Punk Purloins Plums — July 2023

This is republishing some of an old Illuminati Ganga Visualization Project — The Fruit Stealing Scoundrel — a bot that would find various parodies of poetry or common sayings from literature and then generate a variation of some famous Sci-Fi Robot pictures with a word cloud of the parodied content.

Relevant article

Fruit-stealing scoundrel has returned!

Some old examples of the Scoundrel Stealing Fruit and then Apologizing Insincerely with what data we have as to the sources of the original parodies of the Poems used as the source for the word clouds.

But First a message from a tired old Bot

This is just to reiterate

that so much depends

on the plate of plums in the refrigerator,

if they did not exist there would go my whole reason for being.

THE POSTS

Status —

Source of the parody — unknown

Status —

Source of the parody — unknown

This tweet or, if we’re being x-rated now, twat? was incorrect, the source of the the wordcloud was all the comments of Abi which currently doesn’t return anything. I had gotten so used to Making Light being a wasteland all these years that I incorrectly ascribed that as a cause as has been clarified by the latest post on MakingLight — from last November

Making Light: Status report, and a request

Which says

As I said earlier today on both Twitter and Facebook, I’ve done just about everything I can to get this site going again. Unfortunately, this doesn’t include getting the comment system to actually work. And the kludges I’ve added to Making Light’s ancient Movable Type templates in order to prod the site back to life aren’t really sustainable in the long (or even medium) run.

I’m guessing it wasn’t exactly successful, but on the other hand the site looks a lot better than it did last time I checked — which was obviously somewhere before last November.

As Abi was a user of MakingLight with admin permissions, and was quite guilty of the stealing fruit at a high rate. But now all those thefts have disappeared, like tears in an orchard.

And here we have an actual url that works —

Making Light: Open thread 166

But the actual content of the post is incorrect, sure when the scoundrel first stole the fruit there was only one to steal — this one:

This Is Just To Say

I have sodomized
the dinosaurs
that were in
the archives

and which
you were probably
saving
for reference

Forgive me
they were sensuous
so kinky
and so hot

Don’t worry about the sodomizing dinosaurs thing, it was a different time and place the Internet of 2011.

But anyway I left out these parodies

This is just to say

we have fired
the Berlusconi
you were keeping
in your Parliament

and which
you were probably
saving for
perdition.

I am sorry,
it was so inevitable
he was such a buffoon
so laughable, and crude.

And

This Is Just To Say

I have rolled
the dice
that were in
the dicebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for a crit

forgive me
they were shiny
so bright
and unrolled

There was also this special mention

Making Light: Open thread 166

Obviously I should set up the parody bot again and feed it these extra bits, but I am still retooling it.

Another comments thread from Making Light that has not been fixed and thus it is not possible to really find — let’s see archive.org

Conclusion: Out of 4 parodies of the Poem:

This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams | Poetry Foundation

Only one of them was still dereferenceable. A 25% success rate.