The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 24: Pyramids Pt.2 (That Won't Keep My Pyramids Flaring)

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan-Young and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 2 of our recap of “Pyramids”. Hippos! Rhinos! Elephants! Camels! Gods!Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail] to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we should blather on about:Black Lives Matter Black Trans Lives MatterUk Black PrideAnti-Racism charities in the UKBlack Trans Lives - Actions in Solidarity Things we blathered on about:Heaven is a half pipeElephant in stablesThat don’t impress me much The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al YankovicBlog post mentioning Oxter English DictionaryMusic: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

fucking neo-liberals. Bloody neo-liberals coming over here. Liberaling. I'm not sure you can make liberal into a verb. Liberalising. That would make a lot more sense than liberaling. But liberaling is quite fun to say. Yeah, liberaling. That sounds like a piercing. I liberalise. You liberalise. They liberalise. He, she, liberalings. Now what are you liberaling to the table today? And I'd just like to say happy birthday to Joanna for yesterday, especially because this is the one month of the year that we're the same age. Hooray. You're going to be old next month. Yeah. Well, next year when I turn 30 a month, a year before you, that'll be when your gloating really comes into fruition. Oh, I can't wait to gloat about you turning 30 before me. Right now,

I'm just celebrating that I made it out of being 27 without joining the 27 club. Yeah, I know. It would have taken quite a lot of effort to become world famous, but I, I could have done that. Yeah, if you'd want it, obviously. If I'd really wanted. Yeah, I could have become a rock star. That was, but I just, you know, I was busy. I was making bread. If your life depended on it, on becoming famous, and you were given a given value of famous, within a year, what would you do? I said, you'd have to do something horrible, wouldn't you, to guarantee it? Yeah, it'd have to be something that made headlines. And I can't imagine without already having like a function of money you could spend. Yeah.

Either headlines or going viral, like a viral TikTok. I'm glad we don't need to become famous in a year. Yes, no, I've troubled myself with this hypothetical. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or just launch a mega successful podcast. Listeners help us get world famous in case anyone ever makes us. Oh, my relevant hypothetical that I was saying here earlier though. If you are building your grand tomb, what kind of thing are you putting in your burial chamber with you? What are you bringing with you? Is this like, so what I want to bring to the afterlife? You know, go wild with it. Oh, I haven't thought about this. Right. As for things I'm bringing to the afterlife,

like these don't need to be things I had in the real world. So I feel like some big models of horses, because then I could have a bunch of horses, a skateboard, because I feel like in the afterlife, I'll be able to skateboard, which I cannot do in the real world. Because right now I never can do jack. Exactly. Heaven is in fact a half pipe. Is it well known fact for unseen? Well, at the same time, being pushed across the sky by a giant dummy. The sun is not heaven. What would you? The thing is, it really depends on the nature of the afterlife. It's like, if I'm packing to go and stay at my mum's, I know I don't need to bring like a bunch of changes of clothes or whatever, because I can use the washing machine now.

But if I'm going to stay in a hotel, I need outfits for every day. So if I'm going to heaven, and I know there's going to be a beautiful warship waiting for me, I don't need to bring one. Yeah, that's fair. I mean, do you think you'd need a warship in the afterlife? I assume so. What are you waging war on? Anything that's there. It just seems like a lot of effort. Yeah. All right. Well, if not war, then exploration. So maybe the afterlife is like a really cool unexplored planet I get to explore. So a big explorership. I wouldn't be like colonial about it, though. I wouldn't say I discovered anywhere that had people there already. Just like Gangnam. Yeah, I want to explore places, not discover places. Yeah. I mean, ideally, if this is my

afterlife, there probably aren't people there anyway. So it's fun. But yeah, I do feel like one of the big key parts of my afterlife is not having to people. Just like variously adapted elephants. And you bring it back to elephants? Woolly mammals. Yeah, aside from that, just I know books. My hand luggage is usually mainly taken up by books. So it kind of makes sense that my burial chamber will be. Because what is a burial chamber, if not the hand luggage to accompany you to the holiday of the afterlife? The hand luggage of the damned. Yeah. Hey, I'm not damned. I never agreed to any religion that would damn me. Oh, I should have done yoga before I did this. Emperor squad sucks.

These they've got deaths on. And the other ones have orangutans and say, oh, and I've got some with turtles on. And they have a little orangutan necklace. Oh, I love from bed from bed. Yeah. Well, then it's finally learned, rather than complaining. Oh, but I've got no idea what to get you that it's a safe bet. If it's from the Discworld Emporium, I'm probably going to like it. I also had cake for breakfast. I'm quite looking forward to making the cake for dad. Thank you for the nice easy. Yeah. Literally, cakes are so much easier than people make them out to be. I've, yeah, I don't know, bake it. I think

it's never really cakes I fail at, actually. It's because I just like failed marangs and various biscuits a few times. I'm like, I hate baking. Fuck this. But cakes are a bit more forgiving. Cakes are a lot more forgiving than people think. And also, even if a cake hasn't risen properly and is still a bit sunken and weird in the middle, it's still going to taste delicious because cake, cake with jam and cream. That's not going to be a bad thing. Becky and I once tried to make a cake completely via guesswork and in the microwave, and that did not taste good. I did manage to make a half decent microwave syrup sponge, to be fair. I was quite proud of that. I'm definitely tempted to have a go at those

like jammy dodgers and custard creams. Yeah. A bit of me wants to, a bit of me should not have that much access to jammy dodgers and custard creams. I'm assuming it's basically just shortbread type biscuit though. Yeah, I'm sure the biscuit is just shortbread, but the jam and jammy dodgers and the cream and custard creams is interesting. I love the like weirdly perfect rectangle of cream and a custard cream. Yeah. And a custard cream's in forever. I mean, either. I don't really buy biscuits. Oh, Bourbons. I get those Maryland cookies because Jack likes them, so I'll have those occasionally. I buy those when I'm hormonal. They are very good hormone cookies.

