MemeMachineGo!

Wikipedia has a fun entry on common misconceptions including:

Napoleon Bonaparte was not especially short. After his death in 1821, the French emperor's height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches in French feet. This corresponds to 5 feet 6.5 inches in modern international feet, or 1.686 metres, making him slightly taller than an average Frenchman of the 19th century. The metric system was introduced during his lifetime, so it was natural that he would be measured in feet and inches for much of his life. His nickname was "le petit caporal." There are competing explanations for why he was called this, but few modern scholars believe it referred to his stature.

A hot topic in the blogosphere during the current 15 minutes is a young woman who was a minor league con artist. Here's Jezebel's take:

The fact that she's Korean-American is intriguing; as anyone who's been to a Williamsburg art opening knows, for a lot of these dudes, having an Asian girlfriend is some kind of weird fetish (to the point where one Chinese American friend of mine remarked once, "I can't go near those hipster neighborhoods. These guys just want to date an Asian, doesn't matter who, and it's racist and weird and really uncomfortable." Another friend adds, "It's obviously rooted in some racist stereotype of the 'exotic' or 'submissive' - I don't even want to know what.") Vice has never made any bones about its love of hot Asian women - see any "Dos" - so Farrell chose her targets well. One has to note that after writing a note to a stranger at a bar reading, "I want to give you a hand job with my mouth,"she signed it "Korean Abdul-Jabbar." [...]

Farrell is by no means emblematic of Asians, Asian women, women, Straight-Edge ex scenesters, adopted children, administrative assistants, or even other con artists: she's clearly a deeply disturbed person who, however immoral, was seeking love and attention. She wreaked havoc on a lot of lives and left a lot of people feeling not just hurt, but humiliated. She seemed so harmless! They all seem to suggest. And why would they think that? To quote Kim, "unlike any other racial group in America today, Asian women routinely are dehumanized in popular culture as sexualized, meek and voiceless objects." Surely Farrell knew this too?

The article rightly hastens to point out that she's not emblematic of women, or Asians, or Asian women. Funny, though, how the men she defrauded were all such... emblems.

These are some things that have made me happy lately:

• Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent
• Tweenbots
• Extreme sheep herding
• Chimp and tigers (more pictures)

I've posted previously about the reference works available at Bartleby.com. I wanted to call attention to the links on the American Heritage dictionary page, which spotlight some special features:

• regional notes
• our living language notes
• synonym notes
• usage notes
• word history notes
• Indo-European roots index

From the last, I learned that pagoda, nebbish, porgy, and esophagus all stem from the same root.

William Shatner was a (non-flying) Karamazov Brother.

Isaac Newton fought crime.

As warden of the Royal Mint, Newton estimated that 20% of the coins taken in during The Great Recoinage were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convictions of the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult to achieve; however, Newton proved to be equal to the task. Disguised as an habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton was made a justice of the peace and between June 1698 and Christmas 1699 conducted some 200 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers and suspects. Newton won his convictions and in February 1699, he had ten prisoners waiting to be executed.

Zachary Taylor's adventures beyond the grave:

Shortly after breaking ground for the Washington Monument on July 4, 1850, President Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War, fell ill. When he died suddenly a few days later, the cause was listed as gastroenteritis--inflammation of the stomach and intestines. Some historians suspected that Taylor's death may have had other causes, and in 1991 one convinced Taylor's descendants that the president might have suffered arsenic poisoning. As a result, Taylor's remains were exhumed from a cemetery in Louisville and Kentucky's medical examiner brought samples of hair and fingernail tissue to Oak Ridge National Laboratory for study.