Wordnik is an on-line dictionary I haven't been able to stump. (It's disappointingly easy to stump most free on-line dictionaries. But Wiktionary is also hard to stump.)

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:

• regional notes
• our living language notes
• synonym notes
• usage notes
• word history notes

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.

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'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.

Local hotels sell 2-day passes to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for the same price the Aquarium sells a one-day pass. On Sunday, it seemed like we were violating some local custom by not having brought a double-wide child stroller, but Monday wasn't so crowded.

Besides the sea otters (there's supposed to be a webcam of them, but right now it's showing an exterior shot of Monterey Bay,) my favorite exhibits were the leafy sea dragon, and the ribbon pipehorse, two of the most incredible animal mimics I've ever seen, even trumping the leaf mimics I posted to the Free Range Memes sidebar.

Entry title courtesy of the Tick.

The Netherlands is closing prisons: not enough criminals. [via Bob Harris]

If your dad is a chemistry professor, asking why can be dangerous

There's no disputing of the Egyptians' pioneering contributions to cat worship, however.

As of now, Wednesday morning, USPS still hasn't heard of it. Order tracking on Amazon describes it as having shipped on Sunday with the details "Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit."

Maybe the Amazon warehouse in New Castle, Delaware is really far from the Post Office. Maybe it's lost or there's been some other screw-up. Maybe it's even the case that every truck out of the warehouse in the past two days has been filled to capacity with higher-priority packages.

But it's seeming a little more likely that it's simply sitting, waiting to be shipped until I've been adequately punished for my cheapness.

Updated: In the comments, Doug G. points out that USPS' tracking isn't reliable enough to conclude that an item hasn't shipped. He's right, and I withdraw my speculation that Amazon was sitting on my package.

I'm holding off on purchasing it, though, 'cause I don't want the time hit right now.

The Linux Hauppauge HVR-2250 driver looks to be in usable condition, so I should be able to disassemble the Rube Goldberg arrangement by which I have a device attached to my serial port that sends IR remote control signals to a digital TV converter box to change channels so I can record things on my analog TV tuner card. (Yeah, I'm amazed it works at all, too.) I'll be able to record in HD, too, for all the good it'll do me, what with still chugging along with a non-HD CRT TV and an original Xbox for an HTPC.

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.

• 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.

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

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.

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.