Australians wouldn't give a Castle Main Forex, so it looks like they wouldn't give a swear word. Oh, nice. I will say, in case anybody is not aware of this already, Australians don't like you associating them with fosters. I'm not surprised.

It's not really considered a drinkable liquid in Australia. It's barely considered a drinkable liquid in the UK. I think I used it to brush my teeth at a festival. I once used it to cook pasta in a festival reminiscent of Rincewind's Late Night Exploits. How was that pasta? Less successful, honestly. Yeah. Not good.

It wasn't good. I think after that attempt, I just started biting the bullet and buying takeaway food while I was there and stopped trying to cook. Yeah. After going to a festival with a slight cold, eating lukewarm baked beans because I couldn't be bothered to heat them up all the way, and then that cold turning into a full blown illness at the end of the festival, I no longer am willing to eat camping food.

Even though those two things are not connected. No, but like I associate them in my memory. How about you just spring together all your misfortunes? Well, they happened in the space of five days. I also got robbed. That was the Make Beans fold. Oh my God. This is why we don't go to festivals anymore.

Anyway, let's talk about the book the last couple of days afterwards. I'm more depressing than the real life ones, Jesus. Deciding here that festivals aren't real life, by the way, that's it. No, absolutely not. They're liminal spaces. Exactly. Right. Sorry. Anyway, let's talk about the book the last couple of days.

No, still got other follow up. I said I had a lot of follow up. I love you. I love you. I'm sorry. Right. Right. A couple of bits of follow up from the people I gave the flair to.

Yes. So it's connected. Thanks, Dope. Concerning the first part of the book, I just forgot to say it last week. The bit about watching giant slabs of ice slamming into a nearby planet and barely batting in ice, a clear reference to Comet. Comet Shoemaker Levy 9, which having been broken into fragments during an earlier pass in 92, was finally sucked into Jupiter's gravity well

in July 94, and illustrated the value of having a gastro-iant-handied Hoover up low space rocks, which might otherwise end all human life on Earth. Ah, lovely. And I then watched an infrared video of it hitting Jupiter, and it looked incredibly apocalyptic, very good, very nice. Nice. Very big fireball. We like a big apocalypse.

We do. And then later, there's a passing reference, as was it's looking for the egregious professor of cruel and unusual geography, to the tendency of map makers to populate far off lands with such nonsense as race and men with one joint foot. On on round world, these beings are known as sky upholds in appearance such works as Aristophanes, the birds. Here, they're said to dwell in Ethiopia, but they've cropped up

across a variety of cultures, legends and wild suppositions in various tenuously charted locations. Yep. So. Non or fiction disguised as nonfiction and also we've seen giant feet in definitely in one of the Narnia books. And I'm sure in some other fiction too, I can't think of one. Yes.

And then lost, but we don't talk about that one. What? Was that one giant foot? Oh, no, I think the statue had two feet. I think there was only one foot left, but yeah, it didn't look like a lone foot. I feel like it'd be shaped differently if you only had one foot. Right.

Yeah, it would otherwise be really weird to balance. Like it'd be more symmetrical. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it'd be like a wedge. I was trying to stand on one leg earlier and it didn't go well. So I wouldn't assume a symmetrical foot would be helpful. It would, I'm sure. And then Sander Vogel says Skull Duggery, which, by the way,

does have a proper etymology. I just couldn't be bothered to click through more than one link while we were recording, is especially funny if you keep in mind the wizard's showy lack of knowledge of meiosis and preference for mitosis later in the book. Because Skull Duggery isn't apparently an alteration of Scottish Skull Dudry. Or Skull Duggery, Baudry, obscenity, or adultery. So euphemism of uncertain origin. It's a sexual euphemism.

And yeah, when wizard say they'd prefer to split into two, cleaner or hygienic. No Skull Duggery here. Sander Vogel also looked into potential connections with blood load to reality. According to the Wiki, it might be connected to the German Blatlaus, meaning aphid, they say, and I agree, there's nothing to be, that's a bit tenuous. Yeah. And something to do with maybe blood loads, necessarily a parasitic relationship, but yeah, no, I agree.

I think it's just a word he liked. I think, I think that's all I've got because I decided not to go into the maps because I already had an entire page of follow up. That's fair. Cool. Shall we talk about part two of The Last Consonant then? Oh wait, no, one more thing. I did listen to Pratt Chat's episode because I thought I should.

Yes. Yes, there are lots of references we didn't get, won't get around to, and they did a very long, cool episode on it, which I'll link in the show notes. I recommend you go listen to that after you've listened to us, dear listeners. Yes, but listen to us first. Yeah, we don't overlap too much in some. We're not competitive with the other Pratt Ship podcast, but listen to us first. No.

Okay, now I'll let you. Okay, well, before we talk about part two of The Last Consonant, do you want to remind us what happened in part one of The Last Consonant? Oh yes. Previously on The Last Consonant, rinse wins in the outback, hot, flies, fell into waterhole, recruited for baffling quest, ran away, met dwarf. Meanwhile, in the unseen university, the librarian is poorly, the fearless faculty goes looking for a cure and finds a portal onto a desert island, which

they explore for work, not pleasure. Mrs. Whitlow brings snacks and removes their exit. They're stranded. And there's something singularly peculiar about this place. Get Lord. A peon in my podcast. As many as possible. Telling me a peon fried this rice.

No, sorry. This time on The Last Consonant, shall I tell us what happened? I want fried rice now. Yes, dear. Sorry. The stars are old and unfamiliar, as the unseen university faculty find themselves stranded, not just in space, but in time. Inspector, space time.

Answer bound and might alter the future, and a god watches on before quickly growing a boat from a pumpkin seed. The faculty's own attempts at sailing wallow in the water as the versa wanders, following the thick green hose pipe to the botanical boat before informing the others. The patriarchal in appearance, if only three foot God, reveals himself, explaining that the island is his chance at evolutionary redemption after an incident with some inflammable cows.

