Trippin' on Three Patch again.

In the mass of things on my to-read list, Sherlock fanfic remains a vast library that I've barely poked my head in the door of. There is just not enough time. And yet I love it anyway, from afar. Perhaps it's better that way, hearing Sherlockians enthuse about its high points without getting into the parts where penises and orifices become involved. And, yes, yes, there is plenty of fan fiction without the interaction of those two bits, but there's plenty of fan fiction of every possible sort, and where there isn't, someone is bound to get to it one of these days. And like I said, just not enough time.

Soooooo, the reason I adore fanfic so greatly from afar?

Three Patch Podcast.

I don't even listen to their "Spoilercasts," which, bless their hearts, is a completely wonderful concept for those of us that want to get to the next Sherlock somewhat untainted in our ability to enjoy it fresh.

Every time I start listening to one of their massive, multi-part, monthly episodes, it just makes me think. Three Patch Podcast is not one of those things one listens to to reinforce one's own view of the world, if one is a middle-aged white male whose Sherlockian education goes back to the Shaw workshop days. (It's funny to think that we once tittered over lines like "I heard a little sigh of satisfaction as he cuddled the butt into his shoulder," given the level of the new fanfic.) I mean, seriously, I don't get why Sherlock and John would want to !%#@ each other, in any universe. (Sorry, ghosts of editors past and present won't let me write "fuck" even now. Oh wait. I just did. But it wasn't in context, so maybe the internal censors let that slide.)

Didn't I say Three Patch makes me think? Perhaps too much.

The latest non-Spoilercast episode had me actually starting to think Sherstrade makes sense. Rupert Graves and the writers have done such an amazing job with that character that there's material to work with. And just as the Sherlockians of old analyzed the Doyle Canon to piece together an exact location for 221B, the new Sherlockian scholarship takes the Moffat/Gatiss Canon and pieces together the exact relationship between the consulting and government detectives. Only now it's in fanfic and podcast discussions instead of the printed page.

And that's cool. Once upon a time, all a fan could hope to do to communicate his or her thoughts was write -- letters, articles, full-length books -- and hope to get any one of those published so more people could share the thoughts than just those you could hand it to. It wasn't a superior medium, it was just the only one we had. So many more now, all equally valid ways to share one's thoughts.

And as much as one might like to complain about the quality of material that doesn't go through some gatekeeper filter and editorial improvement process, the amount of sheer creativity that is out there and being talked about on a very thoughtful level . . . well, while I still haven't read any of jinglebell's Merlock works, hearing her interviewed on same is fascinating. (Even though "Merlock" still sounds like "murloc," and man, do I hate murlocs. "HEH-ROOOOOOOOOOO!" Yuck!)

I'm sure Three Patch Podcast isn't for every fan of Sherlock Holmes, focusing mainly on Cumberbatch and company Sherlock, but if you've got a fairly open mind and some time to let some different point of views in, it can be a little trippy.

I mean, look how much I just babbled here, unable to really even start to express all the thoughts that pour in during on episode, on culture, on creativity, on . . . not more rain. I think Peoria shall wash away soon. Sorry. Like I said, trippy.

Superfight! Sherlock Holmes's first battle.

Though it's been out for a while, this week was the first time I had heard of Skybound Games's Superfight card game. Having had a lot of fun with their ever-popular Cards Against Humanity, and loving the description of Superfight, I ordered it immediately. And when the 500-card starter box arrived today, the first thing I did was flip through the character cards to see if Sherlock Holmes was there. And he was.

So just to see how the game works out, I laid Sherlock on my desk and had my trusted companion pull another character card from the deck: Polar bear.

Sherlock Holmes was going to fight a polar bear.

And now the next step of the game. My trusted companion picked a card from her three-card hand to add to the polar bears powers, and chose "frost breath." She then picked a second attribute card from the deck at random: "Wall-crawler."

Sherlock Holmes was about to fight a wall-crawling polar bear with frost breath. I would imagine him to be some demon bear from the Eskimo version of Hell, as the frost breath was definitely supernatural and wall-crawling is -- outside of Spiderman -- a creepy demon thing.

So I looked at my own three-card hand to see what powers I could imbue Sherlock with to fight this polar bear. Here were my choices:

"Wearing sharp stilettos." (Walking in those things is bad enough, and Holmes was no savate fighter.)

"Has no bones." (Pretty worthless against a freeze-breath bear.)

