123 Book Meme

I was tagged below by Chris with this meme, courtesy of Toast (and Maurinsky).

1. Grab the nearest book (at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to page 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag 5 people.

From The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman:

They were quite close now, and seeing what was coming, some of the villagers looked up and called to each other to look. The party from the road slowed to a halt, and Mary clambered stiffly down, knowing that she would ache later on.
"Thank you," she said to her...her what?

I'm not tagging anyone, feel free to join in if you like.

123 Book Meme

Here's a nice quick meme, courtesy of Toast (and Maurinsky).

1. Grab the nearest book (at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to page 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag 5 people.

I'm at work, so there aren't a lot of books around. I have my Intro to
Java book, but it's one of those Kinko's things with sections instead of
page numbers. Rolling over to the file cabinet, there are quite a few
books, so I grabbed the first one to catch my eye - "PowerBuilder
Application Techniques Version 6". I know, it's exciting stuff.

"This example deletes one item and all the small pictures from a
ListView:
int li_index
li_index = This.SelectedIndex()
This.DeleteItem (li_index)
This.DeleteSmallPictures()

ListView report view requires more information than the large icon,
small icon, and list view. To enable report view in a ListView control
you must write a script that establishes columns with the AddColumn and
SetColumn functions, and then populate the columns using the SetItem
function."

Hmm, maybe I'll redo this one at home for a little contrast. Not that I
have anything against technical manuals, I enjoy programming, but this
is a bit dry for general consumption.

Ok, 5 people that Toast didn't tag - I'll tag John, Michelline, Mr F,
umm, Chemist and umm, well crap, I'm about out of readers. Nightshift
doesn't read this blog, but I'll tag him anyway.

The Road

So, a while ago, I saw a post about this book over at Tart's blog, and made a note to myself to check it out sometime since I like reading post-apocalyptic type fiction. So I picked it up one day along with The Golden Compass, which I had to read after getting an email at work about how we should avoid the movie because it was going to turn our kids into little heathens or something. Anyway, I almost didn't get it when I saw it was an Oprah's Book Club book, but then I decided that was pretty closed minded. Anyway, I'm about a third of the way through it, and normally I wouldn't post anything until I'm done reading a book, but I might not even be able to finish this one. Not that it isn't good, because it is, but holy shit, it might be the most depressing thing I've ever read or even heard of. Maybe it wouldn't seem so bad if I didn't have a young son, but fuck this is really getting to me. And it's even worse because I can see what's coming. Well, I hope I can't, actually. Anyway, movies and books don't usually get to me too much, but if what I think might happen happens in this book, I'll probably cry like a little baby.

Oh, and I found nothing whatsoever that was controversial in any way in The Golden Compass.

Now you can see the coolest book ever...for FREE

Over on Flickr there's a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus, which is fascinating if you've never been able to find a copy. The illustrations are at once beautiful,amazing and disturbing. The Wikipedia article gives a pretty thorough explanation of the history as well as the mystery around this fairly recent piece of artwork.