The Adherents of the Repeated Meme

Tagged again!

Right, the Official Rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment here once you post it to your blog so I can come see!

As chance would have it, my nearest book is Iain M. Banks' Excession, and the passage in question is a spaceship transmission giving the title shot (and for purposes of the excercise, I'm choosing to interpret "sentence" as "text ending with a period"):

Begin-Read point of Tracked Copy document #SC.c4: +
xGCU Fate Amenable to Change
oGSV Ethics Gradient
& strictly as SC cleared:
Excession notice @.
Constitutes formal All-ships Warning Level 0
[(in temporary sequestration) - textual note added by GSV Wisdom Like Silence @].
Excession.

(No, the whole book isn't like that; it's just how the dialogue between the Culture ships is written. For further context, the Fate Amenable to Change, Ethics Gradient, and Wisdom Like Silence are the names of the ships themselves, or at least of the godlike AI Minds who inhabit them, and SC stands for Special Circumstances, the Culture's secret service and intelligence organization.)

For something a little less obscure, I also have at hand Britta Sweers' fascinating study Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music, which I've been slowly making my way through for a little while now (it's very good, but a little dense and chewy). Page 123 is in Chapter 4, "The Electric Folk Scene: A Sociocultural Portrayal":

In 1965 Karl Dallas wondered, for instance, if folksingers were overpaid - not meaning to attack the stars of the scene, but rather the idea that even those without talent could make money. As he concluded in Melody Maker: "It's become very commercial, to be uncommercial" (Dallas 1965). Hence one problematic result of the musical fusions after 1967 was that electric folk groups presented their music within a commercial context - something that had previously been rejected by the revival scene.

Hmmm. I should probably just let that stand without comment.

This one's been around a couple of times now, so I don't know if anyone here has been hit with it already; who wants to risk the terrible Illumination that the books reveal?

Pick a Window!

In the spirit of honoring the anniversary of the Second Defenestration of Prague, I've finally tossed a bunch of outdated links and got the new comments up and running. Will see about importing the old comments into the new format soon, but meanwhile, we'll actually be able to have conversations around here again. Huzzah.

Have also plunged into the forum-moderation business lately, as I recently helped to found the Charm City Science Fiction & Fantasy board over on Google Groups. It's a sort of offshoot of the writing workshop I joined a couple of months ago, but I don't see much point in restricting membership to either writers or locals, so those of you whose reading habits skew at all like mine (um, is there anyone in the readership here who isn't some variety of skiffy nerd?) should go o'er and join in.

I owe some of you emails. I am aware of this, and have not forgotten you. All will be well.

Golden Apple

No one who has known me for long will be surprised to know that Spyder is one of my very favoritest people ever. I half-seriously call her the sister I didn't know I had, mostly because there isn't a word for a person who is neither a relative nor a lover, but for whom "friend" is woefully insufficient.

Anyway, she turns 23* today. I'm heading up Noo Yawkwards in a few hours to celebrate in person; the rest of you should head over to her place and give her a big virtual hug and Many Happy Returns for the sake of her imminent Illumination.

Yay!

*If you have to ask why this is significant, I'm afraid I'm not cleared to tell you. Fnord.