No Longer 'It'
Mr. VanBrink called upon Our House In Jersey to: "Find the nearest book. Turn to page 123. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog. Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks."
Maria already tagged three more folks, so I'll skip that part.
The book nearest me at the moment is Soduko To Go!, compiled by Michael Mepham. The back cover boasts of the book's "New Portable Size", but it hasn't left my bedroom since the day I brought it home. As you might have guessed, there are very few sentences in this book. Page 123 features a puzzle solution.
So in the interest of participating in this very important activity, I'll flip to page 123 of the second nearest book. Here goes:
"Who could believe that his footfalls ever sounded on a lonely pavement? Who had heard the casual and familiar tones of Chester Arthur? Where was Harrison?"
That's from Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, but she didn't write those lines. She's quoting from The Four Lost Men by Thomas Wolfe.
I inherited my copy of Assassination Vacation from Friends Heather and Sean, who know a good book when they read one. I'm really glad that this was the second nearest book, because it gives me an excuse to say how much I loved it. The author explores the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley by traveling to sites relevant to their lives and deaths, examining artifacts and statues, and chatting up the people she meets along the way. I have to admit, her writing style was tough for me to get used to (a bit rambling), and I had to reread a few passages because, by the time I got to the end of the passage, I'd forgotten what the beginning had been about. But once I got used to the style, I was able to appreciate this book for what it is: witty, insightful, and jam-packed with fascinating facts and anecdotes. I finished it months ago, and now I find myself occasionally rereading passages just because I want to. In fact, six or eight weeks ago, something compelled me to read a passage aloud to my housemates. It was this one:
"In the first summer of the Iraqi war, on the crabby, sweaty second day of a blackout that shut down the Northeast's power grid, I stood in line for questionable foodstuffs in my dark neighborhood deli. It reeked of souring milk. An annoyingly upbeat fellow-shopper chirped, 'Cheer up, everybody, we're part of history!' Maybe because I was suffering the effects of allergy eyes brought on the night before by trying to read by the light of lilac-scented candles about a political murder committed around the time of the Spanish-American War, I snapped at him. 'Sir,' I said, 'except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.'"
posted by Liz/Beth Ann @ 10:13 PM
2 Comments:
If it weren't for all the wars, we wouldn't need the polio vaccine anymore.
Okay. This, I suppose, is a little tardy. But ... here goes.
"...By counting the tracks it is possible to measure the length of time for which the grains were exposed on the surface. The characteristics of the tracks permit the determination of the energy spectrum and the relative abundances of the many elements in cosmic rays.
Galactic cosmic rays, one hundred times less abundant than solar ones, are sufficiently energetic (about 1 gigaelectronvolt per nucleon) to penetrate to a depth of more than a metre into the regolith and there to induce nuclear reactions in the atoms which constitute the grains."
The Cambridge Atlas of Astronomy, edited by Jean Audouze and Guy Israel. Third edition. "Over 1100 illustrations - nearly 500 pages" 1994. This is a coffee table sort of book, but heavy on charts and a step or two higher in technical stuff than would be National Geographic or The Smithsonian, that is not on the coffee table, but, rather, on a shelf of reference books at my left elbow as I sit afront the computer. The only reason it is so handy is that the shelf it is on is about the only one in the apartment of big enough size to accomodate it vertically; other shelves, elsewhere, are too short. It is a nice book, but we don't do a lot of perusing of it. But it was such a bargain: one buck at a library sale. Our little city library must be well funded or eccentricly managed if it can afford to buy and then ditch such an expensive, glossy heavy paper, color illustrated, oversize volume after 10 or 12 years. Then, again, I might be eccentricly managed if we store books for years and don't look at them.
The quoted words are from a chapter entitled "The Moon".
I'm hard pressed to think of three literate friends, much less three friends who would want to be tagged.
Bob's your uncle.
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