Hogfather

1

The bookshop in question is Interstellar Master Traders in Lancaster. ppint is a longtime contributor to

alt.fan.pratchett

The question Susan asks in this book. Many people have found it difficult to determine just what this question is. Perhaps this is because the Oh God of Hangovers asks it first, on p. 153, after which Susan turns to the Death of Raths and relays the question to him: “‘Actually… where do [the Tooth Fairies] take the teeth?’”

When Hogfather was being written, Terry answered the question what it was going to be about as follows:

“Let’s see, now…in Hogfather there are a number of stabbings, someone’s killed by a man made of knives, someone’s killed by the dark, and someone just been killed by a wardrobe.

It’s a book about the magic of childhood. You can tell.”

2

Most physicists believe the universe started with a ‘big bang.’ The contrary view is that the universe is essentially a ‘steady state’ system, though this is difficult to reconcile with the available evidence.

3

A verruca is a large wart that appears on the sole of the foot, also called a plantar wart. Apparently the word is not commonly used in America.

4

The Sandman supposedly sends children to sleep by throwing sand in their eyes, although we have found out (in Soul Music) that, on the Discworld, he doesn’t bother to take the sand out of the sack first.

5

From the Gershwin song ‘I Got Rhythm’: “Old Man Trouble, I don’t mind him”.

6

This nickname has an honourable history, dating back at least as far as the 1941 classic film The Maltese Falcon. It was also the codename of the second (and, so far, the last) atomic bomb ever used in war, which was dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945.

7

We learn a lot more about this character in Jingo. The name seems to be a conflation of the word ‘tactics’ with the Roman historian Tacitus.

8

A famous scene from the 1964 film Mary Poppins. Miss Poppins used her umbrella as a sort of magic wand to grant wishes for the children in her charge. See also the annotation {23}.

9

Susan is thinking of an 18th-century prayer still popular in parts of America:

10

Susan’s response to Twyla’s question loosely parodies a delightfully sentimental editorial that first appeared in The New York Sun in December 1897. The editorial Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus, appropriately enough, uses the ideas of ‘deeper truths’ and ‘values’ to demonstrate that Santa must exist.

11

From the Trad. song ‘Green grow the rushes, O’: “Two, two the Lilywhite boys, clothed all in green, O”.

12

The environment Death visits is called “Black Smokes”. It is a lifeform that is not based on photosynthesis in any way.

13

Matthew 10:29, for instance: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”

14

There is very often a clear parallel between Discworld magic and our world’s nuclear power. This is the sort of timescale it takes for plutonium waste to decay to a ‘harmless’ state. Given Terry’s background in the nuclear industry, and his comments since, there’s no doubt that these parallels are intended.

15

A Jesuit maxim: “Give me a child for the first seven years, and you may do what you like with him afterwards.”

The Jesuits boasted that they could convert anyone if they just started early enough.

16

In Clement Clarke Moore’s poem The Night Before Christmas, “not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”.

18

In P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle, this cry was recommended to Clarence, Earl of Emsworth, as an all-purpose call to food, and used in the enforced absence of his pig man to get the mighty Empress back to the trough. As such it is perhaps not surprising that Gouger, Rooter, Tusker and Snouter did not accelerate away at the sound — they were presumably waiting for Albert to produce the nosebags.

18

From the song “When the red, red robin comes bob-bob-bobbing along…”

19

The bar “Cheers”, from the TV show of the same name, has often been parodied as “Beers”. The theme song of Cheers contains the line “sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name”.

20

“Shlimazel” is a Yiddish word meaning someone who always has bad luck, a sad sack, a terminally unsuccessful person. (From German “schlimm”, meaning “bad”, and the Hebrew “mazal”, meaning “luck” — or “constellation”, as in “ill-starred”.)

21

Jimmy Riddle is rhyming slang for “piddle”.

22

This is the first of many references to the song ‘Santa Claus is coming to town’. “He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice, he’s gonna find out who’s naughty and nice…” Other references are on {24} and {34}.

