Accidental Haiku

The New York Times has gone and created a haiku-generator—no, it's a haiku-discoverer, pulling haiku-meter quotes from NYT articles. It's based ultimately on an open-source Python program, written by Jonathan Feinberg. I grabbed the code and tackled my sent email from the past few months. Here are the (better among the) results:

I may ask for house

    keys later but we'll see how

the day is going.

The other issue

    is one of length -- and this could

be a bit tricky.

Save your work often,

    you know how reliable

your computer is.

I think m4m

    is a little too oblique

for a subtitle.

Hope you celebrate

    with champagne and foie gras, or

some facsimile.

And, as expected,

    the Terman and Kinsey books

are totally cool.

I should start to look

    at those if I'm sending it all

in less than two weeks.

They are not stylists,

    but their writing is clearly

comprehensible.

Do you want to hang

    out with daddy more because

he is not as brown? 

Then they went and moved

    the whole thing to Las Vegas,

ruining our plan.

Just took a skim-look.

    I think this is a good plan.

But not a good goal.

This is, however,

    putting some parts of the cart

before the horses.

She has published two

    dozen journal articles

in addition. Bored?

Yup, that's it! The back-door

    one has been clicking away

since February.

Or is discretion

    dictating another day

in prone position?

Is there anything

    additional coming, or should

I just remove that?

Ponder what you might

    do with a few extra hands

for a long work day.

It is hard to lift

    out the title embedded

in the lighter text.

As a grad student,

    you're managing one big project,

the dissertation.

So I got involved

    in the 'keeping the author

happy' end of things.

You can tell her, too,

    that we're processing the second

half of her advance.

Two kinds of sex

We went to an elementary-school graduation party for a friend of ours on Friday. He's a methodical kid, loves assembling things from Legos, loves Star Wars (has since the age of one!), loves order and pattern and words and numbers, and really doesn't understand instinctively the social cues that most of us take for granted. It's been a struggle for him to get as far as he has, and so the celebration was well-merited. But that's all a little beside the point--there's wisdom to be shared here.

A couple of weeks ago, C. and his mom were in the car, and C. said, "There are two kinds of sex." His mom (from whom he inherits this trait of speaking his mind!) said, "Oh, really? Tell me more." So he explained, "Well, there's the biological kind, where you have kids. And then there's the other kind, which involves alcohol."

Accuracy through typographical error

"We can get much mire done over a couple of beers."

An odd thing explained

Traveling to New York is like going to another country; things are just a little bit different. One thing that struck me on my trip last week was the startling number of pay phones. And behold, here's the explanation: advertising. The ad space on the side of the phone booths provides way more revenue than the calls.

Incidentally, this reminds me of a story from the NYT a few years ago, about a pay-phone buff, the sort of a guy who always answers a ringing pay phone (back when they would take incoming calls, at least). His oddest exchange:

"Hello"
"Hello, is Louise there?"
"No, this is a pay phone"
"I know. Look, when she walks by, could you tell her that Julio called and I'm going to be at Rikers longer than I thought."