Book Club - I had been thinking about picking up one of those pop-scholarly type books on early Christianity, ever since reading the big Time story back in December. But Saturday I found myself at Borders, in pressing need of leisure reading for the flight to Sacto, and so I settled instead on the bestselling novel everyone's been telling me to read. I'm only about half way through The Da Vinci Code, but I can already appreciate why many Christian groups would be up in arms about a mystery thriller whose premise is a nefarious Catholic plot to stop a secret society from exposing Jesus' true nature as a mortal man who married and begat a line of offspring that later settled in France. (Wonder what Mel Gibson thinks of that?)

On a barely tangential topic, what is it with the recent fascination in pop culture with Hieronymous Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights? Sure, Dan Brown alludes to the work in the Code, but Christopher Rice went overboard in using it as a centerpiece to his plot in The Snow Garden. Then there's that Diesel ad campaign (noted recently by Andy Towle) that riffs on the painting. Seems unlikely that the authors all just finished taking the freshman survey course in art history.