Obi’s Sister

The Anchoress is taking part in an interesting meme, the Page 123 Book Meme. It caught my eye, since it is a little different from the usual tell-us-ten-things-about-yourself-speed-dating type meme. So I thought I’d sneak it!

Here are the rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

The nearest book is Mark Steyn’s America Alone - almost done - I’m finishing it up at soccer practice(s).

Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins in the ‘burbs, but 732 AD - as in one and third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within two hundred miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours.

The book is full of jewels. How about when speaking of multiculturalism, Mr. Steyn says, “It’s a quintessential piece of progressive humbug.” He talks about General Napier’s “cultural cool”:

In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee”-the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: “You say that is your custom to burn widows. Very well. Ww also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And them we will follow ours.”

Yeah. Cool.

But I digress. Since I snuck the meme, I feel a little guilty tagging some bloggers with the hot goods, so if you want to play, go ahead!