Dan Brown has got the tweedy jacket plus sweater thing down cold. Of COURSE he's a serious academic, can't we all tell just from looking at him?
Will Sandra be as tweedy?
I'm going to tune in for sure to find out.
You go girl!
...as well as watch her fillet Dan Brown into thin slices of hack and fraud and quick fry him to a crackly crunch.
For some reason, I found this amusing...
Wish I could be home to see this report. If they stream it, Mark, please let me know!
The suit is very interesting because they descibe Brown as for lifting "the whole architecture" of the research that went into their 1982 non-fiction book "The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail". This makes no sense if they beleive the contents of their book are ture history. How can you sue for stealing the whole architecture of a true history. You can only steal fiction. Yet what he is accused of stealing is exactly what they are representing as true.
Oh joy oh bliss. La Miesel enlisted by cable teevee joint to bash mash trash DVC and all associated with same. Had a hoot of a Friday eve digging her doing that bashing and mashing thang about 18 months ago. Exactly who the suits at Sony- religious pampered poodles on their side and all- would avoid. Certainly a dryrun for her coming popularity this spring on morning chat shows. Joy turns to sorrow as I will be nowhere near teevee set at that blessed moment. Go on girl.
Damn! Er, I mean, Darn! And to drive home the point,
Darn! Darn! Darn!
When will the bootleg tapes hit the market?
Ohohohohooo, Sandra ripping Dan Brown to shreds... best pleasure TV can offer! You go, girl!!!
Hope they do stream this! *crosses fingers*
Didn't Robert Graves write a book, King Jesus, making essentially these points, in the 1920's or 1930's?
So let me get this straight Sandra, you DON'T think the Da Vinci Code is true? I just want to make clear since you had to repeat it so many times...
And by the way, what evidence do you have that Paris is, in fact, in France?
I think the suit just might go thru. I remember years ago being stranded in Brussels, and the only English book I could find, was that nonsense. I read it, and kept it around for a while, wondering where was the outrage. And then forgot all about it, until one day I was cleaning -- and discovered that I'd brought the book home. I'm not in to book burning, but it was just so way out there. So I tossed it in the bin. What to my surprise a year or two later, and there's this story out there again...that everybody is talking about, and I thot it was the same book. I really was surprised to find it was the DVC book. Just seems to close to not be lifted - and the rules for such in the EU I do blv are a bit more flexible. Interesting thing is that a ruling is supposed to be in within 2 weeks, and this cud affect the UK showing of the film. Wonder what Sony will do...payoff?
Nice job, Sandra (if you're reading this.) I like the bit about, "Brown took some of HB/HG's errors, neglected to mention what was true about *that* book, and then added errors of his own."
Abrams appears to be a hard@$$ rorschach of Joe Scarborough: nothing really interesting to say, but he'll be damned if he doesn't say it emphatically.
Spent too much time with that rather plodding Brit lawyer sort of agreeing (Abrams and lawyer) that there can't be too much "lifting" if both works are considered to be fiction and whole texts were not involved. In the end Sandra emphasized that rather it was sold as fact - with a fact page - and people go on tours, etc. because they actually believe that it is fact. (Actually, hasn't "history" been sold to a couple of generations of kids as fact when what they learned often was fiction.) So the current generations have been well prepared to accept Dan Brown's imaginings!!
Alas--perhaps Dan Abrams sensed he was outclassed and gave virtually no air time to Sandra Miesel.
BTW--there as a fabric store in New Orleans called Miesel's and I always heard it pronounced my - zels'. Dan Abrams said me' - zel. Which is correct?
Thanks for the hand-off, Mark!
"Miesel" is German and rhymes with Diesel. I coach these media types before we go on the air.
That was a lot of effort for two sentences but if I'd been allowed to say more I'd have mentioned Alex Haley, who had to pay damages for one too-similar paragraph.
The HBHG people at least know that the King of France arrested the Templars and which end of a church is the back. They worked a lot harder spinning their tissue of error. But Brown looks tweedier. I don't look tweedy at all.
Sorry I missed it. I do find it highly amusing that the authors are at odds.
Sorry I missed it - sounds like it would have been a good segment to see. Did Ms. Miesel fillet Mr. Brown into thin slices and fry him to crackly crunch? Would that then make him a crunchy con-man?
They allowed me to speak a couple of sentences. Didn't amount to much. But I'm om SCARBOROUGH COUNTRY tonight at 10:15EST.
I read HB/HG when it first came out, and one thing I could never understand was, assuming they were right and that Jesus actually married Mary Magdalene and was the progenitor of the Merovingian kings, etc., etc., who would care? Ex hypothesi, Jesus wouldn't be who we thought him to be, so why would it help the Merovingians at all that they were descended from some ordinary Joe who had incidentially managed to hoodwink gullible folks into thinking he was God? Wouldn't it only matter if he *was* God? In which case, the Merovingians would have been better off remaining pagans and claiming to be descended from Wotan?