23

Possibly another echo of Mary Poppins (see the annotation {8}), who lived at 17 Cherry Tree Road. The raven’s constant harping on about robins also echoes the movie.

24

The song “Santa Claus is coming to town” takes on a whole new meaning on the Discworld.

This recalls the legend of the original (Asiatic) St Nicholas, bishop of Myra in what is now Turkey, who threw a bag of gold (on three separate occasions) through the window of a poor man with three daughters, so the girls would have dowries, saving them from having to enter lives of prostitution.

I don’t know about other countries, but in the Netherlands we still celebrate St Nicholas’ day (on December 5th) rather than Christmas. Let me rephrase that. We do celebrate Christmas, but we have no tradition of a fat man in a red suit going ho-ho-ho while delivering presents. Instead, we get St Nicholas (‘Sinterklaas’), who also wears red, and comes over from Spain each year (don’t ask) to ride a white horse (not named Binky, as far as I know) over the rooftops and drop presents down the chimneys.

25

The Discworld equivalent of the Easter Bunny.

26

A Tom Swiftie, followed by another one on the next page: “‘I don’t sleep,’ said Frost icily, […]”.

Tom Swifties (after the famous series of boys’ novels which popularised them) are sentences of the form “xxx, said he zzz-ly”, where the zzz refers back to the xxx. Examples:

“Pass me the shellfish,” said Tom crabbily.

“Let’s look for another Grail!” Tom requested.

“I used to be a pilot,” Tom explained.

“I’m into homosexual necrophilia,” said Tom in dead earnest.

27

PG = Parental Guidance suggested — a film classification used in the USA and the UK, meaning that “some material may not be suitable for children”.

28

In mathematics, between every rational number there are an infinite number of irrational numbers. A rational number is a number that can be expressed in the form of p/q where p and q are integers. Irrational numbers are ones that can’t, such as pi or the square root of 2.

29

A lovely reference to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Also plays on the stereotype of the absent-minded old scientist.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (HUP) says that for a quantum particle (e.g. an electron), it is impossible to know with complete accuracy both where it is and how fast it is going. The act of observing it interferes with the event you want to measure (in fact, one might say that at the quantum level the observation is the event) in such a way that it is physically impossible to determine both velocity and position of the particle in question.

30

Archchancellor Weatherwax was in charge of UU in the time of The Light Fantastic, estimated (by some deeply contorted calculation) to be set about 25 years before the time of Hogfather.

In Lords and Ladies, Terry supplies the following piece of dialogue (on p. 224/161) between Granny and Archchancellor Ridcully as an answer:

“‘There was even a Weatherwax as Archchancellor, years ago,’ said Ridcully. ‘So I understand. Distant cousin. Never knew him,’ said Granny.”

31

‘Old Faithful’ is the name of the famous big regular geyser in Yellowstone Park. No wonder Ridcully feels ‘clean’.

32

Clearly the Discworld version of “The twelve days of Christmas” is rather less, umm, unilateral.

33

The song is ‘The Holly and the Ivy’:

etc.

34

Another echo of ‘Santa Claus is coming to town’: “He sees you when you’re peeping”. See the annotations for {22} and {24}.

35

Flower fairies are a Victorian invention, often illustrated in sickeningly cute pictures and still widely popular in America. See also Witches Abroad.

36

This has been tentatively linked to a famous parody song, to the tune of ‘My Bonnie lies over the ocean’: “My father makes counterfeit money, my mother brews synthetic gin, my sister makes loves to the sailors: my God, how the money rolls in!”

37

A perfect inversion of Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

38

Holes punched in cards were used to input programs and data to computers up until roughly the early 1970s, when keyboards became standard.

39

The conversation between the Bursar and Hex is reminiscent of the Eliza program.

