Brad Posts About the Page 123 Meme

My friend Brad just posted about the Page 123 meme that’s been going around for a while now. He has a pretty good post, even attempting to trace the origins of the internet time-wasting sensation. So here were the two books I had closest, and the gory details:

First from Wisconsin Curiosities, 2nd: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff. I don’t have the first edition, and the reason it was on my desk is that the book previously was in the guest bathroom for reading enjoyment, but got packed away with various Arizona Highways and Sunset magazines prior to an actual guest’s arrival, and was just recently liberated by my wife, who plunked it directly in front of my keyboard (which is where she places everything of mine (non-clothing division) that is incorrectly occupying space in the rest of the house), which is how it was stacked on my desk 10 inches away from the left monitor, next to the phone. </run-on sentence>

“An especially impressive non sequitur is a model of the world’s first Ferris wheel, which debuted at the Exposition. It was 250 feet high (nearly as high as the capitol in Madison), and its brave passengers rode in thirty-six enclosed cars, sixty in each, for a total of 2,160 people, many more than the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria combined. An exhibit in the quincentenary department tells the story of a man who drove 30,000 miles photographing every community in the United States that was ever named Columbus, even if a tree out in the middle of a field was all that was left of it.”

Next up was Swing: A Mystery by Rupert Holmes – an Edgar Award winner. This book is about a murder mystery with espionage and jazz overtones, set in the San Francisco Bay area just prior to WWII. My mom had bought me this two years ago, and when I had the flu and couldn’t sleep last Friday night, I read this cover-to-cover in about six hours. It comes with a CD of music composed by the author to purportedly be the music played by the main character. Unfortunately, this page 123 is in the middle of a flashback/dream, so it’s not as relevant:

“I’ll fetch Linney after all. It’s so rare the three of us have the evening together. We can get in a game of Uncle Wiggily before she goes to bed.”

Apparently, this is a tagging meme referring to instant bibliomancy, which Alex Halavais calls “the art of foretelling the future by reading random passages from books”

So it looks like we’ll be getting a game of Uncle Wiggily before bedtime. And I guess it works, as the morning I completed Swing: A Mystery, I was able to secure tickets to The Wiggles, which went on sale 5 hours after the book was set down on my desk.

Posted by Andrew Flynn on February 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Tags: 123 meme, bibliomancy, Michael Feldman, Rupert Holms, The Wiggles, Wisconsin