Pop quiz. Can you match the dragon color to the deadly substance exhaled?

There’s a really interesting lecture by Michael Drout on the 4/16/10 iTunes feed for The Tolkien Professor podcast. Here’s a sample:

Strider, who became Aragorn, was originally a hobbit named “Trotter,” who wore wooden shoes or had wooden feet even. (He’d been tortured by the Dark Lord and so had to wear shoes, or maybe even have prosthetic wooden feet.) And “Trotter” persisted forever. Meriadoc’s name was “Marmaduke.” And my favorite one is that Frodo was “Bingo” — for a long time, I mean, like, multiple drafts. So what I tell my students is: revise, revise, revise … Or actually, the other one is that in The Hobbit, Gandalf’s original name was “Bladderthin.” And again that persisted through whole drafts.

Nice. I just noticed that The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is now available for the Mac, as a $10 instant download. Seriously, best ten bucks you’ll ever spend.

ETA: Listen to my December 2010 interview with Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy will be interviewing Robin Wasserman, author of the YA science fiction novel Skinned, and Eli Kintisch, author of Hack the Planet, a nonfiction book about ambitious and risky geoengineering schemes to address climate change. If anyone has any questions they’d like us to ask them, feel free to suggest them.

Apparently my copy of Shadow & Claw is a big believer in safe sex:

Wow, remind me never to travel to Saudi Arabia:

“Sorcerer” Faces Imminent Death in Saudi Arabia

Ali Sabat was the host of a popular Lebanese TV show in which he predicted the future and gave advice. He was arrested by religious police on sorcery charges while on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in 2008. His lawyer, May el-Khansa, says she has been told Mr Sabat is due to be executed this week … Many Saudi executions are beheadings by the sword in public places.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is scheduled to interview Naomi Novik, author of His Majesty’s Dragon, and Eric Garcia, author of Matchstick Men and Repo Men, so if anyone has any questions they’d like us to ask them, feel free to suggest them.

Here’s a cool visual demonstration of contradictions in the Bible. Each arc stretches between two contradictory verses.

Here’s the table of contents for Zombies, the Spanish-language edition of The Living Dead, which includes my story “El muchacho con cara de calavera.”

Here’s the preliminary cover for the anthology The Way of the Wizard, edited by John Joseph Adams (which includes my story “Family Tree”).

Check out this terrific app: The Scale of the Universe. It allows you to zoom in to a Planck length or out to the size of the Universe, and see a hundred different objects in proper scale all along the way.

George R. R. Martin weighs in on the health care debate, providing some perspective on the horrific situation faced by freelance artists in America. Hundreds of comments to his blog ensued.

In a follow-up post he notes: “I find it telling that virtually ALL the posters from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, and other countries that have a single payer national health care service LIKE their national health plan, and would NOT trade it for the American model. Meanwhile, here in the US, we are clearly split right down the middle … Now I ask you: if there are two restaurants, one where 99% of the customers are satisfied and happy, and one where half the customers are happy and the other half profoundly unhappy with the food and service, which would you rather eat at?”

Here’s a really cool article about the Indian Rationalist Association: Skeptic Challenges Guru to Kill Him Live on TV. The article focuses on the organization’s president, Sanal Edamaruku.

From the article: His organisation traces its origins to the 1930s when the “Thinker’s Library” series of books, published by Britain’s Rationalist Press Association, were first imported to India. They included works by Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin and H.G. Wells; among the early subscribers was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister.

But since Mr Edamaruku took over in 1985, it has grown into a grass-roots organisation of more than 100,000 members — mainly young professionals, teachers and students — covering most of India. Members now spend much of their time investigating and reverse-engineering “miracles” performed by self-styled holy men who often claim millions of followers and amass huge wealth from donations.

The article goes into some detail about how many of these “miracles” are performed.

Finished a new 6,400 word short story, “The Ontological Factor,” a loving homage to Robert Asprin’s Myth series. Years ago John Joseph Adams and I had to sit around Grand Central Station for a few hours waiting for someone, and in the course of that long conversation we discovered that we’re both big fans of the Myth books, and he suggested I should write something in that style. I loved the idea, and spent a lot of time thinking about it, but was never able to come up with a good approach to the material. I went back to it after Asprin’s death in 2008, because I thought it would be a nice tribute to the man who had been my favorite author during my childhood, and I spent quite a bit of time developing a concept, but in the end I just wasn’t thrilled with it and moved on to other things. Late last year I finally came up with what I think is a terrific new twist on the idea of dimension-hopping adventurers, but I was too busy with other stuff to actually write it, and that probably ended up being for the best, because working out all the logical implications of the idea turned out to be fiendishly complicated, and even after I’d spent four or five months plotting it out in my head I still stalled when I tried to actually write it, because things I hadn’t considered kept cropping up. In one of his forewards, Asprin, who was famously afflicted with writer’s block, declared, “These books just look spontaneous and easy to write. Honest!”, and I now have much greater appreciation for the truth of this. Anyway, the story is finally done, and I’m really, really pleased with how it turned out.