Son of “Beyond the Valley of the...” etc.

If Hollywood can have sequel after sequel based on fictional books, so can your humble Justa.

You’ve no doubt read our original post and its sequel with links to newspaper articles spawned by the editorial mantra “We’d better get local reaction to that DaVinci sequel.” Well, we have a couple more.

One is from Owen Sound, Ontario and the other comes from Naperville, Illinois. The picture is from the latter article, linked from the Sun website.

They’re both pretty good articles. I don’t know if the Grand Master in Ontario sent out a news release in advance of his trip to Owen Sound announcing his arrival and his availability to speak to the media about that sequel book. If he did, it’s.... well, it’s pretty progressive on someone’s part. Progressive for Freemasonry, that is.

There’s also this article from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

It’s a bit of an odd duck journalistic piece because it asks the question “What is Freemasonry?” and never really provides an answer. In fact, I’m bowled over by a couple of things in it, but no more so than this from the reporter:

They won't say, for example, whether any living U.S.
president is a Mason but will list the deceased presidential Masons.

“They” won’t? Who’s “they”? Setting aside the purely American semantical oddity that someone who is no longer in office is still deemed “a U.S. president,” I’ll say that the current incumbent in office and no living former presidents have ever been members of the fraternity. That information should be readily available on the internet. In fact, it’s even in the Illinois newspaper article I’ve linked to.

And unless they do things differently in Masonic Lodges in Cedar Rapids, the reporter got her information a little mixed up:

Two men are seated in the center of the room, behind a table that displays an open holy book

Though she’s quoting a “past Grand High Priest over Iowa’s Freemasons” (does the York Rite really have that much power in that state?), I have my suspicions no one is sitting in the centre of the Lodge room. After all, it’s never been done that way. So, in Masonry, that means it can never happen.