And I buy Oreos when Becky comes because they're vegan. Ah, cool. I don't like having lots of snacky stuff in the housebenders. I have to because it all goes in Jack's lunches. So we always have crisps and chocolate bars, which means I eat crisps and chocolate bars for lunch a lot. It'll catch up to me one day and I don't know if the chocolate bars clog up your heart or something. I don't even know what chocolate is meant to do to me. Oh, it's the sugar. That's right. Sugar's bad for me. We're all going to die anyway. Should we, on that cheery note, should we make a podcast? Yeah, sure. Why not? As we're all going to die, I might grab another coffee day.

Yeah, me too. You know, before we die. What? Before we die. Before we die. Hello and welcome to the Two Shall Make Key Fract, a podcast in which we are reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, one at a time, in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagan Young. And I'm Francine Carroll. And today is part two of our discussion of Pyramids, the seventh Discworld novel. Part two and book two. Yes, book two. We're on the Book of the Dead. There are four books in this book, and we are doing three shows about it, which tells me we are putting book three and four together in one glorious extravaganza next week. Yes, I'm going to get up early so we can actually start recording on time next week. Yeah, well,

we'll see about that. I'm under no illusions that there is no way we'll start until at least three o'clock. But optimism, Francine. Cautious optimism. Cautious optimism is the only kind. Yes. A note on spoilers for our dear little listeners. This is a spoiler light podcast of the heavy spoilers for the book we're on, Pyramids. But we will try and avoid spoiling major feature events in the Discworld novels, and we will save any and all discussion of the final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown, until we get there so you, dear listener, can come on the journey with us. A follow-up from last week. I looked up runners and hippos because we were wondering if they were related to cows or what they were related to.

Oh, yeah, yeah. But they're not both their own genuses. So hippos are one of the only two extant. Geni? Yeah, I'm not sure. So hippos are from the family hippopotamidae. So hippos and pygmy hippos are the only alive things in that. And the closest living relatives to that genus are actually cetaceans, so whales and dolphins and stuff. Oh. And rhinos, again, from a genus, rhinoceros. That was a big, dramatic pause, which has its of Greek origin and means nose horn. Good. Very literal people, the Greeks. I've always said that on page one for one of my edition, probably nobody else's. But basically, when they find you bastard. But the stables now held only a handful of rodent war chariots, relics of past glories, an elderly elephant whose

presence was a bit of a mystery, and this camel. Elephant is, and Terry Pratchett confirmed this on the forum, a throwback to Mort, where the elephant escapes Callie's coronation and runs off for a slash. He ends up in the stables in Shelly Baby. Oh, lovely. What did you say? As a matter of fact, I meant that one. A little wave to the readers who had been paying attention, Terry. If you hadn't told me that, I wouldn't have noticed. So thank you. I was not paying attention, which bones well for our recap podcast on the Discworld books. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I missed that whole thing about the dummy can dive or sort of. Yes, which I did look up, but I don't think the actual word, I mean, dunny is from round world things, but I don't think

dunnakin divers had a particularly similar concept in the round world. It's just a fun little very into the history of Victorian plumbing. And then I realized that I needed to not spend an hour looking at the history of Victorian plumbing. I was like, we were talking about how I don't really enjoy board games and tabletop gaming or that much the other day, but I was saying I do like weird Victorian parlor games. I then ended up looking at weird Victorian parlor games for a while. Oh, tell me about one. There were some really weird ones. There were things like you'd have, you'd all have to give a trinket to one person. And then the one person had to guess which trinket was whose and make them do weird forfeits to get them back. And there were things

where you'd have to be unconscious and ladies would have to dance around you. The Victorians were fucking weird. They were. We've touched on that a few times. I am well up for a Victorian parlor game evening one day. When we can have social lives again, I really want to throw like a Victorian parlor game party and I'll make weird old Victorian dishes and we'll all have fans and say last. Yeah, why not? What were we talking about? Sorry, that was my fault. Pyramids. Do you want to tell us what happened previously in pyramids? Certainly. Previously in pyramids. In the valley of the gel. Everything is as it has been for millennia. Except for the fact that the air to the throne is dangling over an alleyway and far away Ancomorpork. Prince Tepik of the Old Kingdom,

