Watched The Da Vinci Code last night. A very bad acting vehicle for Tom Hanks--as a matter of fact there was no acting at all. The movie did not make me want to re-read the book. Who wants to re-read a series of fictional encyclopedic entries after all? It is a sterling example of what happens when you overpatronize amazon.com and Google search, a distinct phenomenon of the 90s and a trap that writers will never fall into again. In the Philippines, the bug bit short story writers, who churned out pseudo-intellectual works, mostly based on mathematical formulae, and absolutely devoid of emotional truth.

In the 90s, my co-graduate students and I who were working on our theses were very strongly discouraged from doing academic research using the Internet, because, according to our professors, it just couldn't be done.