The Randomized Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens Lorem Ipsum (Hitchsum) is randomly generated text in the style of Christopher Hitchens. The text is generated using a Markov Chain and uses as input various debate transcripts obtained from here. I have tidied the transcript—removed quotations, parentheses and transcription notes—to improve the quality of the text generation.
Short of a resurrection, this is the best we can do. For now.
haikus
Haikus can take a while to generate—the random text needs to be repeatedly generated until it fits the poem's form. In addition to requiring the right syllable count for each line (5, 7, 5), my haiku engine also checks that some lines conform to the end of a sentence. This is a challenging requirement because Hitchens spoke in very long sentences.
Haiku syllable counting is automated, so please pardon errors.
To speed up serving the haikus, I have generated a large number of them—just over 16,000—ahead of time and sample from this set. You can download all the Hitchens haikus either unformatted or formatted.
During the Hitchmas 2016 celebration, we projected the Hitchens haiku stream for our guests to enjoy.
Other Ipsums
Hitchsum is one of a large family of ipsums.
If you're interested in words you may enjoy (or not) Tripsum and my Word Usage Analysis of Presidental Debates
implementation
Written in Perl. Text is generated by Algorithm::MarkovChain. Syllables are counted by Lingua::EN::Syllable.
updates
13 Dec 2016. v0.01. Launched site. Getting ready for Hitchmas in Dublin.