"The Secret of Secrets" (Dan Brown, 2025)

In the 18 years I've been writing this blog, I've reviewed 139 books to add to the "recommended books" category of TYWKIWDBI.  I suppose a majority of them have been somewhat obscure works that I wanted to bring to the attention of the readership, but some have been popular titles, including Booker Prize winners and other best-sellers.  Such is the case with The Secret of Secrets. Author Dan Brown rocketed to fame with his series of Robert Langdon thrillers.  This is the sixth book in that sequence, and a Netflix series (without Tom Hanks) is currently in  production.

The book is an easy read because Brown writes well.  He mixes action and problem-solving with an abundance (or sometimes a superfluity) of factual information about the subject matter and the physical locations of the action (in this case Prague).  But another characteristic of his writing this time seems to be the inclusion of a boatload of product placement.  For example:

"Langdon finished dressing, finally feeling warm in his heavy chinos, turtleneck, and thick Dale sweater." 

"They met at Faukman's favorite table in Manhattan - the back booth at Trattoria Dell'Arte - where authentic Italian cuisine was served in a room decorated like an artist's studio..."

"Langdon would have much preferred his usual Vesper martini with Nolet's Reserve gin."

In none of these situations were the details relevant to the storyline.  My wife and I counted over 250 such examples.  I understand that the location of the Four Seasons Prague hotel next to the river was salient for an early action, but the next several dozen times he could have returned to "his hotel" rather than specifying the name (one wonders whether the author has been granted lifetime upgrades to suites for future visits).  I don't remember whether such brand-name specificity was prevalent in Angels and Demons or The Da Vinci Code, and I understand that product placement is done routinely in movies and perhaps in other best-sellling books, but in this case it became a bit annoying.

I did appreciate some of the technical and historical information, one snippet of which I'll copypaste here rather than typing the text:

Readers are invited to offer mini-reviews and opinions in the Comments.

There are two types of sumac

This is one of the most interesting things I've found today and it was worth a quick browse (only fast-forwarded a couple times).  Despite having grown up around sumac since my Minnesota childhood, I never learned (or have forgotten) that there is a world of difference between "poison sumac" and "staghorn sumac."  

Addedium: A tip of my blogging cap to an anonymous reader who offered these links -

Sumac Foraging and Preparation

Sumac vs. Zaatar: What's the difference?

Three-minute drum solo on a bodhrán

"The Maguires at the launch of their debut album, Little Giants and Other Oxymorons at Temple Bar Tradfest in January 2017.  This clip features a bodhrán solo from Seán Maguire, just 11 years of age at the time, followed by a set of reels from the band."

The instrument was totally new to me. Here are some excerpts from the Wikipedia entry:

Composer Seán Ó Riada declared the bodhrán to be the native drum of the ancient Celts (as did bodhrán maker Paraic McNeela), suggesting that it was possibly used originally for winnowing or wool dying, with a musical history that predated Christianity, native to southwest Ireland... However, according to musician Ronan Nolan, former editor of Irish Music magazine, the bodhrán evolved in the mid-19th century from the tambourine, which can be heard on some Irish music recordings dating back to the 1920s....

The drum is struck either with the bare hand or with a lathe-turned piece of wood called a bone, tipper, beater, stick or cipín.  Tippers were originally fashioned from a double-ended knuckle bone, but are now commonly made from ash, holly, or hickory wood...

...a pitch-varying technique that enabled the bodhrán player to closely follow the cadence and melodic phrasing of the tune being performed. This approach marked a significant technical advancement in bodhrán playing, shifting the instrument from a predominantly rhythmic role toward a more musically responsive one. 

Much more at the link.

A very unusual door

The overall image is a bit distorted from using a wide-angle lens indoors, but it does show that a wooden bar has been fixed diagonally across the lower portion of this door.  Its purpose is totally obscure - until you open the door...

