Hogfather

Tis the season to be jolly and cower, brief mortals!

As APR was watching Miracle on 34th Street, APR realized that the greatest Christmas movie wasn’t about Christmas but about Hogswatch Night. So for all of those people who want to celebrate Christmas without all the stuff about JC I give you the Hogfather.



Here are some quotes… especially the one that pretty much sums up all of APR’s belief.

"You're saying humans need ... fantasies to make life bearable."
"NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE."
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers?"
"YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES."
"So we can believe the big ones?"
"YES. JUSTICE. DUTY. MERCY. THAT SORT OF THING."
"They're not the same at all!"
"REALLY? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET YOU ACT, LIKE THERE WAS SOME SORT OF RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED."
- Susan and Death

Ignorant: A state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the 70 almost identical looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to navigate across a 1000 miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, and other such trivial matters.
Credulous: Having views about the world, the universe, and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.

It’s amazing how good governments are, given their track record in almost every other field, at hushing up things like alien encounters. One reason may be that the aliens themselves are too embarrassed to talk about it.
Representatives of several hundred space-going races have taken to hanging out, unsuspected by one another, in rural corners of the planet and, as a result of this, keep on abducting other would-be abductees.
The planet Earth is now banned to all alien races until they can compare notes and find out how many, if any, real humans they gave actually got. It is gloomily suspected that there is only one who is big, hairy, and has very large feet.
The truth is out there, but lies are in your head.

"Here's a tip, though. Just 'Ho, Ho, Ho' will do. Don’t say 'Cower, brief mortals'."
- Albert advises Death on how to be the Hogfather

Susan: [Susan is reading the fairy tale "Jack and the beanstalk" to children] And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement and trespass charges already mentioned and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy any more. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done. Which proves that you can be excused just about anything if you're a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.