Kingdom of the Sun, spent his early years benefiting from benevolent neglect before his seagull slash father packed him off to boarding school. Tepik will eventually inherit a kingdom rich in wonders of the world, if not an actual wealth, but for now is sent to the Assassin's Guild where he masters the arts of Inhumation and makes some friends along the way. He spends seven years learning how to slay and style then nearly snuts it on the last stretch. As he clings by his royal fingertips, his life flashes before his eyes in a pleasing narrative flow. Happily our hero escapes death by splatter and accidentally passes his final murder exam. But celebrations are cut short by the squawking arrival of his seagull slash destiny and after a brief dalliance with

deification, Tepik sets sail to become king and in a roundabout fashion to make the sunrise. So in this section of pyramids two weeks after the events of book one we open on Tepik dressing ceremonially marriage and incest and gender confusion oh my although it's not really that confusing the aunt declared herself a man and it was so. That happened in real life by the way. Oh did it? Yeah yeah one of the fairies declared herself king and it was so. Ah was that um Don't ask me I forgot. Okay sorry. Dill and Gern stitch and stuff the dead king as he looks on with some fascination. Tepik visits his father's mummy. The dead king flails against his future burial plans but Dios loses something in translation. At a visit to the pyramid builders

Tepik floats the idea of a sea burial which Dios quickly sinks with a heavy stare. A confusing competition creates plans for a decadent memorial. Dios takes a mysterious journey across the river. Te Klosp we're going to have fun with pronunciation today. Discusses pyramid payment with his sons 2a and 2b. Tepik has a very high class of obscure dream. Dill, Gern and the chief sculptor critique the dead's face dead king's face. Nine weeks later on a visit to the pyramid in progress Tepik attempts to put the builders a tease which leads to a loss of limb for one. The great pyramid starts absorbing time and building itself and Te Klosp takes advantage by hiring working doppelgangs. Tepik puts some diplomats at ease before a little light judging. He attempts a bit of fairness

Solomon style and Dios misinterprets. Tepik judges the intriguing Petracee or Tracy. We haven't agreed on how we're saying this yet. Tracy and not saying Petracee. It's Petracee in the audiobook but I'm going with Tracy. Yeah cool. Tepik judges the intriguing Tracy who refuses an obligatory voluntary death and Dios announces she should be thrown to the crocodiles. Tracy assumes Tepik is a demon as he stages a daring late night rescue. Tepik manages to remain stony-faced at Dios's wrath over the missing prisoner. They visit the model maker and King Tepik Imon's mummy and Petracee switch hiding places. They visit the under construction pyramid, disorting the world around it like a lead ball on a rubber sheet. One of the time looped to

Klosp 2a's invents a new kind of maths to pay the looped workers. Tepik continues rescuing Tracy in the great pyramid begins to lose its shit. Tepik and Tracy attempt to escape on a camel and get into a confrontation with the palace guards. Dios refuses to recognise the king. Their face off is rudely interrupted by all of the pyramids losing their shit. Tepik and Tracy escape the border on the back of a mathematical genius and the kingdom of gel disappears. In gel itself, Dylan Guern sees the pyramid stop flaring and the gods begin to manifest. Oh no. So yes. Tracy is pronounced Petracee in the audiobook but I am just going to say Tracy because I'm pretty sure that's what was intended. Yeah, shortly. And also I'm not going to try and say Petracee

because I will fuck it up many times. Yeah. Cool. Quick checking on helicopter and loincloth. What? No official mentions of either but I feel loincloth's heavily implied. I did actually introduce an elephant corner didn't I? I could have shoved that elephant in there but never mind. The irrelevant elephant. The irrelevant elephant. Yes. Let's pretend that that happened. I'm not sure which of our quotes come first because we have such different page numbers. Yeah. Do you want to do yours? Yeah. I've done another short one again to make up for next week where I am fully aware my quote is going to be an entire page long. All along the river valley of the gel the pyramids were flaring silently into the night discharging the accumulated power of the day. Great soundless

flames erupted from their capstones and danced upwards, jacket as lightning, cold as ice, with hundreds of miles the desert glittered with the constellations of the dead, the aurora of antiquity. But along the valley of the gel the lights ran together in one solid ribbon of fire. Pretty cool. Yeah that was literally just I chose that one because I haven't had a done a cool descriptive one for a while and I think that's a really really beautiful bit of descriptive prose. Yeah absolutely. It's evocative. Oh good word. An actual short one. What are you telling me now? He demanded in a camel whisper footnote. Horse whispers are not suitable for a desert environment. That just makes me laugh. I like it. It's a bad pun and I love it very much.

That was a terrible pun and I approve. Cool. So characters that we hang out with this this section. We've got to clasp or put a clasp. The pyramid builder and his sons 2a and 2b. The bullet point method of family tree creation. One of which is a paracosmic architect and the other is a accountant. There's one in every family. Paracosmic architect. Yeah. No offence Francine but I don't see you as the paracosmic architect of your family. What with you having very little interest in designing aqueducts? Yeah no I can't take offence to that. I'm not a really very good accountant either though so perhaps I just shouldn't become a pyramid architect at all. They do give him a fun sort of used car salesman spiel where he starts just

upselling thing after thing after thing and because of this weird competition that going for all of it. His and hers labyrinths. One of my favourite bits of it. Steels, avenues, ceremonial sphinxes. Very exclusive. Obeys of the eternal column. Last year were perpetuality. Also our special offer this eon is various measurements of paracosmic significance built into the very fabric at no extra cost. Which is a reference to some weird conspiracy theories around the actual pyramids. Oh is that so? Yeah the great pyramid of Giza apparently there is some something to do with dimensions of it. There are then a bunch of perfect equations built into those dimensions. I did kind of start looking this up but I wasn't sure what I was looking at was factual and what

