User:Old Dickens

Verse

What if the stories were true? What if there really were Vampires and Werewolves and Wizards and Witches who really could turn you into a toad, or make you think they had? Suppose Nick and Nora Charles were the most powerful couple in the country...

There is a story that the world is a disc borne on the backs of four elephants which stand on the carapace of an enormous turtle. In one corner of the Multiverse (the one farthest from Reality) this, too, is true. This is where the story creates the history and a one-in-a-million chance turns up nine times out of ten and the ocean falls into space around the rim without depleting itself. On the Discworld, "what if?" must be answered, the stories lived, the myth made real.

Tales from this remote universe arrived regularly via inspiration particles intercepting the particularly receptive and talented brain of Sir Terry Pratchett, OBE. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sort, file and illuminate the elements of these chronicles in this little corner of the vast library of L-space. Just don't forget your ball of string.

Bridge

Quite likely no one who happens to read this will have heard of Pete Traynor. Peter was a flawed genius (aren't they all?) who provided me, back in the day, with the means to play some really loud rock&roll. More recently and indirectly he provided me with a job in the company he helped to create. I only met him twice, once looking for the job I fell into thirty-odd years later, and once as a user of his gonzo amplifiers.

British musicians might compare Dave Reeves and Jim Marshall; Pete was the Canadian equivalent who enabled the the like of The Band and what would become Full Tilt Boogie. I don't think there's an American equivalent; Leo Fender and Bob Crooks had the advantage of being older.
Peter died the other day, another icon erased from the glory days of rock and roll.

Reader, if you seek his monument – look around you.

http://www.0rigami.com/vb/
http://www.traynoramps.com/

Chorus

I sometimes sit and laugh giddily at the mere existence of some Pratchett characters (Carrot Ironfoundersson, say) and the reality he created out of the absurd stereotype. This is often toward the end of the bottle of wine, but still, it suggests how he's different from other writers I have followed. There are now more than a thousand Discworld characters described here, and that's not all.

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Made a sysop for the many good contributions --Sanity 01:34, 19 August 2006 (CEST)