"Can teleport but goes blind for 10 seconds after each use."

That last one had to be my choice. A seemingly crippling handicap, yes, but if anyone could make up for the loss of sight with his other senses, it would be Sherlock Holmes. Hoping for a little help from the added card, I drew one randomly from the deck. What did I get?

"Can create a hologram of self."

Perfect. Holmes could teleport away and leave a false image of himself at the departure point, keeping the bear focused on the illusion for long enough for his sight to come back. The frost breath is pretty much neutralized.

The one issue I was left with was how, with apparently no weapons but his boxing and baritsu skills, was Sherlock Holmes going to kill a polar bear?

Teleport on to his back, close enough to get him in a choke hold while blind and choke him out?

I googled "Can a man choke out a polar bear?" which, oddly enough, brings up results. One story, purporting to be about a man choking a bear with his bare hands, turned out to be a tale of a man using an axe to nearly decapitate a bear. Another claimed there was too much fur and muscle for a man to choke out a bear. My own thoughts were no more pleasant as I realized that while a man can choke out a larger man with the right hold, a polar bear has claws that could rend the choking arm or leg useless in pretty short order.

The way Superfight is normally played, the two players who constructed the combatants plead their case to the rest of the players, who form a jury to announce a winner. Since this was just a test match, and no jury was present, more internet searching was in order for some hope of saving Sherlock in this match.

One uncorroborated tale told of a hunter cutting off a bear's blood flow by clamping his teeth on the bear's jugular until he passed out, then finishing him with a stick. Hmm, even if true, Sherlock doesn't have a stick. There had to be something else.

Teleporting himself a several stories in the air directly above the bear, and then plunging straight down into the bear, using his legs as spears? Risky, but with potential. Holmes could possibly finish the bear and be only somewhat crippled. Teleportation, while a powerful tool, is kind of a double-edged sword. Holmes could teleport into the bear and kill both of them, depending upon how his powers of teleportation worked. If his own molecules displaced the air or whatever at the point of his arrival, he's be a sure, if slimey, winner . . . or again, sacrifice an arm or a leg by teleporting so that just part of him wound up in a mortal spot for the bear. If medical crews were standing by, he might make it.

A little research into holograms shows that power doesn't really add any lethal effects. So we're back to the grosser side of teleportation.

Yes, teleporting, hologram-making Sherlock Holmes could beat a frost-breath, wall-crawling polar bear. It might cost him, and his survival when the battle was over might be in question, but I think I'm ready to declare him the winner.

Ready to gather some folks to actually play Superfight, now that I've given it the Sherlock Holmes test. It'll be interesting to see how old Sherlock does the next time he pops up in the arena.

The real Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula.

With the passing of film legend Christopher Lee on Sunday . . . well, you know . . . a lot of appreciation coming out. His later film outings in the Tolkien adaptations kept him well on the radar of the general public, and he seems to have crossed everybody's entertainment path at some point . . . and definitely that of the ardent Sherlockian.

Henry Baskerville, Sherlock Holmes, Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes again . . . and again.

Yeah . . .

But while his Mycroft is imprinted on my mind forever . . . "The last doctor who warned me about that was crossing Piccadilly, slipped on an orange peel, and was run over by a delivery van from Fortnum and Mason. Your very good health." . . . it's not a Holmes that will ever be my classic Christopher Lee role.

No, it was those Saturday afternoon matinees in the Strand Theater, where I first saw the preview to The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and got hooked on Holmes, where it wasn't Holmes filling the screen but the never-quite-fully-killed Count Dracula.

Christopher Lee's Dracula always overshadowed his Holmes for me. Frank Langella also played both, but was just too pretty for either role, really. Lee's Dracula was commanding, powerful, and total monster. He was the serial killer before my friends and I even knew what serial killers were. When I first learned of Jack the Ripper, I figured he had to be something like Christopher Lee's Dracula, or else why the heck would people be so scared of him?

On my list of movies I want to go to an alternate universe to see one day is a 1960s Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula featuring Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes and Christopher Lee as Count Dracula. Hammer Films was doing Cushing as Sherlock and Lee as Dracula, so that film was soooo close, sooo possible (except maybe for the whims of that Doyle kid who was still probably a bit of a problem back then).

For now, however, the only Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula we have featuring Christopher Lee is pitting Lee versus Lee in our looking back at his works in our memories. And that's not too shabby at thing, at that.

Bored, with claws.

