Memeage

[telophase]

The oldie-but-goodie meme going around again.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4-7 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest (unless it's too troublesome to reach and is really heavy. Then go back to step 1).
6. Tag five people.

It's a timeline from the back of Gerard Chaliand's Nomadic Empires: From Mongolia to the Danube, because I was listening to a history podcast on the way to work this morning that was all about the steppe warriors of Central Asia and got interested in the topic, so grabbed a couple of books from the stacks.

1480     Ivan III declares the end of the "Mongol yoke," but it proves premature.

1492     Granada taken by the Christians.

1502     End of the Golden Horde. Foundation of the Sefavid dynasty.

1520-1566     Suleyman the Magnificent.



Consider yourself tagged if you want to be.

Comments

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

"You can continue with the contrast marked by thw potent zenithal light and highlight depth by fading the line marking the court."

Zenithal? WTF? Anyway, it's from "Erotic Manga, Draw Like The Experts" which is sitting open on my desk.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Ah, you gotta love those manga-how-to translators, most of whom are unfamiliar with how terms are used in art. IIRC, there's a hell of a lot of "aspect" vs. "expression" mixups in the official HTDM series.

Although you have to wonder why your quote didn't pair "zenithal" with "nadiral" for the highlight depth bit. XD

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Mine is a little fudged because the book closest to me doesn't go to 123. (It's a crocheting book). So I grabbed the closest thing on the shelf behind me that wasn't a magazine or textbook. At least I think my book is fairly identifiable.

"Fifteenth," said the March Hare.
"Sixteenth," added the Dormouse.
"Write that down," the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Alice! Either Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass, because I can't remember which part comes from where. :D

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Correct. It is from regular Alice, but near the end with the court scene. I have a rather large children's version now because I had a really nice annotated copy from my college bookstore but I can't find it anywhere.

[paper-legends.livejournal.com]

I'm curious--what does icon say? In ancient times...?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

"In the good old days, children like you were left to perish on windswept crags." Or so says shannonsequitur, who I ganked it from. :)

[paper-legends.livejournal.com]

Awesome.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

You know, the hardest part of that meme is figuring out which book is the closest...

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I had a choice of that one, Warriors of the Steppe, or Galileo's Daughter, all of which are equidistant from me at the moment. :)

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

I've got either a Dorothy Sayers book or a Doctor Who one. There's a good half dozen books beyond them, but I think those are the top two candidates. ;-)

[wyrdness.livejournal.com]

I'm currently considering whether a textbook counts as a book for this purpose... If it does I can give everyone half of a conversation in very basic Japanese :D

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

For me, it was between two equidistant books, so I'll do both to be mean:

"No, I am not," Mary answered, her own whisper sounding half frightened. "Are you one?"
He stared and stared and stared. Mary could not help noticing what strange eyes he had. They were agate gray and they looked too big for his face because they had black lashes all round them. [the next sentence would give it away, so I'll stop there.]

Among the many dicta for which Horace's text is most famous are the warning against the "purple patch" (purpureus pannus) and the declarations that "poetry resembles painting" (ut pictura poesis), "even Homer sometimes sleeps" (...), and poetry should be "pleasing" and useful" (dulce et utile). Purple patches are inappropriately place ornate passages that violate the principle of decorum and thus should be avoided by writers. [Well, that's enough of that. And since no one will get it. It's the intro material to Horace in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism.]

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Francis Hodgson Burnett FTW.

[chomiji]

(Hee! You did get right down to re-reading Secret Garden, didn't you?   :-)  )

[helen-keeble.livejournal.com]

"The objective in this project was to enhance an existing aircraft display, the Highway in the Sky display. The HITS display shows the corridor in the sky that the plane should be flying in and has been successful in improving navigation in experimental tasks. The objective was to strategically improve the display, not to provide a complete EID display."

Ecological Interface Design, by Catherine Burns and John Hajdukiewicz, which on the whole is a lot more interesting than the above paragraph. It's the closest book to hand because I'm currently working on my dissertation... and I'm doing this meme because I'm currently _meant_ to be working on my dissertation. *wry*

[madame-manga.livejournal.com]

The very nearest "book" is a little insert from a recent issue of Afternoon, which is all one-page 20th-anniversary blurbs and drawings from their various mangaka... and I can't type in Japanese. So let's take the next one down in the stack, early-19th-century punctuation intact:

"They are very pretty, ma'am -- an't (sic) they?" But then again, the dread of having been too civil, too encouraging herself, probably came over her, for she presently added:

"Do you not think they are something in Miss Morton's style of painting, Ma'am? -- She does paint most delightfully! -- How beautifully her last landscape is done!"

"Beautifully indeed! But she does everything well."


From a complete Jane Austen: seven novels for the price of one! I grabbed it out of the bookcase the other day to find a quote for purposes of argument on an Austen list. That passage is from Sense and Sensibility.

[chomiji]

From the nearest thing that isn't a volume of Fruits Basket (left on my desk from blogging the other day) ...

"You all right, Dek?" Finger along his cheek. "You're white. You want me to call a doctor? Dek?"

He shook his head, suddenly sure of that. He sucked in a breath and got an elbow up under him, to see if his head was going to spin. Weak, God .... .

Hmm, Cherryh writes very terse dialog ... (from Hellburner, in this case).

[celticdragonfly.livejournal.com]

This style of advertising cauight on, moving from rag-and-bone men to other working-class environments, such as fried-fish shops and stalls that produced cheaply prepared foods - stewed eels, baked potatoes - and finally soap companies(see pp. 157-158).
Kitchen waste was, of course, the main item to be disposed of regularly, and advice books were full of information on what could be got rid of, in what way. It is difficult to know how far their precepts were followed - the stress laid on the immorality of straightforward disposal implies that probably many people threw out much more than they were expected to. Cooks who were not thrifty put all the kitchen leavings into a bucket. The content was called "wash," and the washman visited regularly to buy it; he then sold it as "hog-wash," or pig swill. Employers were warned solemnly about the evils of this system.