I feel sorry for your wife, D. Sirmize.

When many people do the same thing, it plays a vital part of the human social structure. It’s what we talk about to socialize and get to know each other better. We find out each other opinions on useless mindless stuff, and this somehow teaches us how to get along better. I would wager that if we started a Middle East version of American Idol many of our problems over there would go away.
My advice: loosen up a little, take a ride on the wild side, heck watch a few episodes of America Idol, it may give you a little water cooler ammo and increase your chance for promotion.

Or not.

It’s all good.

Of course, that makes sence if “The Davinci Code” is a sequel; you’d expect the first book in a series to focus more on character development than the second book. But, interestingly enough, very few people that I talk to about the book even know that “The Davinci Code ” is a sequel to “Angels & Demons”. But almost everyone (dare I say EVERYONE) that I’ve talked to that has read both books thinks that “Angels and Demons” is the better book.

So I don’t doubt that you have the opinion you do, D. Sirmize. Reading might have helped a little (as opposed to listening), especially given your dislike for male voices faking French, women voices. I felt similar about a book-on-tape that Heather and I listened to recently by Orson Scott Card called “Shadow of the Hegemon”.

The book was great; Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite authors. But it would have been better to read due to the various voices. There were three different readers. There was a female voice for the chapters that dealt mostly with Petra’s view of things, and that’s the one voice that I didn’t mind. The other two voices (both male) would get on my nerves at times. One voice was a DEEP voice that was only used to read the email correspondence that started out each chapter of the book. I would cringe when the voice read the email addresses. Imagine having someone read this page to you in a voice so deep that you can barely understand it. (Whales might not have a hard time with his voice, but I always missed vital information revealed in the opening chapters because I couldn’t understand a thing.)

As for the other male voice, it was only annoying when he read the part of a female character. Sometimes I wonder how well I’m pulling off my female voices as I read “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” to my kids. Sometimes mid-sentence I’ll catch myself sounding exactly like the voices that annoyed me in “Shadow of the Hegemon”. But Sami hasn’t complained, so I’ll just keep on sounding stupid until the day that Sami says, “Daddy? Can you stop reading the girl voices like that?”

As for the movie, I’ll be seeing it as soon as we can find a babysitter to watch the kids. Sounds like D. Sirmize is the perfect candidate.