Today is an updating day in Hmpf country. Book meme.

[hmpf]

This is ancient, but this is the first time I happen to have something more interesting than a boring old textbook near my computer. Taken from cyberducks

Here are the rules:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

"Everyone feels like that in these gardens sooner or later, though usually not so quickly. It would be better for you if we stepped outside now." She said something else as well, something I could not catch. Far off, I seemed to hear surf pounding on the edge of the world.

(Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun, part 1. On my desk currently because of several threads I'm watching at the moment. One's here, and one's on sf-fan.de.)

Comments

[hittite.livejournal.com]

Here goes (the first book had a very short 123rd page, not even 4 sentences after the 5th, so I picked the second closest--they were both almost equidistant anyways)

The purpose of the body movements of birds is to transmit messages, and each movement is an expression of its own. Like other expressions, they can be subtly modified in meaning, and can be joined together in a syntactical sequence to convey meanings of greater complexity. That is why I believe it is time for us to assemble dictionaries of Animal-English for all such observations.
Bird vocalisations exist for two purposes.

(Brian J. Ford, The Secret Language of Life-How Animals and Plants Feel and Communicate. On desk because I am researching communications strategies used by known species to extrapolate from them to make my aliens in my new universe communicate with my humans.)