If the Vatican is truly controlling all the hispanic population unawares, a. they could get them each to pony up a few grand and wipe out this monumental debt and B. surely they could find some aspiring clergy types out there.

After they fix those problems, then yeah, sure, world domination. But first, tidy your own yard. Especially if you've got all these minions!

This is the same crap that comes up every time a politician is Catholic - and now an interesting variation is the scrutiny surrounding Mass. Gov Mit Romney's Mormonism.

Widespread bad insecurity management. This isn't new, alas, but it hasn't been an historical universal, either.

Ex-Governor Bush, on the other hand, may have gone to one of those fancy Eastern colleges, but he acts reassuringly dumb.

Sadly, yes.

You should remember that as recently as 1960, John F. Kennedy had to state publicly that he was not taking orders from the Pope, just to run for president. Anti-Catholicism has a long and disgusting history in the United States. I'm just surprised that the editorial writer didn't blame Al-Qaeda for the immigration bogey that is currently obsessing the right. Or, perhaps, we will see shortly the same writer asserting that there is a Jewish-Catholic-Islamic-Freemason plot to deprive Americans of their liberty.

Those who can learn from history are doomed to get deja vu a lot, because of those idiots who can't.

Those who do learn from history tend to repeat each other...

Ugh, brain hurt. That's enough Latin for this Monday morning, time for coffee.

It seems that Catholicism is in vogue right up until the moment it espouses something outside the neo-Confederate Dobson/Robertson axis - then it becomes good ol' Romanism and Popery again. They'll embrace the Church when it supports their policies on gays, abortion, and contraception, but when the subject turns to social justice or immigration, it's back to 1886.

Only through the summer season. Rest assured we'll get new programming in time for the fall.

The first time is tragedy, the second time is farce.

Those who take history personally are doomed to repeat it. Santayana sounded so definitive it's easy to believe he's right, but it's quite possible that a forget-history ray would improve a lot of the world.

Some anti-foreigner hostility was expressed with brickbats and fists, but the most potent weapon was the pen. Samuel F. B. Morse, of later telegraph fame, was among the first to sound the alarm. In 1834 he wrote a series of articles for The New York Observer—later published in a best-selling book titled "A Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States"—that in hysterical prose detailed an alleged papal plot to flood America with Roman Catholic immigrants and overthrow the republic.

Reading that piece was eerie. Like you, Patrick, I wondered at first if it was satire. Obviously someone on the Sentinel is trapped in a time warp. What ugly stuff. But at least it gets the anti-immigrant strain of thought out there into the light. As the election draws closer, watch for similar stuff about gay people, and lots, lots more rants about patriotism.

Maybe we take better notes.

It's my understanding that a lot of Hispanics are Pentecostal or other flavors of non-RC (Jehovah's Witnesses are frequent, as also Assembly of God).

Of course, the louder the Vatican yells about War Is Bad, the more the evil priests need to be undermined as Reliable Voices, no matter how helpful they may be when it comes to condemning abortion and the Dangerous Homosexual Agenda.

IIRC most Central and South American countries haven't yet hit the tipover point, where Protestants have taken over, but yeah, they've got a *massive* convert rate. Usually the more conservative someone of that background is, the more a very fundamentalist faith will appeal to them. The average US newspaper is only just now noticing that all Hispanics aren't Catholic, and it hasn't really sunk in. Way to pay attention, the Church started noticing this trend back in the 80s.

(Keep in mind that very fundamentalist includes a lot of attitudes that get in the way of assimilating into US culture, and that *really* get in the way of getting out of poverty. This trend is really Not Good for everyone.)

I can see the author raising the first two fingers of each hand in air quotation as this phrase first comes to his mind. What other phrase was he trying to "euphemize?"

"Ethnic sieve?" "Cultural bulwark?" "Fortress Xenophobe?"

It sounds as if the USA is about to discover Fifth Columnists of the Jackbooted Nun variety.

What was that Nuns on motorcycles game which expanded Batwinged Bimbos From Hell?

let's see--we have an incompetent monarch named George who has set in motion a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, sc. evincing a design to reduce the people under absolute Despotism.

So, yeah, maybe it does feel a bit like deja vu.

