Creative Output

Everyone’s talking about this Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, so I dusted off Haiku Detector and looked for interesting haiku in it. A friend pointed me to a text version, though it’s not ideal for finding haiku; it has many superfluous hard line breaks, missing or superfluous spaces, and so on, which make it harder for Haiku Detector to tell where words and sentences end. There were also page and footnote numbers included in the text. Eventually perhaps I’ll read through it and clean those things up. Haiku Detector found 105 ‘haiku’ in 18752 ‘sentences’.

There were, of course, several similar to this:

Harm to Ongoing
Matter 26 Harm to
Ongoing Matter

of which I think this is my favourite:

Harm to Ongoing
Matter – H a r m to
Ongoing Matter

Some headings formed haiku:

P . 6(e) 7.
Interactions and Contacts
with the Trump Campaign

Other Potential
Campaign Interest in Russian
Hacked Materials

Others which seemed to make sense and stop at actual sentence or at least clause boundaries were:

They are talking to
us. -It is a lot of risk. –
Office of Putin.

“If you have any
questions, I will be happy
to help contact him.”

“We understand all
of the sensitivities and
are not in a rush.”

We also sought a
voluntary interview
with the President.

It’s all because you
recused. AG is supposed to
be most important

He’s a showboater.
He’s a grandstander. I don’t
know any Russians.

you know, this Russia
thing with Trump and Russia is
a made-up story.

But I feel so-I
tell you, I feel a little
badly about it.

“I don’t want to talk
about that. No, I don’t want
to talk about that.”

The president has
issued no pardons in this
investigation.

President said, “I
don’t talk about that now. I
don’t talk about that.”

“Manafort really
appreciates the support
of President Trump.”

“Paul Manafort’s a
good man” and “it’s a very
sad thing that happened.”

The Supreme Court has
applied that clear-statement rule
in several cases.

No statutory
term could easily bear that
specialized meaning.

I understand these
documents already have
been produced to you.

Some were just amusingly surreal because of artefacts in the text:

113
Corney recalled he did not
114

This is the worst thing
that ever happened to me.
“508

815
The President responded,
“I never said that.”

If you imagine that’s the real end of the sentence, and slang for ‘get out!’, it sort of makes sense:

Not telling you to
do anything. Dershowitz
says POTUS can get

I haven’t read the report, nor am I likely to know enough about the surrounding events and characters to fully understand it (nor would I be able to do much about it if I did, not having the right to vote anywhere), but maybe these pseudorandom pseudopoetic snippets will bring some comic relief for those who have. Perhaps I’ll run it through NastyWriter next.