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November 5, 2021 - January 1, 2022
According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.
And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason.
Wizards had always known that the act of observation changed the thing that was observed, and sometimes forgot that it also changed the observer too.
‘You don’t need anything to pull you down. Down’s where you go if there’s nothing to keep you up.’
You see, gentlemen, what has always been the problem with teleporting over large distances is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle,13 since the object teleported, that’s from tele, “I see”, and porte, “to go”, the whole meaning “I see it’s gone”, er, the object teleported, er, no matter how large, is reduced to a thaumic particle and is therefore the subject of an eventually fatal dichotomy: it can either know what it is or where it is going, but not both. Er, the tension this creates in the morphic field eventually causes it to disintegrate, leaving the subject as a randomly shaped object, er,
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‘Like, supposing the population is being a bit behind with its taxes. You pick some city where people are being troublesome and kill everyone and set fire to it and pull down the walls and plough up the ashes. That way you get rid of the trouble and all the other cities are suddenly really well behaved and polite and all your back taxes turn up in a big rush, which is handy for governments, I understand. Then if they ever give trouble you just have to say “Remember Nangnang?” or whatever, and they say “Where’s Nangnang?” and you say, “My point exactly.”’
‘Luck is my middle name,’ said Rincewind, indistinctly. ‘Mind you, my first name is Bad.’
Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like ‘What is my purpose in life?’ very quickly lacked both.
The Thieves’ Guild were punctilious about that. As they said: ‘Hit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.’
‘Oh, women are like deer,’ said Cohen loftily. ‘You can’t just charge in, you gotta stalk ’em—’
‘Et a man once,’ mumbled Mad Hamish. ‘In a siege, it were.’ ‘You ate someone?’ said Mr Saveloy, beckoning to the waiter. ‘Just a leg.’ ‘That’s terrible!’ ‘Not with mustard.’
No, of course, Twoflower never wanted to cause any trouble. Some people never did. Probably the last sound heard before the Universe folded up like a paper hat would be someone saying, ‘What happens if I do this?’
When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.
The Four Horsemen whose Ride presages the end of the world are known to be Death, War, Famine and Pestilence. But even less significant events have their own Horsemen. For example, the Four Horsemen of the Common Cold are Sniffles, Chesty, Nostril and Lack of Tissues; the Four Horsemen whose appearance foreshadows any public holiday are Storm, Gales, Sleet and Contra-flow.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ said Rincewind flatly. ‘You’re just like him. What d’you think this is, homeopathic warfare? The smaller your side the more likely you are to win?
