Monday, February 21, 2005

123, fifth sentence meme

Oh, god, this is unbelievable.

I'm sitting at work flicking through my RSS feeder and I see this, which looks a little diverting, on world of nic.

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Ok. But the nearest books are the ones on my desk, and they have titles like 'Pattern Oriented Software Architecture' and 'Algorithms for VLSI Design Automation', and they're not mine. So I reach over and pull the book I'm reading out of my bag ('Ending Up' by Kingsley Amis) and flick through to page 123, which says, in its entirety.

until he had uncovered a face. Because it was a face he knew only from photographs and the dimmest of infantile memory, he did not at once recognise it.

That's it. No fifth sentence. In fact, no more sentences at all.

Page 123 is the final page of the book. Damn.

The nearest book to me on the shelves, then, is titled 'Innocent Code'. Page 123, sentence five, reads:

If you want to learn social engineering from one of the true masters of the art, or if you like being scared, you should read Mitnick's eye-opening book.

Actually, considering the chances were the sentence would be some code-heavy and unintelligable (to me) technical detail, I can actually endorse this suggestion. So not all is lost.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Er, the whole point of a meme is that you have to post yours on your blog, not in a comments section. Otherwise it won't go anywhere!

Anonymous said...

Mine is

'His handshake was firm and sincere'.

Jonathan said...

Gah!

Stephen Newton said...

I think you should have used 'Pattern Oriented Software Architecture'. After all, that really does reflect the place you find yourself at the time.

Jonathan said...

Okay.

"The core of interactive systems is based on the functional requirements for the system, and usually remains stable".