One of the themes of Kurt Vonnegut's writing is that of the loneliness of modern humans. He posits that the reason for this loneliness is that humans are biologically predisposed to live in large extended communities, which they did for thousands of years in Tribal, or Folk Societies.
Modern Culture has stunted that and thus made people very unhappy, which is the root of most of our problems.
His solution to this, as put forward in Slapstick is for the government to create new, arbitrary families at random, thus giving everyone thousands of potential family members.
Just as in a real family there would be people who you would like or not like, but you would always have a network of people to go to anywhere.
He envisions a world where each family would have its own magazines and embassies in different cities and countries where members could go to socialize, or when they need a little help. Families would be able to take care of themselves.
The method for assigning these families was the random generation of a new middle name for everyone, using the power of the Social Security Administrations computers to assign a random word for everyone that would take the place of their middle name and which would include them in a 'family' composed of all those who share the same name. In Slapstick there is a number as well, but I don't think enough people read this page to need that many variables.
Anyway, the point of this post is that I have created a beta version of this middle name assigning program. It didn't even require much computing power, just a little time.
Remember this is just a beta version, the sampling of words is a bit limited, but I hope to add more as demand requires.
Just click here for your new random middle name.
Publish your results in the comments below and greet your new family members!
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