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Being a fan (another word for enthusiast, not that there's anything wrong with enthusiasm, at least in these here parts) of dada and William S. Burroughs' cut-up method, I thought I'd take a break from doing Important Research to elaborate on that a bit. I could also babble out my obligatory 3000 words per hour, but oh well.
As someone once said, geek brains need exercise. This is best accomplished with weirdness and lots of it. But how to create such weirdness? I can spew it out at 3,000 words per hour, true, but in these days of pronk-powered internet you can have machines do the hard work for you. For example, MegaHAL is an "ELIZA" type program that you can switch out with different brains. A brain consisting of Bible verses and They Might Be Giants lyrics, for example, would probably be quite entertaining.
Babelfishing pages of text (i.e., translating an English page into a foreign language, especially Chinese/Japanese, and then back) can provide some interesting results, as words inevitably get mangled in the translation. You will end up with things like The Game Of Dies.
Breaking up pages into Markov chains and doing your own cut-up manually is another option. By dividing sentences according to common words and remixing them, you can come up with some unusual combinations. For example, a remix of the United States Constitution, the Ultimate Flame, some Negativland lyrics, one of President Bush's speeches, and the Song Of Solomon produces the following:
A bundle of myrrh is "return on success." The $0.000000001 worth of electricity used to send the ability of Iraqis to maintain security gains. According to Gen. Petraeus and Jerry Pournelle. Hee-Haw is benighted. Phone sex operators hang up on you. Telemarketers refuse to be able to access it ever so much more rapidly. If cluelessness were crude oil, your dog to play with oddly placed stains. You are degenerate, noxious and bucklers, all shields of mighty men. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. No person shall be violently reversed. We would leave our children to face a pork chop around your position on Iraq, we should be as valid against the very thought of you. You have all the unholy spawn of a Republican Form of Government, and ballerinas everywhere. Earlier this year, I received an ad about purity of water. Drip, drip, drip. Are you pregnant again? Yes! Babies, babies, right. Motive, we can use as a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and a flock of goats that appear from Gilead. Thy teeth are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.
Myrrh.
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