You Can Tell By the Way She Smiles

The Potato Pistols are a go! quickly working on our first single "E.M.Idaho" and "Spud-Mission." Things got off to a slow start because somebody (Paper Cat, ahem) didn't tape the kitty-cat halftime show during Puppy Bowl II, and our drummer, Paul Cook-me-some-Potatoes, showed up to the session high on powdered mash.

Now, allow me to wax paranoid.

This summer, non-paranoid conspiracy theorists and gullible folks who think Dan Brown novels are factual will await the release of Opie's surefire blockbuster The Da Vinci Code (2006).

For the record, Holly Go-Heavily has not read the book and has no interest in reading it. If I want to read books about worldwide conspiracies, I'll stick to the classics: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow (1974), Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (1989), Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1984) or even Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City (1997).

But Holly does find it funny that Brown's book has created a firestorm of controversy, with a spate of books trying to "debunk" it. Brown (conspiracy theory time) must be in collusion with these writers who feel that the book is blasphemous because of its disclaimer on the first page claiming that everything in the book is based on fact. Before the words appear, there is a keyword that debunks the whole thing. That word: NOVEL. The cover of the book reads: THE DA VINCI CODE: A NOVEL. Those words are on the cover, people. According to dictionary.com, a novel is "a fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters." If you need more help with that word, FICTION is "an imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented." When Dan Brown tells his readers that the events in the NOVEL are based on fact, THAT IS FICTION. Holly doesn't usually like to berate her potential readers, but how stupid do you have to be to believe that The Da Vinci Code is real? Pardon my rudeness, people, but come on.

As the ultra-hip Turtledaub refreshingly told me, "The Da Vinci Code ... what's that? I don't own a television."