"From Sherlock Holmes."

Sometimes, it's the little things.

Little, but a trace of something much larger. 

So, tonight, I decide to watch Conan O'Brien. That's not such a big deal.

And at the start of the show, Conan introduced his guests. Not so exciting, right?

And then he says, ". . . from Sherlock Holmes . . ." my little ears perk up. Cumberbatch is on? I heard nothing of this.

And then Conan finishes, ". . .  Rachel McAdams!"

Let that sink in for a moment. The movie Sherlock Holmes came out in 2009. It's sequel came out in 2011. And yet, it's still being used to introduce the actress who played Irene Adler in 2013. 

The Notebook, Morning Glory, Wedding Crashers . . . all notable Rachel McAdams movies. Red Eye certainly stuck with me. But Sherlock Holmes get top introduction billing even now.

And it brings a silly little moment of joy to the Sherlockian heart.  

(Even if Morning Glory is still my favorite Rachel McAdams movie. I don't think it counts as "a Rachel McAdams movie" unless she lives all the way through it and/or its sequel . . . well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Ghosts for Sherlock's Halloween

Among some traditions, the night of masks and candy that we call Halloween is, quite literally, a lot more spiritual. It is a time when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead grows thin, and those who have passed on have a chance at communicating with the living. Conan Doyle was more into this sort of thing than Sherlock Holmes, but even in Holmes's very rational world, a time for turning one's mind to thoughts of those long gone fits in perfectly with this time of year.

We all have our ghosts, and so did Sherlock Holmes. On a cold and rainy fall eve, with the wind whistling down the chimney and the fog separating 221B from the rest of London, the dead surely rose in Holmes's memory on occasion. And who were Holmes's dead?

The late Irene Adler surely leads the pack, for as another ghost from Sherlock's past, old Trevor, once said, "the ghosts of our old loves are the worst." Especially those with whom a relationship never got to play out, as with Irene. But she's not alone . . . there are other shades who come to mind right behind Irene, practically fighting to get through memory's door to 221 Baker Street.

John Openshaw, for example, murdered on his way home from Baker Street, would not have far to come. Holmes's failure to save Openshaw was haunting even without any supernatural influence. A client killed after obtaining Holmes's help is not a spectre that leaves quickly. Hilton Cubitt will be standing with Openshaw in that company as well.

Others who died during Sherlock Holmes's investigations are apt to be memorable, even if they weren't clients. Blessington -- he who will forever be remembered with a noose 'round his neck -- may have just been a victim of karma coming around, but anyone whose life ends dramatically within days of you first meeting them is going to stay with you.

Those whose deaths Sherlock Holmes was somehow party to . . . Milverton, little Tonga, Stapleton, and certainly Moriarty are liable to come to call during such a spectral season of remembrance. Moriarty definitely has the longest way to travel, but he's also a motivated spook. He left an impression in Holmes's mental ether like no other.

Whether in pleasant nostalgia or zombie nightmare, this pack of Holmes's dead surely revisited him, and their legion held many more, to be sure. Unknown ghosts, like Sherlock's family. Seemingly minor players, like the pale and blue-eyed wife of Godfrey Staunton, who might have touched Holmes's heart at a vulnerable moment. Nameless executed murderesses like she who Holmes called "the most winning woman I ever knew." Those of uncertain fates, like Captain James Calhoun. The list goes on and on.

Unless the Baker Street Irregulars decided to anachronistically dress up as past clients and killers and come knocking on Mrs. Hudson's front door for lollipops, Sherlock Holmes probably spent more quiet Halloween nights that most of us do these days. But that's not to say his brain-attic was not haunted on the occasional dark October night.

Happy Halloween, Sherlock-world. Enjoy your spooks, whatever form they take.

Sherlock Holmes enters politics.

Sherlock Holmes has never been a stranger to politics. Whether it's an appearance in a political cartoon, a reference to "the dog who did nothing in the night-time" in an editorial, or a simple name-drop during any sort of investigative proceeding, Sherlock Holmes has been seen in political circles for quite some time. But he's almost always used to illustrate a point . . . not to be accused of having an agenda.

So when the headline "PC Mindset Dumbing Down CBS's Sherlock Holmes Reboot" appeared in my Google newsfeed today, I had to check it out. What it led to wasn't much of an article . . . a brief blog post, like most of what you'll find here . . . but it took a direction I completely wasn't expecting. There have been political correctness discussions about CBS's Elementary before regarding casting choices, particularly the transgendered Miss Hudson and an Asian-American female Watson. But this reviewer took it down an entirely different road: Elementary's Holmes is apparently a gun control advocate, based on some statistics he cited. (The thought from the headline seemingly being that gun control advocacy is being politically correct, though that really depends upon the political climate one is currently standing in the middle of.)

