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Lords and Ladies

Lords and Ladies is a book by Terry Pratchett. It is the fourteenth book in the Discworld series. The entire series is great, but this is one of the best that I’ve read so far. This is partially because the protagonists are three witches.

See, each Discworld book has different main characters at its focus. Some books are about the wizards of Unseen University, other books follow the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork, a few books deal mainly with Death. The books I like best are about the witches, though. There are three main witches: Magrat Garlick, who is the youngest and most put upon witch, Nanny Ogg, the sauciest and most colorful witch, and Granny Weatherwax, sort of the headstrong and proud leader of the coven, as it were.

Lords and Ladies is sort of a spoof of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, except not really. I mean, it has elements of the play in it, mischievous elves, a play within the book performed by some working men (they scoff at the idea of including a donkey in a play), and people being bewitched, but it really has its own story and ideas.

The thing that sort of drives the entire plot is that elves aren’t just mischievous, but downright evil. They’v been gone from our world for a long time and all that anybody can remember is how glamorous they are and how they are always laughing. It turns out that they are always laughing because they are amused when bad things happen to humans and they project an aura of glamour partially because they think so little of human beings.

Lords and Ladies has it all: comedy, romance, gripping action, and grappling with mysterious forces. I especially like how Terry Pratchett creates a believable and internally consistent world in his books. It has strange rules, but he obeys the rules and subtly reminds the reader that this world is like our world but not with clever story points, dialogue.

Wait, did I mention that there is an orangutan? It crunches some elves real good. You should definitely read this book.

Lunchtime amortization.

I dreamed that I did some service. Except I didn’t actually dream about doing the service I dreamed about standing in line after having done the service to get some food. It was a loooooong line. This was a very popular service project or possibly a very popular after service project lunch.

Even though the line was so long, it moved very quickly. (I almost wrote “it moved quick”. That would’ve been embarrassing.) Also, nobody got mad when people got ahead in line. Probably because we had all just done some service and were feeling great. Also, the line was moving so fast that it didn’t really matter.

When we finally got to the end of the line we ended up at a little restaurant where we ordered from a menu and they took time to prepare the food.  I was confused. I had expected a long table with chips and hot dogs. Easily mass produced food. How did the line move so quickly if at the end of it was just one small restaurant with slow service?

The answer, of course, was time travel. The restaurant was serving everybody simultaneously by spreading them out across the next year. I thought that this was a rather clever way to deal with a sudden spike in demand without losing any business.

Khissssssssss!

Mallory recently learned how to do a crazy cat face. It is really great in real life because her tongue lolls around and her eyes go cross eyed and the rest of her expression stays perfectly the same.

It isn’t quite the same in static image form but it is still pretty good stuff.crazy mal sm

That guy.

I was at Walmart and I had this vision. This vision of being that guy. That guy you go to when nothing is going right and you feel terrible and you tell him all your troubles and he sort of leans to the side and half smiles and pulls a butterscotch hard candy out of his pocket and hands it to you and you know everything is gonna be alright. You know, that guy.

Butterscotch hard candy

Not quite Ethiopian skinny!

Do you know what size you are? It turns out that I’m not as skinny as I thought!

Here is where I rank in the list of average BMIs by country.

I guess I’m still pretty skinny.

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