was just batchic conspiracy theories. It was something to do with sums you could do with the lengths of the size and then the areas of the triangles. And I was going to put a whole section about it in the show but honestly I didn't understand it because it involved very complex mathematics of the kind. But Teclas's sons had to invent to pay the workers. Yeah what is para? What's the prefix para? I should know this. Paramount parachute. Or it can be beyond our like paradox but beyond. Paracosmic significance. We do love a bit of paracosmic significance. It's what I look for in a man. Yeah he's got a nice car but is he paracosmically significant? I think not. That don't impress me much. So yeah got the moves that have you got the

paracosmic significance. Now don't get me wrong yeah I think you're all right. That don't keep me. That won't keep my pyramid flaring in the middle of the night. There's a reason we're not weird Alianca being. Oh I fucking that really long form article about weird Al did I send you that? Or did you send me that? Yes you did it was a really good article. His writing process is just as involved and weird as I hoped it would be. I'm surprising that the people with the Terry Pratchett podcast are also weird Al fans. Nerd. Deos. He was a maximum high priest to a national religion that had fermented and

accreted and bubbled for more than 7000 years and never threw a god away in case it turned out to be useful. You knew that a great many mutually contradictory things were all true because if they were not then the ritual and belief were as nothing and if they were nothing the world didn't exist. I thought that was a really fascinating look into the whole thought process of the high priest thing but it is later on where he's compared to a Grand Vizier. It's a fact as immutable as the third law of sod that there is no such thing as a good Grand Vizier. A predilection to cackle and plot is apparently part of the jogs specification and high priests tend to get put in the same category. They have to face the implied assumption

that no longer do they get the funny hat that they're issuing strange orders, easy princesses, tighter rocks for intonerant sea monsters and throwing little babies in the sea. And I thought it was quite interesting to look at Deos as an antagonist of the book because he very much is an antagonist in this section. He's willfully misinterpreting Tappic and then eventually threatening to kill him basically at the end. He is but he's, it's done not in the way you'd expect. And what he is doing is going yes he's a Grand Vizier slash high priest and yes that means potentially flaying thousands of people to try and make sure you start to the religion but he's not necessarily evil like what he's doing he genuinely

feels is the best thing for the country. That's it and when you think of like a long established state religion kind of thing what you think of is like corruption and exploitation of the power and while you could argue exploitation of the power is a thing here it's for the sake of continuing the power not for any other benefit like I really loved the bit where Tappic just make the offhand comment oh you'll eat beef tonight I suppose when Deos rules that that cow has to be sacrificed yeah and it says it was like a blow Tappic might as well have picked up the throne and hit the priest with it. Deos took a step backwards aghast his eyes two brief pools of pain even though he's very unrelatable and above everything and weird but the idea that he would

be doing any of this for anything other than the reasons he says is just horrible to him abhorrent like yeah I really like that moment I think that that did a lot of character development in two lines yeah and it's interesting because like the whole theme of the book is that this country is the way it is because it's sort of stuck in time and it's and it's not changing and Deos is the engineer of making sure it doesn't change and that they keep all of the belief systems in the old ways yeah and it's a nice theme of how the country needs to catch up and move with the times and not and what it's doing at the moment is stagnating and that's a bad thing and Deos is kind of the big fulcrum of that and at the same time you can see obviously like later we'll find out exactly why

but at this point you can kind of see why because they're in such a precarious position where they are it's almost like yeah but you don't want to take that last you don't want to accidentally take the wrong bit out of the gender tower yeah so it'd be fun to then look back at Deos when we get on to the next section sorry rum traffic Tracey Tracey Tracey what's the callback to Mort? The reason she is being judged by Tepik is because she's refusing to take the poison and die in the king's tomb so she can be with him in the afterlife in Mort there's a bit where they go to a pyramid and the life they have to take is of a girl who is poisoned herself so that she can be with the king in the afterlife oh yeah yeah yeah sortian was it yeah because you've got Isabel trying to

convince her that she doesn't have to and she can do her own thing so I quite like I think the idea is obviously carried on over to this bit yeah so purple please step me up Joanna I'm gonna get out your PowerPoint yeah her costume is described as barely adequate for lying around peeling grapes in so we've talked about who she is and why she's there she was one of the king's handmaidens and she's refusing to take the poison so that she can serve him in the underworld so Deos says she's got to be thrown to crocodiles and Tepik decides to rescue her so there's a little bit of description of her and this is while they're escaping it was strange she didn't talk she chatted she didn't seem to be able to hold a simple thought in her head for more than about

10 seconds her brain appeared to be wired directly to her mouth so that as soon as the thought entered her head she spoke it out loud compared to the ladies he had met at Suarez and Ankh who had entertaining young assassins and fed them expensive delicacies and talked to them of high and delicate matters while their eyes sparkled like carburundum drills and their lips began to glisten compared to them she was as empty as well an empty thing nevertheless he desperately wanted to find her the sheer undemandingness of her was like a drug the memory of her bosom was quite beside the point and I had this in the talking points bit but it kind of fits in here as well which is the description of Tepik's handmaidens the clothing

these two wore between them would have covered a small saucer and the net effect was to turn them into attractive immobile pieces of furniture as sexless as pillars so there's this interesting look at women and the fact that the less obvious scantily clad women is what Tepik is attracted to and of course he's not looking for Tracy because he remembers her colossal tits or whatever I think that was the exact wording yes the memory of her bosom playing upon his mind and I'm going to preface this by saying I am going to then correct some of this rant in the next book or not the next book but like the next section yeah yeah yeah because some interesting stuff happens with Tracy but it's the thing I brought up in color of magic and light fantastic

