Mr. Branaman, when does that novena begin? I'll jump right on that, along with praying for a certain Gnostic of whom I've become quite fond.

"Hey, how about doing a massive novena for Dan Brown and the executives of Sony? We've exhausted all other Catholic avenues, so maybe it's time to tell Mom on them. :)"
It's coming up on the time for the novena to the Holy Spirit! Folks to do that one, too.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/PRAYER/7GIFTS.HTM

I doubt moralology exists, but I know MORONology does...I have a degree in it, just ask my wife. :)
And Bob, I was going to post something about the anti-matter thing, but decided not to. However, I will comment that its insanely hard to contain it, especially for any long period of time, and I doubt that there are albino monks out there running around with anti-matter grenades or anything like that.

rnzy: Please stop insulting Mr. Lovegood and his amusing rag :)

This is coming from someone without much scientific knowledge beyond high school and a few books I've read on the side, but antimatter is the "opposite" of regular matter. Rather than atoms of protons (with a positive charge) and electrons (with a negative charge), it is comprised of antiprotons (protons with a negative charge) and positrons (electrons with a positive charge). When matter and antimatter collide, both are converted entirely into energy according to Einstein's formula E=mc^2. Since so much energy is bound up into matter (and antimatter), a common everyday object like a coffee mug or a baseball meeting its weight in antimatter would produce cataclysmic results. Fortunately antimatter is hard to come by; some scientists speculate that most of the antimatter in the universe was destroyed by the Big Bang. It can be produced artificially, but the process is so expensive and requires so much energy, only tiny amounts can be produced.
In the Star Trek universe, antimatter can presumably be produced in a more economical fashion. The warp core of the Enterprise has a "matter-antimatter reactor" which uses the enormous energy produced by matter-antimatter collisions to power the ship. To regulate this process, the ship is equipped with the completely fictional "dilithium crystals" which are somehow unaffected by contact with antimatter. Every other episode (or at least so it seems), there is the threat of a "warp core breach", the Star Trek equivalent of a nuclear meltdown: damage is done to the containment field keeping the ship's supply of antimatter in its place, and matter and antimatter will collide in an uncontrolled reaction thereby destroying the ship.
More information can be found here.
/End geek-out

how're they going to shoot Angels and Demons? I read the book (and I felt stupid after reading it) and most of the scenes took place in the Vatican.

Obviously, Dan Brown is Luna "Loonie" Lovegood's father and moonlights as the editor of "The Quibbler" in the HP universe

Yeah, it takes that long to hunt up enough pseudo-scholars to pack his footnotes and "fact" pages. Good one, hubby!
-Dean's wife

The author himself says this on his website: "Because my novels are so research-intensive, they take a couple of years to write.
Too funny.

Annalucia,
the reason the guy reading the audiobook didn't laugh is because it was DAN BROWN!!! AHHH!!!

MenTaLguy, I like that "moralology" - especially since when I first read it, I thought you wrote "MORONology". (I need glasses....)

Hey, how about doing a massive novena for Dan Brown and the executives of Sony? We've exhausted all other Catholic avenues, so maybe it's time to tell Mom on them. :)

Brown's new book on Freemasonry is apparently going to be called The Solomon Key & is going to be delayed in release a few months per a report I heard about 2 weeks ago. Didn't say why. A Google search turned up nothin'.

Amy:
C'mon! His Robert Langdon(tm) novels will be great for javascript programmers. They'll be able to create Dan Brown novel generators(tm) for laughs, fun, entertainment. There's already one in Spanish That's absolutely stomach hurting laughter. The generator is great and if Brown's prose in English is bad; it's positively Gongorian (after Gongora one of Spain's poets during the Golden age who was renowned for excessive verbiage)
Annalucia:
I agree with Ruthann. The last page where he describes his girlfriend du roman is bad Barbra Cartwright prose. I was sniggering at the bookstore and had to put it away for fear of laughing outloud for a long period of time.
Here's another plot inconsistency. Ya'd think that ol Rob boy would call up his old flame (Victoria I think) in Duh Vinci, if only the pleasure of meeting an old character again. She also could've played some role (less airheaded; more grounded!) and added spice to a luvvvv triange ;)
Plot inconsistency 2:
How will Dan Brown deal with Rob boy and Sofie on the lam in the upcoming Mason extraveganza?
xavier
xavier

Well, considering how badly written DVC is, and how bad people are saying the movie is, and how bad Brown's other books apparently are, I am not at all interested in seeing any movies based on his books or reading them.

