Men at Arms: A Discworld Novel:15

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Palm and the Guild of Seamstresses were trying to persuade the Patrician to rename the area The Street of Negotiable affection. Page 137 - The menu: Soss, egg, beans and rat etc resonates with the Monty Python's Viking sketch involving spam in everything, rather than rat. Only later on did they diverge into two groups; clowns or court jesters on the one hand and circus or sideshow freaks on the other. Page 173 - "'They do things like open the Three Jolly Luck Take-away Fish Bar on the site of the old temple in Dagon Street on the night of the Winter solstice when it also happens to be a full moon. Page 59 - "Chopping off queen's heads and fighting their cousins every five minutes" is a reference to Henry VII lopping off Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard's heads and the War of the Roses between the Lancasters and the Yorks.

Detritus is silicon based as noted before so is exhibiting the same characteristics that a computer trying to reboot does. These words are commonly found in source code and are intended to be modified or substituted before real-world usage. Page 19 - "Constable Angua had mastered saluting first go" Since Angua is a were wolf and Wolf Cub Scouts are expected to salute as part of their ceremonies, it is not too much of a stretch to suppose Pratchett is deliberately making that connection. The Mona Ogg is a take off on his painting the Mona Lisa whose eyes (rather than teeth) appear to follow you around the room. These underdogs need all the help they can get, for they’ve been given only 24 hours to clean up the war-torn town.Page 26 - Vimes regularly identifies where he is in Ankh-Morpork by the feel of the street through his thin cardboard soles. There have been a lot of jokes based on this old euphemism for whiskey in the names of various North American Bluegrass bands; The Soggy Bottom Boys, The Foggy Mountain Boys and the Foggy Hogtown Boys to name a few. Angua works with the talking dog Gaspode, and also forms a romantic connection with Carrot, who loses his virginity to her but handles the discovery that she is a werewolf poorly. Page 205 - the "Interchangeable Emmas" are upper middle class young women involved in keeping busy with a variety of good works like the Dragon Sanctuary. This comment and the other dogs reactions to it, is particularly apropos because about the time the book came out, dogs were reclassified from the separate species canis familiaris to the subspecies canis lupus familiaris, making every dog a wolf - even a poodle.

Bjorn Again is the name of an Australian band with a repertoire that consists entirely of Abba covers.Another popular reference to this expression is "I'm too old for this shit", a catchphrase for Danny Glover's character in the Lethal Weapon series of movies. Croesus was the king of Lydia, who reigned from 585 BC until his defeat by the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 547 or 546 BC. Page 101 - "dwarfs would indeed eat dog, but only if they couldn't get rat" Often the prejudice against another race is expressed in their dietary habits. The desk sergeant in Hill Street Blues used to say this in each episode of the TV series, at the end of the force's morning briefing. Nobby is trying to sound more upper class using 'meteor' when he means to use the French word 'metier' (which Fred's used on page 214) .

Page 80 -"'That's three beers, one milk, one molten sulphur on coke with phosphoric acid --'" Phosphoric acid is in fact an ingredient of Coca Cola. The Discworld Collector’s Library is a stunning hardback collection of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, with cover artwork by Joe McLaren. Pratchett's drawing the reader's attention to Colon's use of the French 'metier' with the slanty thing over the 'e' emphasizes that this line will be important shortly.He also must deal with a new group of recruits that he has been required to take on for the sake of diversity: Cuddy (a dwarf), Detritus (a troll), and Angua (a werewolf—but Carrot is unaware of this, and believes she is included because she is female). Page 87 - Jimkin " Bearhuggers Old Persnickety" resonates with Jim Bream Bourbon or Corn Whiskey and "Old Persnickety" resonates with Old Pulteney Scotch Whiskey. The bowl-shaped outflow is the simplest form of a water clock and is known to have existed in Babylon, Egypt, and Persia around the 16th century BC.

Leonard as Pratchett points out may be a good inventor but he is terrible at coming up with a marketable name. Now the one behind you, that's a big bow" This line resonates with many movie lines including Crocodile Dundee (Now that's a big knife).

Pratchett is playing on the word "crucible" here since as well as being alchemist-speak for 'back to the drawing board' (a crucible is a container used in high-temperature melting), there is also the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield where the World Snooker Championships are played.