Late to the party as usual, I just picked up on the constant "explosion" of LiveJournal memes (see also "LJ memes") over the past several years, a blog hosting site favored by the young and restless. A great example of such a meme is "Grab the Nearest Book" meme, which looks like this:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
"Grab the Nearest Book"'s Google Number is 13,200. I think I came across it at Due Diligence, one of the blogs I subscribe to via Awasu. Of course, rather than wanting to continue this meme, I instantly wanted to discover where it had orginated. Using Google (what else), I think I discovered the origin of the meme (or for those searching with different keywords: the original source of the meme, the beginning of the meme, the start of the meme, where the meme originated, where the meme started, and who started the meme).
Why do I think this is the origin? Well, for one, the date of April 6th is the earliest I can find, and this blog post discussing the origin of the meme (the only such discussion I could find) credits the same site.
One of the interseting things about this meme is how it seems to have mutated from a survey question on a LiveJournal survey. Of course, there are much earlier memes regarding random sentences from books. See this meme from The Church of the SubGenius.
7:30:03 AM 
