Baaa...

[herveus]

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

The nomenclature for this may seem a bit odd at first -- it's written as [[a-z]&&[^aeiou]], and read aloud as "this and not that."

Mastering Regular Expressions, Jeffrey E. F. Friedl

Comments

[montuos]

Hey, wow! For once I'm at home when I see this meme, so I don't have to explain that, well, there are no sentences that far into the ICD-9-CM 200x!

"Fred and George were both helping customers."

[ladyaelfwynn.livejournal.com]

You must be reading Half Blood Prince! Is this your first time through?

[montuos]

Nope; I read it back when it was still pretty new. Not that I'm currently re-reading it either; it was just the first visible book in the piles of stuff around the computer.

[ladyaelfwynn.livejournal.com]

It's cool that it is the first visible book. I'm stuck with dictionaries, which, while cool in their own right, have neither parapgraphs or proper sentences on page 123.

[montuos]

Yup; fortunately the dictionary, while technically closer to hand, was hidden behind some stuff!

[sagittaria.livejournal.com]

Counting the 5th complete sentence, not the partial sentence at the top of the page, I get this:

"But this points out the impossibility of thinking of coping as a context-free, concern-free list of options that people should choose from to reduce the stress in their lives."

Whew. That's a mouthful. From "The Primacy of Caring: Stress and Coping in Health and Illness" by Patricia Benner & Judith Wrubel.

And I've seen the ICD9 book - it's over 1000 pages, isn't it? I think something like "19.4 Myringoplasty" would have been a fine result. :)