Also, a sleeper cell of Knights of St. John is hiding out in Brooklyn. They're waiting for the Knights Templar to stumble. Their intention is to endlessly raise postal rates to make it harder for struggling writers to query! That way they will take control of the world's literary output.

Say .... You aren't part of that group, are you?

Rachael de Vienne

yup: Yup.

As is well known, America became Top Nation long ago, and History came to a.

The rabid hate that still exists for Catholics puzzles me. They're mostly harmless; hell, even the Catholics don't usually follow their own dogma 100%.

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
the gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see of no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.

(deleted stanza)

A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.

(deleted stanza of burning the Pope)

Ah, the good old days.

Sunlight is, after all, the best disinfectant.

Perhaps after it's been out for a couple of years, we can use it to grow flowers.

Or is this the rise of new Know-Nothings? Hey, if it's that, maybe they'll split the Whigs again, and we'll get a new Lincoln out of it!

There's a saying here in Nashville: "Everybody wants to be Hank Williams, but nobody wants to die." The same attitude applies to Presidents wanting to be Abe Lincoln.

Not only an oblique "mud people" reference, but also a threat of death by execution for anyone who disagrees.

Woohoo!

Q: Who is the publisher of The Journal Gazette and The News-Sentinel?

Steven Broas has overall responsibility for news and opinion pages and all business activities of The News-Sentinel. Additionally, Steven Broas is the CEO & President of Fort Wayne Newspapers, the business agent for both newspapers.

Julie Inskeep has overall responsibility for news and opinion pages and all business activities of The Journal Gazette.

Q: Who are the main newsroom and editorial contacts?

Craig Klugman
Editor
The Journal Gazette
260-461-8853 cklugman@jg.net

It may interest you all to know that Ms. Inskeep is on the AP board of directors.

The 80's update of The Twilight Zone did an episode
based on a story by Joe Haldeman (sorry, can't recall the title) ...

It starts with the viewpoint character
undergoing hypnotic 'past life' regression.

Various things happen,
and she finds herself in another world (similar to our own),
where she is hunted down by the authorities.

In their world, everyone has memories of their past lives,
and grudges never die. Past life murders are avenged,
past life battles are refought.

Having learned that she truly has no past life memories,
the authorities seek her out because they see her
as the answer to their problems.

The final scene ends with the protagonist as hypnotherapist,
working with a patient, saying to him:

"When you awake, you will have no memory of any life but your current life..."

back when we could all remember our past lives, it was actually a benefit, not a hindrance. The thing was that you could remember everything, but you couldn't control into what family you were born and you were the only person who was aware of your past life. YOu couldn't prove that you were Churchill last time around, because you're the only one who can access your memories, so there wasn't much point in whinging about it endlessly.

And it actually was a benefit because you still couldn't control how you came into this world. So, generally, what would happen is that Churchill came back born in India, KKK'ers came back black, sexists came back the opposite gender as they were the time before, and after a few cycles, you got to the realization that there are a lot of surface things that have nothing to do with being human.

Then the third war between the gods and humans broke out and humans won the war but lost the ability to remember past lives.

well, most of us anyway.

So the US can only serve its function as a good example as long as we make sure that everyone else suffers in comparison? If we grant others access then there will be no untouchable stronghold of virtue for the masses to gaze at yearningly as they are ground down into the muck? Convincing!

Hieros gamos. These are things you want to get right. Someone might be watching, and being turned into a tree or a sacred spring or a traffic light in Columbus Circle can ruin your whole day.

Oh, don't be silly.

The Vatican will invade via their subsurface tunnel network.

There's an outlet in every Catholic church in the land; it's how they send money and kidnapped children to Rome.

A lot of people on the (self-described) Right have gotten used to thinking that the Catholic Church was always in "their corner" on issues like abortion, birth control, sex education, homosexuality, male authority, and prayer in schools. Allies in the "Culture Wars."

So some of them are astonished, and angry, to find the Church opposing them on *anything,* instead of following the Party Line; the explanation must be something sinister!

Investigating the Catholic positions in detail probably didn't seem necessary, so long as "cultural" issues meant more of them could be counted on to vote Republican in the future.

(That any Church might actually be concerned with ideas like, oh, compassion, charity, or brotherhood, seems to be out of the question. Presumably, to paraphrase what is said of the Tories and the Anglican Church, their proper role is to be the Republican Party at Prayer.)

