further 'notes' on "angels and demons"

[rivendellrose]

I find it laugh-out-loud hilarious that Dan Brown seems to think that cellphones have dial tones. And that the way to tell if one is getting a signal or not is to see if it has a dial tone. Does he actually live under a rock, or is this some sort of obscure way of telling us that his characters all do? If the latter, I'm oddly impressed... but I somehow doubt it.

Also, the whole ambigram thing is getting really annoying. Give me a few days with my best calligraphy pens, and I assure you that I could copy the stupid thing. His continued efforts to claim that "even modern computers [...] have been unable to forge a symmetrical ambigram of this word" make me laugh so hard I can hardly breathe. If (if!) that were true, it would be because... the ambigram in the book isn't actually the word. It has an extra stroke after the 2nd L, which creates the back part of the A toward the end of the word. That's what makes it an ambigram - otherwise it wouldn't read both ways.

And as for the idea that any calligrapher with decent skill couldn't reproduce it... lol.

I take back my former gripes - at the moment, at least, this book is at least bad enough to be funny.

Comments

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

Ah, good, you got to the ambigram part, and you've sucessfully realized nearly every major complaint I had with that part. (The last one being that the whole "nobody's been able to figure out what these ambigrams look like... but here they are, in a second-rate thriller!" thing was enough of an idiot-plot twist to imply that every single ambigrammist in Dan Brown's sad little fictional world was an utter dolt, and in the process managed to completely ruin the nice bit of suspension-of-disbelief I'd built up.)

I've got a friend who does some amazing ambigrams, and I have no doubt he could whip up half a dozen designs without a problem. Hell, I own a t-shirt where this guy managed to make one single collection of glyphs spell out "fire", "earth", "air", and "water" from four different directions! Also, he just ambigrammed the entirety of Jabberwocky.

Aaanyway, this is another thing that the movie improved - instead of saying "nobody's been able to make one", they show Langdon paging through a few pictures of possible designs and saying that nobody knows what it actually looks like.

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

instead of saying "nobody's been able to make one", they show Langdon paging through a few pictures of possible designs and saying that nobody knows what it actually looks like.

That was actually what I thought he meant the first few times he said it, because... well, honestly, I refused to believe it was possible he was trying to say that a little bit of calligraphy was somehow impossible to reproduce. I mean, seriously - I'm nowhere near a professional-grade scribe, but I know I could do this. It'd take me a while, but... shit, it's not that freaking difficult!

....Seriously, though - this guy you know ambigrammed the whole of Jabberwocky? Can we send his site to Dan Brown with a note that simply says "You've been owned, asshat"?

[ex_mrs260625]

Cell phones don't have dial tones? How do you dial them, then?