Bloody Stupid Johnson
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| Characters from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series |
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| Character details | |
| Full name: | Bergholt Stuttley Johnson |
| Description: | Architect (after a fashion) |
| Associations: | |
| Location: | Ankh-Morpork |
| Story appearances | |
| First seen: | |
| Also in: | |
| Other details | |
| Notes: | |
Bergholt Stuttley Johnson, better known as Bloody Stupid Johnson, is a landscape gardener and inventor on the Discworld (a fictional world created by author Terry Pratchett), and is mentioned in a number of books. Though he has died before the timeline in which most of the books are set, his legacy lives on.
Although evidently able in certain fields, Johnson is notorious for his complete inability to produce anything according to specification or common sense. This fact never stopped him from trying, however. He is also known as Bloody Stupid "It Might Look A Bit Messy Now But Just You Come Back In Five Hundred Years' Time" Johnson and Bloody Stupid "Look, The Plans Were The Right Way Round When I Drew Them" Johnson.
Johnson was not incompetent, far from it; indeed in many ways he was a kind of genius. Pratchett suggests on numerous occasions that he possessed a kind of "inverse genius"; as far from incompetence as genius but in the opposite direction. Certainly no one else could produce an explosive mixture from nothing more than common sand and water, or create a triangle with three right angles.
The most obvious flaw in Johnson's abilities is his blind spot when it comes to marking units on his plans; examples include the Colossus of Morpork, which is currently kept in a matchbox in the Dwarf Bread Museum, and the ornamental cruet set commissioned by Mad Lord Snapcase — the saltshaker currently houses four families and they use the pepper mill to store grain. Those few of his works that are approximately the right scale typically either work in unexpected ways, or simply have a tendency to spontaneously detonate. His attempts at landscape gardening are equally surprising, including the enormous artificial hillock in front of Quirm Manor ("It'd drive me mad to have to look at a bunch of trees and mountains all day long, how about you?") and the hoho in the Ankh-Morpork Palace grounds, which is like a haha but fifty feet deep. His other works consist of a trout-pond in the grounds of the Patrician's palace that, due to the usual misunderstandings surrounding Johnson's work, is an ornamental trout pond that is only an inch wide, yet more than 100 feet in length. The sole trout occupant is very happy, provided he never has any desire to turn around.
While most of Johnson's designs are simply unusual, some of them seem to tap into strange forces, probably by mistake. The most obvious examples of this are the Mail Sorter and Empirical Crescent, but the tendency of his landscape work to spontaneously explode may be an indication of the same phenomenon. It has been suggested that he may have inadvertently achieved the exact opposite of constructing in cosmic harmony with the power of ley lines.
The fact that he continued to receive commissions after the defects in his abilities became apparent is considered to be the ultimate expression of the apparent thinking behind the Victorian follies, i.e. an indication that the person commissioning the work can afford to waste money like this. It became quite fashionable to have your house or garden 'Johnsoned'. This view of Johnson's abilities was not universal, however: it is believed that the town house of the Ramkin family — a rather pleasant old house with well-designed gardens — was never worked on by Johnson because he was shot in the leg by the then owner while walking up its drive one day. They do however have the "Johnson Exploding Pagoda."
Generally assumed to be dead in the time of most of the books, Johnson is never seen, but was certainly alive around the time of the main events of Night Watch: Mr Snapcase took up the Patricianship in the course of the events chronicled at that time, and he could only have commissioned the Ornamental Cruet Set from Johnson after becoming Patrician. This is also approximately when Johnson must have created the ill-fated mail sorter, as dates in Going Postal suggest that this occurred 30 years before the events chronicled there. Given the nature of the sorter, this may not be a problem.
Johnson's name and abilities are a parody of Capability Brown and also, perhaps, a typically conservative swipe at the experimental novelist B. S. Johnson. While some see a pun in the initials B.S.J. (the reverse of J.S.B., the initials for the famous real world composer Johann Sebastian Bach), Pratchett has stated (online and in The Discworld Companion) that this was not intentional.
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[edit] Notable creations
[edit] Organs
Johnson created a number of organs, the most famous ones residing at Unseen University (and called Our Mighty Organ by Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, much to the displeasure of the staff), at the Ankh-Morpork Opera House, and at Don'tgonearthe Castle (owned by the Magpyr family of vampires) in Überwald.
Besides functioning as normal organs, Johnson's instruments include a number of less conventional voices. The UU organ, for example, includes such voices as Vox Dei, Thunderstorm, Whoopee Cushion, Squashed Toad and Squashed Rabbits, in addition to the "terrae motus", or Earthquake Pipe — although no-one is allowed to use it since the time it caused the University to move several inches on its foundations. This organ's other major feature are the 14 keys marked '?'. The organ at Don'tgonearthe Castle was specially built to accommodate the tastes of a traditionalist vampire, and features the specialist voices of Wolf Howl, Thunderclap, Scream and Creaky Floors. Its chord generators, for example 'Ghastly Face at Window', play various combinations of the voices.