(Judging from Los Angeles media, the Church taking a position really is important. Fault-lines between older, more established, generations of immigrants and newer arrivals, and along national and ethnic divisions, some to have contributed to an "I'm here, now close the borders to *them*" attitude in some circles. Now -- again, actually -- they are hearing something very different from the pulpit. Those most open to the message willl presumably be those most inclined to respect authority....)

Look and see how many websites have been put up by people who believe its libels.

As for Mitt Romney - I live in Massachusetts, and I can't recall a whole lot of talk about his being a Mormon. It's been mentioned, certainly, but not in a derogatory way, at least not in major media outlets that I have seen. Maybe I've just been oblivious. As has been noted, there are plenty of actual reasons to dislike him.

It's a farrago of poor scholarship, false etymologies, bogus citations, and skewed logic. Nevertheless, it is, as Miss Teresa puts it, the Catholic version of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. (The Protocols, incidentally, were quoted as valid historical data by the guys who wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail, so it all comes around in a circle.)

Want to see something scary? Read the Amazon.com customer reviews of The Two Babylons.

For those who have not sampled its gourmet delights: http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=450

And a comparison of the language about race and immigration from respectable and less-respectable sources:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=174

When did his forebears arrive in North America?

Some people ride roller coasters.

Some people read books wherein the human race is dissolved by intelligent viruses.

Some people indulge in racial and class-supremacist fantasies.

All of these are methods of dealing with fear, and reinforcing self-identification as a survivor. The first three, however, have few negative effects in the real world.

Nimrod was a mighty hunter. As a hunter, he undoubtedly hunted for leopards. After he killed them, he must have worn their skins. Leopards have spots. Another animal that has spots is the fawn. Priests of Bacchus wore the skins of fawns. Therefore, Nimrod was a god of drunkeness.

I am not making this up.

I protested when the shrub came to town (and not in any goddamn "free speech zone" carefully situated away from his motorcade route) so I guess I'm in rebellion (check).

Sooooo...where's my rum? An ounce or 2 of Captain Morgan, either with a tad of water or in a nice big mug of spice tea, would hit the spot.

Those people are scary crazy. *shivers* I speak from personal familiarity. (And it's even worse somehow that they seem perfectly amiable normal people until they come out with this stuff in conversation, once they've decided you're probably one of them, or should be.)

He derives the word "cannibal" from "kahane Baal," that is to say, "priest of Baal." Thus proving that the priests of Baal ate people.

In actual fact, the word cannibal derives from one of the letters of Christopher Columbus, writing of "los hombres cannibales," (where the -al is the Spanish ending meaning "of or pertaining to"). The Canib, or Carib, Indians did, in fact, eat people. (So did some early Spanish explorers, but leave that aside.) Cannibal-the-word dates to the early 16th century, not to ancient Israel.

(At yet another place Hislop concludes that an ancient Middle-eastern god and a Polynesian god must be the same, since their names, when transliterated into English, both start with the same letter.)

It's truly astounding, and all to prove that the Church of Rome is the Whore of Babylon, founded by Satan, the master schemer behind all the schemes of the world (particularly those oppressing Alexander Hislop).

(As you might expect, Jack Chick is one of the publishers who's reprinted The Two Babylons.)

Well, hell, sure.

But WalMart has low, low prices.

Imagine how much you could buy if you still had a job.

Also, Jews "sit shiva" when a family member dies. This is obviously from "sutra Shiva," which means a line about Shiva, who is the Lord of Destruction (thus Death, who is clearly present during the mourning period). Therefore Jews are really Hindus. They're both from over East there somewhere too, aren't they?

That's why the Mormons are so active proselytizing throughout Polynesia - they are not only a major force in rural Hawaii (BYU Hawaii, anyone?) but in Western Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, and I expect the Cook Islands and Tahiti too, or at least any of those places they're allowed in.

