11. And if they get too bright and start wondering if they might not make rather good kings themselves, then you can have them killed. That’s pretty much Rule One of being a king. You learn that on the first day.
12. Truculent is a lovely word. It essentially means to be very self-assertive and destructive. This perfectly described Mr. Merryweather’s dwarfs, who could have given lessons in aggression to Vikings.
13. Spiggit’s Old Peculiar had recently been the subject of a number of court cases relating to incidents of temporary blindness, deafness, and undesirable hair growth on the palms of the hands. Due to a loophole in the law, it was allowed to remain on sale but it was required to have a warning label on the bottle, and anyone buying the ale had to sign a one-off agreement promising not to sue in the event of any injury caused by imbibing it, up to and including death. Spiggit’s had decided to make the best of this and its advertising slogan now read: “Spiggit’s—Ask for the Beer with the Biohazard Symbol!”
14. See what I did there? Comedy gold.
15. The English writer Horace Walpole (1717–1797) suggested that “this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” Unfortunately, since most of us both think and feel, we are destined to spend a lot of our time on Earth not being certain whether to laugh or cry. Laughter is probably better, but you don’t want to be one of those people who laugh all of the time (“Look, that chap over there’s just fallen off a cliff! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”) because you’ll appear uncaring, or insane. Similarly, if you cry all of the time then you’ll look like a sissy, or a professional mourner, and you’ll start to smell damp. Best to settle for a wry smile, then, the kind that suggests you’re able to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with a degree of grace while still being able to shed a discreet tear at sad films and funerals. Incidentally, Horace Walpole looked a bit like a horse in a wig, and was once accused of driving the poet Chatterton to suicide. He was, therefore, probably a “world as tragedy” kind of person.
16. If you’re bored sometime, and want to puzzle your parents:
1) Fill a small plastic glass with a little water.
2) Lift said glass as if to drink from it.
3) Bypass your mouth and instead touch the glass to your forehead.
4) Spill a little of the water down your face.
5) Tell your parents that you thought you were taller.
6) Take a bow. Ask people to tip their waitress. Tell them you’ll be here all week.
7) Leave.
17. Actually, we have a tendency to take our reflection for granted at the best of times, when it’s really quite extraordinary. When you see your reflection in a window at night, perhaps with a city visible through the glass beyond, it’s because 95 percent of the light striking the window has gone straight through while 5 percent has been reflected, hence the ghostly image of your face. This proves the particle nature of light, but what’s troubling is that the 5 percent of particles of energy, or photons, that create your image are reflected for no particularly good reason that we can understand, indicating the possibility of randomness at the heart of the universe. There’s a one-in-twenty chance that a photon will be reflected instead of transmitted, which means that we can’t know for certain how a given photon will behave. This is very troubling for scientists. If you want to give your science teacher a nervous breakdown, ask why this happens.
18. It was the great scientist Albert Einstein who discovered that matter can be changed to energy, and energy to matter, as in an atomic explosion. His discovery was based upon the work of the physicists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, who produced the world’s first artificial nuclear disintegration in 1932, and their work in turn contributed to the creation of the LHC. Thus, it’s really the law of conservation of energy and matter. But one of the forgotten pioneers in this area is the Frenchman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794), who, in his spare time, became fascinated by the possibility that all of the bits and pieces of stuff on Earth—lions, tigers, budgerigars, trees, slugs, iron, and the like—were parts of a single interconnected whole. He and his wife, Marie Anne, began rusting pieces of metal in a sealed apparatus, then weighing them along with the air that was lost. They found that the rusted metal, rather than weighing less than before, or the same, in fact weighed more, because the oxygen molecules in the air had adhered to the metal. In other words, matter was changing from one form to another, but not disappearing. Lavoisier met a terrible end: he had offended a frustrated scientist, Jean-Paul Marat, and during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) that followed the French Revolution, Marat, who was prominent in the Reign, got his revenge: Lavoisier was tried, sentenced, and then beheaded, all in one day. When a plea for mercy was entered on his behalf, the judge responded: “The Republic has no need of geniuses.” The next time that you burn a match, spare a thought for Lavoisier.
19. Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), for example, experimented with blood transfusions, possibly in an effort to discover the secret of eternal youth. Unfortunately, some of the blood was infected with malaria and tuberculosis, and he promptly died. Meanwhile Carl Scheele (1742–1786), the discoverer of tungsten and chlorine, among other chemical elements, liked to taste his discoveries. He survived tasting hydrogen cyanide but not, alas, mercury.
20. Actually, the Collider experiment had been plagued by many difficulties in addition to the unfortunate scientists/demons interface, including a mishap caused by a bird dropping a piece of baguette into the machinery, so that one prominent scientist even suggested it was being sabotaged from the future in order to prevent it from being turned on and sucking the planet into a big black hole, or transforming it to ash. On the other hand, those of us who hadn’t spent too long hanging around with overly imaginative scientists, and who got out of the house occasionally, thought that the idea of sabotage from the future seemed to be pushing it a bit.
