gacked from just about everywhere...

[anotherusedpage]

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
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. Do what's actually next to you.

Oh how typical. Not only is it feminist, it's also pr0n.

The Descent of Woman:

"The preface to sexual intercourse today is liable to run through the whole gamut of them."

Comments

[dyddgu.livejournal.com]

Unsurprisingly, mine is about Welsh literature
"He complains that 'they cramp and fetter good sense.'"
Hmph. I never get anything interesting when I do this meme! ;-)

[fu-manchu12.livejournal.com]

To complete the trio of unsurprising sentences, mine is form Colebourn's LAtin Sentence and Idiom:

"Me piget laboris; I am bored by work, work is irksome to me."

[dyddgu.livejournal.com]

*is tempted to gack for a sig file*

[fu-manchu12.livejournal.com]

It did occur to me that it's something of an LJ rallying cry :)

[knirirr.livejournal.com]

For a quartet:

The best studied of these are coded by plasmid rather than host genes and operate most effectively against plasmids of the same or closely related types (Falkow, 1975).

[cottonwoolfairy.livejournal.com]

The closest book to me is indeed The Astronomical Almanac 2005, but it has neither page numbers, nor sentences, sadly :)

[foreverdirt.livejournal.com]

"Unfortunately, it has a minor defect - every twelve years or so it will wipe out the about as many Americans as the population of San Francisco."

-- Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern by Douglas Hofstadter

[foreverdirt.livejournal.com]

...only without the the between the out and the about.

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

I've never even heard of that...

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

My second choice (my first one only had 112 pages)

People of mixed race were most likely to feel very safe walking alone in the neighbourhood after dark (36%), while Chinese people were the least likely to do so (13%).

2003 Home Office Citizenship Survey: People, Families and Communities.

(I'm at work...)

[foreverdirt.livejournal.com]

Hofstadter wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Come to think of it, you might be interested in some of the essays on language and logic (including silly geeky stuff on self-referential sentences that kept me and Owen amused while we should've been revising for our Mods) in Metamagical Themas. Remind me to throw it at you tomorrow evening.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Assuming you take the first column:

See Ecstacy.

Not desperately interesting, I'm afraid...

[victoryisall.livejournal.com]

'India was producing over 200 films per year by the early 1930s, but until the introduction of sound recording, it was missing one of its cultural heritage's key elements, song and dance'. Mark Cousins, The Story of Film.

You know it's true what they say: you really do learn something every day.

[synergetic.livejournal.com]

Starley Way, a Cemetary and part of the Elmdon Trading Estate.

The nearest book was, of course, a Birmingham A-Z and those were the contents of grid 5E. One grid down and you'd have had the airport...

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

*grin* I love you

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

Oooh, just out of interest, how good is that book? Worth investing in? Worth finding in a library and browsing for procrastination?

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

amusing though. I've gotten some rather unusual answers off this one.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

The book was A Dictionary of Terms Used in Medicine and the Collateral Sciences, 1887. It's quite amusing in places, really. Being a Victorian medical publication, it treads a fine line between Not Wanting To Discuss Certain Things and finding it actually needs to mention them.

So for potentially sordid terms like, say, "orgasm", we get such wonderfully vague definitions as

"...a term denoting evanescent congestive phenomena, which manifest themselves in one or in several organs at once."

I mean, that could describe anything from a blush, through a migraine, to hayfever, depending how you read it.

[victoryisall.livejournal.com]

To be honest it looks pretty academic, looking at the contents, as I've not had time to peruse it. That's a lie: I've just been procrastinating because it looks a hard read. Lot's of pictures though, and it looks really cool on your book shelf.

[mousey13.livejournal.com]

I think this was the way in which geometry was invented, and passed afterwards into Greece - for knowledge of the sundial and the gnomom and the twelve divisions of the day came into Greece from Babylon.

Herodotus' Histories II.109