is it parody if you're still just doing the thing and you have this scantily clad girl who kind of chatters and seems a bit dumb and can almost play the dulcimer which Kubla can't reference to me and I think I'm going to agree with 95 percent of the powerpoint but that particular bit I feel like it's parodying not that character because she's meant to be this sensual handmade any type and she instead she's like oh I've got some yoga we can do number 59 it's quite sweet I don't think she's a badly written character but I think there's only so much parody when you've got her dressed the way she is and behaving the way she is and bringing it up every paragraph bringing up her bosom every and then combined with the

sexless sex objects there isn't apart from Tepik's mother there hasn't been a woman discussed and his aunt who declared herself a king there hasn't been a woman discussed in this book how am I trying to put this every woman that's been discussed in this book it's her attractiveness has been part of it it's figure-led yeah you know when you get the descriptions of the handmaidens it's they're very scantily clad but to Tepik this makes them unsexy when you get the description of Tracy it it does this and he sort of thinks of her bosom but it's not as sexy as the other woman he thought of when you had Lady Tamalia in the last section it was that she was sexy in a constructed way and it's yeah it's really hard as a while he is a teenage boy so I kind of get

that um I do it doesn't feel like it's written as a frantic teenage boy kind of way no it feels like the women are in this book to be sexualized or sex objects in some way it feels a little bit like the reply guy you get on twitter when a woman posts a picture themselves and either he'll be like oh I really like how you're so beautiful without revealing yourself or like you know I think you'd be much sexier if you just wore a normal dress and no makeup yeah it's like cool I didn't ask for that okay cool yeah I don't need that it's fine I think I look great in this picture but yeah so on the whole Tracy and the other woman in the book thing it's as a female-ish reader I mean he's the term very loosely where I am concerned when you're reading something like this and every woman is kind

of discussed through that lens apart from like I said it's the aunt who declares herself king and his mother who even then is also serviced as the great cat of the sky there's a bit of this kind of boys club feeling behind it and almost well this isn't for you I remember feeling uncomfortable the first time I read it when I would have been a teenager and that's not just criticism of Terry Pratt as a whole because obviously he you know we just have weird sisters and he writes and we had equal rights and he does write women very well but it doesn't mean reading something like this it doesn't feel a bit like well yeah but it's you're you're not very welcome here and it's very male gazey on the women as well like I'm saying this is someone who's attracted to women it's still

it doesn't feel like it's for me yeah yeah I agree yeah I didn't I don't like her I like Tracy I like the character a lot I like the character but I remember I remember feeling very uncomfortable reading these bits when I was a teenager and now honestly my bar is just so lowered by male writers that I don't feel uncomfortable reading this anymore but I I very much get what you're saying yeah and it's disappointing because I know he can do so much better and it but there is this feeling of like this is a boys club and this isn't really for you go away get out of our treehouse we want to look at the magazine we found behind the bushes yeah yeah but I've got more to say on that when we get on to the next section where he then does something interesting with this

character point which does take it further into parody but yeah I don't think he does enough parody to justify the oh man from now Montessi so who else do we meet we meet Gringer the model maker who I just thought was very sweet he's absolutely found his niche in the world he is and you know the funny thing like he's painted as the complete model making nerd stereotype the one guy I know who makes these uber uber realistic models is the guy we know called Nathan who's also like the blacksmith and that who is like the furthest from that stereotype in the world he makes these incredibly realistic like cockpits and oh god yeah he made like this incredible world ball team modern aeroplane and there was like a printed picture of a pilot's wife and it was like

a genuine photo and it was like yeah obviously our listeners can't see but it was it was tiny it was like half an inch yeah um anyway he's like pretty handsome and has a beautiful partner and successful business social life yeah and there's also a blacksmith which is very cool happens to spend many hours building tiny tiny models I've known lots of people who are very into like building tiny models and things like I've got lots of friends who play warcraft and like obviously we know people who play blood bowl you bastard sorry is our next character aren't we you are a card from I fooled you you are a card anyway the camel the greatest mathematician yes the greatest mathematician on the disc and also a camel I like the theory that camels are actually very good at

maths but have worked out that they don't want to be taken advantage of so they just are dickheads that's what I choose to believe I choose to believe it as well mostly because I agree that dolphins are sinister motherfuckers yeah they are never trust anything that smiles that much totally agree apart from quokkas you've seen this oh my god they are the cutest little things I love them yeah okay they're too cute to to mind about I would like an army of them because I feel like I could make them a bit savage like could you imagine getting savage we can have them in our afterlife worship have an afterlife worship with an army of quokkas and a skateboard nobody lets me skateboard or have a warship full of quokkas man the establishment is getting

down man anyway yeah you've asked an excellent camel far more intelligent than a dolphin yep uh the great goddess goddess net oh yeah so last week when we were talking about um the great cow of the sky which is also tepik's mother and you mentioned uh other theories from old mythology about what the sky is sky women um when the gods actually manifest one of them is the great goddess net the body of a woman arched over the heavens faintly blue faintly shadowy in the light of the watery stars she was enormous her statistics interstellar the shadow between her galactic breast was a dark nebula the curve of her stomach a vast water-blowing gas blah blah blah blah so that was cool i'll be a lot of sky distortion that would be it'd be very hard to get even

