Talk:Book:The Last Continent/Annotations
Annotation to the annotation: desserts also include Pavlova, named after a ballerina. --Old Dickens 00:55, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
"Can you hear that thunder? ... We'd better take cover..." are lines from the song Down Under " To be quoted carefully - the song was recently judged to have plagiariased a far older Australian folk song. The author of Kookaburra was still alive enough to sue and receive massive back royalties. It's the flute bit in the middle, apparently. --AgProv 16:30, 1 March 2010 (UTC)
I made the point in a fan-fiction (which is why I'm noting it here) that it would have been known for a long time that XXXX only allowed one-way travel - because of the freak weather, things could go in, but not out. Thus far, canonical.
But the thought occurring to me - so far not canonical at all, , just intelligent guesswork - was that an earlier and wilier ruler of Ankh-Morpork could have used XXXX for transportation of dissidents, criminals and social undesirables, much as we used Australia. Just load a sorry old prison-hulk with convicts, tow it to XXXX, set it adrift, stick around for long enough to confirm it's been caught up in the anticyclone and will be dragged to shore. Keep sending your convicts on a one-way run. Result: XXXX becomes an Ankh-Morporkian prison colony with, as it turns out, surprisingly little enmity for the mother country and no air of "prison" about it. This would explain the surprisingly Morporkian character of Fourecks. Although they all appear to want to come back again, if only to visit...--AgProv 16:02, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
XXXXian acadème
Now we'll get letters from the University of Wallamaloo for spelling its name wrong. The rest may be fair comment. --Old Dickens (talk) 02:11, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
Jam with wooden pips
In his encounter with Scrappy down in the cave, Rincewind eats a gooseberry jam sandwich and detects hints of other jams in there "You know, I think there could be plum in it, too? [...] And maybe some rhubarb. You'd be amazed how often they do that sort of thing. You know, stuff cheaper fruit in. I met this man in an inn once, he worked for a jam-maker in Ankh-Morpork, and he said they put in any old rubbish and some red dye, and I said what about the raspberry pips, and he said they make them out of wood. Wood! He said they'd got a machine for stamping 'em out." (Corgi PB, p. 95). According to an episode of BBC's QI, that's exactly what they did. The Wikipedia-entry for the respective XL-epsiode(which you can find on Youtube) says "Raspberry jam was popular in between the 19th and early 20th centuries, but as it was expensive fake jams were made. Rhubarb and sweetened turnips made the best fake jams and fake wooden pips were made in order to make the jam look more realistic. The trade was so successful, that making the pips were a profitable trade and factories were opened to make them." Unfortunately, I can't give any original source. Is that still good enough to be added? --Robuer (talk) 18:00, 15 September 2015 (UTC)