I am sheep. Hear me baa.

As any regular reader of Parenthetically Speaking may know, I avoid memes. There's one going around Livejournal about 10 Things I've Done You Probably Haven't, that is rather amusing, but there are a great many things I've done you probably haven't. Some of them are really weird (Sled dogs! Theater stuff! Sleeping in trees!), and some are entirely mundane, as one blogger pointed out, but unique because I am the one doing them, at the precise moment I did them. I like that.

So, a meme approacheth, and I say, 'bah, humbug', and then over at Alas, A Blog, I find out Bean has a new blog, and I surf on over, and durned if there's not another meme-like object there.

My brain is trying to say "bah". But it sounds more like "baaaaa".

Cribbed from Bean:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

The book within most obvious visual range is a Japanese-English/English-Japanese dictionary, but I've actually used it for a meme like this before, so I'm letting it off the hook. Plus, it's a dictionary.

The book within easiest reach (a whole five inches closer than the dictionary, literally just barely not touching my forearm, it does qualify as "nearest") doesn't have 123 pages. So, I cheated and went for page 61 - that's half of 123, accurate to within an order of magnitude. Naturally, p. 61 has an illustration: Lactuca sativa.

Pliny has many references to lactuca, but he applies the name to many plants that are not lettuce.

That's from p. 60 of A Pompeiian Herbal, which I like to keep near the computer or the bed and thumb through idly as the mood strikes.

The book underneath A Pompeiian Herbal is one I hauled out recently in response to a law-school-related tragedy: C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed. No page 123 either.

Next closest book is either the 2004 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, or a block of books including my ALWD (legal citation) manual, another book on legal writing, law dictionary, Gannon's book on Civil Procedure, and then The Anti-Federalist Papers (The Federalist Papers are in the other room) cradling gently on top of it The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and other stories, by Robert Louis Stevenson.