Lou Harper's Blog, page 5

Vintage Monday: Old Bookstore

I can totally imagine myself in this picture: just after a rain, the air is nippy but smells good. On my way home for work I stop at the bookstore and end up browsing for an hours, and finally leave with a stack of books under my arm.

Reader Beware

Every once in a while I google one or other of my books, and almost always find them listed on a pirate site. Oh, the joys of authorship. I won't even go there, but this whole new (to me) racket I've stumbled upon is worth sharing.
I found my not yet released book listed on two seemingly different sites—free on other, for money on the other. The second one even looked pretty professional, complete with reviews pulled straight from Goodreads.
The takedown notice email sent to the first site came back as undeliverable. No big surprise. Now, here comes the interesting part: when clicking on the download button at each, I was sent to the exact same login page. To create an account all I had to do was enter my email address and my credit card umber.
Needless to say, my internal klaxons broke into a howl at that very moment. After further poking I discovered the following facts: There are various sites out there—I have no idea how many—offering everything from movie streaming to books magazines, comics. They look different, have unique urls, but they all lead to the same site where you need to create an account by providing a credit card number right upfront.
Yes, dear reader, you guessed it right: this is a scam.  But not a garden variety one, because if they simply stole your numbers they'd be shut down pretty fast. The cleverly nefarious part of this operation is that they simply start charging monthly fees to your card, whether you use their services or not. Apparently, their "free" trial period last five days and they charge you if you try to cancel. (I've learned this from complaints of unhappy customers.)

And it's probably perfectly legal. I wasn't stupid enough to go far enough in the process to encounter it, but I bet there is at one point a term of service they make you agree to. And who reads those? (I'm fairly certain I've promised my firstborn to Apple during one those iTunes upgrades.)
So here comes the warning: DO NOT GIVE YOUR CREDIT CARD INFO to anyone, any site even mildly suspicious. There's zero fucking reason why they should have it for membership. And go to reputable retailers to buy books. Unless, you were hoping to pirate those books. In which case, please go ahead and sign-up.

Wednesday Word: Rapacious

rapacious |rəˈpāSHəs| adjectiveaggressively greedy or grasping: rapaciouslandlords.DERIVATIVES rapaciously adverb.rapaciousness nounORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Latinrapax, rapac- (from rapere ‘to snatch’) + -ious.This word makes me think of carnivorous dinosaurs. 

Vintage Monday: Rabbit

The rabbit is laying Easter eggs. The small brown variety.

Wednesday Word: Risible

risible |ˈrizəbəl| adjectivesuch as to provoke laughter: a risible sceneof lovemaking in a tent.• rare (of a person) having the faculty or power of laughing; inclined to laugh.DERIVATIVESrisibility |ˌrizəˈbilətē| noun.risibly |-blē| adverbORIGIN mid 16th cent. (in the sense‘inclined to laughter’): from late Latinrisibilis, from Latin ris- ‘laughed,’from the verb ridere .
What a perfect word, yet I've never used it. This shall change.

Wednesday Word: Piffle

piffle |ˈpifəl| noun& exclam. informal nonsense.ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: diminutive of imitative piff-.
Lovely word--you can practically spit it on someone talking gibberish.

Thesaurus Thursday

There are bad day and there are good days. Yesterday was one of the latter. After a swim I stopped at my favorite used bookstore to visit the kitties. I spotted one of them right away playing, and did the natural thing--got down to eye level to take a picture. Kitty did what was natural to him: got up, climbed on my shoulders and proceeded trying to chew my ear off. In the literal sense.

After my eventual escape--ears mostly intact--I went browsing and immediately found a 1933 Roget's Thesaurus. I've been looking for something like it for a long time. It's a cheap reprint, but I don't care; my interest is in the content. Old thesauri are a great source to find archaic words. You know, in case I ever decided to write a historic novel.

This book has some nice old expressions too. For example under "relief" it lists: temper the wind to the shorn lamb and lay the flattering unction to one's soul. However, it has nothing about rescuing one's ear from the maws of kittens.

Wednesday Word: Epicene

epicene |ˈepiˌsēn| adjectivehaving characteristics of both sexes or no characteristics of either sex; of indeterminate sex: the sort of epicene beauty peculiar to boys of a certain age.• effeminate; effete: the actor infused the role with an epicene languor.nounan epicene person.ORIGIN late Middle English (as a grammaticalterm): via late Latin from Greek epikoinos (based on koinos ‘common’).
Until yesterday I had no knowledge of the existence of this word. You'd think it should be listed as a synonym for androgynous but my dictionary doesn't think so.

Vintage Monday: Two Gentlemen from Vienna

A handsome couple aren't they?

I know the picture was taken in Vienna because of the photographer's address, but it reminds me of the strange custom of changing the name of some foreign cities and countries. Not just the English do it either. The Hungarian name for Vienna/Wien is Bécs. Don't ask me why; I have no idea.

Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure New York is called New York in most of the world, but United States of America is Eggyesült Államok in Hungarian. (And Hungarian is magyar.) This gives rise to the frequent joke of calling Egybesült Államok. Egybesült is when you fry or deep-fry foodstuff and two pieces get stuck together in the process. Not unlike these two gents are stuck together. Ha! I knew I could bring it back around. :)

Wednesday Word: Churlish

churlish |ˈCHərliSH| adjectiverude in a mean-spirited and surly way: it seemschurlish to complain.DERIVATIVES churlishly adverb.churlishness nounORIGIN Old English cierlisc, ceorlisc 
Now here's a perfectly good word that has fallen out of favor. It would be an interesting experiment calling people churlish with a big smile. Would they be affronted or take it as a compliment?