[edit] Bathrooms
To date only one Johnson bathroom has been discovered (the Patent 'Typhoon' Superior Indoor Ablutorium with Automatic Soap Dish). It was found behind a boarded-up door hidden behind a bookcase in the Archchancellor's rooms at UU, and was promptly opened up by order of Mustrum Ridcully. The bathroom features a number of unusual water spouts and fountains, such as the 'Old Faithful' facility and the 'Musical Pipes' enhancement, interlocked with the university's organ. These have been found to have the same kind of unexpected behaviour as Johnson's other devices, and as a result the bathroom was later sealed up again after an unfortunate incident when the Librarian was playing Bubbla's Catastrophe suite on the UU organ while the Archchancellor was having a shower.
[edit] Monuments and Landscape Design
Johnson has designed a number of monuments and landmarks, including the inch-high Colossus of Ankh-Morpork, the pocket-sized Hanging Gardens of Ankh and the minuscule Quirm Memorial. He was also commissioned to construct an arch to commemorate the Battle of Crumhorn — this arch is now kept in a cardboard box.
His efforts in landscape design are especially noteworthy, and the Ankh-Morpork palace gardens are considered to be his greatest accomplishment. It is here that we find such creations as the hoho, which is a fifty foot deep haha, the gargantuan beehive currently used as a pigeon cote in the absence of ten foot long bees, a structure referred to only as the "Johnson Exploding Pagoda", iron patio furniture that melted and crazy paving that committed suicide, and the chiming sundial that also tends to explode around noon. In the palace grounds is also a maze so small that people get lost looking for it. Another notable feature is the ornamental trout lake, built 150 yards long, but, sadly, only one inch wide. It currently houses one trout that is quite content provided it doesn't want to turn around. At one point there was also an ornate fountain which, upon being turned on, did nothing but groan ominously for several minutes before firing a small stone cherub a thousand feet into the air.
[edit] The Post Office Mail Sorter
Originally intended to be another of Johnson's famous organs, this device was remodelled into a mail sorter in his continual striving for functional improvement. Johnson used in the sorter various gears and other rotating components which for tidiness he constructed with the value of exactly three (rather than the customary "three and a bit") as the ratio between their circumference and their diameter. The Sorter itself came to be known as the New Pie, and eventually caused the downfall of the Ankh-Morpork postal service as the machine started sorting mail that hadn't been written yet, and in some cases never would in that particular trouser leg of time. The damage caused to space-time in the immediate vicinity of the machine made it a significant health hazard, and when this was considered in combination with the ever-increasing volume of not-yet-written mail, the machine was taken out of service and smashed up by a senior postman. The remains are still installed in the basement of the Post Office; as they are still hazardous, there is no obvious means of removing them. It was used during Going Postal to kill Mr. Gryle, a banshee (though the Disc banshees vary from the classic mythological creature).
[edit] Empirical Crescent
Empirical Crescent is a street in a fashionable area of Morpork just off Park Lane, which is generally a high-rent district. Rents would be considerably higher were it not for the continued existence of Empirical Crescent, which still stands despite the best efforts of the Ankh-Morpork Historical Preservation Society. The Crescent is a product of Johnson's unique multi-dimensional approach to architecture. On the outside it is a perfectly normal street, but inside the front door of No.1 opens into the back bedroom of No.15, the ground floor window of No.3 showed the view from the second storey of No.9 and smoke from the dining-room fireplace of No.2 came out of the chimney of No.19. No residents tend to stay in Empirical Crescent for more than a few months and always leave very quickly (usually without taking time to pack the furniture). It is possible that Empirical Crescent's connections form a tesseract, but given Johnson's architectural abilities it seems most unlikely that he actually intended to construct one.
The classic 1940s science-fiction tale, "—And He Built a Crooked House—", relates an interesting potential side-effect of tesseract construction, wherein an unconventional architect builds a house in the shape of a tesseract unfolded into three dimensions. When he returns after an earthquake the building has folded through a fourth spatial dimension into a single block containing every room in the house. He finds that each room remains physically connected to the others, as well as to several other places, including the top of the Empire State Building and, interestingly, nowhere, a place where space and time are not.
[edit] Cooking
In addition to his engineering and architecture, Johnson is also known for his occasional attempts at cooking. Dishes designed by Johnson frequently encounter problems similar to those found in his landscape work — a wedding cake made by him, for example, had as its frosting a substance harder than cement, and was eventually used as a bandstand. His most remarkable work in this field was the Individual Fruit Pie, a gargantuan pastry which exploded during baking and demolished several city blocks. Amongst the ingredients was a single clove.
