Go on then, whats the strangest place/situation you've ended up discussing the Discworld/Pterry in? Mine happened today in the middle of a University Interview, when the guy asked me about my Interests, and having told him about Chester City FC i was then struggling to think of other hobbies that wouldnt make me sound a nerd... so he asked about reading, i said yes... and obviously testing me that i wasnt making that up he then asked what the last book i read was... So on explaining that i'm half way through Night Watch, he then started remembering what happened in it and commenting, then on Jingo and the other books i mentioned i'd read recently... Not really what i expected to be discussing when going for an interview :badgrin:
... a wedding ... My friend was getting married, and I wound up sitting at a table for "random not-married young people". No one seemed to know each other, and conversations kept drying up. Suddenly a girl who was sitting across from me asked if I went to Akiba Hebrew Academy. I told her yes, I spent a year there. She lit up: "Oh, do you remember me then? My name is Irina, we used to be friends!" - which is a bit of an understatement, since we used to be BEST friends all through 7th grade: read same books, ate our lunches perched on the same tree branch, loved and hated the same teachers, etc. I remember missing her terribly, when my family moved and I had to switch schools... At that point, the wedding kind of crescendoed, so we escaped to the lobby and spent an awesome half hour catching up on the past ten years! At one point I asked if she reads Terry Pratchett - "Of COURSE! I used to read in all my classes. The algebra teacher kept wondering why I would bust out laughing in the middle of quadratic equations" Probably my favorite memory of that entire wedding !
Very few people around me seem to read or even know about TPratchett and since i haven't met any of them, exept my sister, i woud say:N/A Tragic, isin't it?
Sitting in the desert - having partaken in to many glasses of brandy and Coke and Jagermeister(type of shot made by Germans, tastes like cough mixture) Trying to capture the essenceof nature as in TP Reaper Man - some people's only connection with nature is that their Volvo ran over a sheep...
I would have to say probably sitting in a Starbucks with six or seven other freaks drinking Coffee from the largest cups in the world.
I don’t really have truly unusual place I’ve discussed the wonders of Terry Pratchett, but I do have a most unusual person. This was back during my six week stint at boarding school, where I discovered the vast difference between getting into the school with the top SAT scores in the country and staying there. My roommate there was from South Carolina, and a tremendous Pratchett fan. At first I was thrill, literally bubbling with excitement, I had a roommate that I could really identify and bond with. I was wrong. While the child loved Pratchett, he didn’t realize that Pratchett was funny. He completely failed to see any humor in and of the Disc world books. That was really the final icing on the cake with that boy. His other main flaw was that he had a face like a fish. Before meeting him I’d never really understood that particular descriptive phrase, but he had every aspect down to the glass dead fish eyes. I could easily imagine his decapitated head lying on ice, surrounded by mackerel.
This is something I’ve never really understood. No, I’m not attempting to wind anyone up…though I most admit that I was very aggravated by it. It’s a bit like trying to explain Far Side comics to someone how doesn’t understand them. I think it is a subtle combination of a dyslexia of humor and stupidity.
He could be an accountant* who has had his sense of humour surgically removed...He must think that "a leopard does not change his shorts" is a typo... *If you are an accountant replace with actuary
For that matter he could be an engineer as well... another race that has had their sense of humor surgically removed... or a metallurgist - maybe studying what they did killed of the part of the brain that has to do with as sense of humor or sometimes just basic people skills.
While updating my CV I noticed that one of my previous employers classified me as a "Software Engineer" - I'm still not sure whether or not that is a contradiction in terms!
When I look in the jobs paper now I see most jobs are described as an engineering job. The guidelines are so open now i'm not sure what actually is an engineering job and what isn't. :roll:
Welcome to my world. After reading Spiky's comment, I now wonder if people think that, because I'm an accountant, I can't be intending to make humorous remarks, and they therefore fail to laugh at my jokes out of politeness. Yes, that must be it!
*Nudges thread back on topic* I don't remember how the conversation got around to books, but I spent 20 minutes talking about Pratcho with a staff member at my local video store.
