Monument ([info]marnanel) wrote,
@ 2008-10-05 11:45:00
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Entry tags:meme

That book meme
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions if you want to.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Hard to see which is the closest, really, because the shelf is in front of me. I'll close my eyes and touch one.

Okay, here it is. Page 56 is in fact blank, since page 55 is a plate. Page 57 doesn't have five sentences on it. If we take pages 54 and 57 as one and count five sentences, the fifth is mostly in Latin and the fourth is a few yards long. This is unhelpful. Here are the fourth and fifth together.

We live indeed in a thieving, cheating, and plundering Age: Cozening is become a topping Trade, only we have got a genteeler way of ſtealing now, than only to take a man's Horſe from under him on the Highway, and a little looſe Money out of his Pocket; our Rapparees are Men of better Breeding and Faſhion, and ſcorn to play at ſuch ſmall Game, they ſweep away a noble Eſtate with one ſlight Bruſh, and bid both the Gallows and Horſe-Pond defiance; and the Mob is not always juſt in this Point, for one Pick-Pocket deſerves a Horſe-Pond as well as another, without any regard to Quality or fine Clothes. But Dat Veniam Corvis, vexat cenſura Columbas, ſay the Latins.


(Google tells me that the Latin quotation is from Juvenal. "The censor pardons the crows but condemns the doves." Someone has written it up here.)

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[info]realinterrobang
2008-10-05 04:48 pm UTC (link)
Is that from Greene's A Notable Discouery of Cozenage?!

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[info]marnanel
2008-10-05 04:50 pm UTC (link)
No, Bailly's Divers Proverbs. I'm not really sure why it's right there on the shelf in front of my nose.

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[info]xugglybug
2008-10-05 05:11 pm UTC (link)
"But in Einstein's case it's not implausible that a man whose editors and translators commented on his frequent mis-spellings of proper names, who found memorization painful and taking tests like "walking to the guillotine", might have struggled with the rote aspects of spelling and writing -- both signposts of dyslexia."

- The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls, and the Real Difference Between the Sexes (Susan Pinker)

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[info]xlerb
2008-10-05 07:31 pm UTC (link)
“Additionally, fluid volumes should not overflow (i.e., exceed hardware capacity) or underflow (i.e., fall below hardware resolution).”

Being the fifth sentence of the abstract of a paper titled Automatic Volume Management for Programmable Microfluidics, as I figured the title/author info didn't count. Certainly not what one would expect to get by opening to an arbitrary page in a conference proceedings on Programming Language Design & Implementation, but oddly enough it's actually relevant to several of that conference's interests.

(That was the physically closest book. One could argue that a book that was farther by distance but not buried under old newspapers is in some sense “closer”, but then that gets me to a bookshelf and then I have the same problem you did.)

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[info]kyte
2008-10-05 07:52 pm UTC (link)
In my case, the line was Extremely Boring: "Hear them saying something."

It's from an NLP workbook, so it could have been something much wackier.

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[info]therealocelot
2008-10-05 09:02 pm UTC (link)
Now I'm sitting here trying to figure out which of about six books is physically closest, and what exactly determines closeness (Book A is physically closest, but Book B requires less contortion in order to reach - does that count as closeness?). I guess that's what I get for having my computer desk right next to the bookshelf.

A - If a patient's behavior is evidence of noncomplicance or decreased learning, a new plan of teaching should be developed and implemented.
B - In my purse, I said.

Edited at 2008-10-05 09:04 pm UTC

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[info]gjm11
2008-10-05 09:14 pm UTC (link)
Ooo, memetic evolution. The version of this meme on [info]cathedral_life's LJ has "the next seven sentences" instead of "the next sentence". Sundry other versions also exist. (The nearest book to me at present is under a big stack of paper that I'm afraid to disturb.)

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