Well, Mel Gibson is a Tridentine all right, and he was basing it on C16th German mysticism. But I think it's a strain of Catholicism that fed very nicely into the various beliefs that split off during the Reformation. I've been teaching a course on ancient Christian asceticism this semester, and it was interesting to note that the more extreme strains were focused on Scripture at the expense of the institutional hierarchy, and of course on inflicting suffering on the (temporal) body - which is often interpreted as a re-enactment of the passion. The Scripture/authority thing was obviously part of Martin Luther's programme; as for the mortifications - well, the emphasis on admitting or even expunging sin through self-denial and self-flagellation strikes me much more as a salvation-through-works theme than anything distinctively Catholic. Those monastic strains which have survived into the modern Catholic church were generally the more moderate ones (Benedictines, Franciscans, Augustinians). I can't speak for Opus Dei, though.

This is done without a vast amount of theological knowledge (not my field, or my period), but it was interesting to me that images of the temptations of St Antony were far more popular in northern Europe around the time of the Reformation than in Catholic countries then or later; and that when Catholics took up the theme, the focus was on Christ protecting Antony, whereas the Protestant (or proto-Protestant?) images presented the suffering as the main theme. Which raises the vital question: is Mel Gibson really a Protestant?

I fully expect to be corrected on some of this. I only came on to this idea during the speculative last few lectures of the course. Incidentally, yes: I am part of an insidious Catholic conspiracy to take over the minds of your young people, what with being an immigrant with an Irish Catholic background teaching religion at a Methodist foundation. Sorry.

Bonus footnote: For Hawaii tourists or residents, if you ever went to see the Polynesian Cultural Center's "historical" show on the settlement of Polynesia and wondered why it seemed excessively vague and handwavey, the above is why. They don't want to present anything that contradicts Mormon doctrine, but they also don't want to present a version of things that's obviously and blatantly false, so they just get all vague and general.

--Francis Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World

Obviously, this is all part of a carefully laid Catholic plot that his been kept hidden for centuries...

I'm not at all convinced that it's an act.

Interesting info about the PCC! Are you one of the posters who lives in Hawaii?

The last time I was there, the rest of my group went to the Polynesian Cultural Center. I didn't, opting instead to have lunch with Ian Lind (iLind.net). It was fascinating, and fun, and at the Art Institute, so also visually stunning. (Hm, we were in Hawaii, that's probably redundant.)

He made me feel better about not going by telling me about the working conditions there. The "performers" are college students at BYU-Hawaii who work at the PCC as their work study. Nevertheless, every few years they get fed up and form a union to protest the horrible conditions. The PCC fires them all and starts over, and despite the dire precedents, the workers eventually get fed up and form a union again. Not at all the happy place it appears on the outside.

I'm not a real close observer, though, since I'm about 30 miles from the BYUH campus and despite living in Hawai'i for 28 years I've never made it to a PCC show.

Clifton is indeed a fellow resident.

As an agnostic this isn't really my quarrel (well, maybe I'm culturally a Lutheran agnostic as opposed to those who are Catholic agnostics...), but I also sometimes wonder why we always hear about the sufferings and discrimination against the Catholic minorities in Protestant countries, but so seldom about what went on in the massively Catholic countries. Norway, for example, allowed the reentry of the Catholic church in the mid-19th century, it took much longer for Lutheranism to be allowed in certain Southern European countries.

And it has been said about practically every ethnic group or nationality.

If aliens landed, they'd hear the same thing: "Well, immigration's been a good thing UNTIL NOW, but we can't have these aliens come and ruin our country with their foreign ways and steal our jobs!"
:)

By the way, it isn't so much Nativism and 1886 that I think of; it is the Armada, and 1588. (Not that Hispanic immigrants are an Armada, but many on the American Right would love such imagery.)

Um, I agree with large parts of the Chick pamphlet on `are the Catholics Christian'. Not the conclusions, but many of the points about the various sacraments, Purgatory etc. Quite a lot of people do. It is called Protestantism. Alleging that the Vatican controls the world is nonsense; so is alleging that Satan runs the Vatican, or that the Pope is the anti-christ.

To state that many of the Catholic Sacraments are unscriptural is perfectly fine, and shouldn't be placed in the same category as `Pope = Satan', and `Vatican = World Government'.

ALthough, devil cookies? Surely a simple explanation of Platonic Idealism would do as an attack on the Catholic Church's doctrine of transubstantiation.

There are those who plan to do away completely with our borders so they can put our middle class in competition against the world’s most impoverished masses.

