Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
The night was as black as the inside of a cat. It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which the gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate. In the middle of the elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye. It illuminated three hunched figures. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’
There was a pause.
Finally another voice said in far more ordinary tones: ‘Well I can do next Tuesday.’ (WS)
Through the fathomless deeps of space swims the star turtle Great A’Tuin, bearing on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld. A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock a leg to allow the sun to go past.
Exactly why this should be may never be known. Possibly the Creator of the universe got bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rotational velocities, and decided to have a bit of fun for once. (WS)
In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven’t got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs. (WS)
On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of course. But mostly evil, on the whole. (WS)
On nights such as this, witches are abroad.
Well, not actually abroad. They don’t like the food and you can’t trust the water and the shamans always hog the deckchairs. (WS)
Unlike wizards, who like nothing better than a complicated hierarchy, witches don’t go in much for the structured approach to career progression. It’s up to each individual witch to take on a girl to hand the area over to when she dies. Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don’t have leaders.
Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn’t have. (WS)
Like most people – most people, at any rate, below the age of sixty or so – Verence hadn’t exercised his mind much about what happened to you when you died. Like most people since the dawn of time, he assumed it all somehow worked out all right in the end.
And like most people since the dawn of time, he was now dead. (WS)
…he was one of those rare individuals who are totally focused in time.
Most people aren’t. They live their lives as a sort of temporal blur around the point where their body actually is – anticipating the future, or holding on to the past. They’re usually so busy thinking about what happens next that the only time they ever find out what is happening now is when they come to look back on it. Most people are like this. They learn how to fear because they can actually tell, down at the subconscious level, what is going to happen next. It’s already happening to them. (WS)
Quaffing is like drinking, but you spill more. (WS)
‘Something comes,’ she said.
‘Can you tell by the pricking of your thumbs?’ said Magrat earnestly. Magrat had learned a lot about witchcraft from books.
‘The pricking of my ears,’ said Granny. (WS)
Magrat peered around timidly. Here and there on the moor were huge standing stones, their origins lost in time, which were said to lead mobile and private lives of their own. She shivered.
‘What’s to be afraid of?’ she managed.
‘Us,’ said Granny Weatherwax, smugly. (WS)
Granny Weatherwax didn’t hold with looking at the future, but now she could feel the future looking at her.
She didn’t like the expression at all. (WS)
‘Oh, obvious,’ said Granny. ‘I’ll grant you it’s obvious. Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn’t mean they’re true.’ (WS)
‘Modern,’ said Granny Weatherwax, with a sniff. ‘When I was a gel, we had a lump of wax and a couple of pins and had to be content. We had to make our own enchantment in them days.’
‘Ah, well, we’ve all passed a lot of water since then,’ said Nanny Ogg sagely. (WS)
It was one of the few sorrows of Granny Weatherwax’s life that, despite all her efforts, she’d arrived at the peak of her career with a complexion like a rosy apple and all her teeth. No amount of charms could persuade a wart to take root on her handsome if slightly equine features, and vast intakes of sugar only served to give her boundless energy. A wizard she’d consulted had explained it was on account of her having a metabolism, which at least allowed her to feel vaguely superior to Nanny Ogg, who she suspected had never even seen one. (WS)
‘… the thing with crowns is, it isn’t the putting them on that’s the problem, it’s the taking them off.’ (WS)
Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact,’ said Granny. (WS)
‘If I’d had to buy you, you wouldn’t be worth the price.’ (WS)
‘Where’s Nanny?’ she said.
‘She’s lying out on the lawn,’ said Granny. ‘She felt a bit poorly.’ And from outside came the sound of Nanny Ogg being poorly at the top of her voice. (WS)
She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it. (WS)
Like most people, witches are unfocused in time. The difference is that they dimly realise it, and make use of it. They cherish the past because part of them is still living there, and they can see the shadows the future casts before it. (WS)
‘Yes, yes,’ said Magrat. ‘Sorry.’
