Neat game found on the BALLOON JUICE website. Why not try it and post your findings?

Posted by: Tim F. at 4:10 pm

Quick, look around (says Tim) and grab the closest book to where you’re sitting. No scooting over to that unopened copy of Whitehead’s Function of Reason, cheater, just grab what’s nearby. Willing to say what it is?

Tom Levenson just tagged me with the “123” meme so it looks like I have no choice. My mission, should I choose to accept it:

* look up page 123 in the nearest book,
* look for the fifth sentence, then
* post the three sentences that follow that fifth sentence on page 123.

Tom appears to have put off answering until he could get closer to his copy of On The Origin of Species. Hmm. We’ll have to run that past the rules committee.

As for me, I’m still sitting right where I was when Tom tagged me at 3:00, so let’s see…uh oh. Right next to my MacBook is Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, fourth edition in paperback. What do you think is the likelihood that I will find three consecutive rules that I respect all the way through an average day of blogging? Me think odds not good. Lucky for me my copy ends at page 105.

Next closest is Les Âmes Grises by Philippe Claudel. I hope you speak French.

En définitive, Matziev, même si je l’ai connu quand il a tourné ordure, valait bien mieux que lui. Au moins, une fois dans sa vie, il n’a pas fait honte a sa qualité d’homme. Qui peut en dire autant?

For those who don’t speak romance languages like you should, I took advantage of AltaVista’s free online tool to translate the passage from French to German to English. Enjoy.

Finally, Matziev, even if I knew it, if it turned waste, were worth very better than it. At least once in its life RK it dishonor quality has its man quality. Who can say of it just as much?

Postmodern!

HIMSELF JUST TRIED THIS:

The closest book is "The Cult of the Amateur" by Andrew Keen (about the internet killing our culture). Page 123 starts with the continuation of a sentence on Page 122, but the fifth, sixth and seventh complete sentences down read:

But according to the Television Bureau of Advertising, total local broadcast revenue fell 9 per cent in 2005 to $16.8 billion. The reason? Key sponsors like Daimler-Chrysler and Ford are cutting advertising budgets - 15 per cent and 15 per cent respectively - or moving on-line.