I have a secret to share with everyone: I'm actually Dan Brown. It's true.

(Funny story I just thought of: The SAT-prep classes I used to teach included a passage on a female writer who used a pseudonym. One of my students raised his hand. "What's a pseudonym?" he asked. "Is that, like, a drug?")

I don't know how they make bananas out in Colorado or, for that matter, wherever you're reading this right now (hey, a callback to one of my other laugh-makers! [That's a term I coined for a joke. (And check it out -- embedded parentheticals! [This is like a greatest hits collection of lame jokes! (Laugh-makers.)])]), but here's how they make them (bananas -- I know, I forgot what I was talking about, too) in DC: I had a rule that I'd only buy two bananas at a time. This is because, while I like bananas, they are not, in fact, "the shit," as Gwen Stefani would have us believe. (I know the song says "this shit," not "the shit." But that song, I think most of us can agree, is just plain ol' "shit.") I appreciate a healthy potassium intake, but, honestly, after two bananas, I'm good for about a week. Thus, if I were to buy three bananas, that third one would, through a natural cycle of ripening, turn into a mushy mess in a matter of days. Now here's how they make bananas in New York: Bananas come bagged in packs of six. And these six bananas are very green and not at all ripe. So I bought a bag of bananas and just let them sit in my kitchen for a good four or five days. By that point, they were only just barely yellow. It's like they're injected with some ripening retardant. This is good because it means that I can probably get through the six bananas without wasting them, but it's bad because I had to just stare at my bananas for close to a week, wondering when I would actually be able to eat them.

The US Open started Monday night. I saw Venus Williams survive her first match, followed by Andy Roddick playing better than he's played in years. It's one thing to watch these matches on TV, but, in person, you can clearly see just how fast they're hitting these balls. I don't understand how every serve isn't an ace. Or, even if you make contact with the ball, how you can return it so that it lands in. Crazy.

Seriously, though: Buy my new book. The one that's got the guy doing the thing that he did in The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. But, this time, it's totally different and not at all the same. I swear.