The wizards wish to leave. All but Ponder, who's a little upset over the lack of wonder at the marvellous miracles at work on the island. As the wizards prepare to set sail, Ponder goes missing, having found the workshop of the intelligent-ish designing deity. The wizards arrive, and a mystical misunderstanding is cleared up with the help of Mrs. Whitlow, who takes it upon herself to teach her to the god about the birds, the bees, and the brilliant efficiency of sex.

As the ragtag bunch of buoyant boatgoers prepare to head out to sea, God assures the wizards that while the ship may be a bit of a squash, it will head for the new continent, just going up as they speak. Ponder decides to stay behind, apprenticing himself to the god. Meanwhile, in Forex, Rincewin and Max arrive in Digi bring a beer along, and our hapless hero heads for a pint, served by a crocodile and surrounded by surprisingly humanoid animal punters. The roe beer suits Rincewin a little too well, and later, after an almost

fight, he's woken by the helpful scrappy and spots wizardish drawings in the dunny. Rincewin plans on running to bugger up, but he's waylaid by a strange beer poster, a scorpion, and overconfidence at sheep shearing. After making a clever cork hat and winning the steadfast snowy, he heads on to bugger up. Drop bears drop, a windmill breaks, thirsty animals glare, and Rincewin's horse defies gravity as he accidentally pens a herd heroically. Rewarded with a handy sack of beer and vegetables, he travels on. Camping for the night, Rincewin accidentally invents Vegemite,

before an inadvertent spot of sheepish behavior lands him under the eyes of the local watchman. And elsewhere, the luggage lost finds itself picked up by Petunia, the desert princess. More about Petunia next week, I assume. Much more about Petunia, if I already mentioned last week, but listeners, your homework is to watch Priscilla Queen of the desert. So, helicopter and loincloth watch. I feel like Mrs. Whitlow is doing something of loincloth duty.

Yeah. It's a very proper, not like, what was it? Not bikini, more like a New Zealand. Yes. Very nice. Two quite large, respectable halves separated by a narrow channel. And she ties some of the spare cloth around her waist sarong style. So that's doing loincloth duty. And beetles are helicopters now. Yeah, no, they do hover.

Yep. More like helicopter than most of the things he quotes. Do you want to go first? Is it just me? The dean asked. Or are we marooned thousands of miles and thousands of years from home? Yes. I thought so. Is there any breakfast? The dean is, at all times, really quite relatable. Good lad. And yours?

Once again, I'm sparing the listeners any attempt at an accent. Oh, I think it's not even. I cannot. There is one line I can do an Australian accent and I will shoehorn that into the episode later. And I expect you don't even know that we happen to produce in particularly fine wines. Our Chardonnay is being specially worthy of attention and competitively priced, not to mention the rich, firmly structured, rusted Dunney Valley Semions, which are tangibly refreshing discovery for the Connoisseur.

You bastard. You bastard. I just really like an eloquent paragraph ending on you bastard. Yeah, it's also a good reflection of a kind of. Well, understood Australian defensiveness. Annotated Pratchett referred to it as cultural cringe. And it's this idea of just not being thought of as a richly cultured country. And yeah, cool.

Right. Characters. Let's talk character. Let's talk character. I thought I'd start with Ridge Cully, including a line that was nearly in my quote for the episode. Ridge Cully told jokes like a bullfrog did accountancy. Yes, very good. Bless him. He's one of the obviously we love him. We may or may not have mentioned that in the podcast last week,

but it's how he relates to the other characters in this particularly well meaning and frustrating way that brings me so much joy, especially in this section. His relationship with Ponder of very sort of calmly explaining that he must be wrong about the ants and treading on an ant to change the future. And the sort of you've got some brains, but sometimes I wonder if you really try to apply logical thoughts subject at hand. And as Ponder gets very downcast and angry,

because my door is always open. Yes, in a in a ballistics kind of way. I like that he seems very aware of his faculty and willing to cut them off at the last second with a rather insulting out chancellor that you should appear to think that, well done, said Ridge Cully. Now, should we go and look at this boat? Trying to stop senior Wrangler from perving on Mrs. Whitlow. I can't help but think you're working up some horrible joke about the poop deck, Jean.

And I prefer not. It's all the same. I have a lot of respect for that. And then, yeah, Ponder, speaking of his relationship with, I love just how desperate he is to find the justification in something that doesn't really make sense. Yeah, especially when the boat appears and he's sort of doing that. Well, that plant switch for a reliable propagation on floating seeds, coconut. Yes, but does it have a figurehead?

Yeah, amazingly shaped vegetables. It reminds me very much of Scully X-Files. The desperate logical explanation in the face of like, which is why X-Files doesn't hold up to binging because you just like. It does become funny after a while. You've saw aliens last fucking week, dude. Do you find me spooky? Sexiest man alive.

But only in the X-Files, yeah. Yeah, young David Covey in the X-Files, not sexy outside of that. No offence to David Covey, though, just in case he's listening. No, I mean, he's still very good looking, but it's just he was heart achingly beautiful in the first couple of seasons. Anyway, Jillian Anderson just kept getting prettier. So it was. Yeah, Jillian Anderson is still the hottest woman alive. Yeah. God, I fancy Mulder.