Found in the Awful Taste But Great Execution subreddit, where there is often some totally bizarre material.  The discussion thread for this post has some salient comments re design and building codes.

U.S. map of named highways in 1927

Apologies to the owner of this image, because I saved it in 2007 without noting the source.  This is obviously not a map of all highways, but rather of the ones that by the 1920s had received "names."

Of personal interest to me is #33 on the map - the Yellowstone Trail - which begins in Boston and passes through Minneapolis on its way to Yellowstone Park in Colorado, then continues on to the west coast.  My family home during my high school years was on the Yellowstone Trail, but I had no idea at the time of the significance of the name.  I'm planning a detailed post in the future, and just wanted to leave this here for now.

Addendum: possible source for the map here.

This is not a book you would enjoy reading

I don't remember the context of the post and whether I expressed it in the post or in the comments, but somewhere several weeks ago I offered the opinion that future wars will not be decided by tanks and battleships or heavy bombardment, but rather by drones, autonomous weapons, and cyberattacks.  I cited this book, and this week I finally obtained a copy from the library.

Ted Koppel was a broadcast journalist, best known for hosting the ABC program Nightline for 25 years.  In 2015 he published this book, which details the susceptibility of the United States to failure of critical infrastructure, especially the national electrical power grid.  The opening chapter is an unrelentinlgy grim portrayal of what would happen if a large area of the country lost electrical power for more than a week.  In 2015 his concern was that such an attack could be accomplished through cyberspace, with the malicious actor breaching the poor or nonexistent firewalls around central power stations.  A second consideration was an electromagnetic pulse.  Nowadays a perhaps easier attack could be achieved by someone in the country unleashing a swarm of explosive-carrying drones programmed to attack substations, trunk power lines, and critical office buildings.  

Other chapters detail the inadequate response measures from civil authorities available in 2015 (and likely even less substantial now after the DOGE cost-saving cuts).  Additional chapters include interviews with various levels of "preppers," from ramen-noodle-saving suburbanites to rural underground-bunker-builders.

No practical solutions are offered, so it's basically about 300 pages of Gloom and Doom, which I just briefly browsed through.  It's a good book to know about; it's not a fun book to read.

Extremely detailed study of a painting

I hadn't even finished watching before deciding it was blogworthy, especially when I learned why angel wings resemble watermelon slices.

Lunch with grandma

Cartoon found in the discussion thread of this image:

Reposted from 2020.

"Hilma af Klint" - an awesome movie about a remarkable artist

I was blown away last evening watching this documentary movie from our library.   I have zero background education in art history, and had never heard of this woman.  Apparently I am not alone in that regard.  After watching the movie I went to the Wikipedia entry, where it was explained that "The family surname is 'af Klint', af being a Swedish nobiliary particle."  She was of noble (but not royal) lineage, born in a palace and educated at the Royal Academy in the fine arts, beginning with landscape paintings and botanical illustrations:

When she was about twenty years old, something happened that altered her perception of the world.  Details at the link and in the movie, but basically by the time she was 40, she began pouring out an immense number of totally abstract paintings, such as these (cellphone camera images from the movie on my TV):

"The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke."

And the final startling fact is that she was creating this art in the early 1900s (before WWI, for reference, and at the time of my grandparents), and that there was no precedent for this style of artistic expression.  Most textbooks date the onset of abstract art to the works of Kandinsky and Mondrian, who followed (?imitated) her.  This lady's paintings were never exhibited in her lifetime because she was a woman and because the style and content of the images were considered "improper" at that time.

Enough from me.  You already know whether you want to see this movie or not.  It may be streamable for $ on Apple or Prime.  I found the DVD in our South Central Wisconsin library system (a huge system that normally has dozens or hundreds of copies of popular movies had only 2 copies of this one).  It can also be ordered directly from Kino Lorber.   Here is the trailer for the movie:

Tobacco quotas and modern farming

Herewith some passages from "Less is Enough" - an excerpt in Harper's Magazine from the foreword to an upcoming republication of Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.

