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.