Dan Brown, Maureen Dowd and Me - That's a Tasty Sandwich!

Spoiler Alert!!! If you have not read Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and plan to, you should probably not read this post.

This post is a review of a review by my old friend Maureen Dowd of Dan Brown's book, The Lost Symbol. Her review appeared in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review. Ms. Dowd and I share a less than positive view of the book. Although, I liked it better than she did. I still haven't finished the last 30 pages of it because it has become so tedious that whenever I get near the thing my eyes begin to lower like the shades in an office in Boylston Hall.

I believe that a book review, whether good or bad, should never ruin the experience of actually reading the book. This is a code that I live by, as do my Automobile Club of America brothers.

Do you see that spoiler alert up there at the top of my page above the Vonneguttian symbol for shvinkter? Maureen gives away a MAJOR PLOT TWIST in the very first paragraph of her review! Now, I admit that I'm not the brightest thread in a Harris tweed suit. I didn't know that Darth Vader was Luke's dad until Luke did, and I didn't realize that Professor Snape was Harry Potter's real father until Book 12, but calling the plot "an Oedipal MacGuffin?"

What the hell, Mo?

Later on in the review she reveals another incredibly important fact. All through the book the CIA is intimately involved because of the highest level of "National Security." If we knew what the CIA Director knew about the evil villian, we would all dive off a cliff like a pack of hopeless lemmings. Again, I'm dim. How could the secrets hidden in a Mason jar bring our country, no, the entire known universe, crumbling down to its proverbial knees? I'm thinking that maybe Osama Bin Ladin is a Freemason and Francis Bacon hid a really, really dirty bomb in that dusty, old knick-knack. Hurry Robert! Think! THINK BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!!

But you don't have to live with that tension, Old MO gives it away! And it's a bit of a stinker actually, I felt totally let down and youtube just isn't that scary unless you're running for public office.

I'll be honest. I always thought that a mason was a highly trained but klutzy pig that built things out of bricks. But then, the only thing lining my educational facilities were the endless lines of lower middle class slackers hoping for TAP grant money.

Dan Brown books are fine. They are o.k. They are alright. Do his metaphors and similes stink worse than Dick Cheney's dick after eight years of fucking us all in the ass? How the hell should I know? My favorite symbol in a book was drawn by Kurt Vonnegut with a black Magic Marker.

Can I write a Dan Brown book better than Dan Brown?

Now that is a good question. In my book, Maureen Dowd will be happy to hear, Robert Langdon would be called Bob and he would get to bang the brainy babe that is forced to listen to page after page of wonky exposition. He'd lay her like George Washington laid cornerstones!!!

But what about a plot? Granted the dollar bill has been done to death but let's start with a penny.

Did you know that a penny used to be made out of copper but now its like 95% zirconium? I'll be able to use that. And what's with this E PLURIBUS UNUM? English? I don't think so. Latin probably, and latin means the Catholics are involved right up to their rosaries. And if you descramble E Pluribis Unum you get:

UP URSULINE BUM

And as any Catholic schoolgirl knows, the Ursuline Sisters were first recognized in 1544 by Pope Paul III. (I think their outfits gave them away.) But wait, another Pope!!! And up a nun's bum? We can use a hot english actress to play the brainy babe. One with good teeth because there's going to be a lot of talking in the movie they make out of my book.



Any editors out there? I'm available and Ron Howard is very interested in my treatment.

For those of you still searching for Maureen Dowd's cameltoe, please go here.