Mic-Macs and language

I watched Mic-Macs this evening, which I'd somehow construed as a French time-travel comedy (clearly part of my mind believes every French film = Les Visiteurs) but which turned out to be rather surprising. A bit twee in parts, and with that certain greenish tint that Jeunet loves so much, but it was fun for an hour and three-quarters. It all wraps up quite tidily, which was all I needed from a Wednesday evening.


Everything, that is, apart from building a semi-successful gibberish generator. I finally swapped to a Markov chain approach, as several wiser people had suggested over the last couple of weeks, and what do you know? Meaningful stuff starts to spurt out:

"I had been a bit of a man who was the only way to the gym and was a bit wrong-footed when I told them about my Marathon run."

"Now I think about it I am going to have to go to the toilet and I needed to go to the toilet."

Well, that second one appears to suffer from some looping, but I think I have a way round that. If I can just muster the intelligence to have it talk to Twitter, and make it capable of reading and digesting Twitter too, then the beast will live.

And as that took a couple of hours and little human intervention, my resurrection of every nineteenth century writer I can lay my hands on will soon come to pass. Oh yes.

Cue nefarious laughter, organ music...