Re: "two be"

On Tue, 1 Jan 2002, J Y S Czhang wrote:

> In a message dated 01.01.2002 01:45:19 AM, exponent@TECHNOLOGIST.COM writes:
>
> >No! Century of the Fruitbat! :)
> >
>     ::startled look O_o? :: Whaaat ... it's MY Century???
Nah, pretty sure it's not. The Discworld is fairly much in line with
us---PDAs, for example, appeared there at much the same time as they
became popular here. (Of course, Ankh Morpork, their London, is ruled by
the Patrician (`One man, one vote. I'm the man and I've got the vote.')
and newspapers and the press are rather recent developments there... (but
they do have a light-based transcontinental communications system).
Anyway, in the edition of _The Discworld Companion_ published in 1997,
we're told that the `...time we are normally concerned with is the final
years of the Century of the Fruitbat, which follows the Century of the
Three Lice'. So one might assume that the century has changed. It is
important to note, however, that the `spin year' is about 800 days long
(but the effective calendar is only 400 because there are two of each
season a year, and each festival is esentially duplicated---Hogswatchnight
by Crueltide (a winter soltice celebration and thus equivalent to our
Christmas), so to non-official people, the year might as well be 400 days
long). Therefore, regardless of which method you use, the year is longer,
so it might still be the Century of the Fruitbat. Furthermore, we don't
know whether Terry Pratchett is writing about _now_ or some other time.
(Also, after a description of the defacto numerical years, we find that
the Century of the Fruitbat is the twentieth century.) At any rate, the
calendar of a flat world that rides on the back of elephants probably
isn't all that important to a globe that obeys the normal laws of physics.

Tristan

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