Oh What a Beautiful (Weekend) Morning

I invariably find other mornings drab solely for the reason that I spend them indoors at work. This is true even though I largely enjoy my job and don't have to drag myself there kicking and screaming.
In my inbox this morning, amongst the myriad of job offers for $6 clerical positions from Monster and adds for Viagra, an email from my cousin Susan caught my attention. Apparently her and my uncle Dave went to the opening of a new Chick-fil-a and didn't walk away with only this lousy photo.

Instead, the industrious duo walked away with 52 free meals. I report that not as a subtle invitation to ransack their home and steal the promised banquet, but only as a reminder that there's a lot of free stuff out there, if only you know where to be at the right time. And also, in no small way, as a congratulations to the two of them.

In other news, Shelly and I watched The Davinci Code last night. For anyone who hasn't seen or heard about the controversial movie (and book before it), Blogger doesn't have any kind of spoiler prevention method, so just don't read the rest of the paragraph. The plot is that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, had children with her, and wasn't the Son of God, only a great prophet. The Holy Grail is actually her coffin and documents proving her relationship to Jesus, which could be used to compare against the DNA of His living descendents. The Catholic Church is aware of this and always has been, and for 2000 years has waged a war against the guardians of the grail in order to destroy their proof, or at least keep them quiet so they don't blow the lid off the pack of lies the Church has been telling the last two millenium.

This was obviously going to make a lot of people mad anyway, but when Dan Brown, the author, prefaced his book by writing "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate", he threw down the gauntlet on the roughly 2 billion people worldwide who consider themselves 'Christians'. Christian researchers subsequently tore his claims to shreds. See here, here, here, and here for a few examples.

Since most of this happened between the time the book was published and the release of the movie, filmmakers had to make a few revisions. In the book, Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen) are equally dismissing of the belief in Christ's divinity before the Church proclaimed it hundreds of years after His cruxifiction; in the movie, Langdon hotly dissents when Teabing makes that claim. Also, the book makes a lot more to do about the "Sacred Feminine", the idea that, before Christianity, most religions primarily worshipped powerful female deities. The movie barely mentions this, as someone subsequently pointed out that the Romans, the most powerful culture of the Ancient World that pre-dated Christianity by several centuries, worshipped the very masculine Jupiter as their principle god, and the Greeks before them made supplications to the even more philandering Zeus. The movie makes a sly reference to this by noting that Romans worshipped "male spirits of nature in addition to the sacred feminine" (quoting from memory). Otherwise, the topic is largely dropped, preferring to focus on the Church's killing of witches as evidence of their oppression of women. Even there they had to make adjustments; the book hugely overstates the number, so the movie writers had to backpedal by making Langdon quote '50,000' with Teabing adding 'some say a lot more than that'.

The puzzles and riddles that made the book a best-seller are there, but in diminished form. Shelly and I both felt it lost something in the transistion to the big screen. Hanks, though, turns in a great performance (I don't think the man is capable of doing anything less), as does Ian McKellen. It might still be worth seeing if you can take the plot with a huge grain of salt.

Now that I've given a lengthy movie review that no one asked for, I think I'll go. I should have a relaxing day ahead of me, except that I need to do a little cleaning. The recent cold weather committed mass genocide against our porch plants, and I need to lay them to rest in a dignified manner (can you say pair of scissors and a trash bag?). Law School Melissa is coming over tomorrow to review for exams with Shelly, and she demands nothing less than a pristine study environment.