"...by the work of my father and other good men to preserve the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association. For about sixty-four years, by a combination of price supports and production controls, that association preserved the lives and livelihoods of small farmers. To limit the production of a product to demand, or to a demand knowingly estimated, is a simple matter. The automobile industry can do it. So can a child. Excessive brain power is not required to “figure it out.” And so it seems odd and even strange that my province and its provinciality produced the only sound agricultural economy that I have known.

Only in agriculture, so far as I know, is this obvious truth ignored, or even overturned on the recommendation of highest authority. In the Seventies, the secretary of agriculture, Earl L. Butz, who supposed that foreign demand would grow without limit, advised American farmers to plow “fencerow to fencerow.” More recently, other experts have advised American farmers to go all out growing soybeans, supposing they will be needed by the Chinese or somebody. Only in agriculture is the rule to produce as much as possible, this silliness to be redeemed if not by the market then by the government. I don’t think this can be dignified or excused by calling it “economics” or “capitalism.” It comes from ignorance or indifference. And it rests on the assumption that farmers deserve their low status because they are in general stupid and their work requires no learning or intelligence. This is the one-crop-by-prescription agriculture invented by the experts and of course recommended by them...

As the experts were seeing it in 1974, the purpose of farming was not the production of the healthiest food at the lowest cost to the land and the people. The purpose was the consumption of agri-industrial products: chemicals, seeds, and machines. The only recognized value was accounted by money...

But in 1974, we had as now, no viable concept of enough. To have some is to need more, and after that, more and more. To have more and more than you need is now a form of common sense, and so we have developed a sort of vogue of billionaires, when the model of citizenship is set by such people as Elon Musk and Donald Trump. To be successful now is to achieve the satisfaction of one’s greed, which of course is enlarged by every additional prospect of satisfaction.

Such was the state of things in 1974, and the state of things is much worse in 2026. We foresee no practical enactment of the concept of enough, but rather submit to the absolute determinism of progress: progress undirected and inevitable. Progress forbids us to stop when we are satisfied. We must go on, adopting the changes of technology, whatever the cost may be to ourselves and our children.

Well said, and I agree 100%.

This essay resonated with me because I used to live in Kentucky (home turf for Berry), and like Berry I had a tobacco allotment.  My first gainful employment as an adult was at the V.A. Medical Center and the University of Kentucky in Lexington.  After a few years of frugal apartment living, I purchased my first home (in that era an $85,000 mortgage got me a nice home with about 10 acres of land in a semi-rural area half an hour from work).  

My land had a history of being a tobacco farm; the photo embedded at the top of this post is a view of my "garage", which was an old tobacco barn.  For those interested, the long drainpipe collected water from the tin roof, which was then directed to an underground cistern to provide my drinking/bathing water.  The drainpipe ends at a bucket on top of the boards covering the cistern, and the bucket had I think some sand to act as a "filter", but every year when the leaves fell onto the barn roof and gutter, various insect larvae would wind up coming out of the faucets in my home.

But back to the tobacco.  Whoever owns the farm owns an "allotment" that allows (but does not require) you to grow X number of pounds of tobacco.  I was working 70-hour weeks, so I did what other farm-squatters did - I drove down to the courthouse once each spring, surveyed the bulletin board and found an offer from someone to sell them my tobacco allotment so they could grow the product.  I don't know how many pounds I was allowed, but the average amount I received each year was about $200.

I don't know if that system still exists in Kentucky or elsewhere, but as Wendell Berry indicates, it was created to control production, because farmers early on realized that overproduction beyond demand just lowers unit costs to the end-user rather than raising farm income.

It is probably no longer possible to live in a "controlled economy," but the principle emphasized by Berry - satisfaction with "enough" - can be applied to a more comprehensive view of lifestyle and life goals.

