Wikipedia is a powerful artistic tool. It contains so much trivia, so many odd images and unexpected connections, that it’s never the same site, visit to visit. It’s a rippling pond of weirdness, and I love it.

One of the textual methods Wikipedia best captures for us is exhaustion. Wikipedian (Wikipedic?) lists return to the Renaissance encyclopedia-of-everything method of gathering information—including even things that don’t quite fit. Every story, every myth, every stray possibility gets its own subhead, its five seconds of obscure fame.

(Aside: The paradox of modern nerd culture is that it makes “famous” the niche; obscurity is denied to everything. In a perversion of Warhol’s maxim, people aren’t more likely to become truly famous, only to be denied the invisibility of the unappreciated outsider-creator. Today, an F. Kafka would be doing interviews with David Remnick and selling silk-screened HUNTER GRACCHUS shirts on Etsy.)

My favorite exhaustive list so far is the Wikipedical (?) list of methods of divination, which methods are stupendously legion in sheer number and in category (”selenomancy,” moon-scrying, being a spawner of many imitators). Here are a few faves:

• macharomancy: divination by swords or knives
• rumpology (also natimancy): divination by buttocks
• tyromancy: divination by cheese
• transataumancy: divination by things accidentally seen or heard
• cosquinomancy: divination by hanging sieves
• cephaleonomancy: divination by boiling a donkey’s head

How you divine the future using buttocks (yours? a handy assistant’s?), I don’t know.

But the donkey’s head thing sounds appropriately occult. Might be hard to convince the NYPD you’re just scrying the foggy shore of What’s To Come, of course, when they show up and ask about the missing donkey and the mysterious smell. But potentially worth it—esp. if the donkey’s head speaks to you (in Latin? backwards Latin?), telling your fortune/the fortune of your buttocks.