blake johnson

Over winter break I decided to read The Da Vinci Code. There is no other book in recent memory which has had such mixed reviews by my friends. I had some people tell me that it was fantastic and fun and others tell me that it was stupid and riddled with eggregious historical errors. I wanted to read this just so that I could form an opinion instead of spouting off with the few tidbits that I knew.

My overall verdict was that it is simultaneously fun and disappointing. It is fun because Dan Brown actually does have some skill at creating a well-paced mystery/thriller. The story proceeds quickly with some exciting intrigue. However, this is all marred by the fact that a work which follows under the banner "FACT" (the header of the first page) has enough errors in it to call into question all references to real people, places, and events mentioned in the story. For instance, Dan Brown perpetuates the myth that Jehovah is the literal name of God (there's a wide consensus that it is not, see this for a good discussion). One sentence which particulary bothered me was something to the effect that the main character's previous love interest studied "entanglement physics" and that this had something to do with "satellites and manta ray migrations".

Say what?! Excuse me? You can't write something like that and have me take you seriously.

Strangest movie I've seen in recent history. The movie completely abandons standard elements of movie-making such as plot, dialogue, pacing... instead there are just a series of images and music that tell the story of John Smith and Pocahontas falling in love (lots of long shots of faces, shots of running through fields, and so on). The music very much mirrored the imagery, with the main theme being a single measure that was repeated over and over again at different volumes and with different instruments. I will admit that it was extremely beautiful, but its beauty was so static and unchanging that it could not hold my attention for the entire 2 1/2 hours.

As you can see, I've done a bit of updating in the last couple days. I upgraded to Wordpress 2.0 and switched to the K2 theme. I'm actually using a K2 style which I found by browsing the binary bonsai group on flickr called Fork. I also like this theme called Snapshot, so I might consider switching to that at some point.

I also installed a number of plugins that have "built-in" support in the K2 theme: Ultimate Tag Warrior,  Extended Live Archives, and Brian's Latest Comments.

I had my first east coast skiing experience this weekend. Now, I have to say that my expectations for the snow were pretty low. The unfortunate thing is that the snow was even worse than I was expecting. Mt. Snow had only a thin cover (maybe a couple inches) over most of the runs, with large exposed areas. And the snow that was there was alternately complete mush or chunky and hard.

This is not to say that I didn't have fun-- it is always nice to be outside and feel the rush of air as you cruise down some groomer, but next time I'll probably drive further north for better snow and less crowding.