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

Out here in the civilised world we shake our heads in wonder, again, at a society incapable of condemning both the killing of unarmed citizens by police officers and the retaliatory killing of blameless police officers by deranged citizens.

One side seems not to realise that attacking (never mind shooting) law-enforcement officers can only increase their fear and promote quicker lethal response. The other side refuses to acknowledge that the police are authorised and paid by society to keep the peace and uphold the law, not to shoot anyone they fear might be a threat.

American society is seriously threatened by those who believe that their interpretation of the second amendment to their constitution is more important than than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and by their tribal, religious, unreasoning hostilities.

There might be a rational constituency there, of course, who can't be heard over the corporate news media's program of confrontation; certainly there are individuals. Maybe some clever activist could start a campaign to Make America Sane Again?

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)