Not quite a “tune” for the summer return, but an opportunity to recognize people who light the world up by seeing it in a different way. Thank you Robin Williams, David Foster Wallace and Jorge Luis Borges, whose “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge”, in a fictitious Chinese encyclopedia, includes this classification of animals:
- Those that belong to the Emperor
- Embalmed ones
- Those that are trained
- Suckling pigs
- Mermaids
- Fabulous ones
- Stray dogs
- Those included in the present classification
- Those that tremble as if they were mad
- Innumerable ones
- Those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
- Others
- Those that have just broken a flower vase
- Those that from a long way off look like flies.
Then there’s Spike Milligan.