Wow.

It's hard not to think of the Father Ted episode, "The Passion of Saint Tibulous." Or to wonder if these idiots are being paid off by the movie studio for the publicity campaign.

This sort of nonsense does need, sadly, be taken serioiusly. In 2004 a friend of mine living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula told me that the propietor of his local movie theater--needless to say, the only one available to people living in the area, given the population up there--refused to show "Farenheit 9/11" on the grounds that it slandered our troops, etc. I'd hate to think that people in some predominantly Catholic community somewhere won't see "The DaVinci Code" because a bigoted theater owner makes the choice for them.

If the previews are a good indication of the quality, I'd much rather they didn't see the movie because of word-of-mouth and reviews testifying to how much it sucked.

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If you want Jesus/Magdalene cover-up trope and what is as far as I can tell an exploration of broadly similar themes, a much better-written source is Graham Joyce's Jerusalem-based fantasy (slipstream?) novel, "Requiem," which came out in the late 90's. Sadly, it's not a subject of similar controversy, because no one read it. (OK, I read it, and I'm sure thousands of other people did, but you get the idea.) It really is a good book, though, Joyce at his most fun.
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"Testing Day" has been out at Strange Horizons for 47 days. As well over twice as long as they've ever spent to reject anything I've sent them before, I'm pretty much on the knife's edge, wondering if (a) they're actually seriously considering it, or (b) they rejected it weeks ago and my e-mail inbox was full that morning. Sadly, there are still 23 days left until I can query.

"Eternal Life" has been out at Flytrap for well over the 6-week response time listed for them on Ralan, but on Flytrap's web-site all they say about response times is to query if they haven't responded by the end of June.

On the other hand, having sent "Johnny and His Robot" to everywhere I could think of that wouldn't require shelling out for postage and received multiple very quick rejections along the lines of "this was a great story, we loved it, very funny, but nah...", I'm actually relieved that "Abyss and Apex" hasn't responded yet. As a matter of writerly self-discipline, I make an effort to have every finished-but-unpublished story I write out somewhere at all times, but it was getting pretty frustrating having to find a new place to send "Johnny..." every two or three days.

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Certain Visitors From The Other Side of the Water will be here next weekend.

WisCon is the week after that. Since he's the pro assigned to the (two-person) group I'm assigned to for the writer's workshop, I was interested to see this interview with Barth Anderson.

The first day of Clarion West is three weeks after I get back from WisCon.

These are Good Things.