Abba Zabba

I'm so sick of The Davinci Code. The book's still a bestseller, the movie's a hit despite terrible reviews, and everyone else is cashing in.

Yesterday, I saw that the History Channel was showing a marathon of a show called something like "Exploring the Davinci Code". I'm sure there are many fascinating historical facts in a show based on a bad pulp novel. But even worse was the show on after that marathon: "Davinci and the Code He Lived By." That's a show about Davinci himself, with the word "code" thrown in there to catch the suckers who will watch anything related to the book. It's too bad there aren't more words in the book's title, to give the knockoff artists something else to work with.

But at least it's the job of the History Channel to talk about that sort of thing. The cover story of this week's Newsweek is about Mary Magdalene. Obviously, there's no actual news going on in the modern day, so it's okay for a newsmagazine to cover a woman who lived 2000 years ago. Assuming she's not fictional, that is. It's bad enough that the big magazines always have articles like "Who was the real Jesus?" around Christmas, Easter, and other milestones of Jesus' life. But now they're playing amateur Bible scholars in honor of a summer blockbuster! Jesus would be rolling over in his grave, if he were still in it.