I fancy Mulder and Scully. Anyway. Now I can watch the X-Files again. OK, yeah, Ponda, not Mulder or Scully, but Ponda was a fastidious child. Carefully reads every label. I love the description of achieving great things or be hunted down by a righteous citizenry by the time he was 10. Absolutely. And I'm so glad he found his niche among the wizards,

even if he doesn't feel very in his niche right now. Yeah, they never say it, but the wizards appreciate his presence, don't they? They do. Yeah, which is nice. And it's nice seeing how he's like he's kind of slowly grown into this role. Like we've seen him build up into like from a student to building up into. He's now got a proper faculty title and everything, or he still hangs out with students in the high energy magic building. It's nice watching him just grow and grow into being a part of this faculty,

even if he's there to be a foil to like Red Cully especially. Exactly, so yeah. And the Berser, who bless him, has had his brain somewhat broken by Red Cully. Yeah, oh, it's beautiful explained, actually. It's really satisfying, but of character, exposition, explanation, expansion, whatever. Preface by the line, he'd probably be the first to admit that he was a tea strainer. Yes, quite so. Yeah, just the very, you get it, don't you, when he's explaining

how overwhelming Red Cully is. Yeah, for someone who wants to quietly sit in a room and play with numbers. Yeah, that's poor Berser. And you see that Red Cully does mean well with it and how extremely unpleasant it must be to be constantly bombarded by it. I do really feel for him, but I also really enjoy the description of him being a lightly poached egg compared to Red Cully as a rich suet pudding with garlic gravy. Poor Berser, yes.

Poor Berser. And then yes, Mrs. Whitlow. Mrs. Whitlow is thriving on the island, really is. Yeah, she's having a lovely time, lovely holiday. She's got a new outfit. She's got her corsets off, metaphorically or otherwise, which must be a relief if she is off the starch corset variety. Absolutely.

And I really enjoy her explaining sex to... I think it's sand in your corset. Sorry, can you? Oh, yeah, exfoliate your corset. But yeah, I love her explaining sex to God. Yes, the matter of factness, I think, that an older woman is able to impart. The wisdom to... And her attitude afterwards where she'd sort of somewhat won, although the wizards couldn't

define how, combined with the nice reminder that, you know, this is the same Mrs. Whitlow from Equal Rights who was keeping an eye out for her next husband through the medium of Granny's tea leaves, I very much enjoy that we've still got that sort of saucy side to her. And I hate myself for using the phrase saucy there, but a better one didn't come to mind. Yeah, nope, that'll do. I can't think of one eye that saucy's in there now. Anyway, and then God. God.

God of evolution. Atheist God. An atheist God of evolution, which is something, I think... Poor Farcraft. But it's something like you need Pratchett to write. You need the buildup of the discworld and how belief works and how people interact with gods to write an atheist God of evolution. Like in the wrong hands, it could be so fucking, I don't know, edgelord.

Yeah, it's definitely written more as a kind of gentle frustration, awareness of his own contradiction rather than a... I feel very bad for him. He's very rinse-wind in the camera. Same thing we've seen a few times, which is... Look, I know the world's magical, inelogical, and shit, but shouldn't it be like this? Couldn't it be better organized? Couldn't it? Couldn't it?

And his appearance as this is kind of pulled out what the wizards would expect, but doesn't understand what the beard is for as a demonstration of wisdom. Yes. And it's... Listeners will be unsurprised that the nature of belief is my favourite thing across all the discworlds, but a different taking it, where the God was so frustrated that people believed in him. Yeah. And yeah, I just wanted to set them off on their own little path. And then when he did try and do something, it all went horribly wrong.

The idea of an inflammable cow was one that stuck with me for quite some time. That's one of those... I couldn't have told you which practice book it was from until this moment, but... That produced a sort of bush that made distressing noises and squirted milk. Not nice. And then, of course, we get to see his actual workshop, which... Do you have an irrelevant broken in half and rummaged around on the inside elephant? Kind of, yeah. So, basically, I was reading about the kind of evolution,

because it fit in of elephant feet. Yeah. You know, it kind of fit in with the elephant wheels almost, but they've kind of... They've evolved in a certain way to be able to walk long distances with a massive weight on top of them. So, if you look at the skeleton of an elephant foot, it's similar to most mammals and birds and fish as well. Everyone's got the hand thing going on. What's it called? Spiny things. What are they called?

Footnotes. Footnotes. Thank you. But they've also kind of evolved a sixth finger, which is interesting. Right. It's a false digit, a sesamoid bone, it's called. And it's kind of used for support and change the foot posture over the generations as it evolved and just made it. So, yeah, it's kind of evolved into...

I think soundbites would be impressed how its feet have evolved to do just walking. I'm impressed. Good job, elephants. I'll link to the better explanation of that written by scientists. But it's hard without pictures. They're like on tiptoes. I still have the mental image of the medieval depictions of elephants. So, when I got to the bit in the workshop where it split in half and he's running around the intestines, I imagined that as a medieval-style tapestry. And that brought me joy for hours. I looked into it.

And his beetle consumption... Compulsion as well. Beetle consumption. Don't worry about your beetle consumption. His beetle compulsion and it's a nice justification for... So, I found the actual numbers. Colliopterra is the beetle, like proper name for this order. About 400,000 described species.

About 40% of described insects and 25% of all known animal life forms. That's too many. New species are discovered frequently with estimates suggesting there's between one and two million, which is a broad spectrum. That is a broad spectrum. It doesn't sound like it when you say it quickly, but then you're like, hmm, actually. Between one and two million, right. Did you know that bats have like a bunch of fucking species as well?

Like 4,000,000,000. Yeah. Bats comprise about 20% of all classified mammal species worldwide. I love bats so much. They're so cool. Bats and beetles. Little flying things. They're flying things for diversification.

And yeah, I just like the idea that that's why we have so many beetles that, God just makes them as a little calming hobby. Yeah, absolutely. And there's another one somewhere making bats. Yeah. And then rinsewind. Rinsewind. Rinsewind.

Mostly just getting from A to B at this point in the book. I think he's showing character development. He's being nice to sheep. He is being nice to sheep, which I respect, even if it's largely to do with fear of their glares, but a sheep looking at you is an intimidating thing. Yeah. He was so built bad for them. You can see him like get this empathy and.

Oh yeah. Yeah. I like how he's very single minded, but not opportunistic. So when he's offered a lot of money for his horse, he's like, I just want enough to get to bugger up. I want to go home. I want to get a boat. I want to go home.

