I am decidedly anti-meme myself, but yesterday Alison featured a quirky one:

1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open the book to page 23.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

I am surrounded by stultifyingly dull school books, which have rendered my answer as: “His seat faced toward the door, and she guessed that he had been perturbed by the approach of an acquaintance, a fact confirmed by the turning of heads and general sense of commotion which her own entrance into a railway-carriage was apt to produce.” (From the stunningly boring House of Mirth.)

Much more intriguing than my answer to the meme is the question of where it came from. And, furthermore, why the twenty-third page? Should i start counting from the first complete sentence? What book started all this? In my quest for knowledge, i backtracked from Alison, who got it
via Dave
via John Biesnecker
via John Hicks
via Greg
via Michael
via Keith
via PeterMe
via Caterina
via David Chess
via Long Story, Short Pier
via Elkins (ah, see, now we’ve crossed over to LiveJournal)
via happy_potterer via sternel, who doesn’t directly attribute the source, but points to PegKerr who was “infected” by
kijjohnson
infected by Mckitterick
infected by Bob Howe who, lamentably, attributes two sources (Silvertide and Curmudgeon), though it seems clear that the former got it from the latter who got it from kricker.

Here, the chain becomes tangled. Kricker attributes two sources: pbsage who got it from cynnerth. The latter indicates that s/he received it via seamusd whose journal is friends-only and cannot be viewed by the public. S/he claims to have seen it first at Kricker’s journal. Kricker confirmed his/her attributions, and points out that seamusd had posted about it first. However, lower in that exchange Seamusd reiterates that it originated from Kricker.

It is increasingly hard to find journals closer to the meme-source via google, as there is a proliferation of hits that occurred after the LJ-to-domain-blog leap in the middle of my chain, especially after being featured on such highly-linked sites such as Bluishorange, PeterMe, and Caterina. Interestingly, on LJ pages the meme is often accompanied by a few other recent memes which do not appear to have made the LJ-to-domain jump (or, at least, not on such a large scale). What does this say about the nature of the LJ community vs. blogdom at large? Where did this meme come from? Can you find a higher, earlier link than Seamusd?