There’s this little meme going around Facebook at the moment that has the following instructions:
* Grab the book closest to you
* Go to page 56
* Find the 5th sentence
* Write that sentence as your status message
* Copy these instructions as a comment to your status message
* Don’t go looking for your favourite book, or the coolest one you have – just grab the closest one
I picked up the meme from my friend Megan, so I thought I’d give it a go. The nearest book to me was the proof copy of MageSign, sitting right next to me on the desk. Can you see how I’m cleverly making this both a fun meme and a bit of shameless self promotion? I’m so clever. But really, it just happened like that. Honest.
Anyway, the fifth sentence on page 56 of MageSign turned out to be:
Like animated corpses clawing through soft mud to the world above, the words oozed through his mind and sounded in his ears and his brain simultaneously,whispering, cajoling, teasing, flirting.
Spooky stuff. I quite like these sort of things that make you randomly look at a piece of writing completely out of context. If you want to get involved, consider yourself tagged by the meme – put it up on your blog, Facebook status, whatever, and leave a comment here with the line you found. And make sure you put what book it’s from too, or that will just be too frustrating. If you don’t have a site to carry the meme on, that’s fine - you can just leave a comment here if you like. Come on, get involved.
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“In the lower figure, at time T + 0.5s, the mRNA has advanced by one codon.”
Exciting stuff, huh? A real cliffhanger!
It’s from an Introduction to the Study of Man, which has some stuff on human biology, genetics, evolution etc.
I’ll need to start carrying some very cool book in my pocket at all times so when a variation of this meme hits (there’s a few new strains of it per year!), I have something a bit more presentable.
Hey there – I did this over at the Brascoe blog… from Annie Dillard’s Writing Life.
Good ones. Thanks guys. Such variety!
“What happens?”
From Heads First C#, O’Reilly press.
Very succinct. But I have to know – What happens?
not sure you really wanted to know, but ….
“Instead of popping up the Contacts application, your program now shows the MessageBox. When you made the new Main() method, you gave your program a new entry point. Now the first thing your program does is run the statements in that method – which means running that MessageBox.Show() statement.”
Actually it’s the best programming book I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a few in my time. The ‘Heads Up’ series seem to be the next generation of dummies guides, and are very well regarded by those in the know.
Ha! I knew that’s what would happen.