Company suggests a "courtesy remittance"

I have been a State Farm customer for 60+ years, ever since my first car and apartment.  Recently I've noticed a change in their billing policy.  I used to get statements for the car, house etc a few weeks before they were due.  This week I received correspondence regarding my car insurance, including an enclosed "courtesy remittance slip."  It states quite clearly that this is not a bill, but I can use it to make a payment before the next bill arrives.

My next payment is due in two months.  I ran the numbers.  If I keep my funds in my credit union and wait to pay this in November, I will gain a dollar or two, which is not big money.  But if you multiply this by the approximately 100,000,000 policies that State Farm services, it becomes a useful chunk of change for the corporation.

This is all legal.  It's not predatory or manipulative.  But it adds to my growing dissatisfaction with American corporate business policies.  Am I being unreasonable?

Interesting interview on Bloomberg this morning

Lots of interesting stuff presented during the Bloomberg pre-market "Surveillance" progeram this moning.  Jonathan Ferro commented on the above set of numbers, showing changes year-to-date for three crucial indicators.  Brent crude has risen 80% this year, and the yield on the 10-year treasuries has increased by 85 basis points.   So there has been an energy shock and an interest rate shock, but despite those factors, the broad market measured by the S&P 500 is up double digits.  Some discussion thereafter by Lisa Abramowicz and Annmarie Hordern re how the markets have been resilient because of demonstrably increased profits and the expectations of future growth based on potential contributions of artificial intelligence, into which segment of the market vast quantities of capital have been pouring.  None of this is "new" today but it is startling to see it combined into one graphic.

Even more interesting IMHO was a prolonged interview with Stephen Schork, a a former floor trader on the New York Mercantile Exchange and the editor of an oil market newsletter.  His commentary runs from the 17:30 mark to the 24:00 mark of the program this morning.  I'll try to have the video embed start with his comments; if it doesn't, you can mouse to that point or click this link.

It seems to me that financial markets around the world are still considering the Trump/Netanyahu "not exactly a war" situation to be a temporary matter that will resolve soon.  My crystal ball does not suggest the same.  Strategic petroleum reserves around the world have been depleted severely by the lack of timely shipments from the gulf for most of this year.  China is already resuming purchases of crude after being out of the market during the higher prices.  And now the Houthis are creating massive problems for Saudi Arabia, impairing the east-west pipeline and blocking transport east from the Red Sea, to the extent that I think the Saudis are now telling European countries that they cannot guarantee to provide oil - just when the colder weather starts to hit Europe.

This is a massive clusterfuck, and it's not getting better anytime soon.  

A "fish nest"

Third Place, Conservation Hope. A male white-spotted pufferfish creates an intricate spawning nest in the sand. The fish carefully shapes a two-meter-wide radial pattern using only his fins. Built over several days, this structure and its subtle details reveal the extraordinary effort this small fish invests in reproduction.

This was one of the winning photographs in the Ocean Photographer of the Year competition, from a gallery in The Atlantic.  Photo credit Yuta Shigeno,

Mashup of the movies of 2023

A time-tagged list of the many hundreds of sources for these movie clips is available at the Sleepy Skunk tumblr page.  When I view these rapid-fire mashups, I like to keep the list open in a separate window so I can click back-and-forth to identify movies that might be worth checking out from the library.  And since everything in the mashup is of necessity out of context, I find it useful to turn on the closed captions icon to clarify the dialogue.

The quotation cited at 0:48-0:53 is one of my favorite passages from Charles Dickens (originally in Our Mutual Friend).  The dialogue at 0:23-0:37 is from Past Lives, which I reviewed and rated 4+ last year.  And the Dennis Quaid quotation is laugh-out-loud funny in this context.

$5000 checks offered by a politician in 1935

What do we call this?  Coincidence?  Foreshadowing?

Relevant discussion re Sinclair Lewis' writing and modern politics, with a hat tip to an anonymous reader.