Yes; we call them Free Traders. They are the direct intellectual descendants of the Liberals, and the efforts to repeal the Corn Laws. Nowadays, they tend to be accounted Tories, in what I must say is one of the weirdest twists.

Their way of thinking, as the British Ambassador to Japan is reputed to have said, goes like: `Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ'.

No scare quotes necessary. Hating a large, rich, unaccountable, authoritarian, unelected organisation that preaches obesiance to kings and dictators is a good left-wing virtue. Hating Catholics isn't. Hating Catholic beliefs isn't. But the church itself? Crack on.

Glad I could help clear that up for you.

(Why do I remember this stuff? Taking up the brain cells that I could have used to understand long division, or American electoral politics?)

That story's been told, yeah.

o/` eet ek nas naj, na sus ga nil pa et eet ek nas naj o/`

Nor would I have thought of Fort Wayne, Indiana, as being a great melting-pot of immigration, either of the poor, the dispossessed, or of the sacerdotally-enhanced. Of course, I speak under correction. Maybe the editor was frightened by a monstrance. Or perhaps someone waved a biretta in his face. Or tried to censer him.

History is fractal, and chaotic. It never repeats exactly, but takes forms that are remarkably similar, yet different, from the previous ones. Small factors can cause tremendous differences -- or none at all. And it scales, both up and down, in terms of its self-similarity.

Unfortunately, this holds true for historical idiocy as well as historical genius.

Not only that, but since Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity and Jesus and the Bible are all tools of Satan!!!1!!!11!!

But we can go further. Textiles are also produced in mills. That means that all clothing is reprobate, and should be discarded.

That leaves the truly pious naked and shivering in the rain—which is, of course, God's Reign. And shivering is a kind of trembling, which all pious folk ought by rights to do before the Awesome Power of the Lord.

Those pains in your hands and feet (if you're of European descent)? Those are cryostigmata! They're a sign you're about to become one with Christ! Stay out in the Holy Reign just a little longer, and you won't have to wait for the Rapture!

Gotta craft a series of "poi vey" jokes IMMEDIATELY. Must dash--

That's why the Mormons are so active proselytizing throughout Polynesia - they are not only a major force in rural Hawaii (BYU Hawaii, anyone?) but in Western Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga, and I expect the Cook Islands and Tahiti too, or at least any of those places they're allowed in.

According to the List of temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Wikipedia, there are temples in (Western) Samoa, Tonga and Tahiti. If the Polynesians are lost tribes, I imagine that New Zeland must be on the to-do list.

Your handle begins with an ecks, add a 'b' to that and you get 'Becks'. You are therefore a lover of beer. Beer sounds like 'bear', an animal sacred to the Norse gods. The Norse gods are Satanic creations. Ergo, you are Satan.

Characterizing the Pope as the antichrist did not originate with Protestants, though it was a common theme among them until the early 20th Century. The earliest identification of the Pope as Antichrist of which I am aware was by Arnulf, Bishop of Orléans in 991.

Arnulf summarized recent Papal history (Concupiscence, murder, assassination, nepotism, conspiracy) and concluded with this comment: “The observance of His holy religion is despised by the sovereign pontiffs themselves.”—Francois Villemain Life of Gregory the Seventh, volume 1, page 176.

Arnulf was probably not the first Catholic to identify the Pope as the Antichrist. He was certainly not the last to do so.

Didn't know we Pixie Princesses knew this stuff, did you?

Pixie

That's the way propoganda works: lies, hatred, bigotism and unreason are mixed in with elements of truth and reasonableness. People who are disgusted by the former try to ignore it proceeding to the latter, but Chick hopes that the subliminal message will stick and that the next time you see a Catholic mass, images of the priests of Osiris and evil Catholic priests with the devil at their shoulder chanting mumbo-jumbo will leap unbidden into your mind and reinforce whatever legitimate and reasonable anti-Catholic views you already had. Goebbels worked in just the same way.

Is there a prize for that? There ought to be.

Didn't know we Pixie Princesses knew this stuff, did you?

With a name like Rachael de Vienne, I'd have placed you in the ninth century anyway. Or else as the secret Vatican assassin from a Dan Brown novel. Unless, of course, that was the joke.

Glad I could help clear that up for you.

Thanks. I think.