‘Right,’ said Granny, slightly mollified. She’d never mastered the talent for apologising, but she appreciated it in other people. (WS)
‘I think I shall ride out on the chase. And you can come too.’
‘My lord, I cannot ride!’
For the first time that morning Lord Felmet smiled.
‘Capital!’ he said. ‘We will give you a horse that can’t be ridden. Ha. Ha.’ (WS)
A year went past. The days followed one another patiently. Right back at the beginning of the multiverse they had tried all passing at the same time, and it hadn’t worked. (WS)
Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.
Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all. (WS)
There was plenty of flat ground in the Ramtops. The problem was that nearly all of it was vertical. (WS)
The idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow. *
*All of them, unfortunately, unprintable. (WS)
… Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood. (WS)
Demons were like genies and philosophy professors – if you didn’t word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers. (WS)
The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo. (WS)
No, things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it. (WS)
This cat, on the other hand, was its own animal. All cats give that impression, of course, but instead of the mindless animal self-absorption that passes for secret wisdom in the creatures, Greebo radiated genuine intelligence. He also radiated a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox. (WS)
It’s not much using being a witch unless you look like one. (WS)
The old peel-the-apple trick should do that. You just peeled an apple, getting one length of peel, and threw the peel behind you; it’d land in the shape of his name. Millions of girls had tried it and had inevitably been disappointed, unless the loved one was called Scscs. (WS)
Greebo was one of her blind spots. While intellectually she would concede that he was indeed a fat, cunning, evil-smelling multiple rapist, she nevertheless instinctively pictured him as the small fluffy kitten he had been decades before. The fact that he had once chased a female wolf up a tree and seriously surprised a she-bear who had been innocently digging for roots didn’t stop her worrying that something bad might happen to him. (WS)
She gave the guards a nod as she went through. It didn’t occur to either of them to stop her because witches, like beekeepers and big gorillas, went where they liked. (WS)
Occupying the metterforical stalls were a rabble of rabbits, weasels, vermine, badgers, foxes, and miscellaneous creatures who, despite the fact that they live their entire lives in a bloody atmosphere of hunter and hunted, killing or being killed by claw, talon and tooth, are generally referred to as woodland folk. (WS)
Magrat had used a lot of powder to make her face pale and interesting. It combined with the lavishly applied mascara to give the guard the impression that he was looking at two flies that had crashed into a sugar bowl. He found his fingers wanted to make a sign to ward off the evil eyeshadow. (WS)
There are thousands of good reasons why magic doesn’t rule the world. They’re called witches and wizards, Magrat reflected... (WS)
‘...what about this rule about not meddling?’ said Magrat.
‘Ah,’ said Nanny. She took the girl’s arm. ‘The thing is,’ she explained, ‘as you progress in the Craft, you’ll learn there is another rule. Esme’s obeyed it all her life.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘When you break rules, break ‘em good and hard…’ (WS)
Greebo’s grin gradually faded, until there was nothing left but the cat. This was nearly as spooky as the opposite way around. (WS)
The Fool was vaguely aware that you could tell which direction the Hub lay by seeing which side of the trees the moss grew on. A quick inspection of the nearby trunks indicated that, in defiance of all normal geography, the Hub lay everywhere. (WS)
Granny’s implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occasion, mountains. (WS)
Three marriages and an adventurous girlhood had left Nanny Ogg with thigh muscles that could crack coconuts… (WS)
‘You know, Hwel, I reckon responsible behaviour is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.’ (WS)
...it is very difficult to be racially prejudiced against creatures seven feet tall who can bite through walls, at least for very long. (WS)
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages. (WS)
Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn’t trust it. Often you couldn’t even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered it turned out to be something else – coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer. (WS)
‘So what you’re saying,’ said Magrat, icily, ‘is that this “not meddling” thing is like taking a vow not to swim. You’ll absolutely never break it unless of course you happen to find yourself in the water?’ (WS)
‘Everyone’s just people.’ (WS)
… the only thing it is possible to be sure of is that good sex doesn’t last long enough*.