He's like not taking loads of money. He's not insisting on 500 squids after the bet is won or anything. He's just like, I just, just. I just want to get to bugger up. I think some of it's his kind of like almost fatalism. Like, he knows if he gets 500 quid, he'll get it stolen off him in the next. That's true. And him being nice to sheep clearly isn't working out for him either.

No, but I think part of it is like he's sort of built this humbleness up in the face of. Sorry. I thought you were pausing mid sentence to have a sip. And I was going to call you out on that, but there was no more sentence. Got it. No, I ran out. I ran out of sentence before I got to the end of sentence. And I was hoping if I just took a sip of coffee.

I'd just let it fly. No, sorry. I was baffled. Okay. Crocodile. Crocodile. I'm assuming this is a reference to crocodile dundee. Yeah, probably.

Something else that's very big Australian pop culture and I've never seen. Was it out by now? Was it? Yeah, definitely. This is what, 98? Yeah, there were a bunch of them weren't there. Yeah, I feel like the first one was probably more like early to mid 90s. 1986.

Ah, but yeah. So obviously that means there's another crocodile dundee reference, which is you call that a knife. This is what I call a knife. I am aware this is crocodile dundee reference, but 90% of my knowledge of Australian culture comes from that one episode of The Simpsons. And so I just read this for hours quietly giggling to myself with call that a knife. This is a knife.

That's not a knife. It's a spoon. Ah, I see you've played knifey spoonie before. Very good. Very good. Is that your one Australian phrase? Yeah. It's a good one to have.

It should come up pretty often. Say it quietly to myself almost every time I open my Cracklery drawer. I don't know why it's so fucking funny. Anyway, and then Snowy, the heroic little horse himself. Yay. Oh, the brackets scrappy again. Yes, scrappy again in small stubborn horse form. But this is one I wouldn't have thought to look for what the reference was if it wasn't

for Ben and Liz when we talked about this book with them. They mentioned the man from Snowy River, which is one of those things that's like very well known in Australia and not so much outside of it. What is it again? The man from Snowy River. And I might be wrong about people not knowing it outside of Australia. It being popular in Australia, but that's my understanding. Banjo Patterson, who was a poet and author of many, many Australian tales,

wrote a narrative poem called The Man from Snowy River. And it told of a man who wrote a creature, something like a racehorse undersized. And the whole bit with the canyon and the horses racing, that's like a whole reference to it. He's also a guy who wrote the lyrics to Waltzing Matilda, which adds some amusement when you realise that a lot of the stuff about rinse winds setting up to camp and making your soup, a lot of it scans. But a lot of it scans with Waltzing Matilda and scans to the tune of it, which I wouldn't have noticed if Anatata Pratchett hadn't pointed it out.

Very cool. God, he had so much fun getting references in here, didn't he? Yeah, which also those Castle Main brewing efforts I mentioned earlier, like one of the guys in them was referred to as Snowy. So I assume that's also a reference too. Yes. And then, yeah, location, we go to the little township of Did You Bring a Beer Along? Yay.

Which tiny little middle of nowhere place. Unlike Llamados, that name, I got the reference right away. You don't say. Did You Bring a Beer Along? It's got a bar, it's got some sheep. It's got some weirdly anthropomorphic animals. What's going on there? Yes, everything's, for some reason, you can't really say to the crocodile, is that a wombat drinking a beer over there?

Yeah, it might just be that there's, you know, it's a weird magic. Everything's gone wrong. Everything is slightly surreal and it just kind of adds to it. It's all very hallucinogenic, half dream kind of thing. I like that they have a sheep during contest. I've never really thought about the logistics of shearing a sheep. Well, now we know you need a mirror, scissors, or sheep. It was a bloody beautiful sheep, though.

When Rincewin's doing his kind of barber bit, he says something about something for the weekend, which I didn't know was an old-timey sort of euphemistic thing barbers said when they were offering to sell someone condoms. Which was a thing, apparently. Yeah, yep. Where else would you get your condoms from? So that's something I learned. Something for the weekend, sir.

Something for the weekend, sir. No, I mean, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, so I mean, say no more, squire. I wonder if that was the same kind of era where madness wrote house of fun. Yeah. Everything was just very difficult to order. That was the only place. Yeah, we didn't really go anywhere else. There was some camping.

There was, like I said, the aforementioned canyon. Oh, we've got the cave. We've got the god cave. We've got the god cave. Pretty cool. But from that, they're still on the island with these fecunegetes. Mm-hmm. And no, yeah.

Rincewind's pretty much just out back. Did you bring a beer along? Out back. Yeah. I think he's about to be dragged somewhere else. Yes, I've got the impression that some dragging is happening in his very near future. Shall we talk about the little bits we like? We should.

I like the running gag of things arriving in Forex on Driftwood. Camels, for instance. It was mostly the camels that got me. Yeah, I know some things end up going from place to place on Driftwood. In fact, I've got a study right here from the Journal of Maluskan Studies. Driftwood is a vector of the oceanic dispersal of estuarine gastropods and an evolutionary pathway to the Sunkenwood community, which I haven't read, but I did enjoy the title.

And I think the Sunkenwood community sounds like a wonderful commune. Yep, I'm going to join that one. I'm into it. Yep. And yeah, it's just made me love desert island discs. There's a joke in here when the Marooned and the Chair of Indefinite Studies says to the Dean, I was just wondering, is a little mental exercise if you're marooned on a desert island. Oh, Dean.

And a music would you like to listen to? The Dean's very sarcastic response is I would like to listen to the music in the Yank Moorpork Opera House. Oh, did you read it? It's sarcastic, right? It's just like not even getting the fun of the joke, like the sultry, like, I would listen to the Yank Moorpork Opera House. Oh, I took it as more like because he wants to be back in Yank Moorpork and not marooned. Because the Dean is definitely a sarky little bastard.

