A Blog Around The Clock

It started with Henry who was bored with the simplicity of the "pick the nearest book" meme and decided to make it really hard!

Mike picked it up and tagged a few people, including me and Wilkins.

So, what are the rules? Hey, Henry came up with this, so feel free to make the rules as you go. After all, what's he gonna do - release calcium from intracellular stores?

OK, pick not one but TEN books. They don't need to be the closest to you - take your time and make good picks. It's not easy - you want people to work hard, but still figure out the sources eventually. Goldilocks Principle applies - not too obvious, not too obscure. Or whatever you prefer - make it easy so everyone can have fun, or make it so darned hard nobody gets it and you can gloat about your sophistication!

The unalterable rule: take ten books, and transcribe the fifth sentence from page fifty six.

If you want, you can have five of them be fiction, but you can change that as well.

If you want, you can provide hints, but you don't have to.

Then tag six people, or some other number (including zero) as you wish. As Wilkins notes, memes are supposed to mutate and evolve, so don't be a stickler for the rules. Just have fun!

OK - here are my ten:

1. I suppose that the mere fact that I was in the company of two friends itself proves that I wasn't actually some kind of hermit when it came to my rat studies.

2. They're screwing the security guards in the bathroom.

3. By the end of the nineteenth century, organic synthesis was widely accepted and the vital force theory was abandoned.

4. Cyanobacteria actually can tell time using a mechanism similar to our circadian clock, from the Latin meaning "about a day".

5. Half blind, I picked myself up and ran and ran and ran.

6. The idea that the transmission of news via paper might become a bad idea, that all those huge, noisy printing presses might be like steam engines in the age of internal combustion, was almost impossible to grasp.

7. Born in 1769, the twenty-year-old seminary student had weathered the French revolution by working at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with the dashing eccentric zoological genius Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire.

8. Males place packets of sperm everywhere on the female's head or tentacles.

9. Escoffier begins with the browning of beef and veal bones in the oven.

10. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

Hints: 8 of the 10 authors also write blogs.

I tag:

John McKay
Peggy Kolm
Tom Levenson
Dr.Isis
Carl Zimmer
Brian Switek

Honor system - refrain from Google for 24 hours. Post your best guesses in the comments. I will post the solutions to the riddle in 24 hours in the comments here.