prior probability

I have been busy working on a new whimsical literary project this week and will be sharing the fruits of my intellectual labors here starting today. My prologue is below the fold:

According to Linda Bordoni (via Vatican News), Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, visited some 68 countries during his 12-year pontificate. Here is a link to his official testament, and here are his Reflections on Old Age.

To commemorate this joyous rite, check out the oil painting Les Disciples by Swiss artist Eugène Burnand:

Is this not one of the greatest Easter paintings of all time? Via Mike Frost:

What a cool homage and great remake of a Billy Joel classic!

Today (17 April) is the 64th anniversary of the “Bay of Pigs” invasion for the liberation of Cuba. Building on previous accounts of this covert and controversial operation (see here, here, or here, for example), last year I wrote a heartfelt homage to the brave and idealistic men of this doomed military expedition: Who Betrayed the Cuban Brigade?

Via Wikipedia (links and footnotes in the original), I stumbled upon this remarkable anecdote of the time when Mario Vargas Llosa punched Gabriel García Márquez in the face:

“In 1971, Vargas Llosa published García Márquez: Story of a Deicide (García Márquez: historia de un deicidio), which was his doctoral thesis for the Complutense University of Madrid.^[36][37] Although Vargas Llosa wrote this book-length study about his then friend, the Colombian Nobel laureate writer Gabriel García Márquez, they did not speak to each other again. In 1976, Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez in the face at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, ending the friendship.^[38] Neither writer publicly stated the underlying reasons for the quarrel.^[39] A photograph of García Márquez sporting a black eye was published in 2007, reigniting public interest in the feud.^[40] Despite the decades of silence, in 2007, Vargas Llosa agreed to allow part of his book to be used as the introduction to a 40th-anniversary edition of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was re-released in Spain and throughout Latin America that year.^[41] Historia de un Deicidio was also reissued in that year, as part of Vargas Llosa’s complete works.”

See also this story about the quarrel in El País as well as footnotes 38 and 39 below the fold.

Did you know that literary giant Mario Vargas Llosa was once the leading presidential candidate in the 1990 Peruvian general election? Although Vargas Llosa won the first round with a narrow plurality, his opponent, Alberto Fujimori, won the election in the runoff round. Below is a recording of the 1990 debate between Vargas Llosa and Fujimori:

I was first introduced to the great Mario Vargas Llosa in college — I was a Spanish literature and political philosophy major — and instantly became a fan of his classical liberal politics and a lifelong reader of his works. Here are two obituaries: one by the BBC; the other, El País.