News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 31 (entry 2)

Thu Oct 31 2002 19:01 Kills All Known Murder. Dead.: Occasionally Jason and I have discussed the possibility of automating the generation of Tonight's Episode titles. Unfortunately, it's impossible because the act of coming up with the data for the automaton would be equivalent to coming up with a bunch of Tonight's Episode titles, and then you could just use the titles. However, Kevan has come up with a clever approximation: you take a more general-purpose text generator and simply feed it the Tonight's Episode buzzwords. Kevan calls this innovation "Tonight's Sponsor" and recommends the usual suspects. The dataset yields some strong contenders, as well as approximations to actual Tonight's Episodes past ("Nothing Comes Between Me And My Murder") and future ("Snap! Crackle! Death!").