Make no confusing plans . . .

Zac Thompson tagged me.

The rules [as he copied them]:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Now Zac being a stickler, perhaps the stickler, for both detail and accuracy, I am surprised that he did not indicate that the rules are ambiguous. Zac chose to post the fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences; I would have read rule No. 4 as calling for the sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences to be posted.

Be that as it may:

1. The nearest book: The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City, by Carl Smith. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. Paperback edition, 2007.

2. Page 123: The midst of Chapter Seven, "Promotion" [of the Plan].

3. Fifth sentence: A bit of a toughie here. Much of the page is taken up with a black-and-white reproduction of a period (1910's) colored lantern slide of traffic congestion in downtown Chicago with the ever-timely original caption "Chicago's rapid growth has been one cause of street congestion" and additional caption material by Carl Smith, so there aren't five full sentences of text proper on the page. Counting the non-boilerplate sentences from the caption, though, I am anointing this as the fifth sentence:

"But his [Walter L. Moody's] most impressive publication, in both conception and execution, was his Wacker's Manual of the Plan of Chicago."

4. The next three sentences are:

"The first version of several editions of this book appeared in 1911. Like Chicago's Greatest Issue [: An Official Plan], Wacker's Manual was a shorter and more economically produced version of the Plan of Chicago, though it was more substantial than Chicago's Greatest Issue. The first edition included a very self-congratulatory chapter on the planners."

5. I tag: Edward Lifson, Brian Dickie, Lynn Becker, Lee Bey, and Curtis Black.