I’ve long been a fan of nonsense. (It seem me who they look where to sit down one’s.) Unlike its near relatives—noise, lies, and bullshit—real nonsense is surprisingly hard to construct, because the sense-making instinct runs deep with us humans. So when I see a performance like Vanessa Bayer’s as “Dawn Lazarus” in this SNL skit I tend to take notice. Which then leads me down a rabbit hole of related arts like double-talk (which is easier if you do it in a foreign language) and good old Engrish menu fails. Meanwhile, the glorious internet digs up treasures from the pre-Google era, like the player names in Fighting Baseball:

Now, in 2017, machine learning comes on the scene and opens entirely new frontiers for nonsense-lovers. Witness this attempt to train a neural network to generate paint color names based on the contents of the Sherwin-Williams catalog (producing some names that could have come straight out of LiarTown, USA):

I wasn’t sure about machine learning before, but it’s growing on me.

Links via @golan, via @annaleen, and via the great glorious Internet, long may she reign.