Do you remember SB-Talker?
Quite a while ago, when I first got my then
top of the line 486 bawx I discovered this text to speech program in the SB16 directory.
This discovery changed my life irrevocably.
The ability to make my computer
gabber gibberish at me had a
strange addictive quality (not unlike
Everything 2). I would feed lines of
consonant-
vowel combos (e.g.
babababagugugugu) and
laugh hysterically as the
sim-voice would strain itself trying to generate these noises. After a little bit of
experimentation, I found out that adding
punctuation to the mix could raise the
comedic bar a smidgen higher by constantly changing the
pitch at which the noises came out. After about another hour of experimentation I could nearly make the program
sing!
Well, ok.. maybe sing isn't quite the right
word. Probably something more like "
gargle violently".
Suffice to say, there was some
wacky noise coming from the computer room.
Back more
towards the point, I decided at this time that I had to get someone over to see/hear this thing in
action (not that my friends needed any
prompting, this
486 was
very hot stuff back then). After a little while there was a little
party going on in my house, and people were waiting for the computer to
blow chunks.
At some point, between one
belly laugh and the next, someone suggested that
story writing might be really
cool as well.
So it began.
Fantastic stories about
samurai milkmen,
weapons of mass destruction, and a
Jamaican lad named
Heebeegeebee were tossed about
all night long, and in the middle of one of the stories was the
phrase "find many cows".
I can't remember how exactly the
phrase got in there, and we were all
really tired and laughing at just about anything at that point, so it's very likely
the story didn't make any sense at all. This
phrase though, was
the most hilarious thing I had ever heard in my life, and brought on one of my
Fits of Uncontrollable Laughter(TM).
We began (in vain) to figure out what made the
phrase so
unbelievably funny by first singling it out. After that didn't work I
stole the con back and wrote this
poem:
Find many cows,
Find many cows!
Find many cows?
Find many cows.
Roughly half an hour later, after I could
successfully breathe between
fits of laughter, I wrote the
poem down so I wouldn't forget it.
To this very day, everyone who was there still remembers it, and I still play it back whenever I need a
good chuckle.