Yes. But he should be careful with the music in the Yank Moorpork Opera House because murders. Murders? But some non-UK listeners might not get the reference, which is a very popular long-running Radio 4 show called Desert Island Discs in which someone famous comes on and is interviewed about the eight songs they would choose if they were stranded on a desert island. It's also the inspiration for the name of one of our fellow podcast Desert Island Discworld. Yes.

Shout out to Al. He asks his interviewees which Discworld books they'll bring them. Yes. Terry Pratchett himself was on Desert Island Discs. Yeah, I was listening to it the other week. Oh, we? Because he talked about one of the books we did whenever it was. I have got the list of the songs he chose, which are Symphony Fantastique, Dream of a Witch

of Sabbath, London Symphony Orchestra, Thomas the Rimer by Steel Ice Band. I'm not surprised they made the list. Unless it's a bit spoilery if you haven't read all of the books, but Steel Ice Band's Winter Smith album is Discworld inspired and very good. The Race for the Rhyngold States, Bernard Miles, The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart, Bat Out of Hell, Meat Life. Of course. A Silk Road theme, Kitaro, Great Southern Land, Ice House and Four Seasons Summer.

Obviously, Vivaldi. It's a very nice eclectic little mix. You can have one luxury object and one book that's not the Bible, I think. Or How to Escape from a Desert Island. Exactly. There's bound to be something with a title, something like Edible Plants of the South Seas. Now, I know you disapprove, but I'm a fairly practical person. And I realise that behind every plant that we now eat,

there are all the unsung cavemen that prove the other ones were poisonous. That's nice and relevant for this one. And your luxury? Cheating, I know. But the Chrysler Building from New York. Built in 1930. It's a marvellous piece of Gothic art deco with eagles heads and gargoyles and a summit, which looks like some kind of a solo cinema.

It's just this marvellous silver creation. It's the ultimate skyscraper. We shall have it shipped out immediately. Thank you. The Chrysler Building is really fucking cool though. I know, but it's a luxury item. Skyscraper makes perfect sense. I'll link to the transcript as well as the episode for anyone who wants to.

Awesome. Anyone who prefers their content in written format, in which case, why are you listening to this? I only got down to transcribing one episode. Which, by the way, I might get back to, but for me, it takes a long time. Yeah. God, whoever does that for the living is not paid enough. No.

Tedious, especially when it's yourself. Yeah, I can't. I can't listen to myself for that long. Anyway, no worries. No worries. As they say, a lot in this. It was an amazing phrase. It was practically magical all by itself.

It just made things better. A shark's got your leg. No worries. You've been stung by a jellyfish. No worries. You're dead. She'll be right. No worries.

Oddly enough, it seemed to work. I love She'll Be Right. I use that one. A lot in day-to-day life. Yeah, me too. I know no worries is meant to be a very Australian thing, but I cannot see it without hearing Hakuna Matata. Yeah, I use it as my dinada, which I used to get tell off for when I wait for sometimes,

which I guess, fair enough, it was not really fine dining language. But I remember at the end of one very long day, the thing that nearly drove me over the edge was some old guy who'd asked for, I don't know, more wine or something. And I said, no worries or no problem, something like that. He said, actually, you should say my pleasure, or certainly. And his wife told him off, so that was nice, because otherwise I think I was about to burst into tears.

That's fair. It was like 11 o'clock or something. I was like, fuck off. I'm sure you're right, but just fuck off with it. I will never understand the people who feel the need so intensely to be right that they will chastise a fucking waitress over a turn of phrase. The logic behind it, and so far as there is any, is that no problem suggests that perhaps there could be a problem, which is the shittiest broken logic I've ever heard,

because your welcome suggests that maybe you wouldn't have been welcome, or certainly suggests that perhaps it wasn't a certainty. Wine is never a certainty, not at 11 o'clock in a fancy hotel. I also used to, I also twice in my first week or whatever it was, once got told off of bringing some on the wine menu without asking, and then by another table got told off of not bringing the wine menu, and they had to ask for it, at which point I realised there was no winning. There was no winning.

Anyway. Drop bears. Drop bears. She'll be right. She won't be. Not the one that just landed on Rincewood. These are koala-like bears that paralyze their prey before feasting by having very padded bottoms and dropping out of the sky onto their heads.

Very dangerous. And apparently they are one of those running jokes for tourists. We try and convince them that drop bears are real, much like we try and convince people that Haggis are live animals that must be hunted. Yeah. Or that Lestershire is real. Yeah, Lestershire is definitely not real. Just look at how it's spelt.

Well, sure, I picked Lestershire here. I think it was the spelling. Yeah. It's just there to upset Americans. Like us to Shire. Don't write in, it's a lovely county. The pub we hang out has jackalope on the wall, which is a textile wrap rate with antlers, and we used to convince people that it was a very real live animal.

We had such a good pata down. Yeah, no, they're actually North American. There is a rarer Scandinavian variety, but I'm not sure if it actually counts as a true jackalope. You should see the wingspan on it. Yeah, then. That was generally. That was generally when it broke.

Kipping point, yeah. When you started feeling bad about them falling for it. The plain language, which also would have been one of my quotes, but it would have involved me running out an entire page. This is just the Xeon similes, such as snagged as a wombat's Tonka, checking your twisters when you know that's when you bend a smarty, gonging like a possum's armpit, which is when you crack a crusty. When your ears are stuffed like a mudgy's kettle after a week of Friday,

is that stuck up like Morgan's mule? I know you're referring to happier than Morgan's mule in a chalky patch. Have you got any real ones? What do you mean? These are all real? Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Faster than an eel and a snake bit.

The problem is I tried being real ones, but I kept going back to when we were doing the bromeliad, which just meant faster than, e.g., an eel and a snake bit. I did find an appendix with some Australian English colloquial similes if you're interested. Oh, marvelous. We've got sadder than a Werribee duck, very disappointed by the outcome. A Werribee is home to one of the world's largest sewerage farms.