Eliza is a program written in the dark ages of computer science by Joseph Weizenbaum to simulate an indirect psychiatrist. It works by transforming whatever the human says into a question using a few very simple rules. To his grave concern, Weizenbaum discovered that people took his simple program for real and demanded to be left alone while ‘conversing’ with it.

40

Refers to a marketing campaign launched by semiconductor manufacturer Intel in the 1990s.

Intel’s problem was that, although it has almost all of the market for personal computer chips, its lawyers couldn’t stop rival manufacturers from making chips that were technically identical — or, very often, better and cheaper. Its response was to launch the ‘Intel Inside’ sticker, to attach to a computer’s case in the hope of persuading end customers that this made it better.

41

There is a folksong about the hunting of the wren:

In Ireland until quite recently, the hunting of the wren on St. Stephen’s day — Dec. 26th — was a very real tradition. People did kill a wren and hang it on a branch of a holly tree, taking it from house to house rather like children trick-or-treating on Hallowe’en.

42

The main Viking god Odin, although not a thunder god, had two ravens, Hugin and Munin, who did this. He also had only one eye.

43

King Arthur visited this place of horror with a bunch (24? 49? 144?) of his trusted knights and re-emerged with only seven left alive. No one ever told what they had encountered there. I believe it was a faerie castle.

44

This is the air glow around Cori Celesti (as in our aurora borealis), but it is also a reference to the Coriolis force that acts on spinning objects.

45

Confirms Ridcully’s remark on p. 86 that the word can be used as a name.

46

Willow bark contains aspirin.

47

Mescal. A piece of typical Discworld lexical confusion here: the name of the drink (and of the associated drug) is mescal, the country it comes from is Mexico. And yes, mescal is the original drink that has a worm at the bottom of the bottle.

48

Maenads are from Greek mythology and were tied up with Dionysus, God of Wine. They were beautiful, nude and indeed maniacal, possessed of an unfortunate tendency to tear apart anyone they met, especially if it was male.

49

An old advertising campaign for Alka-Seltzer (a medicine often used as a hangover cure), used the line “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” to describe the sound of the pills dropping into water and dissolving.

50

In our world there is a magazine Guns And Ammo; this appears to be the Discworld equivalent.

51

This is confirmed by the eyewitness testimony of Rincewind and Eric (in Eric).

52

The little match girl dying of hypothermia on Christmas eve is a traditional fairy tale, best known in the version written by Hans Christian Anderson.

53

Plays on an old advertising slogan intended to discourage giving puppies as Christmas presents without thinking about how they’ll be cared for the rest of their lives.

Compare also the motto for Lady Sybil’s Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons: “Remember, A Dragon is For Life, Not Just for Hogswatchnight”.

54

The present incarnation of Hex has a lot of in-jokes about modern (mid-90s) personal computers.

The computer business is littered with TLAs (three-letter abbreviations), such as CPU, RAM, VDU, FTP; Hex has its CWL (clothes wringer from the laundry), FTB (fluffy teddy bear), GBL (great big lever). “Small religious pictures” are icons, and they are used with a mouse. Ram skulls are an echo of RAM (random-access memory).

The beehive long-term storage is a little more obscure, but in the 1980s some mainframes had a mass storage system that involved data stored on tapes wound onto cylinders. The cylinders of tape were stored in a set of hexagonal pigeon holes, and retrieved automatically by the computer as needed; systems diagrams always depicted this part of the computer as a honeycomb pattern. And then there’s of course the fact that ‘beehive’ rhymes with ‘B-drive’, which is how one usually refers to the secondary floppy drive in a personal computer.

Interestingly, Douglas R. Hofstader’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid contains a chapter in which one of the characters (the Anteater) describes how an anthill can be viewed as a brain, in which the movements of ants are the thoughts of the heap.

55

A common error message on many types of computer tells you that there is an error at a certain memory address, expressed as a number. This information is completely useless to anyone except a programmer.

Based on The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, it has been suggested that this may be the address of CMOT Dibbler’s cellar, mentioned in Reaper Man.

