On Holiday

I haven't had the chance to blog lately after driving for ten hours with a ten-month-old on Monday and recovering yesterday. (Actually, she was quite good, all things considered.) I finally got around to reading The Da Vinci Code. It is a watery-thin version of Umberto Eco's historical-ecclesiastical novels with a slightly more sophisticated adventure than Raiders of the Lost Ark. It is replete with curious factoids, but the problem is that most of them are not true. This seems to be a major shortcoming: factoids are only interesting to the extent that they are facts that you would not have previously known or necessarily guessed. Margaret Mitchell has some useful comments in this vein here. And one other thing: a professor of "symbology" from Harvard? I'm reminded of shopping in a Borders bookstore yesterday and running across the "Metaphysics" section. Instead of finding Aristotle and Leibniz there, I found books about crystal balls and the dark arts.