Grinning like a shot fox, dry as a dead ding goes donga. Useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. And there's lots of these, I'll link to that. For the useful ones, chocolate teapots always been my preferred. Vegemite slash marmite. Honestly, I didn't bother looking into the difference between the two constitutionally. I've never actually tried Vegemite. I like marmite.

I don't think I've tried Vegemite. Becky tells me it's better than marmite. Yeah, you're right. Marmite, I did the steved amateur thing. It was the first time I tried it, I spread it on like Nutella. I didn't really know where it was. And it put me off so third. And I don't really like twiglets, and that's put me off trying again.

If I can get hold of some Vegemite for not an insane amount of money, then I might do so. I cook with marmite a lot. Oh yeah? Like as just an umami stock coming? Yeah, like I'll throw it into a gravy or like a red sauce or something like that. That's a good idea. Vegemite was introduced in the early 20th century, following the disruption of marmite imports after World War I.

The inventor worked for a food company already. He was given the task of developing a spread from the used yeast, being dumped by breweries. Right. It's about to celebrate its centenary. I always fuck that word up. And a little town in Western Victoria is claiming the invention as its own by creating a museum in its honour. Oh, excellent. So if anybody is around Beaufort, 50 kilometres west of Ballarat,

soon you may be able to go in. Then much more about the origins of Vegemite. I love all those old food adverts and that. And yeah, like Bob Roll's one of my favourite, even though I don't eat fluid beef. All solid beef for that matter. Also, Amanda Palmer has a very funny Vegemite song. Oh yeah? It's called Vegemite and it's like a sort of dramatic slow piano ballad about

how difficult it is to have a relationship with someone who eats Vegemite when you can't stand it. Oh, no. It's on her Down Under album. So I'll link to it in the show notes. But it's also, there's like a, no, but she's performed like a lot out there. She's very popular. But there's like a spoken bit in the song where she sort of breaks down and then goes, I'm sorry, and explains that she doesn't like Vegemite because a British neighbour tricked her

into eating a spoonful of Marmite when she was a kid, which on its own is very funny. But I've seen her perform it with Andrew O'Neill actually singing the song, which started as like a bit because she was on tour with them and found this ridiculous, cheap, like floor length gown and bought it for them on the basis that they'd sing this very lying on a piano song wearing it. But Andrew O'Neill instead of obviously doing her spoken bit will just go on an unhinged rant for that section. That seems fine, yeah.

None of which I can remember in detail, but there were things like a very, very in-depth explanation of who the tree villain was in X-Men. It's not Magneto. It's definitely not Magneto. So if I can find one of those videos, I will link to it. But it's a very amazing song and it's really annoying because I love Marmite, I probably love Vegemite, but I also really like singing the song. It's very satisfying to belt out.

Good. I'll look it up. I intend to enjoy it. I intend to enjoy it. I expect I'll enjoy it and also I intend to. Talking points. Let's go on to the biggest stuff. Speaking of unhinged rants, let's get to our scheduled unhinged rant section.

Yeah, I've kind of crammed all of my opinions into one. I'm building up to some kind of fantastic central thesis that I'll have abandoned by Episode 3. Cute. I like it. I'm consistent, if nothing else. But starting with the idea of time travel, because I have a love-hate relationship with this in fiction because the rules are always different about what you've changed and what

you need to unchange and what it does to the future. And depending on how intense those rules are in something, I generally have to switch my brain off from trying to understand it, specifically Doctor Who. Well, that's because Doctor Who don't even try and keep it consistent. There's no point trying to understand it. Exactly. Back to the future, I just love the good movies. And Ditto, Bill and Ted's most excellent adventure.

I mean, yeah, when you get like campy comedies, it's not. Yeah, that's what I mean about the love-hate thing. Like, I love it in a campy comedy. I hate it when it tries to take itself very seriously. Oh, really? I see. I quite like it. I like a time travel paradox.

Well, I love this very, very determined insistence of Ponder of just how important it is. And he's so forceful on the wizards of this idea of you could somehow stop your own grandfather from ever being born by treading on the wrong aunt. Yep. But then having to go into detail of exactly how that aunt affects your grandfather being born. Yeah, metaphor does not go over well. Especially not with Rid Cully. And it's sort of hand-waved by the end of the section with Rid Cully saying, well,

you know, past happened before we got here. But now we're here. We've changed it. Well, then we changed it before. And that pretty well summed it up. It is very easy to get ridiculously confused about the tenses of time travel, but most things can be resolved by a sufficiently large ego. And it is a time travel narrative in that they literally do travel back through time,

but it's not like the big focus of the book is a time travel thing. Kind of as they change the past. They do change the past. But I like it as a narrative because it's not super hung up on the detail beyond what works for the story. There is no trying to lodge out logic out of it. It's accepted that the egos are doing a lot of work. Obviously, it is lodged out by the end of the book, as you said.

But it doesn't go into the depths of the logic beyond getting Ponda to play off Rid Cully. And that's fun for me. That makes me enjoy this book. That's good. That's a practice explaining temporal mutability. We like temporal mutability. Apart from when it comes to the four librarians gland, he's got a malfunctioning temporal gland.

I like time travel tropes in general. I enjoy all of the things you don't on here. It makes sense. I'm more of a sci-fi person than you are. The temporal mutability is like a sliding scale of how easy it is for time travelers to change the past and why. So Ponda is worried that there's somehow between temporal balancing act, which is quite high on the scale, which is you have to be careful.

Or you'll change the past in theory. If you don't tread on that, it might be okay. And temporal chaos theory, which is just by being in the past, you've altered it, which is potentially causing a snowball effect, which could have any kind of unseen consequences. So some examples of that in media. Simpsons, again, second Simpsons reference. Treehouse of horror 5.

I was just thinking of that one where he goes back and steps in a bargain. Everything's fine. And then Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, which is another... That talks about a few of them in that one, actually. But that's a nice little chill story, which I won't remember trying to explain. But do go read it. And then Rick Calle is arguing for the stable time loop. You can't change anything because you already did.

