On Unicode as a political tool in Gravity's Rainbow

Language Log via Languagehat.

Card catalog porn

. . . at the Czech National Library:

The cards vary: some are white cardstock, some are a pale mint green, and others are onionskin. Some are typed, some are mimeographed, and some are handwritten. Each moves beneath the finger with a subtly different gravity. Some have the softened, yellowed edges of frequent fingering, while others exhibit the crisp, unsullied corners of a hidden treasure.

—Myla Goldberg, "Library, Interrupted", Time's Magpie: A Walk in Prague

I'm sure the green and purple jellyfish building would have been sexy, too.

Gull on skull

Appeared to be leering at traffic.
Thursday, July 22, 2010.

Gull on skull

Monday, July 12, 2010.

Gull on skull

Friday, July 9, 2010.

Gull on skull

Thursday, July 8, 2010.

Gull on skull

Well positioned on the crest, Wednesday, July 7, 2010.

Gull on skull

Monday, June 28, 2010.

Kestrel on dinosaur again

Friday, June 18, 2010. First vertebra of neck. Second b-o-d of the year.

Kestrel on dinosaur

Small but majestic, facing away from traffic. First 2010 b-o-d!

Craft and love

"True amateurism should not be looked down upon. In times like ours any manifestation of liveliness must be cherished."
—Books, Boxes, and Portfolios: Franz Zeier

Patti Smith

Saw her at the Harold on Sunday, bought a book, had it inscribed. What a benevolent, beautiful presence. Too many jumpy people in the audience, though.

Mutton fat

A subtle greasy-white color "highly esteemed by scholars, who preferred it to the brilliant green and white hues of jadeite."
—from a Minneapolis Institute of Art paper on museum interpretation and effective labeling techniques.

A crock, but interesting

Typealyzer, which returns a Myers-Briggs analysis based on blog contents. It says I'm a Doer (Extraverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving). Hah! I wish.

Borges tidbit

Taxonomy has been on my mind lately. I was excited to read this line from JLB's "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" at artist Paul Perry's remarkable Alamut:

Beauty belongs to the sixteenth category;
it is a living brood fish,
an oblong one.

Though tech author Douglas Crockford provides a more literal interpretation

The whale belongs to the sixteenth category; it is a viviparous oblong fish.

and points out an underlying typo—belleza (beauty) for ballena (whale)—I much prefer the former version.

Two very different sites (one extant, one not) with much to explore. Crockford has a lot to say on JavaScript. The subject index of Alamut is itself quite a taxonomic tour de force.

Speculation about "how this confusion was orca-strated" in a comment on Will Fitzgerald's translation.

There's another refreshingly unformulaic blog post about the Borges quote at readin.

Conjure-related

Lapland was traditionally regarded as the home of witches and wizards able to conjure winds and tempests, per the Online Etymology Dictionary.

On Jeff Koons

By Peter Schjeldahl in a New Yorker review of the MCA retrospective – not complimentary to the collage-like paintings:

"Painting is a medium of concerted imagination, symbolizing consciousness. It's not a flat dump for miscellaneous ideas."

Other personal bloggers who liked the quote:

• Elliptical Vistas
• Articulations

Etymology of 'prairie'

According to Canadian word expert Bill Casselman, early French explorers had no word for the vast grasslands they encountered in North America, so they used prairie, meaning grazing land or dry scrubland. Pré (meadow) is related, from the Latin pratum.

A palate cleanser

Posted because I have abused poetry in these pages (by calling haiku things which are not haiku).

The real thing is always an imitation
Consider new plum blossoms behind the zendo
– Philip Whalen, "Dharmakaya"

Check out Whalen's The Invention of the Letter as digitized by Steve Silberman.