Manner of Speech

I wrote a computer program to write haiku. This was in 1994 or thereabouts. I wrote it in PASCAL. Here is its best work:

Interfacing by Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier

The taller teacher
enlightens slowly, but this
ignorance consumes.

Or rather not its best work. It had no best work, because I hadn’t written into the program any sort of function for besting. It only had functions for working. The above work is the only work it made that I remember 25 years later.

The other day I was walking down 3rd Avenue and I heard a man say, “It’s about yay big,” which is a thing my father says. “Yay” or “yea”? Or “yae”? I thought of my father but it didn’t occur to me to call him. I actually need to call him for practical purposes to do with a kid and a car but I’ve been putting it off. I don’t like talking on the telephone.

Suppose that I had written a computer program for having telephone conversations. It wouldn’t have to have good ones. It would just have to have ones that followed the rules.

“Hello.”
“Hello.”
“Do you know who this is?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”