Audio edition of The Ionia Sanction on sale at Downpour

Downpour is the online consumer division of Blackstone Audio, who sell audio books to libraries.

Right now Downpour is selling the audio edition of The Ionia Sanction on their special deals page.

And in passing, I'm in good company in that sale.  I never thought I’d see the day when my name was on the same page as Isaac Asimov, Conan Doyle and Patrick O’Brian. 

I'm literally aghast

Merriam-Webster, who should know better, has decided that literally means the exact opposite of literally.  Google has followed suit.   They've decided that since most of the internet world has no clue how to use literally, that they might as well give up and give it the wrong definition.  

This will inevitably raise the age-old question whether dictionaries should describe the language as it's used, or the language as it should be used.  

But, if you're going to take the rubbish written on the internet as the definition of English, then it's only a small matter of time before school dictionaries tell u that u means you.  Looking forward to that, r we?

Vicki Leon in the LA Times

The excellent Vicki Leon, who pops in to comment on this blog from time to time, and who wrote Working IX to V, and The Joy of Sexus, today has an opinion piece on the assassination of JFK published in the LA Times.

It's very much worth reading.

Vicki also has a previous piece in the LA Times.  She suggested that killers who do it for the notoriety would be less inclined if there was a perpetual ban on publicizing their crimes or their names.  She uses as her example what happened to the guy who burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356BC.  (It's the same temple that my heroine Diotima works at in The Ionia Sanction, and it was indeed destroyed by arson).

To find out what they did to him, here is Vicki's article.

I thought as much

I know funny error messages on web sites are common, but this one confirms something I've long suspected.  This from one of GOOGLE's own services:

500 Internal Server Error
Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation.
If you see them, show them this information: ...

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad

Your quiz for today:  who said "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad"?

Was it Shakespeare?  Was it Homer?

Nope.

If you googled for the answer, you probably think Euripides.  This is a classic example of something being repeated on the internet so much that people think it must be true.  The answer isn't Euripides.

In its usual wording as above, it comes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  But he was rephrasing a saying that goes back more than 2,500 years.  The earliest use I know of is the play Antigone, where Sophocles quotes a version, which I've stolen from the Perseus translation:

For with wisdom did someone once reveal the maxim, now famous,
that evil at one time or another seems good,
to him whose mind a god leads to ruin.

Sophocles then adds:

But for the briefest moment such a man fares free of destruction.

Which is a variant of, "Well it seemed like a good idea at the time!"

And as the text makes clear, by the time of classical Athens it was already considered an old saying.  The origin must go back into prehistory.  Which is rather cool really for such a subtle idea.