As Elementary's main character, Sean "Sherlock" Holmes, seems to enjoy hitting people with a stick more than shooting at them, I suppose he is. He's also from Great Britain, which is definitely gun control country. So one could argue that being pro-gun-control is a part of his character. Joan Watson, being an American, might like to tote a pistol just for contrast, but her mentor keeps insisting she use a stick like he does, to bop baddies on the head.

The blog post also considers Sean Holmes to be anti-free-market and anti-businessman, based on some of his actions and statements. But if you consider what a jerk he is to people of all sorts of stations in life, that would also mean he was anti-a-whole-lot-of-professions-and-hobbies.

The original Sherlock Holmes did have some definite, and sometimes curious, political leanings. He was certainly pro-education, seeing a good education as an important part of the future. He thought England and America would make one great country if they came together once more. He didn't seem to think guns should be illegal, and he didn't seem to think drugs should be illegal, but who's to say? One could get into a good debate as to where he fell on the political spectrum, though I'd definitely tend to think liberal, if not radical. But that might be telling more about me than Sherlock Holmes.

As for CBS's Elementary, I suspect its writers are more concerned with their next plot twist than promoting Obamacare, but you never know about that Hollywood liberal elite. They're as tricky as Irene Adler -- and you know what a show biz type she was. But in the end it doesn't really matter what their leanings are, so much as we've hit a level of popularity for characters named Holmes these days that the politics of one can be worth a pundit's time.

And that's a happy little takeaway.

Because all diamonds aren't blue carbuncles.

Fall is a time for the fans. The very old school fans. The fans whose numbers make any other fan base seem like lightweights. The fans that fans don't think of as fans the way we think of fans.

Not the Trekkies. the Potterheads, the Twihards . . . no.

The sports fans. Between pro football going strong and major league baseball hitting its climax, one can't spend any time at all among Americans at large this time of year without hearing about some game or the other. And if you listen closely, it doesn't take long to learn that they care as much about their favorite teams as we ever did about Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

It makes for some interesting compare/contrast musings. The love of physical prowess versus the love of mental proficiency. The accepted adversarial nature of fan groups versus the "can't we all just get along" dislike of inter-fan-group squabbles. The strict framework limiting possible outcomes versus the open creative field of limitless possibilities. And yet there is something very similar about the depth of passion sports fans feel, approaching a religious intensity, just like best of our own breed.

In fact, sometimes the best of our own breed has a beloved sports team or two that they may just care about almost as much as Holmes. But not all of us. So when something comes along like a World Series baseball match-up pitting the St. Louis Cardinals against the Boston Red Sox, a Sherlockian who hasn't spent any time considering the sport all year long might want to find some rationale for picking a team, just to be social.

So which is the logical choice for a Sherlockian in this World Series?

"St. Louis" appears twice in the the Canon of Sherlock Holmes. "Cardinal" appears twice in the Sherlockian sixty as well. Two and two equals four, the number of games it takes to win the World Series. Can't really dispute that kind of logic.

Boston may have some old Sherlockian clubbish connections, and the word "red" may have some Canonical mojo. But "Sox" gets no traction in Holmes lore, so all in all, it's hard to back the Rex Sox using Sherlock-based decision making. Of course, Sherlock-based decision making doesn't exactly have a lot of power in the fresh air and training world of professional baseball.

As I type this, Boston is leading St. Louis 3-1 in the fifth game of the series. But like I said, it takes four games to win the thing, and both teams have won two at this point. Will the Sherlock Holmes team win in the end? Well, unlike certain Holmes imitators who use "magical" deductive powers to predict the outcome of ballgames, no one can truly tell how things will turn out.

We shall see.

Hats on to Sherlock Holmes.

I love getting the chance to wear a Sherlock Holmes hat.

Not that silly deerstalker. When you wear that thing, you can only be going for one effect: to look like somebody who wants to look like Sherlock Holmes. Whether you're the kid whose mother painstakingly sewed a costume for him in today's "For Better Or Worse" comic strip or Katherine Parkinson playing Kitty Riley pretending to be a fan of Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock, the deerstalker cap screams "SHERLOCK HOLMES!!!" to the point where it's practically unwearable. (Big kudos to Steve Thompson and the boys for figuring out how to get that hat on a modern day Sherlock and make it part of his image all in one fell swoop.)

