"A thousand chimpanzees with typewriters..."

I was reading Karina Fabian's Fabianspace the other day and decided to give a writing analyzer she talked about a shot. The first thing I ran through it was "On a Road from Victory." The results were so funny and being the idle sort I am, I blew twenty minutes and ran a bunch of my other stuff through. I pasted only the complete bodies of the pieces, leaving off the titles and such. I'm wondering what the algorithm is keying off of as some of the stuff did seem to be bunched in a consistent pattern. here's what I got:

"On a Road from Victory"--Margaret Mitchell
"A feather's Fall in Vacuum"--James Joyce
"Morning Ritual"--Lewis Carroll
"Tarzan at the Earth's Corps"--Cory Doctorow
"Cannon Law"--Stephen King
"The Sorcerers' Game"--Stephen king
"Gated Community"--Stephen King
"The Long Trek"--Stephen King
Chained Dogs (Chapter 1)--Kurt Vonnegut
Chained Dogs (Preface)--Kurt Vonnegut
Chained Dogs ("On Heinzelmannchen")--David Foster Wallace
"Marine Diplomacy"--David Foster Wallace
Mountain Peculiar (Chapter 1)--David Foster Wallace
"How the Fox Got His White Tail Tip"--Rudyard Kipling
"How the Deer Got His Antlers"--Rudyard Kipling
"How the Beaver Got His Tail Flat"--Rudyard Kipling
"Change"--Rudyard Kipling
"I Gotta Tell This"--Chuck Palahniuk
"The Criminal Class"--Chuck Palahniuk
"Neither Fish Nor Foul"--Margaret Atwood
"The Christmas Fool"--Anne Rice
"Words of Rust"--J.D. Salinger

The only author in the bunch I've actually read was Kipling and the three "How the..." are, in deed, "Just So Stories." That the Chained Dogs preface and chapter sound alike (and the note on Heinzelmannchen sounded different) makes sense. I don't quite understand why the two Danube County stories and the autobiographical piece, "The Long Trek," would sound like Stephen King.

Never the less, a reasonable way to waste time.



16 August 2010: Feast of St. Fructuosus. Battle of Bennington 1777, Battle of Camden 1780, Fort Detroit surrendered to British 1812, Palestine Riots 1929, last emperor of China captured by Soviets 1945, highest parachute jump by Colonel Joseph W. Kittinger II USAF 1960.

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