What does she want for Christmas?

I THOUGHT IT WAS THE SEASON TO BE JOLLY, said Death.

'Ah, well, yes, you see, one of the things that makes folks even more jolly is knowing there're people who ain't,' said Albert, in a matter-of-fact voice. 'That's how it goes, master. Master?'

Hogfather

Maybe you had to be there, but anyway, the scene is Mr Crumley's department store, with an exhibit of the Hogfather, something like Santa Claus, but whose sled is drawn by pigs. Then something else appears:

The four pink papier-mache pigs exploded. A cardboard snout bounced off Mr Crumley's head.

There, sweating and grunting in the place where the little piggies had been, were . . . well, he assumed they were pigs, because hippopotamuses didn't have pointy ears and rings through their noses. But the creatures were huge and grey and bristly and a cloud of acrid mist hung over each one.

And they didn't look sweet. There was nothing charming about them. One turned to look at him with small, red eyes, and didn't go 'oink', which was the sound that Mr Crumley, born and raised in the city, had always associated with pigs.

It went 'Ghnaaarrrwnnkh?'

The sleigh had changed, too. He'd been very pleased with that sleigh. It had delicate silver curly bits on it. He'd personally supervised the gluing on of every twinkling star. But the splendour of it was lying in glittering shards around a sledge that looked as though it had been built of crudely sawn tree trunks laid on two massive wooden runners. It looked ancient and there were faces carved on the wood, nasty crude grinning faces that looked quite out of place.

Parents were yelling and trying to pull their children away, but they weren't having much luck. The children were gravitating towards it like flies to jam.

Mr Crumley ran towards the terrible thing, waving his hands.

'Stop that! Stop that!' he screamed. 'You'll frighten the Kiddies!'

He heard a small boy behind him say, 'They 've got tusks! Cool!'

His sister said, 'Hey, look, that one's doing a wee!' A tremendous cloud of yellow steam arose. 'Look, it's going all the way to the stairs! All those who can't swim hold onto the banisters!'

'They eat you if you're bad, you know,' said a small girl with obvious approval. 'All up. Even the bones. They crunch them.'

Another, older, child opined: 'Don't be childish. They're not real. They've just got a wizard in to do the magic. Or it's all done by clockwork. Everyone knows they're not really r---'

One of the boars turned to look at him. The boy moved behind his mother.

My body is a temple

If his body was a temple, it was one of those strange ones where people did odd things to animals in the basement, and if he watched what he ate it was only to see it wriggle.

--Terry Pratchett, The Truth

Things are not always what they seem

• From the beginning, AIDS has been exaggerated as a significant threat to heterosexuals in the U.S.
• It is far from clear that Abraham Lincoln cared deeply about social equality between whites and blacks.
• Martin Luther King Jr. cheated on his doctoral dissertation and on his wife.
• We fall out of love with our children less often than with our lovers/spouses because our children carry our genes.
• Despite what is widely assumed by professionals in the counseling and education industries, self-esteem has not been shown to be causally related to academic and behavioral outcomes.
• Whatever intelligence tests measure is related to many academic, occupational, economic, and behavioral outcomes-and it is substantially heritable.
• It is far from clear that many returning Vietnam vets were spat upon.
• It is far from clear that child sexual abuse produces devastating and long-lasting effects in nearly all of its victims.
• Studies have found that many gender stereotypes contain an element of truth.
• There may be credible UFO sightings that science is currently unable to explain.

Or so says Howard Gabennesch.

I misread the one about falling out of love with one's children. I thought it said "because our children carry our guns". (Fall out of love with THIS. [Blam blam!])

He also says critical thinking requires such traits as these:

• Being unwilling to subordinate one's thinking to orthodoxies that demand to be swallowed whole-at the risk of being charged with heresy
• Refusing to dismiss possible merits in ideas that otherwise may be deeply repugnant-at the risk of appearing immoral
• Being capable of saying, "I don't know"-at the risk of appearing unintelligent
• Being willing to judge the truth value of ideas sponsored by demographic and cultural groups to which one does not belong-at the risk of being accused of prejudice
• Being willing to change one's mind-at the risk of appearing capricious
• Being open to the arguments of adversaries-at the risk of appearing disloyal
• Having an acute awareness of the limits and fallibility of one's knowledge-at the risk of seeming to suffer from that dreaded malady, low self-esteem

The word "swallow" popped out at me, and having just finished Terry Pratchett's The Truth, I couldn't help but think of "Spit or swallow, the eternal conundrum."

William took a deep draught of the tea. It was thick and stewed, but it was also sweet and hot. And slightly lemony. All in all, he considered, it could have been much worse.

"Yes, we're very fortunate when it comes to slices of lemon," said the Duck Man, busily fussing over the tea things. "Why, it is indeed a bad day when we can't find two or three slices floating down the river."

William stared fixedly at the river wall.

Spit or swallow, he thought, the eternal conundrum.

The Lord of the Rings is Boring

I read over two hundred pages of The Fellowship of the Ring, and found it dreadfully heavy going. Dry, pretentious, bloated, boring, and humorless are words that come to mind. Meanwhile I love Terry Pratchett. But others like them both.

Whose side is Terry Pratchett On, Anyway?

"War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?" he said.
"Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?"
"Absol--well, okay."
"Defending yourself against a totalitarian agressor?"
"All right, I'll grant you that, but--"
"Saving civilization from a horde of--"
"It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together," said Fred Colon sharply.
"Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?"

From Thud!