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Going Postal
''Going Postal'' is a fantasy novel by British writer Terry Pratchett, the 33rd book in his ''Discworld'' series, released in the United Kingdom on 25 September 2004. Unlike most of Pratchett's Discworld novels, ''Going Postal'' is divided into chapters, a feature previously seen only in Pratchett's children's books and the Science of Discworld series. These chapters begin with a synopsis of philosophical themes, in a similar manner to some Victorian novels and, notably, to Jules Verne stories. The title refers to both the contents of the novel, as well as to the term 'going postal'. The book was on the shortlist for both the Nebula and Locus Awards for Best (Fantasy) Novel. It would also have been shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, except that Pratchett withdrew it, as he felt stress over the award would mar his enjoyment of the Worldcon. This was the first time Pratchett had been shortlisted for either award. Plot As with many of the Discworld novels, the story t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terry Pratchett
Sir Terence David John Pratchett (28 April 1948 – 12 March 2015) was an English humourist, satirist, and author of fantasy novels, especially comical works. He is best known for his ''Discworld'' series of 41 novels. Pratchett's first novel, ''The Carpet People'', was published in 1971. The first ''Discworld'' novel, ''The Colour of Magic'', was published in 1983, after which Pratchett wrote an average of two books a year. The final ''Discworld'' novel, ''The Shepherd's Crown'', was published in August 2015, five months after his death. With more than 85 million books sold worldwide in 37 languages, Pratchett was the UK's best-selling author of the 1990s. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998 and was knighted for services to literature in the 2009 New Year Honours. In 2001 he won the annual Carnegie Medal for ''The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents'', the first ''Discworld'' book marketed for children. He received the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hugo Award For Best Novel
The Hugo Award for Best Novel is one of the Hugo Awards given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories published in, or translated to, English during the previous calendar year. The novel award is available for works of fiction of 40,000 words or more; awards are also given out in the short story, novelette, and novella categories. The Hugo Awards have been described as "a fine showcase for speculative fiction", and "the best known literary award for science fiction writing". The Hugo Award for Best Novel has been awarded annually by the World Science Fiction Society since 1953, except in 1954 and 1957. In addition, beginning in 1996, Retrospective Hugo Awards or "Retro-Hugos" have been available for works published 50, 75, or 100 years prior. Retro-Hugos may only be awarded for years after 1939 in which no awards were originally given. To date, Retro-Hugo awards have been given for novels for 1939, 1941, 1943–1946, 1951, and 1954. Hugo Award nominees and winners ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Herodotus
Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria ( Italy). He is known for having written the '' Histories'' – a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was the first writer to perform systematic investigation of historical events. He is referred to as " The Father of History", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero. The ''Histories'' primarily cover the lives of prominent kings and famous battles such as Marathon, Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. His work deviates from the main topics to provide a cultural, ethnographical, geographical, and historiographical background that forms an essential part of the narrative and provides readers with a wellspring of additional information. Herodotus has been criticized for his inclusion of "legends and f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Farley Post Office
The James A. Farley Building is a mixed-use structure in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, which formerly served as the city's main United States Postal Service (USPS) branch. Designed by McKim, Mead & White in the Beaux-Arts style, the structure was built between 1911 and 1914, with an annex constructed between 1932 and 1935. The Farley Building, at 421 Eighth Avenue between 31st Street and 33rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, faces Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden to the east. The main facade of the Farley Building (over 8th Avenue) features a Corinthian colonnade—the largest of its style in the world—finishing at a pavilion on each end. The imposing design was meant to match that of the original Pennsylvania Station across the street. An entablature above the colonnade bears the United States Postal Service creed: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." The colonnade’s i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philately
Philately (; ) is the study of postage stamps and postal history. It also refers to the collection and appreciation of stamps and other philatelic products. Philately involves more than just stamp collecting or the study of postage; it is possible to be a philatelist without owning any stamps. For instance, the stamps being studied may be very rare or reside only in museums. Etymology The word "philately" is the English transliteration of the French "", coined by Georges Herpin in 1864. Herpin stated that stamps had been collected and studied for the previous six or seven years and a better name was required for the new hobby than ''timbromanie'' (roughly "stamp quest"), which was disliked.Williams, L.N. & M. ''Fundamentals of Philately''. State College: The American Philatelic Society, 1971, p.20. The alternative terms "timbromania", "timbrophily", and "timbrology" gradually fell out of use as ''philately'' gained acceptance during the 1860s. Herpin took the Greek root word ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stanley Gibbons
The Stanley Gibbons Group plc is a company quoted on the London Stock Exchange specialising in the retailing of collectable postage stamps and similar products. The group is incorporated in London. The company is a major stamp dealer and philatelic publisher. The company's philatelic subsidiary, Stanley Gibbons Limited, has a royal warrant of appointment from Queen Elizabeth II. History The company has a long corporate history, having started as a sole trader business owned by Edward Stanley Gibbons in 1856 and now being a quoted company with a number of subsidiaries. Before 1900 The business started when, employed as an assistant in his father's pharmacy shop in Plymouth, Gibbons set up a counter selling stamps. In 1863 he was fortunate enough to purchase from two sailors a sackful of rare Cape of Good Hope triangular stamps. In 1874 Gibbons moved to a house near Clapham Common in South London and in 1876 he moved again to Gower Street in Bloomsbury near the British Mu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Killer Poke