We have this cat, which we inherited from another Sherlockian who most thought didn't leave Peoria enough. He's a lovely cat, a classic fluffy golden tabby sort of fellow, and a bright one at that. Like our friend Sherlock Holmes, he can lie about and be the laziest thing imaginable, but when the game is afoot, he springs to life and is all energy. Unlike Holmes, however, he does not wait for the cases to come to him. When bored, he tends to start stalking whatever prey is handy.

Just like we do on the good old interwebs sometimes. For example, take this bit from today's Twitter feed:

Now you might think, "Really? You're going to put Howard on display as an example of someone being mean just because they're bored?"

Did I say that? Nope. There's a reason I relate to my cat. And I'm the one that's bored. Time to play "How many captions can I write to go with that picture?"

Jonny Lee Miller picks up his latest script for a new Elementary!

Surprising Joan Watson with a wake-up was harder after she became homeless.

Not wanting Captain Gregson to see he'd wet his trousers, Mr. Elementary
pretended to dig for clues from inside the dumpster.

"I've heard you can find pink suitcases in these things if you look long enough!"

And it was then that he felt the first fin brush against his ankle . . . dumpster piranha!

"I get in the dumps at times . . . see? I can do Canonical!"

If you see a big booty hooker in a trash bag prom dress in this picture, shame on you!

The network quickly realized that a green dumpster was a cheaper recurring character than Alfredo, Miss Hudson, or even Clyde, and started including "Trevor Trashbin" in every episode.

Mr. Elementary didn't really need to stand on Detective Bell's shoulders to get out
of the dumpster, but his "being an ass" quotient was down this week.

The annual "Who can act their way out of a plastic bag?" contest was close at that
year's production company picnic, but Jonny Lee popped out in a photo finish!

"And I thought they smelled bad on the outside!" he said, before taking shelter
for another winter night in downtown Hoth.

Okay, when the Star Wars references come out, it's time to call it a night. Thanks, Howard!

So much for Saxe-Coburg Square . . . .

One of the lovely things about Sherlock Holmes is that there is at least one place he dined where his followers could always dine as well. Simpson's was the first choice of Sherlock Holmes after a long fast in "The Advenure of the Dying Detective," as well as a place where he could meet Watson while looking out at the passing London streetlife on the Strand in "The Illustrious Client." Other restaurants have not been so lucky.

This thought crossed my mind this morning when I stumbled across the Hiltl Restaurant, the "oldest continuously open vegetarian restaurant in the world." Its claim to fame is based upon its opening in Zurich, Switzerland in 1898.

"Wait a minute," I thought. "Wasn't there a vegetarian restaurant near Saxe-Coburg Square in 1890?"

Well, I didn't exactly think that exact thought -- more like "Wasn't there a vegetarian restaurant in 'The Red-Headed League' which was published in something like 1891, and I should look that up in my chronology . . . oh, it occurred in 1890." But writing that all out doesn't quite flow as nicely, so one wonders why I just did it. Probably because this topic doesn't have much meat to it, in more ways than one.

Anyway, here's the lovely words of Sherlock Holmes from that case:

"I should like just to remember the order of the houses here. It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. There is Mortimer's, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane's carriage-building depot. That carries us right on to the other block. And now, Doctor, we've done our work, so it's time we had some play. A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin land, where all is sweetness, and delicacy, and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex us with their conundrums."

There has always been a question of whether or not Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson had their sandwich and coffee at that nearby Vegetarian Restaurant on that October day in 1890. What we do know, however, is that it did exist a full eight years before the Hiltl opened up in Switzerland.

Finding history's first vegetarian restaurant is a trickier proposition. Wikipedia will even tell you that London didn't see its first "successful" vegetarian restaurant until 1961. England had its share of vegetarians throughout the 1800s, and religious vegetarianism was around in other countries long before that. But a vegetarian restaurant?

I find it hard to believe that the one Sherlock Holmes spoke of in "The Red-Headed League" was the first of its kind, but our Sherlock was a cutting-edge sort of fellow. He surely experimenting with vegetarianism's effect on his mental faculties at some point.

These days, the world even has vegetarian McDonald's in India, so that little place near Saxe-Coburg Square might have fared better and not disappeared. But at the time? Perhaps it needed a location that was not quite so hard to find.

Well, of course he is!