*Except for the Zabingo tribe of the Great Nef, of course. (WS)
Magrat wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn’t want to do. Like being dead, she considered, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it. (WS)
‘…. There’s nothing wrong with cackling. In moderation.’ (WS)
The road, Hwel felt, had to go somewhere.
This geographical fiction has been the death of many people. Roads don’t necessarily have to go anywhere, they just have to have somewhere to start. (WS)
‘Meat is extremely bad for the digestive system,’ said Magrat. ‘If you could see inside your colon you’d be horrified.’
‘I think I would,’ muttered Hwel. (WS)
‘Don’t you want to die nobly for a just cause?’
‘I’d much rather live quietly for one.’ (WS)
‘Actors,’ said Granny, witheringly. ‘As if the world weren’t full of enough history without inventing more.’ (WS)
Granny subsided into unaccustomed, trouble silence, and tried to listen to the prologue. The theatre worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her to control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better. (WS)
‘I’d like to know if I could compare you to a summer’s day. Because - well, June 12th was quite nice...’ (WS)
Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past. (WS)
Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger is one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard steam of wrath power the turbines of revenge. (WS)
‘Witches just aren’t like that,’ said Magrat. ‘We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.’ (WS)
‘You’ve got to admit he was real royalty,’ said Nanny Ogg, eventually. ‘It only goes to show, royalty goes eccentric far better than the likes of you and me.’ (WS)
‘A king isn’t something you’re good at, it’s something you are.’ (WS)
‘We’re bound to be truthful,’ she said. ‘But there’s no call to be honest.’ (WS)
‘Destiny is important see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It’s the other way around.’ (WS)
Magrat knew she had lost. You always lost against Granny Weatherwax, the only interest was in seeing exactly how. (WS)
There was a pause.
Finally another voice said in far more ordinary tones: ‘Well I can do next Tuesday.’ (WS)
Through the fathomless deeps of space swims the star turtle Great A’Tuin, bearing on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld. A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock a leg to allow the sun to go past.
Exactly why this should be may never be known. Possibly the Creator of the universe got bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rotational velocities, and decided to have a bit of fun for once. (WS)
In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven’t got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs. (WS)
On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of course. But mostly evil, on the whole. (WS)
On nights such as this, witches are abroad.
Well, not actually abroad. They don’t like the food and you can’t trust the water and the shamans always hog the deckchairs. (WS)
Unlike wizards, who like nothing better than a complicated hierarchy, witches don’t go in much for the structured approach to career progression. It’s up to each individual witch to take on a girl to hand the area over to when she dies. Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don’t have leaders.
Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn’t have. (WS)
Like most people – most people, at any rate, below the age of sixty or so – Verence hadn’t exercised his mind much about what happened to you when you died. Like most people since the dawn of time, he assumed it all somehow worked out all right in the end.
And like most people since the dawn of time, he was now dead. (WS)
…he was one of those rare individuals who are totally focused in time.
Most people aren’t. They live their lives as a sort of temporal blur around the point where their body actually is – anticipating the future, or holding on to the past. They’re usually so busy thinking about what happens next that the only time they ever find out what is happening now is when they come to look back on it. Most people are like this. They learn how to fear because they can actually tell, down at the subconscious level, what is going to happen next. It’s already happening to them. (WS)
Quaffing is like drinking, but you spill more. (WS)
‘Something comes,’ she said.
‘Can you tell by the pricking of your thumbs?’ said Magrat earnestly. Magrat had learned a lot about witchcraft from books.
‘The pricking of my ears,’ said Granny. (WS)
Magrat peered around timidly. Here and there on the moor were huge standing stones, their origins lost in time, which were said to lead mobile and private lives of their own. She shivered.
‘What’s to be afraid of?’ she managed.
‘Us,’ said Granny Weatherwax, smugly. (WS)
Granny Weatherwax didn’t hold with looking at the future, but now she could feel the future looking at her.
