Would I sleep with Sherlock Holmes?

Penn Jillette likes to tell a story of how he once met a woman who had the chance to sleep with Elvis and turned it down. After finding out that fact, he didn't want to have anything more to do with her, as the thought of not taking the chance to sleep with a legend, just to be able to tell the tale, was unbelievable to him. He always concludes his story by saying that he, as a heterosexual male, would definitely sleep with Elvis, given the chance.

As I wrote yesterday, the Baker Street Babes raise a lot of questions in their latest podcast, but one of those is something they were asking their guests in the initial interview: "If you had the chance to bang any character in the Canon, who would it be?" Interestingly, not all of their guests answered, "Sherlock Holmes."

I mean, when I stop to think about it, I have to sympathize with Penn Jillette. It's Sherlock Holmes. The Sherlock Holmes. I mean, I never found the guy attractive, but hey, it's Sherlock Holmes. You could write (or have ghostwritten) a book called I Slept With Sherlock Holmes and have people buy you drinks for life. Sure, the next day's conversation would probably go like this:

"Hey, everybody, Sherlock Holmes isn't gay after all!"
"How do you know that?"
"Well, I slept with him. He didn't seem that enthused."
"You're barely acceptable as a heterosexual, no wonder he wasn't thrilled."
"Yeah, but have you slept with Sherlock Holmes, Miss Thang?"
"Well, no . . . ."
"So there. Call me when a literary legend finds you hot enough to sleep with."

See? Suddenly you've just one-upped everybody.

Now we just need an actress starring as Sherlock Holmes who makes this hypothetical concept a little more palatable. (I'm sorry, the young lady playing Holmes in Carter DeLaat's web series 221B just looks a little too young. Like twelve sometimes. No wonder Watson's upset when she's injecting cocaine.) Helen Mirren? Parker Posey? Uma Thurman? But then, does female Sherlock Holmes count as the Sherlock Holmes?

Ah, well. Far too many questions flying around these days, thanks to the new blood in our Sherlockian circles. But we'll get around to answering them all eventually, even if we have to jump a few sharks to do it . . . this surely was not a blog post I ever expected to be writing.

And now, back to Dartmoor and The Hound, where nobody is doing anything the least bit scandalous . . . .