Map of Bones

Its mom's birthday today so we met up at The Podium's Casa Armas for dinner. But before dinner, we got to shop around a bit. There's a National Bookstore Best Sellers store at The Podium which carries more popular and selective titles as compared to their regular branches, which tend to be more of a school-and-office-supplies depot.

I found and bought a copy of James Rollins' Map of Bones in paperback. Fully Booked didn't have a copy last time we checked through our online bookstore. This book came out before The Judas Strain. Its still related to the "Da Vinci Code"-genre where fiction is mixed with Christianity-related themes. In this case, the bones being referred to are the bones of the three Magi (or the "three kings" led by the Star of Bethlehem to Jesus; or wait -- was that supposed to be the Shepherds?) who visited Jesus as a child. Well, according to our church's pastor, Jesus was already a "child" of about 2 years old by the time the magi visited him, and not an infant as he is typically depicted in nativity scenes. His reason for saying this is the original (Greek?) text uses the word for "child" and not "infant". Hmmm... more conspiracy theories from The Vatican?

And while we're on the topic of Christianity, the Philippine Star had a front-page feature article today about the supposed relevance of Aug 8, 2008 (8/8/08). Its supposed to be the 2nd coming of Christ because "888" in Greek corresponds to word "Jesus". Yeah, yeah. And June 6, 2006 (6/6/06) was supposed to be the coming of the Anti-Christ in the person of Russian president Vladimir Putin. And last year's July 7, 2007 (7/7/07) was the year of the Cross supposedly because "777" in Greek corresponds to the word for "Cross". You can read about these predictions at a site called Revelation 13. Personally, any prediction site that greets you with offers of DVD's, jewelries, and many others from Amazon, sounds pretty suspect to me!