stiff My pal Lee over at Tar Heel Ramblings tagged me for the very simple 123 Book Meme. This meme asks you to complete a kindergarten-level task and report the results. It’ll give you a good sense of what I like to read when I’m not blogging. It might scare you, but if you’ve been here before, you’ve been scared plenty already and this won’t faze you a bit.

So why am I a problem child? Because the meme didn’t work on my first try. It’s always something with me.

Here are the meme rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people & post a comment here once you post it to your blog, so I can come see.

I have a few half-read books in the pipeline, but as instructed, you have to pick the book nearest to you. That book is Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing.

I opened it up to page 123 and what should I find? Almost nothing. It was a chapter title page: Shooting Haiku in a Barrel. That’s it. No fifth sentence to find. No three sentences to list after that. It would figure I’d pick a book with a faulty page 123.

So onto Plan B. Pick another book. This time I chose Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. Before you ask, yes, I’m really intrigued by stuff like this. I don’t want to actually see a cadaver or be a cadaver, but I don’t mind reading about ’em!

Page 123 and the fifth sentence: The researchers concluded that the planes had broken apart at altitude, spilling most of their human contents into the sea.

The next three sentences: To figure out exactly where the fuselage had broken apart, they looked at whether the passengers had been clothed or naked when pulled from the sea. Sir Harold’s theory was that hitting the sea from a height of several miles would knock one’s clothes off, but that hitting the sea inside the largely intact tail of the plane would not, and that they could therefore surmise the point of breakup as the dividing line between clothed and naked cadavers. For in both flights, it was the passengers determined (by checking the seating chart) to have been in the back of the plane who wound up floating in their clothes, while passengers seated forward of a certain point were found floating naked, or practically so.

That’s just lovely, isn’t it?

If this doesn’t give you a fear of flying, reading this might. I live directly under the flight path of an airport located three miles west of me. As a result, I have regular and terrifying nightmares about planes crashing into my neighborhood. The nightmare I described isn’t all together horrible, as it involves The Three Stooges. Even in my nightmares, I have to laugh a little.

I won’t tag anyone, but if you would like to crack open a book and do the meme, have at it! 1-2-3 Go!

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