56

Possibly Hex has caught a virus. On the Discworld, there’s no obvious reason why a virus shouldn’t be transmittable from human to computer or vice-versa.

In the early 1970s there appeared a sort of proto-virus called the ‘Cookie Monster’, which cropped up on a number of computers — notably Multics-based machines. What would happen is that unsuspecting users would suddenly find messages demanding cookies on their terminals, and they would not be able to proceed until they typed ‘COOKIE’ or ‘HAVECOOKIE’, etc. — in much the same way as Hex is ‘cured’ by typing ‘DRYDFRORGPILLS’.

For more details see: http://www.multicians.org/cookie.html

57

In on-line conversations, a common error among newcomers is typing everything in block capital letters, known colloquially as ‘shouting’. This causes varying degrees of irritation among readers. There are also some people with vision impairments who use software that purposely uses capital letters, as they are easier to read, but fortunately this software is improving.

58

Hex’s polite phrasing here parodies that of the famous computer HAL from Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (and the sequel 2006), who said things like: “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer” and “I am completely operational and all my systems are functioning perfectly”.

59

The real-world version of this is is known as a “Divide by Zero” error. Dividing by zero is an operation not allowed by the rules of mathematics, and computers will generate an error when asked to perform it.

60

The usual phrase is, of course, “talk the talk and walk the walk”, meaning to both say and do the right thing. If anyone can definitively point to the origin of this phrase, I’d be interested to know it — possibly from the US civil rights movement of the 1960s.

It’s been mentioned more than once that the Stanley Kubrick movie Full Metal Jacket, the character Joker bandies words with a marine called Animal Mother, who answers: “You talk the talk but do you walk the walk?” This encounter may be significant purely because Animal Mother’s helmet bears the text “I AM BECOME DEATH”.

61

This speculation has been advanced in the context of, e.g., the ancient pyramids of Peru, where the stones really do fit together almost perfectly, and where the Kuta Lines really can only be seen from above.

Apparently the part of Peru where the Inca lived is rather prone to earthquakes, and not wanting their perfectly fitting stones to fall over and break into little pieces when the earth moved, the Inca built all their major buildings with the walls sloping inwards. Many Inca buildings are still standing (less a roof or two, of course), in sharp contrast with California, where modern buildings fall over with distressing regularity.

Britain has things called leylines — ancient sites so arranged that they draw a perfectly straight line across a map, allegedly impossible to trace without modern cartographical techniques.

For the most bizarre extrapolation of this belief, see Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods, which claims not only that aliens visited the earth in ancient times, but also that they actually started human civilisation.

The footnote ties together a number of modern myths about aliens, ending with the “The truth may be out there…”, the catchphrase of the 90s TV series The X-Files.

62

They were Roman household gods.

There are many beautiful shrines to them — there was at least one in every well-to-do ancient Roman house. The god that saw to it “that the bread rose” was called Priapus, a god of fertility, who was conventionally represented by or with a huge phallus.

63

A propaganda poster first used in the First World War bore the slogan “Careless talk costs lives” as an admonition against saying anything, to anyone, about (for instance) where your loved ones were currently serving, in case a spy was listening. (Also: loose lips sink ships.)

Interestingly, the Auditors also feel that there is no difference between creating and costing lives.

64

Once again Terry completely inverts the meaning of a song lyric without changing a single word (see the annotation {24}). The original song here is ‘Jingle Bells’: “Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh”.

65

Refers to the nuisance phenomenon on the Internet called ‘spam’. Email with subject lines resembling the above are mass-mailed out to thousands of people in the hope that a small fraction of them will fall for it, and be persuaded to perpetuate what was, in essence, a pyramid scheme, and highly illegal in most countries. This sort of ‘Make Money Fast’ spam is growing rarer these days, being replaced with unsolicited ads for too-good-to-be-true credit cards, mass-email programs and cheap long-distance phone calls.