oculus out for the lads for the lads anyway onto locations yeah so obviously we'd spend this pretty much this whole section in jelly baby uh and we get more of a description about the nature of the pyramids and why they're doing what they're doing and they flare and how they're distorting time because obviously the great pyramid is proper distorting time before it's even finished because it's so big that size isn't everything don't worry he mentions that seeing something that big even though like it's smaller than the mountain behind it because it's man-made is really unnerving and i totally get that like seeing huge statues or huge buildings especially when not surrounded by other huge things yeah is always a completely different

feeling than seeing a massive cliff so a jarring thing that i quite like it's why i really like like the industrial sci-fi-ish look of wind turbines and the huge cranes at the london darklands and stuff like that i get that weird jarring feeling but i kind of like it so yeah the nature of the pyramids the idea is that they're dams in the stream of time and they're built so that there's preserved time in the middle so a king a dying king lives forever and the time that should have passed is stored and flared off every 24 hours but this method has kind of been forgotten over the years so now they think it's more to do with the ritual than the building of the pyramid itself but that confuses me slightly because like the the point of the

arses that he remembers everything from the beginning yeah but i think that's why he's shocked that tepid demands such a big pyramid but he can't see a way around it if that makes sense that yeah that's true like he doesn't want yes no you can see him like but also no yes of course also as much as deos has been the high priest for a very long time and followed the ritual and everything i don't think he ever had would have had much to do with actual pyramid building so deos is so focused on maintaining a state of status with ritual so he's he doesn't think it's about the building of the pyramids he thinks it is the effect is being achieved yeah no that's true yeah yeah the necropolis was yeah the other location

within jelly baby yeah this is the mysterious place that deos likes to take a boat to in the middle of the night so the necropolis is where all pyramids are effectively in daylight the necropolis was merely gloomy as though the whole universe had shut down for early closing he'd even explored it wondering through streets and alleys that contrived to be still and dusty no matter what the weather was on the other the living side of the water so it's this sort of weird creepy whole dead city it's kind of like the feeling that we got after lockdown felt like christmas day like you know if you walk through town on christmas day and there's no people around and it's really odd yeah yeah it's felt like that for all of lockdown

before the ark which is the the shopping center in town opened i think they were just putting the finishing touches on it callum and i went for a walk in the middle of the night around there and it was very cool and creepy that's what i'm imagining necropolis except obviously far grander and with less top shop i do really love walking through towns late at night in the areas where there aren't going to be people around like yeah when i used to go on a lot of like three four a.m walks and my mum had passed away and i was like not sleeping i'd go walk through the town and like three four in the morning when the pubs have let out people have gone home and the kebab shops have shut but the the sun hasn't come up yet it's very eerie in a really interesting

way cool anyway so yeah so i thought the necropolis was cool i thought i'd bring it up and then we don't go to them but we have mentions of sort and feb which i've misspelled a feb yes with this diplomatic delegation so sort we've already we already talked about in mort so that's where there were that had the ancient that was the ancient egyptian place in mort and there's a pyramid and stuff and it is a desert culture like that this place but i feel like in mort it was kind of a proto jelly baby if that makes sense and now it's more its own thing yeah i really like the description of the sortians who've tried to dress in some kind of jelly culture but they've just thrown on a bunch of things that's translated as um a visit to the court of st james wearing a

bowler hat a claymore a civil war breastplate sacks and trousers and a jackabye and haircut yeah a phoebe is just is more of the ancient greasy type place everyone's white hair and beards and wearing togas which are a bit like loincloths a bit yeah why not it's bits of fabric wrapped around the body it is that and it does cover the loins among other things yes are we sure we haven't missed an actual loincloth this week no i'm not sure i'm doubting myself now it's just like we're in the desert i didn't see one i feel like loincloths heavily implied for the whole section as i said mandibles and loincloth has always heavily implied um yeah so we'll talk about a phoebe and sort a lot more next week but i thought i'd mention them here as they are first

brought up which would be fun when we talk about a phoebe i can remember what i know about ancient greek philosophy which is mostly someone running into an argument with a plucked chicken yelling behold a man so little bits we liked um deos avoids using the past tense at all times he does do that but i thought it was funny i think it is funny that deos avoid speaking in the past tense deos would bend any sentence to breaking point if it meant avoiding a past tense and this is in context this is when he's discussing the frescoes of previous rulers of gel one of my favorite sense he is the king when the gel empire extends from the circle c to the remotion when almost half the continent pays tribute to us but it's almost like for deos all of time is

happening concurrently yeah which um mind blown it's pretty cool uh taking an interest i take it by this you mean tephic being prince charles yeah um which is such a such a long running joke i mean bearing in mind this is written in the late 80s and that is still a running joke now in 2020 so 30 years later that when prince charles is introduced to people he takes it in and yes yes what do you do i do you enjoy that yes but i think the queen does it as well although in a less aggressive manner oh yes and how long could you be in a pyramid builder three thousand years i say that's an excellent queen impression thank you i think it's a the modern royals thing isn't it that one must be seen to take an interest yes yes that's very i

don't know if uh international listeners have similar state officials who do the same kind of things but it's very much uh oh yes let's put the commoners at ease by being absolutely weird and unnatural yes what do you do and then as they're explaining nervously normally you have to have your hands behind your back and you sort of rock back and forward on the heels is very much a nod and look interested i wonder what goes through their heads during that time that would be an amazing in a monologue to have i always imagine it's the benny hill theme music it always should be oxter english oh yeah so when they're describing king uh techie what's tepica imon tepica imon's uh casket crafted it was with forafi smaragd smaragdin skelskaren delfinet

