Tagged

Lucky me.

I recall seeing various versions of this throughout the blogosphere in the past, but haven't seen examples of the phenomena in at least a year or two. Alas, being tagged, the blog equivalent of a chain letter, is not extinct. Unlike chain letters, a tag could actually provide some enlightening answers when the questions are not too inane. Fortunately the one that landed in my email box courtesy of my friend, Max the Drunken Severed Head is pretty painless (compared to some examples I've seen in the past which included 10 wide ranging and often stupid questions), otherwise I'd be referring to him as my FORMER friend, Max.


What Max's email requested I do was this:

1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Locate the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences on your blog and in so doing...
5) Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.


Of course some people might posit that comic books only have 22 pages making me ineligible to answer such a question. Yes, there are comic books in my immediate vicinity, but there are other books as well, though this proved to be tricky as well.

The nearest books to me are a stack of YA and children's books, foiling me by either being too short, having illustrations on page 123, or chapter finishes less than 5 sentences long.

Expanding the range of the nearest book, brings two equal contenders.

I'm a bit unclear on steps 3 and 4 so I'm going to interpret it as I see fit, since I'm not sure if a sentence which begins on page 122 but ends on 123 counts as the first sentence, or not, and also because I'm unclear on whether listing the next three sentences includes sentence 5, or begins with sentence 6. I'm beginning with sentence 6.

At any rate, here are the three sentences from the first book:



I hope my gamble works!

Apes often imitate what they see.

If Titano sees me putting this human-size puppet down, he may put Lucy down, too!




Here are the sentences from the second book:


Her bones, they say, were turned to stone.

Still she hides in the woods and is seen no more in the mountains.

But everyone can still hear her, since her voice, and only her voice, is still alive.





I'm tempted to leave everyone hanging and not name the books, but in the spirit of kindheartedness, the first book was in fact a comic book; a collection of some of the greatest comic books ever published, "The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen."




















The second book was "Men and Gods" by Rex Warner with illustrations by Edward Gorey. The story that my sentences came from should be pretty obvious.








As for the 5th step in Max's instructions, I really hate the idea of inflicting this sort of thing on anyone, but since I'm one of those people who immediately start scanning people's bookshelves when I'm let into their homes, I'm always curious about what people are reading, so beware. When I decide who's getting hit, I'll update this post letting you know.