0-star Hotel
The Null Stern Hotel's a Swiss hotel whose name means zero-star hotel. According to Wikipedia, it's the only one.
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The Null Stern Hotel's a Swiss hotel whose name means zero-star hotel. According to Wikipedia, it's the only one.
I just read The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips, based on a recommendation on Ken Jennings' blog. A Jeopardy 5-time champion writes a novel that includes a Jeopardy champion? Yeah, I'm there.
It's a frustrating book. The prologue is a tremendous bit of writing. I read it aloud to Pocahontas. It makes me care more about whether a shouted audience request on a concert LP made it onto the CD re-release than most fiction ever makes me care about whether people live or die.
The prose sometimes hits the same heights as the prologue, but it's in service of a story that grows increasingly strained, culminating in the most contrived situation I've ever seen an author ask me to take seriously, bedroom farce played straight.
I did enjoy the Jeopardy champion, though. He's a minor character, our hero's brother, the kind of verging-on-Asperger's know-it-all I've encountered often in fandom and geekdom. (And, yes, the kind of verging-on-Asperger's know-it-all other people have encountered when they've met me.) I'm wishing now (as I often end up doing) that I hadn't been quite so prompt about returning it the book to the library, so I could share some choice passages about him, like how he'd argue contrarian positions until his victim capitulated, then he'd disprove whatever his assertion had been.
But, in conclusion, I'd advise reading the prologue and skipping the rest. But I thought enough of Phillips' writing that I plan to give The Egyptologist a try.
James Patrick Kelly's Standing in Line with Mr. Jimmy is a story that has stuck with me. Our hero is a feckless youth on the dole. In the course of the story, he discovers that he's truly trapped -- an open secret that he and his friends hadn't been privy to is that once you've been on the dole, you become untouchable to employers. It was capricious, and cruel, and believeable.
Today, the LA Times has a story about a trend of people being denied jobs because they have bad credit.
With a policy like that being applied indiscriminately, once you're behind on your bills, how are you ever going to get out?
It was just two months ago I was talking about how great the American Heritage dictionary at Bartleby.com was. No more.
Due to financial and usage considerations the reference works licensed from Columbia University Press and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have been removed as of June 2009.
The consolation is that you can look up the notes indexes from the Internet Archive:
and then look those words up at dictionary.com whose results include the full American Heritage entries, including the notes.
There doesn't seem to be a way to get to the Indo-European roots appendix.
However, affixes.org, is a great consolation -- a guide to Greek and Latin roots, on online version of Ologies and Isms by the World Wide Word's Michael Quinion.
Wonder how obnoxious it would be to actually buy the electronic AHD.