In computer jargon, a killer poke is a method of inducing physical hardware damage on a machine or its peripherals by the insertion of invalid values, via, for example, BASIC's POKE command, into a memory-mapped control register. The term is typically used to describe a family of fairly well known tricks that can overload the analog electronics in the CRT monitors of computers lacking hardware sanity checking (notable examples being the IBM Portable and Commodore PET.) Specific examples Zuse Z1/Z3 The Z1 (1938) and Z3 (1941) computers built by Konrad Zuse contained illegal sequences of instructions which damaged the hardware if executed by accident. Commodore PET The PET-specific killer poke is connected to the architecture of that machine's video rasterizer circuits. In early PETs, writing a certain value to the memory address of a certain I/O register (POKE 59458,62) made the machine able to display text and graphics on the screen 106% faster. This was accomplished by dis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Discworld Geography
The Discworld is the fictional setting for all of Terry Pratchett's ''Discworld'' fantasy novels. It consists of a large disc (complete with edge-of-the-world drop-off and consequent waterfall) resting on the backs of four huge elephants which are in turn standing on the back of an enormous turtle, named Great A'Tuin (similar to Chukwa or Akupara from Hindu mythology) as it slowly swims through space. The Disc has been shown to be heavily influenced by magic and, while Pratchett gave it certain similarities to planet Earth, he also created his own system of physics for it. Pratchett first explored the idea of a disc-shaped world in the novel ''Strata'' (1981). Great A'Tuin Great A'Tuin is the Giant Star Turtle (of the fictional species ''Chelys galactica'') who travels through the Discworld universe's space, carrying four giant elephants (named Berilia, Tubul, Great T'Phon, and Jerakeen) who in turn carry the Discworld. The narration has described A'Tuin as "the only turtle ever ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Death (Discworld)
Death is a fictional character in Terry Pratchett's ''Discworld'' series and a parody of several other personifications of death. Like most Grim Reapers, he is a black-robed skeleton who usually carries a scythe. His jurisdiction is specifically the Discworld itself; he is only a part, or minion, of Azrael: the universal Death. He has been generally used by Pratchett to explore the problems of human existence, and has become more sympathetic throughout the series. Works Death has appeared in every Discworld novel, with the exception of ''The Wee Free Men'' and ''Snuff'', and had a possible cameo at the end of ''Johnny and the Dead'' (the character was not identified, but spoke in unquoted small caps as Death does in the rest of the series). The Discworld books in which Death is a leading character, starting with ''Mort'' in 1987, are: *''Mort'' – 1987 *'' Reaper Man'' – 1991 *''Soul Music'' – 1994 *''Hogfather'' – 1996 *''Thief of Time'' – 2001 Character Death's hollow, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semaphore Line
An optical telegraph is a line of stations, typically towers, for the purpose of conveying textual information by means of visual signals. There are two main types of such systems; the semaphore telegraph which uses pivoted indicator arms and conveys information according to the direction the indicators point, and the shutter telegraph which uses panels that can be rotated to block or pass the light from the sky behind to convey information. The most widely used system was invented in 1792 in France by Claude Chappe, and was popular in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. This system is often referred to as ''semaphore'' without qualification. Lines of relay towers with a semaphore rig at the top were built within line of sight of each other, at separations of . Operators at each tower would watch the neighboring tower through a telescope, and when the semaphore arms began to move spelling out a message, they would pass the message on to the next tower. This s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Discworld Characters
This article contains brief biographies for characters from Terry Pratchett's ''Discworld'' series. This list consists of human characters. For biographies of noted members of the Discworld's "ethnic minorities" (dwarfs, trolls, undead, etc.), see the articles for those races. Some character biographies are also listed in articles relating to the organisations they belong to. For further Discworld character biographies, see the table below. Characters are listed alphabetically by name. 71-Hour Ahmed Adora Belle Dearheart The daughter of Robert Dearheart, founder of the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, Adora Belle Dearheart appears in ''Going Postal'', ''Making Money'' and '' Raising Steam'', she is a cynical, angry heavy smoker. Adora's family is conned out of the Grand Trunk by Reacher Gilt, forcing Adora to be employed at the Golem Trust. In ''Going Postal'', Adora begins a tentative relationship with Moist von Lipwig; by the time of ''Making Money'' they have become engag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Havelock Vetinari
Lord Havelock Vetinari, Lord Patrician ( Primus inter pares) of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork, is a fictional character in Terry Pratchett's ''Discworld'' series, a series of forty-one books describing a parallel universe whose main world has reflections of our Earth. He is depicted as the ruler of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork. Vetinari has written an unpublished manuscript known as ''The Servant'', the Discworld version of ''The Prince'' by the Italian statesman and diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli. Fictional biography Early years Lord Vetinari was born into the extremely powerful Vetinari family (a pun, or play on words, on the real-life family of the Medici and on the word "veterinary") and raised by his aunt, Lady Roberta Meserole. As a youth, he enrolled in the Assassins' Guild which, apart from teaching its students how to kill other people for money, also gives them an excellent academic education. Lord Vetinari was particularly interested in the classical arts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
