Monday, July 6, 2009

Miscellaneous Thoughts on Reading


Lately I've been extremely interested in a series of books by John Norman entitled the Gor series. It's a series detailing the various accounts of a people who inhabit a Counter Earth: a planet extremely similar to Earth in almost every way except that it orbits the sun in the position exactly opposite our Earth (i.e. a mirror to Earth's orbit).

This series has been extremely interesting, but as I was reading the fourth of the series, Nomads of Gor, and a friend of mine lent me his electronic copy. I opened it in Microsoft Word, and as I got to page nine or ten, a message popped up from Word: This document contains too many spelling and grammatical errors for Microsoft Word to continue processing. Click "OK" to continue. That actually made me laugh, and granted some of the words were fictional characters, creatures, and implements, it still had a plethora of legitimate spelling and grammatical mistakes. I thought it was just hilarious that Microsoft Word not only confirmed that in its own small way, but Word actually gave up trying to help me fix those mistakes!

In other news, though, I was listening to Bill Maher the other day on YouTube and on his show (via HBO) he runs a segment entitled New Rules where he mentions ironic "new" rules we should set up in the country based on idiotic or illogical precidents that have been showcased recently by the media-at-large. Well, New Rule: We don't need any new electronic devices to simply hold a novel or multitude of novels.

If I don't have time to buy the book and bring it with me or it isn't available electronically to read on a computer. Who cares?! Don't sell us another useless piece of technojunk that will be outdated the minute it reaches us! If you want to sell electronic copies of books/newspapers, then do so through current technological means. We have enough gadgets, gizmos, and thingamajigs to give us cancer (okay, really just a headache). We don't need another one! Especially if it resembles anything like this:

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