Marcel Duchamp’s Dadaist painting L.H.O.O.Q. I don’t get it, either

The Da Vinci Code Cracked, at Long Last

Carl E. Olsen at Envoy Encore, the "banana republic" of Catholic blogs (according to Mark Shea), finally does all Catholics and historians and Catholic historians a great service by refuting the Übercrap known as The Da Vinci Code. He plans to post even more on the subject soon. Keep it coming. I love a good historical conspiracy thriller as much as the next man, but both the history and the writing and the sanctimonious tone of this ponderous tome were utterly unbearable (robed albino Opus Dei assassins? Gee whiz...). I, much to my regret, wasted an evening in the airport reading it after having exhausted my portable library. You may wonder why I read it in the first place; I'm not sure myself. I was out of books, and stuck overnight at an airport with an indefinitely-delayed plane, and had finished my edifying reading during the wait. Sadly, I didn’t have my backup books, either. So I dropped by the bookstore, I see art, I see mystery, I see some hints of conspiracy and the Templars, and then I think, hey, it’s like Foucault's Pendulum. Hardly. In your dreams, Dan Brown.

Foucault was weird and paranoid but at least it didn't take itself so seriously: plus it was written by someone with an attention-span longer than a ten-year-old. It also may have been anticlerical but it pretty much smeared everyone and had a serious undercurrent of self-critical satire regarding our own age's fixation with hidden plots and secret societies, something the deadly dull Da Vinci desperately needed. Plus, heck, Umberto Eco is a real intellectual instead of a pseudo or a posseur. It got to the point I was so bored with Da Vinci I started doodling in the end-pages and writing sarcastic remarks in the margins, something I never do. Amy Welborn has already done her best to point out the book’s numerous shortcomings in her on-target review, while the boberia was so bad has even managed to get a refutation in the secular press, which comes as a great relief. Finally. Mr. Dan Brown, please, before you write another horrible novel with yourself as the thinly-disguised "hero" and go off on another tangent on the frickin' sacred feminine, please remember we Catholics invented it. Ever heard of the Virgin Mary?