21. Actually, as we have established, it was generally considered unwise to drink Spiggit’s at all.
22. Well, I say “experiment,” but his fellow dwarfs simply sat on him and poured the sediment down his throat, then quickly stepped back to watch what happened. While this is still technically an experiment, it also qualifies as torture, as does almost anything involving the involuntary ingestion of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar.
23. There usually isn’t very much to read in The Infernal Times: the weather is always hot with a chance of fireballs; everybody is either miserable, angry, or tormented; and your favorite football team is in the process of losing its most recent match because, in Hell, both teams always lose. And keep losing. To a controversial penalty decision. In extra time. And extra time goes on forever.
24. Not even the jobs of the really lame demons like Watchtower, the demon of people who ring the doorbell just as you’re about to serve dinner; Eugh, the demon of things found dead in soup, with additional responsibility for flies in ointment; Bob, the demon of things that float when you don’t want them to; Glug, the demon of things that sink when you don’t want them to; and Gang and Agley, the demons responsible for disrupting the best-laid plans of mice. Mice really hate them. If it wasn’t for them, mice would rule the world.
25. From this we may surmise that Old Ram was a priest or church minister of some kind. Who knows, he may even have been a pope, for there have been some very dodgy popes over the years. Alexander VI, who was one of the infamous Borgias, and was pope from 1492 to 1503, sired at least seven children and was described as being similar to a hungry wolf. Benedict IX (who reigned at various points from 1032 to 1048) was pope on three occasions, but surrendered the papacy on two of them in exchange for lots of gold before being hounded out of Rome in 1048. Finally, Stephen VI (896–897) disliked his predecessor, Formosus, so much that he had the corpse dug up and put on trial. Found guilty, Formosus had his garments removed, two fingers cut off, and was then reburied. But Stephen, who was still angry at Formosus, ordered him to be dug up again and Formosus’s body was thrown into the Tiber.
Stephen probably would have sent divers to find the corpse so he could do something else to it if he hadn’t been strangled himself in 897, suggesting that Stephen wasn’t much to write home about either when it came to being a pope.
26. The ILC, or International Linear Collider, was the proposed next stage in the physicists’ attempts to understand the nature of this, and possibly other, universes. It would be a straight-line tunnel thirty-one kilometers long, and in it electrons and positrons (antimatter electrons) would be fired from opposite ends, reaching accelerations of 99.9999999998 percent of the speed of light before they collided. The collisions would be more precise than in the Large Hadron Collider, and therefore potentially more likely to provide answers to those big scientific questions: What happened in the Big Bang? How many dimensions are there in space? What is the nature and purpose of the different subatomic particles? And what does the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that gives matter mass and gravity, look like? Which was all well and good, except that the LHC had already cost $7 billion and the ILC was likely to cost nearly as much again. In scientific terms, this is a little like your parents scrimping and saving to buy you the latest computer games console only for you to tell them that there’s a new one coming out in six months’ time, but this one would just have to do until then. Ungrateful lot, scientists …
27. Translated from lies to truth, this means “No, I hardly told him anything at all, and what I did tell him was just enough to enable me to continue to pursue my ultimate goal without having him worry about what suit he might wear to the Nobel Prize ceremony, because he’s not going. I’m the only one who is going. Just me. Got a problem with that? No, I didn’t think so. It’s mine, all mine! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Laughter fades to madness. Men in white suits arrive with promises of a nice padded cell, three meals a day in pill form, and no nasty sharp edges upon which you might bang your knee and hurt yourself.
Similar translations from other areas of life of which you should be aware include: “The check is in the post.” (A check may be in the post, but it’s not your check, and it’s not going to your letter box.) “I’ll think about it.” (I don’t need to think about it, because the answer is no.) “You don’t look a day older.” (You really don’t look a day older—you look ten years older, and that’s in dim light.) “You may feel a small sting.” (Only death will hurt more, and that won’t take as long.) And the ever-popular “It’s perfectly safe. It isn’t even switched on …” usually spoken just before moments of electrocution, the loss of a limb due to incorrect use of a hedge trimmer, and people being blown up by gas ovens.
28. Evil, unlike good, is constantly at war with those most like itself, and ambition is its spur.
29. A Scottish proverb says that “Evil doers are evil dreaders.” In other words, those that do ill, or think ill of others, naturally expect others to do ill to them. Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart. Or, as the French writer Voltaire put it, “Fear follows crime, and is its punishment.”
30. Because Hell was huge, and only a fraction of it was occupied, the Great Malevolence had largely given up on trying to decorate every inch of it in a suitable manner. After all, there’s only so much time that you can spend putting up big black mountains that loom menacingly, and building great fiery pits in which demons toil, before you start to think, Well, why bother? Thus most of Hell is like the spare room in your house, the one your dad keeps promising to turn into his den but instead just fills with boxes of unread books, and old bills, and that exercise bike he bought and now claims doesn’t work properly because it’s too hard to cycle, although it’ll be fine once he gets around to fixing it, and anyway, it cost a fortune, that bike.
