I am having a quiet chuckle at the moment over a joke ( I don't have many, and very very few are original...) that occurred to me while posting a "contribution" to a BB in a galaxy far far away...

I am a fan of Terry Pratchett, his Discworld novels, and his other novels. He has that dry quirky sense of fun that I like.

I was sitting on the loo (known in the family in the as the "library" for reasons that will be apparent) and the cover of his "Men at Arms" caught my eye. Well rather a detail did.

One of the recurring characters is a troll by name of Detritus and I was sitting there staring at this picture and I suddenly realised that the book was upside down, but that the face of Detritus still made sense. It was a little like the paradigm change between the old hag and the beautiful girl.

But Pratchett's trolls was the starting point of the little, abbreviated wisecrack that came to mind while I was writing. In another of his books ([i]Night Watch[/i]), Pratchett writes a whole subplot on the topic of trolls, silicaceous life forms, and the effect of superconductivity on their mental function. It is a great sequence, starting with Detritus learning to count, first in binary, then in octal, then learning how to convert octal to decimal. The subplot finishes with Detritus locked in a "pork futures warehouse" writing increasingly abstruse mathematical equations in the frost on the walls, ending with an enigmatic "=" where he froze solid.

So, there is the basis for my pune on the "troll", in the debate that this BB had developing.

"Trolls are silicaceous life forms. Their mental functions work best when temperatures are below 100K. That is also why they tend to become incoherent and dysfunctional when the resulting debate, or they personally, gets heated."

Yeah yeah I know it is not all that funny but its the best my sense (wierd or wired, never worked that out) of humour got.