66

A reference to the painter Paul Gaugin, who spent his most productive years in the South Pacific doing just this.

67

The episode of the king and the old man is based on the story of Good King Wenceslas. Of course, Terry doesn’t quite see it the way of the Christmas carol.

68

A common device to help visualise the effect of gravity on the fabric of the universe, similarly useless beyond a certain point.

69

The full expression is “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey”.

The expression supposedly dates back to a time when cannon balls were stored on the decks of ships in pyramid-shaped stacks held in place by a brass frame around the base. This frame was called a ‘monkey’, and when it got very cold, the brass monkey would contract, causing the stacks of cannon balls to collapse.

70

In the UK and Australia, The Big Issue is a magazine sold by the homeless. In many cities all over the world similar projects have been started.

71

Ever since the Apple Macintosh, graphical user interfaces for computers have used a special cursor shape to indicate that a lengthy operation is in progress. The Windows hourglass cursor is Microsoft’s version Apple’s original wristwatch.

72

For the details of the time Ridcully is referring to, read Reaper Man.

73

In The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck, published in German in 1909, two children set off on a long journey to find the Blue Bird of Happiness, only to learn that it was in their own back garden all along.

There’s also a Far Side cartoon wherein “Ned, the Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, is visited by the Chicken of Depression”.

74

Normally, cladists are those who try to classify organisms in such a way that related species are placed in the same family, not in a family with other species that look the same. This is quite the opposite to Ponder’s cladism. This method of classification is called “dichotomous key classification”: unfortunately Ponder has left out the conventional first step in this kind of identification, which is something along the lines of “can it move unassisted?” — if so, go to animal, if not, go to plants.

In our world, there is also some classificational confusion concerning bananas, since the so-called banana tree is technically a banana plant (its stem does not contain actual wood tissue), which would make the banana (so the argument goes) a herb instead of a fruit. This is one of those arguments that never really gets resolved, because the ‘answer’ can simply go either way depending on what definitions you use in which contexts.

75

There is a song that goes:

76

A standard children’s song, once (apparently) popular at Girl Guide camps, went:

77

In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Scrooge has the catchphrase “Bah! Humbug!”.

78

Darwin gathered much of the data for his version of evolutionary theory while in the Galapagos Islands, which he visited on HMS Beagle.

79

There is a classic set of children’s stories called (in English) Slovenly Peter, by Heinrich Hoffman, originally written in German circa 1840. One of the stories is about the scissor man, who comes in and cuts the thumbs off of a little girl who refuses to stop sucking her thumbs.

80

In the legendary BBC TV series Dr Who, the Tardis is famous for being “bigger on the inside than on the outside”. When the series began in 1963, the Doctor was accompanied by his “granddaughter”, Susan.

81

A US television presenter named Soupy Sales was hosting a children’s TV show in 1965, and in one famous live episode ad-libbed:

“Hey kids, last night was New Year’s Eve, and your mother and dad were out having a great time. They are probably still sleeping and what I want you to do is tiptoe in their bedroom and go in your mom’s pocketbook and your dad’s pants, which are probably on the floor. You’ll see a lot of green pieces of paper with pictures of guys in beards. Put them in an envelope and send them to me at Soupy Sales, Channel 5, New York, New York. And you know what I’m going to send you? A post card from Puerto Rico!”

That the station subsequently got $80,000 in the mail appears to be a bit of an urban legend, but Soupy’s show did get pulled for two weeks before he was allowed back on the air again.

82

Bilirubin is formed when haemoglobin is broken down, and is basically the the pigment that makes faeces brown.

In The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris, Hannibal Lecter at one point says that the killer ‘Buffalo Bill’ is a former patient of his named Bill Rubin. In Harris’ previous book Red Dragon the killer Francis Dolorhyde had no teeth and was known as the Tooth Fairy.