Rich, I don't know about Brown, but I do know that Michael Baigent, co-author of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail is the editor of "Freemasonry Today", a British publication, so perhaps there is a connection.

This sequel on Freemasonry... Does anyone have any info. out there as to whether or not Dan Brown may even be a Freemason? He seems to be rather overly generous with all the info. about Masonic symbols in the Roslin temple in The Da Vinci Code.

Laura,
I'm pretty sure you were just being snide, but you've touched on one of my fears; that Catholics will swallow any lying codswallop from Brown about Freemasons that matches their prejudices.
That won't help our credibility when we want people to view Church history as we do.

How does Brown describe the female protagonist? Here's what I mean.
DISCLAIMER: The examples below are NOT actual quotes from the book!!!
When he's talking about any of the male characters he simply states what's going on, for example: "The Catholic Church is evil," said Smith.
When he's talking about the female protagonist it goes more like this: "I agree with you," whispered Tess in a sultry voice, her long blond hair streaming behind her, ample figure swaying slightly, her round, luscious breasts covered with dewy beads of perspiration.
It's quite humorous.
The narrator did an admirable job -- his snickers and guffaws were not captured on audio!
'thann

Obviously this pope had a degree in moral theology before becoming pope.

Jimmy, Jimmy... we're talking about Dan Brown here. I believe the correct discipline would be "moralology".

Annalucia: I can't speak to the former, but as to the latter? Practice, I imagine... and many, many takes.

"And how did the person reading the audiobook get through it without bursting into laughter?"
By gnawing one of his own legs off?

Ann, that was my first thought, too.

OK, Ruthann - how does Dan Brown describe a female protagonist? And how did the person reading the audiobook get through it without bursting into laughter?

AAAA! NOOOOO! THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING!
How am I supposed to comfort myself with the knowledge that DVC will soon be a bad memory if I know that MORE crapola-rama lurks on the horizon?!
On the other hand, how exactly would Sony "learn its lesson" based on the bazillions of dollars this thing earned last weekend? AND everyone I know who saw it over the weekend who isn't part of the Catholic conspiracy to have good taste in filmmaking thought it was excellent. So I have little hope for the ratings dive we seem to think will come next weekend...except for the eternal goodness of Hugh Jackman to overpower the eternal inanity of DVC.
I despair.

I think you'll find that Brown thinks there are good occult elites and bad ones; a manicheeism which admirably suits his junior-high school world view.
So: Freemasons=good; illuminati=bad
Catholic Church=bad; Cathars=good
We can play this game all the way through lunch into study hall.
PVO

I listened to an unabridged audiobook of Angels and Demons (the book Jimmy's describing, with the Illuminati and antimatter). It was SO horribly written (even worse than DVC, if you can believe it), that my son and I laughed our butts off listening and re-listening to several scenes. Talk about purple prose! Brown's descriptions of the female protagonist are hilarious.
It finally got so bad that I ended up having to set my player to warp speed to get through the thing. The book didn't get any better, but the pain was over faster.
'thann

Are the Illuminati the good guys or the bad guys in this book?

Um. Antimatter? Maybe I'm being over-influenced by Star Trek, but doesn't releasing anti-matter at all cause the planet to implode or something?
Yeah. Too much Star Trek. I'll go take a nap now.
--Ann

Hey, if he'll expose the Freemasons, he can't be all bad afterall!

Hmm...I guess I don't see the bad news in all of this.
What we need to do is to really make sure people know this is related to the DVC movie and get them to go out and see it. Then when they see people being killed by anti-matter of all things, they'll take DVC even less seriously.

Well, I guess Dan Brown has a different answer to the question: "Is the Pope Catholic?"

Obviously this pope had a degree in moral theology before becoming pope.... And a real sense of fun. (I mean, he committed a mortal sin to have a child, and he didn't even commit the enjoyable one.)

Hm. Evidently, the point is to make it a really Catholic sin. I mean, many Protestants agree that fornication is wrong, so you don't get the special anti-Catholic twist of the knife there. So why make the pope only a bad Christian, when you can make him a really bad Catholic?