Long Weekend in LA

Had a business trip to LA. Took the wife with me for a weekend getaway before the trip. We visited Santa Monica, Pasadena (CalTech is there; we've already established my wife and I are nerds), Malibu, Beverly Hills. Ate at Spago's. Met Wolfgang Puck.

Dune 7 Sucks (we knew it would)

I won't expand on what others have already stated so well - the insipid writing, the assumption that the readers are idiots who need to be beat over the head with backstory and foreshadowing, the 1-dimensional cartoonish characters, the ridiculous idea of bringing all the characters from the original series and the prequels back, etc.

It's bad enough that the enemy that the Honoured Matres are running away from is Omnius (that's not a spoiler, anybody who read either the House series or the Legends series would know that). But the old couple from the end of Chapterhouse are ... Omnius and Erasmus?! Are they kidding.

We are constantly reminded that BH and KJA have access to Frank Herbert's notes. Well, that may be true, but I am 100% certain that those notes have nothing to do with this book. There is no way on Earth that Frank Herbert's notes indicated that Omnius was the unknown enemy because in Frank Herbert's universe there was no Omnius. When he was talking about domination by thinking machines he clearly had something more subtle in mind that the simplistic interpretation of BH and KJA. And he certainly didn't intend the old couple (who represented him and his wife) to be machines.