Bibliomancy

Someone pointed me to a post on The Land of Nod blog about Dictionary: The RPG. It reminds me of a similar trick I incorporated into a game I once wrote and plan to work on again: Comedy Blackout. In that game, I started the same way by opening a book to a random page, but then I dropped three pennies on the page and used the specific elements where the pennies landed. A dictionary or thesaurus works pretty well, but even better (in my opinion) is a comic collection, such as one of the Far Side Gallery books. Or maybe the Codex Seraphinianus... but that costs something like two or three hundred bucks, so it's not as amenable to use as a game tool.