So the past, including whatever they do here, already happened. Media that sometimes kind of demonstrated in the tragic where it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can't escape the fate you've been dealt sometimes as trying to save somebody's died kind of thing. So take it out of tropes and into kind of philosophy. He's arguing for block time or eternalism. So as opposed to growing block theory where the past and present exist for the future doesn't,

which is the more common way of looking at it, it's not very... It's not taken up very widely anymore, block time, especially because relativity seems to just prove some of it or cast doubt upon parts of it. But reading arguments about it is great fun. Like, I love philosophers yelling at each other. So this is like quite from a wiki, one of the wiki pages. Go and remember which one now. I'll write it whole.

Avshalom Elitza vehemently rejects the block universe interpretation of time at the Time and Cosmology Conference, which, by the way, held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in 2016. Elitza said, I'm sick and tired of this block universe. I don't think the next Thursday has the same footing as this Thursday. The future does not exist. It does not. Ontologically, it's not there.

I love philosophers getting angry. And then, obviously, they're butting up against the grandfather paradox from different directions, which is quite interesting. If you kill your own grandfather, or do something, that's the example, but generally do something else to make your birth or just a mental time travel trip impossible. How did you then travel to the past to take that action? So from TV tropes. So then, killing your grandfather causes you to not exist.

And since you don't exist, you never killed him, which means he survives. So you exist. So you go back to kill him, which means he doesn't. So you don't. Therefore, he does. So do you, etc. As Rick Kelly puts it,

only one thing I don't understand there. Rick Kelly said, who'll trade on the ant? What? Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Said the arch chancellor. If I trade on this ant, then I won't exist. But if I don't exist, then I can't have done it.

So I won't. So I will. See? I love how he's very happy with the paradox. I mean, obviously, the type of problem is confined very much to fiction, because in real life, the paradox means it can't work. Logical paradox can't be a thing. Mm-hmm.

So it can mean that time travel could never exist, according to the law of contradiction, blah, blah, blah. My husband Jack has a very, very, very picky about time travel in literature and film media. He says that almost everybody fucks up the logic. And apparently, one of the few books he's read that doesn't is The First 15 Lives of Harry August, which I'm sure I've recommended before,

but we'll recommend again. That's one of my favorites. Yeah, I still need to read that one. Yeah, I like it as kind of a bigger picture, looking at, again, sort of motivation in the Ponder and Ridcully relationship. As Ponder's so worried that what they will do will affect things, change the fast, change the future, it really relates to how he is so certain that he does have a place,

a purpose that what he can do will affect things. That's why he wants to learn how things work. It's such a big motivator for him. And why it's so somewhat disheartening when he meets the God until he rallies around it, which is that he wants to know what the purpose is. And he doesn't understand that humans aren't the purpose of the whole business. And the God explaining the purpose of the whole business is, in fact, to be the whole business.

Yes, which is a... And the God's sort of very pissed. I don't want something that's going to think about the universe. So please don't look at it, God. You'll see all the holes. It's tech dressing. No one knows how that line of code works. But if we take it out, it breaks.

So we just left it in. That's nice, isn't it? The program's all right. But yeah, but Ponder, having looked for purpose, looked for finding the reasons and logic behind everything, when he finds out there isn't, he's like, okay, well, then this is it. This is the thing.

This is what I'm going to stay and learn now. Especially when he gets drawn into this whole, the elephants and the bees idea. Yeah. Elephants are pollinated by bees, right? Yeah, I think so. That sounds about right. But I really like time travel tying into this overall theme. Ridicully is very happy to bluster through.

His ego overwrites a lot of paradoxes, slash they make sense to him because of how his mind works. So yeah, he's quite happy to blithely soldier on and not be caught up in the heavy detail, whereas Ponder wants to see the bigger picture. And Rincewind is wants to run from it. Yeah, Rincewind has been plonked into this massive amount of bad luck because of it and would like to now leave.

Thank you. Yeah. No, it's not my fault. Rincewind wants boredom and potatoes. And the last thing he wants is to have to deal with the bigger picture in any way, shape or form. He doesn't realize he's running to it and is very much trying to run from it into a ship.

And I love this as a theme for the book of this idea of looking for purpose and getting somewhat lost on the way. And just how much your actions and what you're looking for affect everything else. Yes. And I will forget all of these themes as we go into the next episode, as I said. But our themes and theories evolve. They do much like other things

because evolution, which is a fun little kind of a sight plot, the theory of evolution as a side plot. Yeah, no, I like that. That's fine. That's like the seed plot. Yeah, yeah. So we've kind of got the watchmaker analogy here. Yeah.

Made by a watchmaker who's frustrated by his watches who keep going off and doing the wrong thing. So this is the theory of intelligent design, which is popular among the more Christian of the philosophers slash theological of philosophers. And it's the idea that the human eye is a really common example. This is so nuanced and details, it must have something intelligent,

must have had a hand in its design. Yeah, it's very hard for us to imagine the kind of time needed for things to evolve, which I think is why these things persist. I quite liked one of Darwin's quotes from The Origin of Species, which kind of seems to settle on this midpoint that this book does. There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one, and that while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,

from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved. So this idea that as would happen on this island, you'd make a few things and then they go off and do the wrong thing. I think it was Darwin's kind of halfway point. I've never been quite certain, I read different things on to whether Darwin said this kind of thing to make his book less scandalous or whether he did retain a kind of theology.

He was quite Christian. He was certainly to start with, I'm not sure. I think he maintained his belief that there was a theological hand in it somewhere from what I've read, but then obviously we can't really know for certain. The payoff on fish being fish-shaped kind of, which is the elephant wheels. So he quite sure about the wheeled? The god look concerned. Do you think they're too small, not suitable for the belt?

