Wouldn't that have been a pretentious start to a blog post?

I think any sentence starting in "Why I" should probably continue with "man" as in "Why-eye man, yuz ganna have a reel piss-up like".

Language isn't communication, it's a tool that sets of thoughts in the brain. Words are just words, but by experience and convention and luck, we respond to them. If I write the following:

"There's a giant black dog on my keyboard"

you'd be hard pressed not to at least visualise some of that.

This is why I got interested in how to make a computer generate sentences at random, and how much this can be used to make me laugh in the middle of the night while I'm sitting in a towel, after a shower, with nothing better to do. Those days are gone, but the programs remain. Here are some links:

• The Haikulator - this generates random haikus and was the subject of some haiku research
• The Bibulator - this generates random tracts of nonsense biblical gibberish
• The Nth Commandment - more biblical gibberish, but in the form of nonsensical imperatives
• The Chartulator - last night's discovery - a program to generate pop charts that are meant to be perverse

Why do some of these make me laugh more than others? Why did some of the Haikulator's Haikus end up embroidered on shirts, almost as a slogan that meant something to me? Why is the Chartulator not very good, causing it to end up in a "crypt" folder that I rediscovered by accident last night with no recollection of ever having made it?

It comes down to the same reason that we find puns funny or not funny. Words, in orders which don't quite belong, or with leaps of logic or connections that we know are absolutely unsafe/insane/ridiculous cause us either pleasure or pain depending on how artfully done they happen to be... or how nearly coincidental they turn out to be when just picked from a virtual hat by a computer program.

I'm not saying that some comedians are funny because of pot-luck... but some computer programs are.