Guards! Guards!

I always go through this phase after watching a series of anything, where everything else looks weird for a time afterward. It’s true if I read a whole bunch of one author as well. A long time ago I read everything Dostoyevsky ever published and then when I finished doing that, everything else just looked strange to me so I had to gear up and read all the other 19^th Russian authors if I wanted anything else to read. I didn't like Tolstoy much, but I really liked Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov. I have no intention of going back and re-reading all that to find out if all my likes and dislikes hold true. My brain is too mushy for that now.  

If I re-read anything a million times these days, it’s Terry Pratchett. He’s funny and smart and builds a story like nobody’s bidness. I re-read Guards! Guards! just recently for about the umpteenth time just because it always amazes me how well Pratchett lays out a story. This particular tale is set up similar to a murder mystery except instead of a crazed human killer, our boys in brown must figure out how to stop an enormous fire breathing dragon. In the middle of all this “detectoring,” Pratchett creates memorable 3D characters that are loveable, well, not loveable like say Winnie the Pooh, but loveable like FrankTagliano without all the swearing, who I find myself really rooting for.

Pratchett won’t leave off with just being entertaining like many authors do, he’ll sneak in a Discworld version of String Theory and multidimensional universes and does so expertly. In fact, unless you’re really paying attention, you won’t even realize you've just been taught a lesson, you’ll just come away magically smarter than when you before. Now while this sort of info might be old hat to some of us now, when Pratchett wrote Guards! Guards! in 1989, it was news to a whole bunch of people. He deals with Quantum Physics in his own special way in most of his stories.

"What're quantum mechanics?"
"I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose." –Eric

I read about String Theory for the first time in Equal Rites. Yes a book in popular culture introduced me to a branch of Physics that wasn't even being discussed in universities at the time. Well not in my state school in Alabama anyway. I know this for a fact because I was suffering through all sorts of Physics classes and science courses that began with the word “Quantitative” at that very point in history, so Thanks Terry Pratchett for stepping in where public education, that I paid a lot of money for, failed me.

Anyway, I said all that to say that I’m going through a viewing readjustment phase after watching eleven seasons of Poirot back to back. Everything looks strange to me right now except The Sopranos for some reason and I am not up to writing about that probably ever. I tried to watch the latest version of Frankenstein last night, but for some reason I couldn't get any audio. I decided that this was probably a sign from Blind Io and I went back to reading instead. I have to wait until my internal viewing receptors reset themselves before I review another show. 

Now I’m drinking tea, watching it snow and moving back to a story I’m writing about elves because I just can’t get enough of fantastical worlds filled with magical creatures where the Koch Brothers don’t exist.