Yes I Do Respond To These Things
Southern Beale has tagged me in a meme.
Here are the rules.
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to take a passage from the last book I read “The Age of Turbulence” by Alan Greenspan.
Here are those “next three sentences”.
But the biggest surprise that awaited me was an extraordinary tutorial on the roots of market capitalism. This is the system with which, of course, I am most familiar, but my understanding of its foundations was wholly abstract. I was reared in a sophisticated market economy with its many supporting laws, institutions, and conventions long since in place and mature.
That part of the book was especially interesting. He was talking about converting formerly communist Eastern European economies into market economies. Ahh the good ole days, when capitalism triumphed over collectivism. How I long for those days.
Okay now, this is the part where I tag people and they don’t ever respond. Here it goes anyway. Joe Powell, Ned Williams, John Norris Brown, Nathan McIntyre, Jeffraham Prestonian.
I feel left out!
I’m going to play along (except for the tagging part) anyway. The book is Learning perl, and here are the “next three sentences,” which don’t break out cleanly because of examples:
The /g modifier tells s/// to make all possible nonoverlapping* replacements:
A fairly common use of a global replacement is to collapse whitespace; that is, to turn any arbitrary whitespace into a single space:
Once we show collapsing whitespace, everyone wants to know about stripping leading and trailing whitespace. That’s easy enough, in two steps:†
* It’s nonoverlapping because each new match starts looking just beyond the last replacement.
† It could be done in one step, but this way is better.
Stupid moderation queue…
Hey! I wanna be tagged!
Anyways….I had this book at hand (one of the 5 I got for Christmas; this one published in 1940, printed in 1940, “A Treasury of the World’s Great Letters”, ed. by M. Lincoln Schuster. Page 123 is the beginning of Part 2, “Letters of Not So Long Ago (1747 to 1896). Skipping to p. 125…”Lord Chesterfield Lays Down some Precepts for his Natural Son”…(London, March 6, O.S. 1747)
“Virtue and learning, like gold, have their intrinsic value; but if they are not polished, they certainly lose a great deal of their lustre: and even polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold. What a number of sins does the cheerful, easy good-breeding of the French frequently cover! Many of them want common sense, many more common learning; but, in general, they make up so much, by their manner, for those defects, that, frequently, they pass undiscovered. I have often said, and do think, that a Frenchman, who, with a fund of virtue, learning and good sense, has the manners and good-breeding of his country, is the perfection of human nature. This perfection you may, if you please, and I hope you will, arrive at.”
Well, that’s five sentences, and an ton of commas. And I seem to recall from history that in 1747 no one cared much about body odor.
I wonder if Lord Chesterfield, if alive today, would reconsider his praise for teh French.
Dang, and I thought nobody would respond.
The problem was, when I first spotted this, I was at work. Now I’m at home, and have a better excerpt. This book was on my computer desk at home: Carl Sagan’s Billions and Billions which was published posthumously. The “next three” sentences are:
Obviously, Mssrs. Sagan and Minano were a wee bit too optimistic…
Not yet.
I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to take a passage from the last book I read “The Age of Turbulence” by Alan Greenspan.
I figured you’d pick Greenspan!! I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew.