Since I wrote a little app to download much of my YouTube metadata, it was obvious that I needed to feed it through another little app I wrote: Haiku Detector. So I did. In all of my public YouTube descriptions put together, with URLs removed, there are 26 172 sentences, and 436 detected haiku.

As is usually the case, a few of these ‘haiku’ were not really haiku because the Mac speech synthesis pronounces them wrong, and thus Haiku Detector counts their syllables incorrectly. A few more involved sentences which no longer made sense because their URLs had been removed, or which were partial sentences from song lyrics which looked like full sentences because they were on lines of their own. Most of the rest just weren’t very interesting.

There were quite a lot of song lyrics which fit into haiku, which suggest tunes to which other haiku can be sung, if the stress patterns match up. I’m not going to put those here though; there are too many, and I could make a separate post about haiku in Jonathan Coulton lyrics, having already compiled a JoCorpus for rhyme.science to find rhymes in. So here are some other categories of haiku I liked. For lack of a better idea, I’ll link the first word of each one to the video it’s from.

Apologies about my camerawork

Also, there’s a lot
of background noise so the sound
isn’t very good.

There was a little
too much light and sound for my
poor little camera. 🙂

But hey, if I’d brought
my external microphone,
it would have got wet.

I’m so sad that I
had to change batteries or
something part-way through. 😦

Who do I look like,
Joe Covenant in Glasgow
in 2008?

Now the guitar is
out of tune and my camera
is out of focus.

Performers being their typical selves

John Roderick:

Eventually
they get around to singing
the song Cinnamon.

Aimee Mann asks John
Roderick to play one of
his songs (which he wrote.)

Jim Boggia:

But first, he gives us
a taste of what he’s really
famous for: tuning.

And now he’s lost his
voice, so it’s going to be
great for everything.

Cody Wymore:

Cody Wymore can’t
do a set without Stephen
Sondheim in it.

Cody horns in on
it anyway by adding
a piano part.

He pauses time for
a bit so nobody knows
he was unprepared.

It’s about being
in a room full of people
and feeling alone.

Paul and Storm:

Why does every new
verse of their song keep taking
them so goddamn long?

Little did I know
that four other people would
throw panties at Paul.

Ted Leo:

We’re gonna bring the
mood down a little bit, but
maybe lift it up!

Nerf Herder:

Meanwhile, they have to
fix up the drums because I
guess they rocked too hard.

Zoe and Brian Gray:

It’s For the Glory
of Gleeble Glorp, which isn’t
a euphemism.

Zoe Gray has to
follow Brian Gray’s songs from
the Gleebleverse.

Clint McElroy:

He’s here to perform
for us an amazing act
of léger de main.

Travis McElroy:

Travis gets up on
stage and holds a small doll’s head
in a creepy way.

which brings us to Jonathan Coulton:

He loves us and is
very glad to be with us.
This is Creepy Doll.

Jonathan Coulton
remarks on the lax rhyming
in God Save The Queen.

Jonathan will use
Jim’s capo, and he will give
it back afterwards.

Jonathan did not
know this was going to be
a cardio set.

That guy Paul has been
seeing every goddamned day
for the last two months.

MC Frontalot:

MC Frontalot
talks about samples and tells
us what hiphop is.

Jean Grae:

It’s not because she’s
a lady, but because she’s
an alcoholic.

She feels like she should
get a guitar case, even
without a guitar.

Jon Spurney:

Jon Spurney rocks out
on the guitar solo, as
he is wont to do.

Me:

Eventually,
at about 6:38,
we get to the point.

The ship’s IT guy:

He has been very
glad to meet us, but he’s not
sad to see us leave.

Red Team Leader:

Red Leader has some
announcements to make before
the final concert.

The Red Team didn’t
mind, because we’re the team that
entertains ourselves.

All the JoCo Cruise performers in the second half of the last show:

Let’s bring Aimee Mann
back out to the stage to join
the Shitty Bar Band.

We now get into
the unrehearsed supergroup
section of the show.

JoCo Cruise hijinks

This is the last show,
unless we’re quarantined on
the ship for a while!

Half of those palettes
were 55-gallon drums
of caveat sauce.

This pun somehow leads
to a sad Happy Birthday
for Paul Sabourin.

Paul Sabourin points
out Kendra’s Glow Cloud dress in
the front row (all hail!)

They talk about why
they did note-for-note covers
instead of new takes.

Make It With You by
Bread, which has even better
string writing than Swift.

So by Friday night,
they’d written this musical
about JoCo Cruise.

A plan to take over the world:

Here’s how it’s going
to work: first we’re going to
have a nice dinner.

And once we have our
very own cruise ship, we shall
dominate the seas.

Some Truth:

An actual cake
which is not a lie. It was
delicious and moist.

It was delicious
and moist. This is Drew’s body
given up for us.

Questions and answers:

What do you do when
you reach the limits of your
own understanding?

When she reaches the
limits of her knowledge, she
says she doesn’t know.

the green people with
buttons who are aliens
wanting to probe you

Wash your hands! Do you
need to take your life jackets
to the safety drill?

What about water,
though? Where do you sign up for
the specialty lunch?

Calls to action

All this and more can
be real if you book yourself
a berth on that boat.

It was supported
by her Patreon patrons.
You could be one too!

If you want to hear
him sing more covers this way,
back this Kickstarter:

That will do for now. Next perhaps I’ll make word clouds of my YouTube descriptions from various time periods, to show what I was uploading at the time. Or perhaps I’ll feed the descriptions into the app I wrote to create the data for rhyme.science, see what the most common rhymes are, and write a poem about them, as I did with Last Chance to See.

Eventually, some of the content I create from my YouTube metadata will make it into a YouTube video of its own — perhaps finally a real channel trailer. But what will I write in the description and title, and will I have to calculate the steady state of a Markov chain to make sure it doesn’t affect the data it shows?