Dads: they’re just made that way.
31. Plays in ancient Greece always included a group of between twelve and twenty-four actors who would comment on the action onstage, and they were known as the “chorus.” If you’re bored, and fancy amusing your parents (and when I say “amuse,” I mean “annoy greatly”) you can form your own one-person Greek chorus by following your mum and dad around the house and giving them a little commentary on their comings and goings. You know: “Mum takes milk from the fridge. Mum pours milk. Mum puts milk back. Mum tells me to stop talking about her in that weird way.” Or: “Dad goes to the bathroom. Dad drops pants. Dad rustles newspaper. Dad tells me to go away or I’ll never receive pocket money again.” The long winter evenings will just fly by, I guarantee it.
32. Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) was a Russian scientist who signaled the arrival of his dogs’ food by ringing a bell or, occasionally, giving them an electric shock, which wasn’t very nice of him. He found that the dogs began producing saliva even before they tasted any food, simply because they’d heard the bell, or received a shock. This is known as “conditioning.” You have to wonder, though, if the dogs eventually got a bit tired of the shocks and the bells and the absence of food, and made their unhappiness known to Pavlov. This is known as “biting.”
33. When we see colors, what we’re really seeing is a certain frequency and wavelength of light hitting our eyes. Photons, which are units of light, have to leave an object in order for us to pick up on pink, or blue, or that strange brown color only found in damp earth and school uniforms. Black is the absence of photons, an absence that we choose to describe as a color. There is a school of philosophy known as Existentialism, which takes the view that life is all a lot of nothing, really, and as a consequence we are all in a state of great sadness. Unsurprisingly, Existentialists don’t get invited to many birthday parties.
34. In mythology the basilisk was known as the “King of Serpents” because of its crown-shaped crest. To it were variously ascribed the capacity to kill with its gaze, its breath, or the sound of its cry. It was even said that if a soldier pierced its skin with a spear, the poison in the basilisk’s blood would flow up the weapon and kill its assailant. It was rumored to be hatched by a rooster from the egg of a toad or serpent, thus providing an interesting variation on the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Actually, scientists believe that they have now proved that some form of chicken came first, as a particular protein in eggshells can only be produced inside a chicken. Mind you, it was probably a very surprised chicken that pushed out the first egg: “Cluck! Mavis, dear—cluck, cluck—you won’t believe what’s just fallen out of my bottom …”
35. Tricky business, infinity, and a lot harder to explain than one might think. One of the more interesting theoretical manifestations of infinity, and the problems and paradoxes associated with it, was proposed by David Hilbert, and takes the form of Hilbert’s Hotel. Hilbert’s Hotel is always full, but whenever a new guest arrives the hotel can always find room for him, because it’s an infinite hotel with an infinite number of rooms. So, if a new guest arrives, he gets put in Room 1, the person in Room 1 moves to Room 2, and so on. Then an infinite coach, full of an infinite number of people, arrives, but the hotel can still fit them in. The manager moves all of the current guests into a room with a number twice as large as their current room—so Room 1 moves into Room 2, 2 to 4, 3 to 6, and so on. This means that an infinite number of odd-numbered rooms are now available for the infinite coach filled with an infinite number of guests. Unfortunately, Hilbert’s Hotel can’t exist in the real world because there are only 1080 atoms in the universe, so there isn’t enough matter to create an infinite-sized hotel. You wouldn’t want to stay in it anyway: if you ordered room service, the food would take a long time to arrive and it would always be cold, and if you forgot your key you’d have a terribly long walk back to reception.
36. And what a lovely collective noun that is, a shiver of sharks, because it’s so apt. Similarly, you have to love a smack of jellyfish, which is exactly the sound a load of jellyfish make if you drop them; a lounge of lizards—hence the name “lounge lizard” for a chap who hangs around in bars trying
to look sophisticated; a parliament of owls, although this one is a little troublesome because owls actually look a lot smarter than most politicians, and therefore might find the use of “parliament” a bit offensive as a description; an unkindness of ravens, who are clever but talk about other birds behind their backs; a scold of jays, who are always complaining to ravens for being unkind; and a sleuth of bears, as bears make very good detectives due to their foraging skills. Except for the Three Bears, obviously, because they took ages to work out who had burgled their house.
37. And in case you think the idea of adding wee to beer is disgusting, there is actually a verb, to lant, which means to add wee to beer in order to flavor ale and improve its taste. And not just any old wee, but aged wee, which is known as “lant.” Oddly, in olden days lant was also used in wool processing, for cleaning floors, as a glaze on pastry (“This bun tastes a bit funny.” “Too much wee?” “No, too little! Is there a shortage? If so, I can help …”), and, oddest of all, as a means of keeping one’s breath fresh, which raises the question: how bad must people’s breath have smelled already if adding wee to it made it smell better? Frankly, you really don’t want to know.