My first thought upon hearing of actor John Noble being cast as Mr. Elementary's father in the CBS nit detective show Elementary today was "Stand with me here upon the terrace, for it may be that another fine actor shall be wasted upon dreckful story."

But then I was reminded by a Fringe-fan friend of that eternal possibility that Walter Bishop, John Noble's character on Fringe, could always be evil Walter Bishop from the alternate universe. And then it all kind of fell into place. Even good Walter Bishop in Fringe-world had a son that came from an alternate reality.

And do realities get any more alternate than Elementary?

My personal theory has always been that Mr. Elementary was part of the homeless network that Sherlock Holmes (Cumberbatch version) used, a heroin addict gone delusional. This theory has become harder to sustain as the real modern Sherlock's fame grew and no one in New York seemed to ever do a Google search and find they were following an imposter around. But now, with the introduction of a man who looks a lot like a dimension-hopper from another reality as the guy who put Mr. Elementary in New York with Joan to begin with . . . well, it all comes back to making sense.

The delusional Mr. Elementary wasn't just moved out of London to let him play Sherlock. He was moved to an alternate universe without a Sherlock, so he could play to his heart's content. Well, until that demon heroin lured him back into the tunnel of injections.

Oh, Walter Bishop Holmes, you wacky, wacky genius! What will you come up with next?

A Hope of visiting 221B.

Rob Nunn raised an interesting question tonight on Twitter about A Study in Scarlet. To save you a couple of clicks, I'll quote it here:

"The address of 221B was in Holmes’ advertisement about the missing wedding ring when Jefferson Hope dodged Holmes’ first trap. If Hope is smart enough to do that, surely he would be smart enough to recognize that same address popping up a second time in such a short span, especially with the intimate knowledge of streets and addresses that London cabbies have. So my question is, why did Hope agree to pick up someone at 221B?"

As Holmes's opponents go, Jefferson Hope was a great one. Sure, he's not as "pure Evil" as the more black-and-white might like, but that is part of what makes the best villains -- a firm conviction that they are doing the right thing.

"You may consider me to be a murderer; but I hold that I am just as much an officer of justice as you are," Hope tells Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade after his story is done. While this Hope is much more noble in some ways than the Jefferson Hope of BBC Sherlock's "A Study in Pink," they do share certain interesting qualities: They both know their time on Earth is soon to be over and neither one worries too much about walking into Baker Street. The two facts most likely go hand in hand.

The original Jefferson Hope was taken by surprise when Holmes slapped handcuffs on him and responded with a "roar of fury" and tried to escape by crashing through a window. (Quick trivia: How many people broke windows at 221B Baker Street? I can think of two, including Hope. More?) But once Jefferson Hope was quite kindly once the shock had passed. He had the instincts of a wild mountain man, but also the perceptions of a gentleman. In fact he seems almost like a proud grandfather when he talks about Holmes getting those handcuffs on him:

"I was standing in the yard when a ragged youngster asked if there was a cabby there called Jefferson Hope, and said that his can was wanted by a gentleman at 221B, Baker Street. I went round, suspecting no harm, and the next thing I knew, this young man here had the bracelets on my wrists, and as neatly shackled as ever I saw in my life."

Jefferson Hope is an older fellow, having successfully accomplished his life's mission of vengeance, and is just kind of letting things play out. And while he may recognize the address at 221B Baker Street, he has no reason to associate it with law enforcement. In fact, the coincidence of it being the same address he had the ring retrieved from probably just made him all the more curious as to what the resident of that flat was all about -- it actually added incentive for him to return, since he wasn't fearing capture too much anyway, being on the side of justice and with not much time to live. Otherwise he would always wonder . . . which almost takes us to a reverse of the "always wonder" that almost got Sherlock killed in the BBC Sherlock appearance of Hope.

Perhaps I have that latter adaptation too much on the brain of late, but the TV Jefferson Hope's tortured cry of "MORIARTY!" lines up interestingly with the Canon Jefferson Hope's reticence to give up the name of his accomplice who fooled Sherlock Holmes, getting the lost wedding ring back in the guise of old "Mrs. Sawyer." We know that Holmes supposedly only first met Moriarty in "The Final Problem," but Moriarty's appearance in The Valley of Fear already raises questions about some details of that earlier record. Could it be that a decade-younger Moriarty took a little more active hand in criminal adventures and owed a favor to a London cabbie on a mission of vengeance?

That's the thing about the Canon of Sherlock Holmes. You try to answer one question, and you just wind up with at least one more.