Seasons

Ok, visited the "cadavre exquis" site, and I'm not extremely impressed. For one thing, the "verses" all follow the same pattern. For another, there's severa ppl in there putting in dirty words just because they're "kewl" or something. While I'm anything but a swear word Nazi, I at least prefer them to be there for a reason other than "kewl"ness.

It is, however, similar to a card game we occasionally play. Take some index cards & cut em into 4 pieces. Then, on front & back (if desired), write nounse, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs. (A noun on each side of one card, for instance.) Shuffle the nouns, verbs, etc. separately, and stack them up in the order [adj] [noun] [verb] [adv]. Then you can just flip one from each pile over and add "the" to the beginning. So you end up with sentences like "The masculine submarine gargled halfheartedly."

This game got boring after a while, so I decided to make a version with varying sentence structures. Using mIRC script, I've made 75 or so newspaper headline templates (Dracula seen attacking a tampon in the valley of the shadow of death), 30 or 40 definitions (Burrito: a Spandex cow filled with fiberglass), several song titles (Defenestrate me in the psych ward, lazy crustacean), band names (the Reno churchgoing antichrists), and even mutilated Bible quotes (blessed are the crusty, for they shall sit on the aftershave). (Wow, that was a really long sentence. O.o) Anyway, I made it so I could add words and entire word lists whenever I want to right from mIRC, without having to open text files. So it now has maybe 10k words to plug into the sentences, and is usually grammatically correct. I oughtta put it online for ppl to dl sometime, but then I might actually run into bandwidth limits and stuff.

www.newzoid.com does it with real newspaper headlines, can be quite profound. And how did you recognize me, Onyx

Are you Dracula, or the Spandex cow?

You’re right about the pattern and dirty words, OnyxFlame. But the verses depend solely of the input of the visitors… Usually the phrases in the French version sounds better than the English ones. On their links page I found this other page with crazy, randomly generated, headlines for medical stories: http://chanter.com/yves/medical.htm Very funny! And the phrases are well build. I tried to discover how it’s done, by isolating the building blocks. I think It’s more complex as it looks at first sight (or the programmer cheats and the phrases arte less random than they pretend to be).

I'm not at all surprised that a lot of people here like these kinds of things. We seem to be by and large linguistic enthusiasts with artistic and musical talents. In my writing, I like to explore the bizarre and make people laugh. For example, I wrote a story that you could read without understanding but could listen to and understand it completely. It was something like "Duh Why Lee Focks". It was hilarious to listen to because the reader would make sense but pronounce everything in a strange way.

Then there are ways to write that break expectations, like "He had an apple in each hand and a pear in the other."

I've been playing a sort of game with a few of my poet friends that just involves writing two-line poems. One guy will write about three dozen first lines and pass them over to the other guy (usually by email), who will finish the poems (or pass them to someone else to make three-line poems from). It's surprising what good results we sometimes get.

I've done "3 line stanza" poems with my cousin, similar to what you're talking about except since we're in person we generally make the poem tell a story as we go along. The last one was about a group of 40 sailors who went off in a ship to explore. They were carrying a cargo of kale, and everyone got really sick of eating it, so one night a sailor unveiled his stash of contraband celery. They all got drunk and the one gay sailor on board got sensory overload. Then a deserted and sinister-looking island came in view, but it had a lot of fruit trees so they were going to land anyway so they wouldn't get scurvy or something. Unfortunately, we never finished it, but it could've been really interesting.

Hmm, not too impressed with newzoid.com. It sounds TOO much like real news.

Here's some examples my own program has produced. WARNING: may include dirty words and/or adult stuff


DEFIANT CAMEL MOUNTS 821 COWS.
JENNIFER LOPEZ DONATES FIFTEEN IDIOTS TO "SUCK THE MISSILES" FUND.
OPERATION EROTIC GNOME FAILS WHEN 7 PROSTITUTES BEEP ANALLY.
WOMAN REPORTEDLY CHASTISES SATAN WITH A NACHO.
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER MENOPAUSAL NUNS ON THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE.
UROLOGIST UPRISING IN BEIRUT LEAVES SNAKES PREGNANT.
WEATHERMEN SAY BEAN DIP ABUSE IS THE LEADING CAUSE OF INCONTINENT GRANDMOTHERS.
STONED GOLFER DENIES DRINKING KING KONG'S URINE.
ELVIS IMPERSONATORS RESCUE 69 ROMULANS FROM CRAPPING GRANDMOTHER.
FLATULENT MAN AVENGES SISTER WITH HIS ASS.

Yes, I have a twisted mind.

One of the best of our two-line poems:

Tell me of the land of my forefathers
and then shut up.

Onyx, isaacc, I love those!

Prof, that is so cool that you do stuff like that with your wife. It sounds like you're friends too. A lot of people (guys especially) want to get sucked into the whole knight/damsel construct (which is artificial anyway) at the expense of everything else.

I particularly liked this piece of medical news:

A report to the House Subcommittee on Mad Cow Disease, endorsed by the National Rifle Association, brazenly dares to suggest that a prediction made by Nostradamus increases the chances of religious extremism.

Patricia: I've figured out the pattern of the medical report thingy. It's really pretty simple, every headline has the same pattern.

DOCUMENT (a new CIA report, Martha Stewart's new bio-epic) MEDIA/GROUP (premiering tonight on Fox, hitting the newsstands later this week) INTENT DESCRIPTOR (makes it doubtful that, lays to rest the issue of whether) CAUSE (unsaturated fat, frequent computer use) CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP (helps prevent, contributes to) EFFECT (fascism, the common cold)

Guess all that random sentence programming *is* useful for something.