She didn’t like the expression at all. (WS)
‘Oh, obvious,’ said Granny. ‘I’ll grant you it’s obvious. Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn’t mean they’re true.’ (WS)
‘Modern,’ said Granny Weatherwax, with a sniff. ‘When I was a gel, we had a lump of wax and a couple of pins and had to be content. We had to make our own enchantment in them days.’
‘Ah, well, we’ve all passed a lot of water since then,’ said Nanny Ogg sagely. (WS)
It was one of the few sorrows of Granny Weatherwax’s life that, despite all her efforts, she’d arrived at the peak of her career with a complexion like a rosy apple and all her teeth. No amount of charms could persuade a wart to take root on her handsome if slightly equine features, and vast intakes of sugar only served to give her boundless energy. A wizard she’d consulted had explained it was on account of her having a metabolism, which at least allowed her to feel vaguely superior to Nanny Ogg, who she suspected had never even seen one. (WS)
‘… the thing with crowns is, it isn’t the putting them on that’s the problem, it’s the taking them off.’ (WS)
Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things. Well-known fact,’ said Granny. (WS)
‘If I’d had to buy you, you wouldn’t be worth the price.’ (WS)
‘Where’s Nanny?’ she said.
‘She’s lying out on the lawn,’ said Granny. ‘She felt a bit poorly.’ And from outside came the sound of Nanny Ogg being poorly at the top of her voice. (WS)
She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it. (WS)
Like most people, witches are unfocused in time. The difference is that they dimly realise it, and make use of it. They cherish the past because part of them is still living there, and they can see the shadows the future casts before it. (WS)
‘Yes, yes,’ said Magrat. ‘Sorry.’
‘Right,’ said Granny, slightly mollified. She’d never mastered the talent for apologising, but she appreciated it in other people. (WS)
‘I think I shall ride out on the chase. And you can come too.’
‘My lord, I cannot ride!’
For the first time that morning Lord Felmet smiled.
‘Capital!’ he said. ‘We will give you a horse that can’t be ridden. Ha. Ha.’ (WS)
A year went past. The days followed one another patiently. Right back at the beginning of the multiverse they had tried all passing at the same time, and it hadn’t worked. (WS)
Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.
Some people are even more unfortunate. They get them all. (WS)
There was plenty of flat ground in the Ramtops. The problem was that nearly all of it was vertical. (WS)
The idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow. *
*All of them, unfortunately, unprintable. (WS)
… Nanny believed that a bit of thrilling and pointless terror was an essential ingredient of the magic of childhood. (WS)
Demons were like genies and philosophy professors – if you didn’t word things exactly right, they delighted in giving you absolutely accurate and completely misleading answers. (WS)
The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo. (WS)
No, things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it. (WS)
This cat, on the other hand, was its own animal. All cats give that impression, of course, but instead of the mindless animal self-absorption that passes for secret wisdom in the creatures, Greebo radiated genuine intelligence. He also radiated a smell that would have knocked over a wall and caused sinus trouble in a dead fox. (WS)
It’s not much using being a witch unless you look like one. (WS)
The old peel-the-apple trick should do that. You just peeled an apple, getting one length of peel, and threw the peel behind you; it’d land in the shape of his name. Millions of girls had tried it and had inevitably been disappointed, unless the loved one was called Scscs. (WS)
Greebo was one of her blind spots. While intellectually she would concede that he was indeed a fat, cunning, evil-smelling multiple rapist, she nevertheless instinctively pictured him as the small fluffy kitten he had been decades before. The fact that he had once chased a female wolf up a tree and seriously surprised a she-bear who had been innocently digging for roots didn’t stop her worrying that something bad might happen to him. (WS)
She gave the guards a nod as she went through. It didn’t occur to either of them to stop her because witches, like beekeepers and big gorillas, went where they liked. (WS)
Occupying the metterforical stalls were a rabble of rabbits, weasels, vermine, badgers, foxes, and miscellaneous creatures who, despite the fact that they live their entire lives in a bloody atmosphere of hunter and hunted, killing or being killed by claw, talon and tooth, are generally referred to as woodland folk. (WS)
Magrat had used a lot of powder to make her face pale and interesting. It combined with the lavishly applied mascara to give the guard the impression that he was looking at two flies that had crashed into a sugar bowl. He found his fingers wanted to make a sign to ward off the evil eyeshadow. (WS)
There are thousands of good reasons why magic doesn’t rule the world. They’re called witches and wizards, Magrat reflected... (WS)
‘...what about this rule about not meddling?’ said Magrat.