And ponders like that probably just give him legs, which is kind of explaining his question about why a fish fish-shaped, because that's the best way to get around in the water. Why does everything have legs? Because it's the best way to move around. Because of chance as well, obviously, because during various extinctions, this design is the one that's stuck. And then everything about from this or that.

I know it's not what you mean, but I like the implication that if things have gone slightly differently with extinction events, we could have elephants with wheels. Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. Oh, okay, good. I'm glad I'm not misinterpreting you. So the kind of description he had about his book where you used to have three little... Oh, yeah. And you matched different animals.

Yeah, I matched the different animal parts up. Becky from my birthday or not for Christmas gave me something called The Great Book of the Animal Kingdom by Bito Valle, which has a bunch of different animal combinations already drawn up nicely. Oh, my bliss. I've copied a couple of for funsies and painting practice, my favorite of which is the snail bird, snared. Snared.

Snared. I forgot about the snail bird. Everyone likes a snared, Joanna. I love the word snared. Yeah, just along the... Because we're on science, I quite like the two different types of scientists. We've got shown here with the wizards, which is the Prologan C type scientists who have made great progress over the centuries,

often great progress followed by dying painfully. And then the over thinkers like Ponda who come at it from a... But this and then this and then this who kind of eventually take apart building blocks of the universe and work out how they're going. So yeah, I think in combination, we do have a good faculty. I love the description of the wizards as they'll take a bite of something and then ask if it's poisonous with their mouth full. Exactly.

It's like chemistry always used to taste their chemicals and stuff. And I know geologists still do that, but I assume it's less often you find a poisonous rock and then just the one line I quite like to... It had never struck him that evolution works in all kinds of ways. There were still quite deep scars in old buildings that showed what happened when you had the other kind of wizard. Oh yeah. There's a lot of nice callbacks in this for that one especially.

I know it's not just sorcery, but sorcery is calling back to a time where that was more common. Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. But the idea of the wizards evolving into this quite comfortable faculty where they're not really fighting for top spots anymore. Yeah, it's like a nature balance thing. Cultural evolution. I just said that to sound clever.

I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Yeah, well done on backing yourself up, Sergio. I'm so confident in myself. Yeah, that's all I have to say about that. That's pretty much all I have to say about part two of the last continent. Francine, do you have an obscure reference for Neil for me? Yeah, it's mentioned that there are seeds that float around and they're talking about boat-shaped fruits and stuff.

Oh yeah, of course. So I had a little look into that. And there's like a whole, you'll be very surprised to know, speciality of drift seeds and drift fruits. Seeds that ride the ocean currents. This is one cool webpage I found, says. And I quite like that very poetic opening wine, which is imagine yourself floating helplessly on the open sea,

thousands of miles from land, your destination at the mercy of the wind and currents. Perhaps eventually you might drift ashore on the coral sand beaches of a remote tropical island or distant continent. This is precisely what happens to countless thousands of tropical drift seeds and fruits, a remarkable flotilla of flowering plants that travel the oceans of the world.

And they've included a very cool map, which I put in notes. I don't know if you can see it. I have got it up. It's very cool. But yeah, there's all kinds of stuff. So you've got like the coconut, which I think you mentioned. You've also got things like the sea bean, the box fruit,

the knicker nut. The knicker nut. Yeah, no case, sadly. But yeah, I'll link to the webpage. And it's got a bunch of very interesting things about drift seeds and fruits. I knew about the coconut things. I think that's a tumblr post that always falls back down

to the Monty Python restaurants. So are you telling me coconuts migrate? Yes, actually, they do. How they got to Camelot, we're not sure, but they definitely do migrate. Very good. I quite liked, I can't remember if it was a Twitter, a Tumblr post, but I saw somebody go.

But if coconuts ended up in some of these places before horses did, does that mean that somebody turned up on a horse one day and someone else went, what an excellent impression of a coconut? Yes, that's definitely what happened. I'm confirming it now. That's nice.

No humans have always been shitposts. Yes. Right. Well, I think that's everything we have to say on part two of The Last Continent. We will be back in your ears next week with part three, which begins on a page. Good.

I've quite got to. Page 256 on the Corky Paperback and starts with Ponder Stibbins cleared his throat. Where would you like me to start? Which I've told him, page 256. God ponder. And obviously going funnily enough to the end of the book. We're not going to save the last page

for a bonus episode or anything. In the meantime, dear listener, you can find us on Instagram, The True Shall Make You Threat, on Twitter, at Make You Threat Pod, on Facebook, at The True Shall Make You Threat. You can join our subreddit community, r slash ttsmyf. Email us your thoughts, queries,

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Cheers. And until next time, dear listener, don't let us detain you. I just clicked through one of the links on that Drift Bean thing. Yeah. To seabean.com. And oh my God, there's so much stuff.

I've got sea bean stories, how to grow sea beans, how to polish sea beans, why sea beans float, games and fun stuff, sea beans by location, books on sea beans, sea bean jewellery, sea beans in the news, sea bean symposiums. It's good. Good Lord. Yeah.

And this is a very early website, but it's still updated by the looks of it. Someone's put a 2022 link here. Let's have a sea bean symposium 2022, the 25th, the 25th, annual international sea bean symposium at Beachcombe's Festival. It's way too soon to know if there'll be one, but if so, it'll be in Texas.

That's quite delightful, actually. Yeah. So it's in Texas in even numbered years, in Florida in odd numbered years. That makes sense. It doesn't tell me anything about the sea bean symposium, though. It's a mystery. Mystery sea bean symposium.

Yeah. Oh, I've clicked through to the 2019 one. Keynote presentation from the Rio Grande to Alligator Point, scavenger hunt. Goodness me. What a whole niche that I'm not really going to go to much further into, but I'm pleased to know it exists. Francine, put the link in the show notes

and then close the link before you go too far into. Hold on. You can make a sea bean spinning top. We can print out a coloring fade. It's too late. We've lost you. We've lost you. All right.

No, I've closed it. I've closed it.