Just saw Sandra verbally bodyslam Karen "I'm an Airhead" Holt, deputy editor of Publisher's Weekly on Scarborough Country. What a hoot! Some of the funniest television I've seen in a long, long time! Ms. Holt was brought on to defend Brown and she used the "it's just fiction" ploy. Sandra and the other guest, but especially Sandra, ripped into this argument contending that Brown held that his novel was completely factual. Then Scarborough ran a clip of an interview given by Brown in which he said that everything was factual in his book. Ms. Holt looked as if she had just been demoted to the mail room of Publisher's Weekly! Sandra kept smashing away at what a total mass of error and ignorance the DVC is, citing chapter and verse. A total rout, and great television. Bravo Sandra!
dog gone it, I missed it! Sandra, you go girl!
Hate to admit it, but Michael Baigent, co- author of HBHG is a Kiwi.
So you see, once again those bloody Kiwis are at the forefront of world error and controversy.
Good for you, Sandra, to smack Down Dan Brown 
Randy - "This makes no sense if they beleive the contents of their book are ture history. How can you sue for stealing the whole architecture of a true history. You can only steal fiction. Yet what he is accused of stealing is exactly what they are representing as true." I see it exactly the same way you do. It's as if the heirs of Charles Darwin sued the producers of 'King Kong' because they "stole" the idea of evolution and used it in their story. Isn't the whole point of publishing a theory you think is true to get other people to adopt it? I think they're just sore because the writers of DVC are going to make a lot more money than they did, and they want some of it. The moral is: crackpot ideas properly belong in NOVELS, and should not be paraded about as History.
I'm sorry I missed both of these. (Fortunately, I already know what Sandra looks like because I saw her and Carl Olson on an EWTN show.) The Abrams appearance sounds a lot like when Amy Welborn was on either Scarborough or Hardball and couldn't get a word in edgewise, but the the Scarborough appearance sounds like great TV. Let me know if a video of it ever turns up online.
I agree with Wanda. Unless Brown's writing includes direct steals from the HGHB authors in terms of phrasing, I don't know if it counts as plagiarism. Sandra (or anyone else who's read both books), are there instances of word-for-word copying?
Doggone it! I missed both of these. Thankfully, I've read her book (Da Vinci Hoax). But it would have been nice to see this.
Sandra
Be sure to wear all black, with a scarlet-lined black cape.
Just kidding.
I would love to see this.
As to the legal aspects, the courts will have to decide. But Carl Olson has assembled a bunch of close sorrespondences over at the Ignatius blog,
http://insightscoop.typepad.com
The full link doesn't want to paste for me.
Any video links, yet??? I had a right to life meeting and missed Scarborough and The Journey Home (EWTN).
I have a suggestion for those of you missing these golden nuggets: TIVO. TIVO is the best friend of those who watch a lot of TV, or those who only like one or two things on TV.
You can find the transcript for the Abrams show at this link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11605044/
and for the Scarborough show at this link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11605084/
Hope this helps!
Another way to find out what Sandra looks and sounds like is to attend science fiction cons ("conventions" to you mundanes.)
The link was really helpful. I wish I could have seen the Scarborough show. TIVO is great, but no if you find out about the show after it airs.
But Will, I've only been to one convention since 1993 and that was six years ago. The con scene is of no interest any more.
There's a photo of me at our book's website, www.davincihoax.com
Just read the transcripts - great work Sandra! I'd have loved to have seen Holt's face.
Didn't Robert Graves write a book, King Jesus, making essentially these points, in the 1920's or 1930's?
King Jesus was published in 1946, according to a quick google search.
A little late, but I would disagree that crackpot ideas belong anywhere, even in novels. I've read an enormous amount of science fiction and fantasy, and noticed a trend some years ago, whereupon my reading started to drop off. Where writers once took the trouble to write a novel or short story to explore an idea (no matter how crazy), today's writers use ideas that were once seriously (albeit fictionally) discussed as plot devices to carry a thin story line, frequently soft (or hard) core porn (both sexual and violent). It is rare in much science fiction and most fantasy, for example, to find any type of organized religion treated with respect, or its adherents as anything but hypocrits, out for the money and the power (we all know about all that money and power being a priest, minister or rabbi brings in ...). Organized religion is, virtually without exception, treated as oppresive with long lists of stupid rules and meaningless ritual (redundant in today's world, I know). The thought that religion (or, worse, a religion) might actually act for the good in the world is beyond the ken of today's modern pulp writer. It's all a fraud, presumably, and this spirit infuses most popular fiction in all genres. A genuine integration of religious themes into a work of fiction isn't hard, but the writer either has to set out to do it deliberately (and risk getting things wrong), or actually believe "that stuff." The anti-religious attitude of many writers is picked up by the reader -- why St. Anthony Claret declared that a bad book did more damage than anything else (or something like that). That's why I say that if a crazy idea is used in fiction to explore the idea in its various ramifications, it is probably (with reservations) okay, but if that same idea is just used for sensationalism or PR, it descends to "crackpotism" and can be classifed as a cheap trick to make money, and should not be given serious consideration, not the least reason being the damage it can do to the unwary.
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