Monkeys Typing Shakespeare

From the desk of the Top Banana

It’s 2:21 AM. I’ve got a full bag of Funyuns, a fresh can of Coke and only a few monkeys are up typing. The storms that just drenched Southern California turned the monkey’s Zen garden into a mud pit and flooded the SIMI Project’s pantry; ruining about 800 pounds of monkey chow. Thankfully, most of the monkeys had been hording food from my personal kitchen and, all told, there seems to be around 1,000 pounds of chips, salsa, peanut butter, pickles and cheese stored in and around the main Typing Pen. I thought we’d been running out of those items awfully fast but I had just figured my wife was pregnant again.

Dr. Adam Safran of the SIMI Project. Too much caffein?

I hope you appreciate the effort that it’s taking to write these updates more frequently. Between the monkey feng shei lessons, DJ studies, anger and arrogant management classes, managing the new Monkey Goods store and my current presidential campaign, I’ve been really pressed for time. I even tried getting some of the monkeys to type my updates but it was even more tiring filtering through all of their work looking for the bits and pieces to string together a full update. You may have even noticed some odd words showing up in your typing samples instead of Shakespeare.

This July will officially mark our four year anniversary trying to prove that given enough time and typewriters, monkeys can type Shakespeare. What have we learned since we were first inspired by the SETI@home project to harness idle time around the world? Well, for one, finding aliens seems to be a lot more popular then petting monkeys as the SETI project seems to have the SIMI project beat by about 1,000 to 1 in enrollment. However, we figure that will all change once someone finds an alien.

Okay. That’s probably enough of an update for now. I ran out of Funyuns two paragraphs ago and I have to get up early for Mad Scientist school. We’re having a midterm on The evil genius laugh and maniacal hand rubbing.

Until next time,

‘Dr.’ Adam Safran
Top Banana and Presidential Candidate
100monkeys.org/The SIMI Project