Memo to NRO

Spoiler

You've got malware

[collapse]

Please clean the damned malware off your site NOW. While you’re at it, undo all the recent “improvements” that have made NRO a tedious, unreadable mess, too.

By the way, don’t call that number. I recommend that everyone stay away from National Review Online until get they their act together.

Update: According to some online diagnostic services, National Review‘s site is clean. A scan of my hard drive found no malware. Nevertheless, I still got redirected to a site that wanted to install a bogus Flash update the last time I visited. I would guess that whatever agency handles the advertising on the NR site is running some tainted ads. It looks like I’m not going to spend much time with Kevin and Jonah for a while.

Update II (April 3): Whatever was hijacking my browsers seems to be gone from the site now. NR is still a pain to navigate, though.

Terrestrial and epiphytic

Phragmipedim Fliquet 4N

There was another orchid show at the botanical garden, and I spent yesterday there taking too many pictures. It’s going to take a while to go through them all and edit the better ones for my Flickr site. Here are a couple of the weird things.

Epidendrum Neon Valley

… comfy armchairs with ejection seats for emergencies

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres:

“I am a conscientious objector to child conscription, on grounds that I should not have to suffer for a disintegrating school system’s failure to provide teachers or study materials of even minimally adequate quality.”

And:

Then again, Harry was standing in a bank that literally stored your money in vaults full of gold coins guarded by dragons, where you had to go in and take coins out of your vault whenever you wanted to spend money. The finer points of arbitraging away market inefficiencies might well be lost on them. He’d been tempted to make snide remarks about the crudity of their financial system…
But the sad thing is, their way is probably better.
On the other hand, one competent hedge fundie could probably own the whole wizarding world within a week. Harry filed away this notion in case he ever ran out of money, or had a week free.
Meanwhile, the giant heaps of gold coins within the Potter vault ought to suit his near-term requirements.
Harry stumped forward, and began picking up gold coins with one hand and dumping them into the other.
When he had reached twenty, Professor McGonagall coughed. “I think that will be more than enough to pay for your school supplies, Mr. Potter.”
“Hm?” Harry said, his mind elsewhere. “Hold on, I’m doing a Fermi calculation.”
“A what? ” said Professor McGonagall, sounding somewhat alarmed.
“It’s a mathematical thing. Named after Enrico Fermi. A way of getting rough numbers quickly in your head…”
Twenty gold Galleons weighed a tenth of a kilogram, maybe? And gold was, what, ten thousand British pounds a kilogram? So a Galleon would be worth about fifty pounds… The mounds of gold coins looked to be about sixty coins high and twenty coins wide in either dimension of the base, and a mound was pyramidal, so it would be around one-third of the cube. Eight thousand Galleons per mound, roughly, and there were around five mounds of that size, so forty thousand Galleons or 2 million pounds sterling.
Not bad. Harry smiled with a certain grim satisfaction. It was too bad that he was right in the middle of discovering the amazing new world of magic, and couldn’t take time out to explore the amazing new world of being rich, which a quick Fermi estimate said was roughly a billion times less interesting.
Still, that’s the last time I ever mow a lawn for one lousy pound.

There may be a Harry Potter fanfic worth reading, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

(Via J. Greely.)

Link-o-rama

Bingo

A game to play next time you read a second-tier fantasy novel. (Via J. Greely.)

Advisory

Some trigger warnings for other literature.

1944, near Naples

Italy, 1944:

88 airplanes were a total loss. Eighty-eight B-25 Mitchells – $25,000,000 [1944 dollars] worth of aircraft

Vesuvius, 1944

Update: More on Vesuvius here.

Anthony Sacramone’s list of the twelve funniest books ever written is better than most such lists, though it’s missing Terry Pratchett, Robert Benchley and a few others. ((I was pleased to see that someone else remembers Will Cuppy.))

“Let us build a fairyland for the people by dint of science!”

North Korean slogan or TED talk tidbit? (Via Jonah Goldberg.)

A large serving of silly nonsense is below the fold.

Continue reading “Link-o-rama”

The most-shoplifted author in Britain

Pratchett and friends

I’m not sure which writer whose books I have the largest number of on my shelves. It might be Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe or R.A. Lafferty. Or it might be Terry Pratchett. Pratchet, long one of my favorite writers, died today.

There are various notices and such here, here, here, here and here.

The Pratchett shelf

Post script: It turns out that the quote from Death in the upper picture is one of Neil Gaiman’s contributions to Good Omens.

Yesterday in literary history

A note on Nathaniel Hawthorne from Flannery O’Connor:

… Hawthorne couldn’t stand Emerson or any of that crowd. When one of them came in the front door, Hawthorne went out the back. He met one of them one morning and snarled, “Good Morning Mr. G., how is your Oversoul this morning?”

O’Connor may be the greatest Catholic writer of fiction of the 20th century, but the book of hers I most enjoy is a collection of her letters, The Habit of Being.

Further reading

Someone at Ricochet requested “Fantasy Reading Suggestions.” The recommendations thus far have been disappointing. In the 103 comments I perused, Gene Wolfe, in my opinion the best living writer in English, is mentioned only once, his name misspelled. Others whom I consider essential have not been mentioned at all. For what it’s worth, here is some fantasy that has been overlooked so far there.

Gene Wolfe: Soldier of the Mist, at the very least, and The Sorcerer’s House. Read Wolfe carefully; every word counts, and nothing is as simple as it may at first seem. (Incidentally, Josh W. is working his way through The Book of the New Sun, one chapter at a time. It should keep him busy for several years. The most recent installment is here.)

Diana Wynne Jones: Pretty much everything she ever wrote is worth reading, so I’ll just name a few favorites. Howl’s Moving Castle (vastly better than the movie); Dogsbody; The Homeward Bounders; Fire and Hemlock; The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

John Bellairs: The Face in the Frost and The Pedant and the Shuffly. (Bellairs also wrote St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies, which isn’t fantasy but is very funny, particularly if you are a Catholic who survived the silly years after Vatican II.)

Lord Dunsany: Any collection of his short stories.

J.R.R. Tolkien: He wrote more than just the novels Peter Jackson trashed. Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major and Leaf by Niggle are all worth tracking down.

Tim Powers: I have yet to read a disappointing book by Powers. The Anubis Gates is particularly recommended to English majors, and Declare to those who wonder why the Soviet Union lasted as long as it did.

C.S. Lewis: Till We Have Faces. The only fiction by Lewis I’ve ever re-read.

Charles Williams: Descent into Hell. Williams was one of the other Inklings, and his influence is perceptible in Tim Powers’ writing.

Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman. Is it about a bicycle?

R.A. Lafferty: Anything and everything you can find. Much of his output is nominally science fiction, but it’s SF unlike any other and I don’t hesitate to call him a great fantasist.

G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday.

… and probably much else I’ll think of later.