Ever read "rec.humor.oracle"?  Like it?  Already seen the archive at
ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/oracle?  Whoa!  Almost 10000 pieces of humour
and wisdom, in about 400 files (each containing between 1 and 5 of the 
original news articles), totaling 14 MByte.

"OrySplit" was written to deal with these archive files.  It can split
them into the original news articles and, even better, convert them
to fortune cookie format.  You can then have a program like "cookie"
(util/misc/cookie20.lha, cookie21.lha) or "IntuiCookie" (util/misc/
ICookieRT.lha, ICookieMUI.lha) pick and display Oracularities at
random.  And you can apply "CookieTool" (util/misc/cookietool.lha) to 
them, to select Oracularities of a minimum or maximum size, or only 
those that contain certain keywords.

One example file, "918-919" is supplied.  Try these commands:

  orysplit 918-919      ; creates articles 918 through 919
  orysplit 918-919 -c >wisdom       ; creates a cookie file

The following examples assume that you have the "CookieTool" archive,
too:

  cookietool wisdom -ss         ; sort by size
  cdbsplit wisdom temp -x -kmicrosoft -Kbill -Kgates  ; extract MS stuff

One more hint:  The archive files at cs.indiana are packed in Unix .Z 
format.  You might use gzip (util/pack/gzip124x2.lha) to unpack them.  
Or, if bandwidth doesn't matter, you can also have the ftp server
uncompress them for you, by e.g. requesting a file called "922-924", 
when the file is actually listed as "922-924.Z".

"OrySplit" is freeware, C-source is included.
      

 PERMSSN    UID  GID    PACKED    SIZE  RATIO     CRC       STAMP          NAME
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
[generic]                15069   35275  42.7% -lh5- 64bf Oct 26  1997 orysplit/918-919
[generic]                 6915   11892  58.1% -lh5- b1dd Oct 25  1997 orysplit/orysplit
[generic]                 1479    4254  34.8% -lh5- b1a5 Oct 25  1997 orysplit/orysplit.c
[generic]                  896    1697  52.8% -lh5- 55ca Oct 26  1997 orysplit/orysplit.readme
[generic]                  272     463  58.7% -lh5- 2311 Oct 26  1997 orysplit/orysplit.readme.info
[generic]                  273     628  43.5% -lh5- df17 Oct 26  1997 orysplit.info
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ -------------
 Total         6 files   24904   54209  45.9%            Oct 27  1997