Grab the nearest book, turn to page 23, copy down sentence 5 and post it. (via, who has me doing LJ “memes”. Next I’ll be talking to myself, posting it to a web page, and calling it a “blog”.)

It was not the end of humanity, although there were moments, in the course of the thirty-one years of world conflict between the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914 and the unconditional surrender of Japan on 14 August 1945 — four days after the explosion of the first nuclear bomb — when the end of a considerable proportion of the human race did not look far off.

– Age of Extemes (not all the sentences are quite that long) Bloglines Search: page 23

Of no particular interest, I find it amusing that if I had reached right instead of left, the fifth sentence, of the twenty-third page of Stations of the Tide was

“Enter.”