(Why do I remember this stuff? Taking up the brain cells that I could have used to understand long division, or American electoral politics?)

Tell me about it, he said with feeling. My brain is stuffed with great wodges of stuff that will never be of any use unless Jeopardy! not only deigns to have me on but has categories on "Hobby Games of the '80s" or "The Novels of Alan Dean Foster." Meanwhile, I distinctly remember taking classes in calculus, chemistry, and many other useful subjects, but I'd be hard-pressed to prove it.

I suppose in order to make this on-topic I'll have to find a way to blame the Vatican for it. Must ponder.

That would be late 10th century. See, the way it works is this: the first century was 1-100. All second century dates except 200 start with 1. So 991 AD (or CE if you're picky) was at the end of the tenth century.

You pickin' on my name? We princess/ goatherd/ booksellers don't take kindly to havin' our name picked at, Bub.

And assassin? The only things I've ever assassinated are an occasional mouse and a rattle snake. That's all the confession you get from me.

Pixie

Bigotry has nothing to do with logic.

Also, your handle (possibly your actual name) contains 'Ledgister', which sounds an awful lot like words that mean 'lawgiver'; but Gawd Awlmahtee is the only TRUE Lawgiver, so you're trying to set up laws contrary to His, and therefore you're a Satanist.

And 'Fragano'? O Lord! It sounds like it ought to mean 'one who frags (throws fragmentation grenades)'. That's not only Satanic, it means you're Objectively Pro-Terrorist! Better stay away from Little Green Footballs.

ajay, you're right. In fact I suspect the phrase 'immensely tall and strong albino' may be a unique identifier...or is it an urban myth that albinism is often correllated with sickliness?

A.R.Yngve: Bigotry has nothing to do with logic.

Yes, in exactly the same sense that bacteria have nothing to do with antibiotics.

Really? I've never read the damn book, just flipped through it in a bookshop, and I was convinced I must have imagined that bizarre detail.
I mean, an albino assassin with no legs?
a) Come back here, I'll bite your knees!
b) No wonder he only murders very old renowned curators; anyone else can easily outrun him - unless he has Steve Austin-style bionic prostheses, or just little powered wheels in the sole of each foot
c) presumably he must carry an immense case around with his array of different-length legs, which must raise eyebrows at Customs
d) I don't think the police rely exclusively on height when chasing murderers - "That's him, Sarge!" "No, leave it, son - our albino suspect's 6 foot 2 and that albino's only 5 foot 11"
e) I suppose that if he were assigned to murder someone in the Scottish Highlands, he could mix and match to get one leg longer than the other, which would allow him to run round the sides of hills faster
f) presumably, like a Terry Pratchett troll, he must cost his employers a fortune in sunblock

Albinos, as far as I know, have the obvious health problems - sunburn and eyes very sensitive to bright light - and generally various other visual problems such as nearsightedness. But other than that they're as healthy as non-albinos.

Incidentally, it is not a unique identifier: Bigboy, the villain in Stephen Hunter's 1950s Deep South thriller 'Pale Horse Coming', is also an extremely strong albino. Respect my superior pulp-fu.

And the leg thing is really stupid. Shoes with lifts can make a dramatic difference in someone's height, enough to make people see them very differently. Dan Brown, as established elsewhere, is a bad writer.

Thank you. May I now proclaim myself an Onomaster?

Well, that's embarrassing. These days I'm hardly even willing to admit reading a trashy writer like Michael Mostcock. I don't anymore, btw, not since I realized that there Really! Is! A Secret! Formula! to his novels..."oh, gods, not another goddam Eternal Fucking Champion!"

Oops. I knew that, honest. (What with being employed as a professional ancient historian and all.) My excuse is that I was just picking the ninth century at random, or rather as the time the name reminded me of, and hadn't actually registered the AD 991 reference. Or else I was just tired. Still, I am duly embarrassed.

But I wasn't picking on your name. It's a very nice name. Just notably medieval.

I'm with Lizzy on the albino amputee assassin. Does he have any other character traits that begin with an "a"? Are we getting an insight into Dan Brown's writing methods here?

It's not a joke?