inlaid it was with pink jade and showed i was like all right what's that most of it and i found a blog post from 2005 where he also reckons pratchit has a copy of a book called oxters english dictionary uh subtitle uncommon words used by uncommonly good writers uh and i've ordered a copy of that oh cool is it yeah published in 85 that book and sounds exactly like the kind of thing terry pratchit would have a that's fair copy off and apparently all those words pop up in the showed as a type of like random black stone i think and smaragdin is means emerald colors and i didn't get as far as the rest before i found that book i wanted to order so yeah the real royalty thing i wrote down that that kind of ties in with putting its ease i suppose

but it's to clasp moaning about the fact that they can't really afford the pyramids that they've ordered um he's saying oh they're half gods too you don't expect real royalty to pay its way that's one of the signs of real royalty not having any money and yes it reminded me a bit of something that will come up in a future book where a character is allowed to be scruffy because she is part of the upper classes and so wealthy that the middle classes would take great pains over their appearance but she was truly upper class so she'd wandered around in dragon dung stains jobbers and the like yeah yeah absolutely and yeah that's very uh reflected in the english class system where um upper class people will quite happily have a mud covered 30 year old land

driver with dog hair all on the inside whereas middle class people who aspire to be more will have a spotless brand new car with like seat covers on and things yeah it was a very weird british class system it's like with the eccentricity if you're truly upper class you can get away with being batched it but if you're middle class you've got to fall in manners to the letter yeah exactly middle class and aspiring um yeah literal pyramid scheme oh yeah so when they're doing the whole paying people in stupid disappearing money money the phrase he uses is making your money work for you which is something that was and is used when selling pyramid schemes to people i figured that was a a little pyramid scheme reference

because pyramid yes pyramid schemes were late 80s early 90s they were a very big thing that people think of as having disappeared except now they're fucking mlm facebook groups yeah guys please don't join mlms never work for somebody who asks you to pay them to work for them do you want to start us off with some incest not a sentence on your essay today but here we are in these uncertain times hmm in these unprecedented times incest incest in ancient egyptian royal families was a thing um it's a it was a thing in lots of royal families uh there's something to do with keeping bloodline pure and keeping properties and powers and all of these things within the family without

any pesky other families becoming involved and watering things down and in ancient egypt in particular there was a lot more brother sister was kind of marriages lovely whatever's the more well known in our regions ones like the hapsbergs here are very notoriously were sorry they died out were very notoriously inbred um but even they weren't straight up you know brother sister kind of thing the but yeah obviously it's so long ago it's hard to tell quite what an effect that had on ancient egypt but at least uh to karmine who's like unnecessarily famous because of his preserved tomb yeah but like wasn't a very important pharaoh also was beyond doubt we can know from dna stuff the child born from a first degree brother sister relationship um and he was probably

disabled and possibly because of the incest stuff and he married his half sister oh and i call him yeah but in the ptolemic years uh the incest thing was even used as a kind as kind of proof or propaganda that the royal lineage was separate and above common laws and oh right um yeah yeah like we are not like you did you know it's got some historical origin there yeah cool sorry about uh sunrise myths because oh yeah that's much nicer this is this bit doesn't involve incest so the sunrise myths in this bit uh the great orange sun was eaten every morning evening by the sky goddess who saved one pit for a fresh sun the following morning and deals knew it was so sun is the eye of ye toiling across the sky each day in his endless search for his toenails

and deals knew this was so the sun's a round hole in the spinning blue soap bubble of the goddess nesh opening into the fiery world beyond and the stars are holes the rain comes through and that's also so and my favorite folk myth said the sun was a ball of fire which circled the world every day and the world itself was carried through the everlasting void on the back of an enormous turtle hey part of the reason i found that funny is something more is when we get to small gods and the discussion of how the earth actually works but i thought i'd look up some actual bits of mythology about sunrises so helios a greek solar deity who was identified with apollo was a charioteer who drove his fiery vehicle through heaven by day and he floated

back across the ocean in a golden bowl uh to mount cool and that was that's an ancient greek sunrise myth uh the navajo people portrayed their sun god as a worker named jehonne i am not pronouncing that right i'm sorry i should have lit that up uh sunbearer so every day he hauls the sun across the sky on his back and he hangs it from a peg in the wall and rests at night which is nice um kelts uh viewed the sun journey as a cycle of death and rebirth on a yearly cycle so belton is held in spring which uh honors their sun god but then the egyptian one i looked at which was interesting uh the sun god ra travels across the sky in his sunboat and at night he passes through the underworld but his journey was a daily rebirth so dawn he was a newborn sun god

in the morning he was a child at noon he was maturing by sunset he was an old man ready for death um and so his rebirth was every morning was a celebration over the forces of death but i thought that was interesting because in the next section we get the riddle of the sphinx and this riddle of what walks on one on four legs in the morning and then they rip it apart with logic but the riddle of the sphinx comes from the idea that ra was actually a child in the morning and went through the whole cycle of life in one day right and that's why uh that's why that riddle gets associated or at least they are linked linked to each other yeah so that was cool i thought that was really interesting yeah there are lots of cool funness i must say mythology is awesome and it

