Meme for Youme, and Youme for Meme (and Teame for Twome, as well)

Matt Hulan actually thwacked me with a meme stick a few days ago; here’s the response.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 161.
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Use what’s actually next to you.

I believe at the moment that I read the challenge, the appropriate response was this:

Ben said, “One person smoking a cigarette a day in a three-acre parking lot does not produce secondhand smoke in sufficient concentration to worry about.”

Books do move about in here rather alarmingly, but I think that the book in question was the nearest, by a reasonable definition of nearest, that is, closest to my right hand. It is, of course, possible that there was a book behind me or under my chair that was closer to some part of me than this one, but as point five indicates, the purpose of the thing is not to drive the memer crazy with tape measure and calipers but to freeze a sort of random moment of their book world. And here it is.

I had seen the thing before, sometime, possibly with different page numbers and line numbers. In my own case, it was bound to be a book that either recently appeared or would soon appear on the blog, so I wasn’t inspired to take it up until asked. Oh, the nearest book might have been some book for my Perfect Non-Reader (who reads quite well these days, although not this Tohu Bohu, please the Lord), which would have been unlikely to have a hundred and sixty-one pages. Or it could conceivably have been the Giants Media Guide, which has one the hundred and sixty-first page only four sentence-like constructions, along with Pedro Liriano’s major league batting states (oh-for-one with one SH in sixteen games) and a complete list of Giants 100-RBI seasons with all of the seasons by active current Giants in bold (nine such seasons, and a very small number of trivia points for guessing the number of different players and getting all the names right, slightly more points for getting the years without looking them up). I doubt that I’ll blog the Media Guide, because as a reference book, I just read in it. Oh, and there’s a book about Richard Lionheart and Blondel which I am stuck eighty-three pages into, and which stinks, and which I will most likely never finish or blog. Other than that, though, what I read, I report on.

Although I admit I don’t usually include the fifth sentence of the 161st page. Perhaps I should start doing that.

All of which is to say, thanks for tapping me, Matt. YHB hasn’t been doing much blogging lately, on anything of much interest. Anytime a Gentle Reader wants to poke me with a request stick, feel free.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.