Friday, February 15, 2008

Wordly Wordy Word

Have you guys heard of Open Office?

Open Office @ Wikipedia
Download page from their main website

It's a free suite of office programs, like Microsoft Word and Excel and suchlike, only instead of dropping $500 freaking dollars, you could spend ZERO dollars.

To be sure, not every feature is duplicated, but there's almost everything you could need in Open Office. I downloaded and installed it last night and was very impressed with how robust it is - for free, no less.

This might make me re-think the whole "you get what you pay for" thing. What's next, perpetual energy machines?

You know how when you first open a blank document to try a word-processing program for the first time, you type some random shit, just to see how it formats? I think this is fun, it would be neat to create a book made up entirely of these snippets, from people around the world. (Key logger software on all Best Buy PCs!)

There might be an interesting psychoanalytic component of these sorts of snippets, as they are not made for anyone to read, not meant to be saved, and so are free of the usual mental constraints on creative output.

That said, what does it mean that my little snippet starts out cute and ends with a wahh wahh wahhh (wah as heard in want, with the sound of something going comedically awry)..((Is there a word for that, the opposite of serendipity?)) of a friendly Average Joe getting smack-down comeuppance from an unfeeling government representative?

Here's the snippet of random shit from my Open Office typey-typey:

I was walking down the street one day when I saw a little girl crying in the park. Her balloon had been snatched by a gust of wind and caught in a tree. I decided to help her out, so I offered to climb the tree and retrieve her balloon.

She explained that she wasn't crying because the balloon had gotten away, but because it had been trapped by the tree. I offered instead to help the balloon get free. The girl became very excited at this idea, and pleaded with me to do so.

I climbed the tree and set the balloon free, only to receive a fine from a passing policeman – apparently balloon liberation is a form of littering.
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