makes sense that every culture has some kind of myth over what the sun is because mythology is basically applying things to the world to understand how it works pyramid construction oh yeah no just the fact that we still don't know how they were built is pretty cool there's lots of different theories about it but nothing's been proven either way yeah and modern architects with computer aided design software have spent their careers trying to work this out and we still don't know and it's mad i understand why all the conspiracy theories came up um like obviously there are huge arguments about every aspect of it um like the first third at least was almost certainly built we used to just ramps arguments like what kind of ranks was it a long straight one it's exact ramp spiral ramps then

you have to get what supplemental tools they must have used to get the rest of it on top um internal ramps is quite a promising theory apparently yeah one of the big theories in pyramid construction now is that they were built somewhat from the inside isn't it yeah the other thing i found interesting was all three of geysers famed pyramids were built during one very manic period of construction which was uh 2550 to 2490 BC oh so it was like a really short space of time in the grand scheme of Egypt in the grand scheme of a huge huge time period and they did also have caps were apparently put on the top with solemn ceremony in the same way that they're describing here so that was a thing too oh cool oh i probably not for the same reason yes i don't

think real life pyramids flare off spare time but i've never been to geysers so i wouldn't know i already talked about the sexless sex objects during my purple pasty run earlier so i will go on to jinkies it's old man capitalism jinkies oh no the reason i wrote that like that is because in my notes i literally went surprise the villain is capitalism again what i know so this is just a little footnote but i thought it was a fun it was an interesting point as well as a fun point younger assassins who are usually very poor have very clear ideas about the morality of wealth until they become older assassins who are usually very rich where they begin to take the view that injustice has its good points yes that being the the old truism that uh the

older you get the more conservative you get because you generally have that property that you don't want to be heavily touched on anyway yeah which is something i've even noticed with myself you know when i was uh 18 living at my parents house for the first time barely employed and choosing between food rent and alcohol and largely choosing alcohol because my landlord was a lush and didn't mind it didn't really matter whether the rent money went to him first before it got spent on beer or if i cut out the middle man i was a good bloke anyway finish yourself i was a very not to be up myself i was quite a generous person i would donate quite a lot to charity and i would do things financially for other people and i would always get around in

and then as i've become wealthier as i've aged and not obviously i'm not to have no great wealth but you know i'm comfortably off now and have a decent career and a full and earn a nice wage i find myself thinking twice before i'm quite so generous with my money and i and i know that's not a good thing and it's very much like my first thought is well why should i and then i will aggressively look at that thought and then usually end up being generous with my money anyway but i have more of a hesitation than i used to i just think it's interesting especially within a capitalist society how being more comfortable financially could potentially affect moral decisions yeah not that someone is automatically evil if they have money but you can

if you see yourself and i there was something i read about uh the first thought you have is what your program to think and the second thought you have is you're actually interrogating what you think and we'll obviously we'll talk about first and second and third thoughts a lot more in later books oh yes um was it Churchill's quote that was something like uh show me a man who wasn't left-wing as a young man and i'll show you a man without a heart show me a man who wasn't conservative and old man i'll show you a man without a brain uh something like that massively got that quite wrong france do you have an obscure reference for me i do when they're talking about the the pyramid flares dying down at the end of the night i talk about a high pitched sound that just

starts to become audible and it kind of goes key key and then collapses and goes ops at the end uh kiosks is the other word for the great pyramid of geese oh cool kiosks was the greek name for kufu who built the great pyramid of geese kufu kufu yeah but who we know very little about considering he was clearly reasonably important he was uh the second pharaoh of the fourth dynasty in the 26th century bc but like we don't know much more interesting than he was there and had a big old pyramid um i seen because his pyramid is quite so ostentatious it got looted fairly early on in the century's long looting process awesome cool so that is everything on part two slash book two of pyramids so next week we're going to talk about it's literally everything there is nothing else to

say apart from all the things they don't try and all the things we miss yeah apart from like literally all the things cool whatever that's a good healthy amount of discussion though so next week we're obviously going to do the rest of the book say book three the book of the new sun and book four the book of 101 things what you can do which is my favorite logician it does bring me much joy oh i wonder if we can get hold of a copy of that must be able to i'm sure i might have one lying around see if you can find one i'm hoping my um oxters dictionary turns up before next week anyway that's nothing to do with anything cool so yeah next week we'll do book three and four of the book you know what i mean the volume i do it yeah the thing yeah yeah books three and four of this

book yes the smaller books within the books russian nesting books see that's fit here okay it's russian for hello yeah let's tea with lemon please oh nice these are the only sentences i know i'm russian anyway until next week dear listener uh you can find us on instagram at the true show mickey frat on twitter at makey frat pod you can follow us on facebook at the true show mickey frat you can email us the true show mickey frat pod at gmail.com send us your thoughts queries questions albatrosses castles and snacks please remember to uh rate and review us wherever you

get your podcast because it helps other people find us and we do like it when other people can find us oh we haven't thanked our best listener for the picture oh yes and thank you victoria for the amazing uh willy mammoth cartoon which dear listeners you can find on our twitter and instagram and facebook and all the rest of it they were in sun hats hammered in sun hats they brought like the things we said last week i was in a very bad mood that day and that massively cheered me up so thank you very much victoria i was very pleased um yeah and until next time dear listener don't let us detain you oh i should have got obergean can i be asked to go out again today absolutely cannot

do you let me to come and fling an obergean over your doorstep oh please darling fling me an obergean fling me an obergean i'll be back for breakfast