1. Go into the archives of your LJ.
2. Find your 42nd entry ever. Yes, this may require some counting and basic maths. Deal with it.
3. Link to that entry in a new entry. This is the meaning of your life.

My 42nd entry was about buying sf books in London, and drew a response from the late . Certainly true that I spend a lot of time on both London and sf books, but I don’t think it is my entire life!

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4-7 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest (unless it’s too troublesome to reach and is really heavy. Then go back to step 1).

The nearest book is Patrick Carroll’s Science, Culture and Modern State Formation for which I’m approaching a review deadline. The relevant sentences are about the views of the 18th century Austrian writer Johan Frank about the policing of public events:

In relation to the policing of popular entertainments, he was acutely aware of the need for police personnel to be dispatched with good judgment and respect for citizens. The notion that the police could “lord it over” the citizens had the result that the public, instead of feeling grateful for the “care” police provided, expressed the “greatest aversion to everything that is called police, and considers as nothing all the good that the police provides against the tyranny of … impetuous judgments.” Frank compared the “obstinacy of the police superintendent” to stubborn parents who rule their child with an “iron rod”. Such a mode of policing, exercised under the “pretense of good order,” could only result in the police earning the “hatred of the entire nation.”

Has a certain contemporary resonance, doesn’t it?