Jingo

A popular song from the Second World War had the lyric:

Bless 'em all, bless 'em all!
Bless the long and the short and the tall!
Bless all the sergeants and double-you o-ones,
Bless all the corporals and their blinkin' sons.

The phrase was also used as the title of a stage play (filmed in 1960) by Willis Hall, describing the plight and fate of a squad of British soldiers in Burma.

22

In the Good Old Days™, besieging armies would sometimes hurl the rotting corpses of dead animals over the city walls by catapult, with the aim of spreading disease and making the city uninhabitable. So in a sense, a dead dog could be a siege weapon…

23

Leshp bears a resemblance to H. P. Lovecraft's similarly strange-sounding creation, R'lyeh — an ancient, now submerged island in the Pacific, inhabited by alien Things with strange architecture, which rises at very long intervals and sends people mad all over the world. For full details, see Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu.

24

“It'll all be over by Christmas” was said of the First World War by armchair strategists, in August 1914. Ironically, the phrase has become a popular reassurance: more recently, President Clinton promised the American public in 1996 that US troops in Bosnia would be “home for Christmas”.

25

Ahmed's catchphrase is borrowed from Signior So-So, a comic Italian character in the famous wartime radio series It's That Man Again (ITMA).

26

The original Fanny Adams was an eight-year-old girl in Alton, Hampshire, whose dismembered body was discovered in 1867. About the same time, tinned mutton was first introduced in the Royal Navy, and the sailors — not noted for their sensitivity — took to calling the (rather disgusting) meat “Sweet Fanny Adams”. Hence the term came to mean something worthless, and finally to mean “nothing at all”.

27

Oxford University has a ceremony called the Encaenia, which also involves lots of old men in silly costumes and a procession ending in the Sheldonian Theatre.

28

The Pavlovian experiment in our world involved ringing a bell before and during the feeding of a group of dogs. After a while the dogs learned to associate the ringing of the bell with food. A part of them was essentially programmed to think that the bell was the same thing as food.

29

Refers to the fact that, for many years, surgeons used to double as barbers, or vice versa.

30

The Keystone Cops were a squad of frantically bumbling comedy policemen from the silent movie era.

31

The “lone gunman” theory is still the official explanation of John F. Kennedy's assassination, despite four decades of frenzied speculation. Conspiracy theorists like to claim that Someone, Somewhere is covering up the truth, in much the same way as Vimes and Vetinari are conspiring to cover it up here.

32

In 1363, in England, Edward III — then in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War with France — ordered that all men should practise archery on Sundays and holidays; this law remained technically in force for some time after the longbow was effectively obsolete as a weapon of war.

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