February 15, 2008 — 9:01 AM
123 book meme
I don't often get into memes that float around the electronic world. But I was invited this morning to participate in one by a fellow pastor, Jim Bonewald. The instructions are simple enough:
1) Grab the nearest book of 123 pages or more.
2) Open it to page 123.
3) Find the first 5 sentences and write them down.
4) Invite five friends to do the same.
So here's my contribution to this meme.
From Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert:
Most reasonably sized libraries have a shelf of futurist tomes from the 1950s with titles such as Into the Atomic Age and The World of Tomorrow. If you leaf through a few of them, you quickly notice that each of these books says more about the times in which it was written than about the times it was meant to foretell. Flip a few pages and you'll find a drawing of a housewife with a Donna Reed hairdo and a poodle skirt flitting about her atomic kitchen, waiting for the sound of her husband's rocket car before getting the tuna casserole on the table. Flip a few more and you'll see a sketch of a modern city under a glass dome, complete with nuclear trains, antigravity cars, and well-dressed citizens gliding smoothly to work on conveyor-belted sidewalks. You will also notice that some things are missing.
Now I tag Bruce, Tiffany, Heather, Karl, and Monte.