‘Ah,’ said Nanny. She took the girl’s arm. ‘The thing is,’ she explained, ‘as you progress in the Craft, you’ll learn there is another rule. Esme’s obeyed it all her life.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘When you break rules, break ‘em good and hard…’ (WS)
Greebo’s grin gradually faded, until there was nothing left but the cat. This was nearly as spooky as the opposite way around. (WS)
The Fool was vaguely aware that you could tell which direction the Hub lay by seeing which side of the trees the moss grew on. A quick inspection of the nearby trunks indicated that, in defiance of all normal geography, the Hub lay everywhere. (WS)
Granny’s implicit belief that everything should get out of her way extended to other witches, very tall trees and, on occasion, mountains. (WS)
Three marriages and an adventurous girlhood had left Nanny Ogg with thigh muscles that could crack coconuts… (WS)
‘You know, Hwel, I reckon responsible behaviour is something to get when you grow older. Like varicose veins.’ (WS)
...it is very difficult to be racially prejudiced against creatures seven feet tall who can bite through walls, at least for very long. (WS)
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages. (WS)
Destiny was funny stuff, he knew. You couldn’t trust it. Often you couldn’t even see it. Just when you knew you had it cornered it turned out to be something else – coincidence, maybe, or providence. You barred the door against it, and it was standing behind you. Then just when you thought you had it nailed down it walked away with the hammer. (WS)
‘So what you’re saying,’ said Magrat, icily, ‘is that this “not meddling” thing is like taking a vow not to swim. You’ll absolutely never break it unless of course you happen to find yourself in the water?’ (WS)
‘Everyone’s just people.’ (WS)
… the only thing it is possible to be sure of is that good sex doesn’t last long enough*.
*Except for the Zabingo tribe of the Great Nef, of course. (WS)
Magrat wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn’t want to do. Like being dead, she considered, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it. (WS)
‘…. There’s nothing wrong with cackling. In moderation.’ (WS)
The road, Hwel felt, had to go somewhere.
This geographical fiction has been the death of many people. Roads don’t necessarily have to go anywhere, they just have to have somewhere to start. (WS)
‘Meat is extremely bad for the digestive system,’ said Magrat. ‘If you could see inside your colon you’d be horrified.’
‘I think I would,’ muttered Hwel. (WS)
‘Don’t you want to die nobly for a just cause?’
‘I’d much rather live quietly for one.’ (WS)
‘Actors,’ said Granny, witheringly. ‘As if the world weren’t full of enough history without inventing more.’ (WS)
Granny subsided into unaccustomed, trouble silence, and tried to listen to the prologue. The theatre worried her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn’t belong to her, one that wasn’t in her to control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn’t belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn’t know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better. (WS)
‘I’d like to know if I could compare you to a summer’s day. Because - well, June 12th was quite nice...’ (WS)
Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past. (WS)
Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger is one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard steam of wrath power the turbines of revenge. (WS)
‘Witches just aren’t like that,’ said Magrat. ‘We live in harmony with the great cycles of Nature, and do no harm to anyone, and it’s wicked of them to say we don’t. We ought to fill their bones with hot lead.’ (WS)
‘You’ve got to admit he was real royalty,’ said Nanny Ogg, eventually. ‘It only goes to show, royalty goes eccentric far better than the likes of you and me.’ (WS)
‘A king isn’t something you’re good at, it’s something you are.’ (WS)
‘We’re bound to be truthful,’ she said. ‘But there’s no call to be honest.’ (WS)
‘Destiny is important see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It’s the other way around.’ (WS)
Magrat knew she had lost. You always lost against Granny Weatherwax, the only interest was in seeing exactly how. (WS)
