otrops: jeff van campen's personal blog

I’ve really been enjoying the posts on “book titles, if they were written today” over on your monkey called and kottke.org. I wasn’t going to blog about it, but Jason Kottke has posted a selection of the best titles from the comments.
This one was just too good not to share:

Then: If on a Winter’s Night [...]

In the coming weeks the number of posts on this blog is likely to increase. I’m going to publish short commentaries on and selections of items I find interesting from around the web. The last two posts on the new Tube map and David Byrne’s Perfect Cities are examples of this. These posts will all [...]

I came home to find a message from Tim on facebook. He asked if I’d heard about Penguin’s Blog a Penguin Classic program. I hadn’t. I have now, though, and I’m pretty excited about it.
You go to the site and fill in your details. They choose a book randomly and send [...]

So, after posting the last book meme, Mike went and published another book meme. Here’s how it goes:

Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next three sentences.

In my case, the closest book was Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B. Carroll. [...]

I haven’t posted in a while. To remedy this, I’ve decided to use some memetically generated content, rather than bothering to actually write something original. I noticed this particular meme on some of the science blogs I read. It’s a bit stale now, but it’s my kind of fun.
Below are “106 books of pretension,” [...]