Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Annals of Catymology: a really rancid random text generator
I'm always fascinated by rancidness. In his post today on Stupid machine-generated spiritual blather Geoffrey Pullum of Language Log noses into a mother-load of rancidness:
The site established by the Devi Press (find them if you want at
http://www.devipress.com/, but I am damned if I am going to
give them a link) for the purpose of advertising its books on Christian,
gnostic, and mystical topics has a set of pages containing 1,185 articles
on religious topics, each with an accompanying link to a page advertising
a book called The Mystic Christ. The article titles, indexed in
ASCII order, run from "1 John God Is Love" and "A Love Sent From God
Above" down to "Youth Group Devotions" and "Zohar Kabbalah". And a
typical piece of prose from one of them looks like this:
Abounding opposites present a few pages but he was carried out of members
who went to our conversation ends where it really fulminating on
ecumenically united states . . .
If I weren't such a shy, unassuming bachelor cat, I might have thought of that self-referential technique myself.