I take it that when they catch the editor, Patrick, Teresa, and their assembled co-professionals in the publishing business will be formed up, in hollow square, while... No, Patrick will be off to one side, with the rest of Whisperado, playinmg Danny Deever as the idiot has his buttons snipped off, his keyboard broken over the publisher's knee, and then thrown into the Central Park lake with an antique cast-iron Underwood chained to his ankles.

I wonder what you'd get if you turned Mr Brown onto some of the more recondite ravings of Nesta Webster? (Particularly Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, the book that first popularized the Masonic/Illuminati conspiracy.)

In the fashion that will be familiar to all the Making Enlightened, this points an obvious direction:

Taking the Christ out of ChristML
Taking the Christ out of OS Christ
Taking the Christ out of Christ-Ray Spechrists

Obviously, this is the reason that Our Lord in His Infinite Wisdom created global replace. Further examples are left for those daringly unwise enough to try.

And the SNL skit will have Chuck Connors as Dan Brown. (What? No one remembers "Branded?")

Echristchriston? Christtreme Sports?

I tried making the pun some years ago that the MicroSoft codename for XP really should have been Cairo, but nobody got it. Except a few of the Making Enlightened.

And perhaps I've been given too much credit here. I really did devise 'Xopher' by regular substitution of my first name, based on the pattern observed in 'Xmas'.

I found an online pirated copy of The Da Vinci Code, and grepped through it for every occurrance of "legs". Here, in Chapter 93: "His legs still ached from being bound all that time, but Silas had endured far greater pain." That's all I could find, nothing about amputation. In fact, the string "amput" doesn't occur on that page.

Mongo the killer albino monk also had several interchangeable brains which he kept in jars hung on his Rosary beads, so that he could alter his stupidity level to suit the exigencies of the plot, if it be lawful to call it a plot.

That would be a *great* company name. Trademark it immediately!

You may, or may not, be pleased to hear that I have some books which I bought in Cairo six years ago and monogrammed with a chi-rho. Up until now this has been the very definition of a private joke, in that I didn't actually tell anyone about this or even lend the books out. Oh well. If a thing's worth doing, it's worth boasting about.

And I for one will believe anything bad about the Da Vinci Code on principle. It isn't a very good principle, but I'm short of them at the moment.

Also: related article in the Boston Herald.

Well, there's still all the crap research hektographed from crap sources, and more importantly, pasted in without the slightest creativity or imagination in its use.

Tony Robinson's documentary on the book's sources (which is the one to watch if you're going to watch anything on the topic) had a very interesting aside: Robinson said that he believed that Brown had every right to use whatever he wanted to as source material for a fictional thriller. He didn't explicitly say that Brown did not have the right to pretend that this junk was real history, but he had not long earlier run a clip of Brown talking about the "real" Priory of Zion, followed by a detailed demolition of the silly hoax.* I rather think I feel the same way. If Brown had said, "Look, this is a fantasy based on other fantasies; if you can't figure that out, I've got some palantiri to sell you." But he didn't do that.

Brown refused to be interviewed for Robinson's program; it was said that he was "researching his next book." Since, from the evidence of his prior books, this could not have taken more than half an hour, perhaps he just didn't want to talk to someone who had done some actual research.

*I almost called it "stupid," but the guys who put it together were actually rather clever -- not honest, but they found a way to use their skills as con men and forgers to separate les fous from their francs without breaking any specific laws.

*wears candle's favor into battle*

The ending was about as slapdash an effort at tying up ends as I've ever read, though.

This, by the way, is a classic example of what journalists mean when they say something is "too good to check".

Mongo the killer albino monk also had several interchangeable brains which he kept in jars hung on his Rosary beads, so that he could alter his stupidity level to suit the exigencies of the plot, if it be lawful to call it a plot.

Mongo only supporting character in improbably successful airport thriller of life.

Ajay, what you may have interpreted as amputated legs was a device strapped to one of Silas' thighs. The object in question is something SUPPOSEDLY used by members of Opus Dei as a form of personal mortification (i.e., sharing the suffering of Christ).

Where the book fell apart for me was the word used to open a certain object was in English, while the French form of the same word is also five letters...sheesh!

I'm only vaguely medieval. We pixie princesses transcend time, and aren't associated with just one era.

Sha'el, princess of pixies, queen of goats
AKA/Rachael de Vienne
WarDancingPixie.blogspot.com