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Sunday, January 25, 2026

The Elmer Davis News

This is an example of more or less "by rote" cut and paste, conducted on an WW2-era radio broadcast.  A five-minute commentary was chopped up into beginnings of sentences, ends, and neither beginning nor end.  The pieces were re-connected in random order, according to a "beginning-middle-end" arrangement.  (A couple minutes of content was lost because one of the sections ran out of pieces, which stopped the matching process.)  Minimal editing.
 
William S Burroughs did a lot of cutup like this, except with newspapers and scissors.  We'll be doing something for his birthday next week,  so this seemed at least like a kind of warm up.