RICHARD ROPER & DAN BROWN -ODD COUPLE

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, RICHARD ROPER STYLE

Richard Roper is a thoughtful journalist, and yet in his April 15 column he offers us a perfectly thoughtless idea. An idea that ripples far beyond his own self-promoting purposes. He defends his appearances on any and all outlets (Fox, Leno, Stern), because as he instructs us: "This is the land of opportunity...so I believe it's perfectly acceptable to tell your stories on a wide variety of stages."

It's not his instructions here that bother me; it's their implications. Roper weighs his book-promoting appearances based on a "I go by how people treat me" scale. By implication, that tells me he would therefore cooperate with any City Council member who treats his parking tickets helpfully...vote for any candidate who treats him and his career generously ....support any general and his war who treats his opinions favorably.

Richard, this may be "a land of opportunity," but using your logic, I wonder what kind of news favors you would have shown Nazi candidates running in the elections of the 30s? I mean, if they had "treated" you nicely, would you have felt comfortable returning the favor? See -- this is what I mean about the ripple-effect implications of your logic. A logic my three grandchildren unfortunately just read and quoted...

THE "LAST SUPPER," WITHOUT DAN BROWN

When Dan Brown invited himself to daVinci's "Last Supper," he concocted a colorful collection of villains for the price of his headline-making book. But for all his jaw-dropping implications about the famous painting, he forgot the meal itself!

Nowhere does his "DaVinci Code" address what the food on the table might have been telling us. I mean, while he was busy de-constructing 2000 years of researched religious history, why one wonders didn't he find something conspiratorial about the food itself?

Turns out he didn't have to. Others now have. Not authors, but art experts. The "Los Angeles Times" reports they can document that in the "52 renderings of the Last Supper painted between the years 1000 and 2000 (eg. El Greco, Rubens, etc), the size of the loaves of bread grew by 23%. and the meal itself by 66%."

So here's the thing, Dan...! What you may have missed is the "conspiracy" of how the Western world has been seduced into eating bigger, and growing fatter ever since that long ago Seder.