Just before leaving the office today, a weird thought about Douglas Adams and Vogon Poetry brought me to a web site called the Vogon Poetry Generator. It asks for a series of seemingly innocent words, which I filled in.*  When asked for “A friend’s name”, I used the name of a well-known blogringer whom I’d just been chatting with, because his name was in my mind.

The poem that the generator spat out was, in the moment, absolutely hilarious.  I immediately cut and pasted it into a blog entry, commenting that I was laughing too hard to drive home.  It WAS funny, and I didn’t really worry too much about the insulting aspects of it because after all, I didn’t write it, a program did.  I honestly had no idea how the program was going to assemble those words into a poem, because I ran it once and only once.

Even as I finished posting the blog and editing it up a bit, the person named in the poem read it and commented.  The comment seemed like the usual banter.

I did then drive home, but as I drove I kept thinking about the poem.  I kept thinking as I went to the grocery store and picked up some things for dinner.  I thought about it some more as I drove to the house … and since I live an hour from where I work, I had lots of time to think.  I finally decided that even though I didn’t really mean for it to do so, the generator had made the poem a bit … personal.  It seemed possible, even likely, that it might offend its subject, whom I like and respect.  In short, I just didn’t like the way I felt, having it in my blog.

It’s gone.  I’ve deleted it prior to 3AM UK time, hopefully before anyone’s awake enough to read it.   I pray the person whose name I used wasn’t offended, and if he was, let him know I regret that and I’m sorry.

* For the record, the words I used were “dead”, “chartreuse”, “sweat socks”, “<name>”, “groggy”, “froggy”, “dimtwarf”, “snorkel”, “moldy bread”, and “warthog”.