Dan Brown’s blockbuster new book The Lost Symbol was recently released and the human race can’t stop its collective heart from racing like a thoroughbred on a greased track with wind machines at its back! Here’s my early review.

This time around, hero Tom Hanks (played in the book by Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon) is in Washington, D.C. trying to unravel all sorts of ominous shenanigans, probably involving ancient Masonic stuff like secret handshakes, bare-ass paddling, the art on U.S. currency with eyeballs over pyramids and what-have-you, and grown men whispering to each other in scotch and cigar breath… that sort of thing.

It’s all some sort of plot that probably leads to a passel of no goodniks. Not unlike modern day tea baggers running amok searching for monsters in every shadow and shouting paranoid stuff.

SPOILER ALERT: Langdon probably solves the mystery and lives!

2nd SPOILER ALERT: His attractive female sidekick will probably fall for him along the way.

3rd SPOILER ALERT: There’s probably no talking dragon, dancing elk, evil Pope, dude with a mullet smoking a hookah or reference to Roberto Clemente’s podiatrist.

The Lost Symbol is probably a taut thriller that I’ll probably read some day, just so I can go to the movie version of it and be majorly disappointed.

Thanks, Opie Cunningham. Thanks a lot.