- When he wasn’t oppressing people, standing up to U.S. hegemony, or shopping for new fatigues, Fidel Castro was apparently copyediting—and quite handily, at that. A new report claims that Gabriel García Márquez used to send Castro all his manuscripts, taking advantage of the dictator’s keen attention to detail: “After reading his book The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Fidel had told Gabo there was a mistake in the calculation of the speed of the boat. This led Gabo to ask him to read his manuscripts … Another example of a correction he made later on was in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, where Fidel pointed out an error in the specifications of a hunting rifle.”*
- Attention British people and/or Anglophiles with large quantities of British currency: look at your five-pound notes. A micro-engraver has etched teeny-tiny portraits of Jane Austen onto four of these bills, which substantially increases their value: if you have one, it’s probably worth something on the order of twenty thousand quid. You’ll need a microscope to be sure you have one of the special notes. So go out and buy a microscope already—you keep putting it off, putting it off, all these years you’ve said to yourself, Self, it’s high time you bought that microscope you’re always going on about …
*footnote, Dec. 9:
Giraffes, Despair, and Other News
