Haikuleaks: "Cable is Poetry"

HaikuLeaks searches through the Wikileaks "Cablegate" data for haikus. I'm not sure if it's fully automated, or human-generated—seems too perfect to be computerized. Either way, genius.

(thanks, JJ!)

• [Lt. Mamiya]

  As a couple of astute posters have already pointed out, this concept was pronounced definitively lame nearly a decade ago – but thanks for turning back the clock…

  http://violinbackpacker.tripod.com/banhaiku.html

  • [mdh]

    and thanks for insulting our hosts!

  • [humanresource]

    Rant about haiku
    Becoming hipster cliche -
    Why so serious?

    • [travtastic]

      I enjoy haiku
      so freaking underground it
      doesn’t exist yet.

• [stAllio!]

  too perfect? try HAIKU FAIL!

  “rocha and rands” = 4 syllables
  “doesn’t the US respond” = 7 syllables

  • [Anonymous]

    The S would be a separate syllable, actually – it got that one right.

• [Rob]

  I like this. I would like to see these little haikus lovingly embroidered on pillows. Embossed on commemorative plates. Quoted out of context like bible verses.

• [Anonymous]

  Seems to be automated via this Python module: https://github.com/jdf/haikufinder

• [Anonymous]

  Yeah, this is pretty clearly an automated process, looking for sentences with the right syllable count, and adding line breaks in the right places.

  I’d be impressed if someone had actually written proper haiku inspired by the leaked cables, but this is neither creative, nor clever.

• [genericrich]

  Sigh. Haiku’s are not just meter or # of syllables. It is an imagistic form, where use of images conveys emotion. EPIC HAIKU FAIL

• [grikdog]

  the word you’re looking
  for is senryu, not haiku –
  fail, fail, fail, fail, fail

• [Anonymous]

  They read perfectly
  when in the voice of Shatner.
  Is Kirk haiku-prone?

• [Lobster]

  Ah, haiku. It’s like Twitter, but artsy! :D

• [davethegame]

  Haiku purists lack
  ability to laugh at
  funny site concept

• [mdh]

  “Either way, genius. “

• [The Life Of Bryan]

  This is beautiful
  Technology leveraged
  to show truth in lies

• [foo]

  This is pretty similar to the haiku abuse at hiddenhaiku.com, but with politics.

• [82times]

  Here’s another site that does something similar, but makes new ones on the fly:
  http://cableku.info/

  My personal favorite (from 09MADRID392)…

  Counsel and John Yoo
  based on misinformation
  permitted torture

• [grikdog]

  Haiku purists know
  our precious art is 2 l33t
  4 Am3Fvcons.

• [Anonymous]

  Try the various permutations at Is It Haiku? http://daghlian.com/haiku

• [Anonymous]

  To automate this search, you’d have to have a tagged corpus of words (including proper names) with their syllables counted. And you’d have to be able to recognize sentence boundaries.

  Then you’d have to search for word combinations that fit into 5 – 7 – 5 syllable patterns, and which end on a sentence boundary.

• [Anonymous]

  I like that “hipster cliche” haiku post above.

  Why did my mind register the last line of the second one in column two as “in mind, not just evil”?

  • [humanresource]

    Cheers Anon; yeah, evil does work better.
    Enemies of joke haiku should open their minds to the glory of a genre now liberated from zen padantry, or else miss out on the noble offerings of Western Masters such as Beavis and Butthead:

    Burning cherry tree
    Every blossom is aflame
    Shit, here come the cops