Click on one of the links below, and we will provide for you an unusual and entertaining story. We hope you will find our prose striking and enlightening. (We're not quite ready to provide poetry!) The story is different each time it's generated, so you can click the Rewrite link at the bottom for a new version of the story, or click a different button for a completely different story. Here are the stories we have to choose from.
- A Detective Story
- When I Was Young
- Today's Horoscope
- A Morning Visit
- The New Story of the Three Little Pigs
- A Letter to Santa
- Out In the Old West
- A Recipe
- Total Nonsense
- A Fun-Filled Vacation
- New! A crime report
- Band Names
- A New Relationship
- A Breakup
- Alien Encounter
The genre of "noir" detective fiction grew to popularity with the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who were imitated by many lesser writers, including this one. Our little program adds an extra surreal touch to the story.
You've probably been on the receiving end of the inter-generational lecture, explaining how hard life was "back then," and by implication, how easy life is now. From your point of view as a kid, the stories didn't even make sense. Are you now on the dispensing end of the lectures?
This may be as accurate a horoscope as any.
A fantasy about a community of creatures.
Bet you haven't heard this version of the story.
Let's see how Santa handles this.
A tense encounter ensues when a stranger comes to town.
You can't find recipes quite like these anywhere else! Use at your own considerable risk!
Yes, this is pretty much total nonsense.
Have we got the vacation for you!
An actual crime report, taken from the news. Details have been changed, to incriminate the innocent.
Got a new band, but can't come up with that all-important name for your group? Let us do it for you! More than twenty amazing names each time you load!
The story of how we met.
The story of how we met.
What happens when one encounters an alien being.
When you combine young girls who have a love of wordplay and a programmer father, this is what can happen. Some of the stories and many of the words that you see today were contributed by the girls many years ago. The program has been updated over the years, from DOS and QBasic to web-based PHP and MySQL.
There have been lots of word substitution games over the years. You have probably played some of them. The popular "Mad-Libs" books have been loved by kids and adults for quite a few years, and there are several "Web-Libs" sites on the Internet.
This site is different because it supplies the fill-in words from its own database, which contains thousands of appropriate (or not) words and names.
As evidence that games such as these considerably predate the "Mad-Libs" books, I can share with you a book I own that was published around 1900 called "Revelations of My Friends." It consists of one-page stories with blanks for key words, each covered by a die-cut page which prevents the user from seeing the text until after the blanks have been filled in (photos below).
The humor in "Revelations" was quite a bit gentler and more refined than what you find on this site. Maybe it's a sign of the times.
Someone else who has a copy of the book was featured in a segment on NPR's Weekend Edition. Here is his web page referring to the interview: Edwardian Mad Libs.
On your honor, "play the game,"
Fill the spaces, sign your name,
Then tear off the upper leaf,
Revelations lie beneath!
Most, but not all of the stories in my copy have been filled out.
Here is this story as completed in the book:
And lastly, here's what a Dolly Varden hat is about.