Terry explains the name as follows:

“Oh, lor’. Billy Rubim is an old medical student joke…”

“Like most really stupid jokes, it’s one that you won’t spot unless you have the right background. Others on here will doubtless explain, but according to one of my informants, a nurse, every batch of medical students learns it anew and Mr Rubin’s name turns up in various places to general sniggering.”

83

The Greek gods, particularly Zeus, were fond of incarnating themselves as animals of this sort, usually as part of a scheme to seduce or ravish some unsuspecting young woman. On the Discworld, Om used to do the same sort of thing. See Small Gods for details.

84

A land such as Narnia. A reference to C. S. Lewis’s classic fantasy story The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, in which the heroes are magically transported to the Land of Narnia through the back of an old wardrobe, which was made from a tree that grew from the seeds of a magical apple taken from that Land long before.

85

The fairies in J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, Tinkerbell in particular, are generally kept happy (and alive) in this fashion. I don’t know if there’s an earlier reference.

86

A scene familiar to anyone who’s ever watched an episode of Star Trek.

87

Old IBM mainframes (as well as, later, the first IBM PCs), had large, bright red, power switches, causing the phrase “big red switch” (often abbreviated as BRS) to enter the hacker’s jargon.

Hex, after seeing Death enter the laboratory, is in fact asking if Death has come for him, which (a) throws an interesting light on Hex’s own feelings about his sentience, and (b) explains why Death’s reply to Hex starts with the word “No”.

88

‘Write-Only Memory’ is a curious, but pointless concept, since the data stored there can presumably never be retrieved. Real computers do have a type of storage called ‘Read-Only Memory’, or ROM, which contains information that can never be erased or overwritten.

Write-Only memory has a real world precedence in a practical joke perpetrated by an engineer working for Signetics corporation. The joke was eventually given a wider audience in the April 1972 issue of Electronics magazine.

89

This translates to “Don’t fear the reaper”, the title of a well-known song by Blue Öyster Cult.

90

In Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, a dinner party is rather spoiled when Death visits (a Death not entirely unlike the Discworld’s). The visit is occasioned by the hostess serving tinned salmon mousse, and the American guest complains that he didn’t have any salmon mousse.

91

“What are you waiting for? Christmas?” is a mild taunt used to encourage someone to start doing something. It is, for instance, what Duke Nukem in the computer game Duke Nukem 3D says after the player has been inactive for a while. Given Terry Pratchett’s love of other games in that genre (such as Doom and Tombraider) a familiarity with Duke Nukem may perhaps have contributed to his use of the phrase here.

92

The ancient Celts painted blue patterns on their skin using the woad plant, possibly as a means of setting the warriors apart from civilians.

93

The whole concept of the modern Santa Claus is commonly ascribed to a Coca Cola promotion. However, the idea was around long before then. See http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/santa.asp for details.

The modern red-and-white image of Santa derives from the poem The Night Before Christmas (see the annotation {16}), first published in 1822. Coca-Cola adopted him as an advertising symbol in the 1920s, and only since then have the colours become ‘fixed’. However, it is worth mentioning that St Nicholas was a 4th century bishop, who would have worn red and white robes.

94

Desmond Morris, in The Naked Ape: “I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.” However, Terry says that he was unaware of this prior use.

95

An echo of Beatrix Potter’s nursery stories and their illustrations, most obviously Peter Rabbit. The “gold watches and top hats” suggests the White Rabbit from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

96

“Uncle Mac”, the BBC presenter of the popular 1950 radio programme “Children’s Hour”, always used this phrase to sign off his show.

97

An afterburner helps jet aircraft gain speed by using exhaust gases for additional combustion. Nitrous oxide (aka laughing gas) is used as a combustion-enhancing speed fuel in e.g. drag-racing cars. Also, nitrous oxide, when added to water, becomes nitrous acid.

All of which might throw light on the oft-asked question: “what precisely happened to Ridcully in the bath?”

98

From the Bible: “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.” (Proverbs 15:17)

99

This is the last line of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, spoken by Tiny Tim, who also had something wrong with his legs.