Terry Pratchet, Vacuum Cleaners, and Attic Greek

Tetsuko, Nathaniel, Crystal, and I decided to head down to Denver to a booksigning of Terry Pratchet's in the Tattered Cover. For any of you unfamiliar with the Tattered Cover, it's an independent bookstore in downtown Denver, though you wouldn't know it from the inside, it's pretty affluent. Anyway, this was going to be a long and interesting trip inside a large blue van that we call the Leviathan. This is the sort of car that you can frighten other drivers with. It looks like you need a Class-C liscence, or maybe you do, sait pas.

I'm not very familiar with Terry Pratchet's work, only his fans. Many of my old paleo-comrades were heavy fans of his, though I adamantly refused to read his books out of fear of being entertained. Still, it would be nice to see the man responsible for so many esoteric conversations at the paleopad. I could never contribute to such conversations, only listen and study how they expressed themselves. I found it easy to do this, one of my reasons for switching to Archaeology and subsequently to the study of languages such as Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, and Latin. These occupy the bulk of my time now, though I can't find a class on any of them at U of W.

We hit Denver and walked down 16th street mall. It was wonderful, I remember almost skipping down the steps as musicians were all around us playing for a few bucks. Jazz blended to bluegrass which turned into a lonely man with an acoustic guitar. Walking down the street reminded me of last year's SVP meeting (Society of Vertebrate Paleontology), which followed my ever-so-brief paleo career. I could remember the exhultation of digging Allosaurs, discussing avian phylogeny over rum, and the incessant meeting of paleontologists that I had long read of. Speaking of paleontologists, Tom Holtz (Tyrannosaurus expert), can do a mean Time-Warp.

Walking past the hotel I had stayed at reminded me of my obligations to write up the findings of the site and publish it in some small unknown journal, but I pushed such thoughts from my mind and continued walking down the mall. We arrived at the Tattered Cover, and Terry Pratchet gave a wonderful speech that held a lot of meaning to those who have read his works on Discworld (which floats on the back of a large turtle). Myself not being one of them, I dug my nose in a Greek textbook to familiarize myself with infinitive constructions.

I got it in my head to get Mr. Pratchet to sign my Greek textbook, to test his eccentricity. I got up, and waited in line. People clutched copies of his new book Thud, I felt a bit left out. But finally, my time came, and I handed my Greek text to him. He looked at me very, very oddly. Then he he very formally waved me to his side, and asked me to translate a passage in Greek for him. He wanted to know how to say "No usefull parts inside" in Greek, in the context of a vacuum cleaner. So, I grinned, wipped out my handy-dandy Greek dictionary... only to find that there was no English-Greek translations. This was going to be difficult.

I kneeled by Mr. Pratchett's side for the better part of half an hour following a trail of suffixes. It was easy to get the first part, ouk, as it implies no (thought it may be the wrong no). Useful was simple enough as well, krhsimos. Inside was more difficult, and I'm worried that I wrote down the wrong word despite it being a cognate, esoteriko. Now the tough part... part. I looked and looked and could not find it! Eventually I turned randomly to another page in sheer frustration and... there it was. I handed Mr. Pratchett the paper, and skipped my way back down 16th street mall, feeling somewhat redeemed for leaving paleontology, for surely I would not have been useful to him otherwise.

Ouk meros krhismoo esoterikos.