What I really enjoy, however, is wearing one of those other hats that Sherlock Holmes wore. The less iconic ones. Sherlock was a  true hat-user in an era of serious hat-users, so there are a few.

Top hats can be fun, and finding the right moment to bring out that magical Victorian topper I found in an antique store years ago is always a delight. (Thank you, 221B Con, for this year's moment.) This Halloween season brought a different Sherlock Holmes hat into play, though, when . . . for my usual complex chain of Halloween costume logic . . . I decided to go to one party dressed as "Stumpy" from the short-lived TV series Carnivale. (Yes, I have a horrible history of picking the most obscure and unrecognizable costume choices possible for Halloween.)

The hat my costume involved this past Friday was the boater or skimmer, the flat straw hat favored by modern barber shop quartets, once used by carnival barkers, Victorian beach-goers, pre-War FBI agents, and, yes . . . Sherlock Holmes.

In Sidney Paget's illustrations for "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box," Holmes is shown wearing a boater quite dapperly while interviewing a witness, hailing a cab, and even in the case's most gruesome moment, as he carefully looks over the severed ears central to the mystery.

And if that wasn't enough, a different kind of gruesome occurs with Sherlock Holmes and the boater in Fox's 1939 film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when Basil Rathbone's Holmes does an in-disguise song-and-dance number, "Beside the Seaside" with boater in play. (While BBC's Sherlock has cunningly paid tribute to many a moment in the history of Sherlock Holmes, this is one I hope they continue to overlook.)

Chances to wear the Sherlockian boater come few and far between, but as cosplay moves more into the fore as a standard Sherlockian activity, perhaps we'll be getting a lot more Holmes hat opportunities. Sherlock Holmes's variety of headgear makes him an excellent role for the hat fancier to display a lot of what men have worn over the years.

And besides, sometimes it's just fun to wear a hat.

Positively Elementary S2E5: He's a player and I don't mean chess.

(SPOILER ALERT! It's time to spill all the beans on this week's Elementary. Abandon hope of freshness, all ye who enter here!)

"No interesting murder cases in the last few weeks."

Only in TV land do we get statements like that. Murder, murder, murder . . . Joan Watson's instincts are to take up a missing-boyfriend case instead of insisting on murder this week, but her partner Sean "Sherlock" Holmes is sticking to the TV network agenda: Procedurals need murders to have their procedure.

Sigh. But as this week's episode is by the writer of last year's favorite offering, "Snow Angels," I'm curious to see what develops.

Interestingly, we learn that Sean Holmes is a chess player this week: the mark of a scheming mind, according to our old friend Sherlock Holmes. While chess is traditionally the tag writers like to add to demonstrate someone's intellectual nature, it has always been interesting to me that Sherlock Holmes made more references to playing cards -- and actually playing cards himself -- than anything to do with chess. Cards always made more sense with Holmes, playing the hand one is dealt, reading one's opponents. Moriarty was the chess man in the Canon, if ever there was one.

But that's okay. While Sean has been holding back in the area of disguise, where Sherlock excelled, the New York Holmes does disguise his voice on the phone this week, and disguise it well, so he gets a few points for that. Still, I'm having more more fun watching Joan Watson on her side investigation . . . well, until they find a fun fellow named Leo in hotel room full of money, drugs, and whores. Like the male viewers, Leo is checking out Joan Watson during the interview and his crazy moustache is almost as much fun as the Sean's last line in the scene, when he walks off with Leo's wad of cash:

"That cocaine, however, that's entirely yours!" Good on you, Sean, for playing against overblown Sherlock stereotypes! Got an actual laugh out of that one, which has been a long time coming with Elementary.

But then it gets funnier still, as Joan's case to find her friend Jennifer's missing one-night-stand takes a sudden twist: That irrepressible scamp Sean was the culprit all along. Imagining him dodging Joan's encounters with her friend Jen for the past year adds a little spice.

In contrast to Sherlock Holmes, who let the ladies be John H. Watson's department, Sean Holmes seems to happily head down that road whenever he can slip it in outside of his weekly murder mystery. . . the fact that he's stayed clear of Joan Watson while she's living in the same house with him wearing some very sexy outfits -- which can even coordinate with bullet proof vests when called upon -- is a testament to his willpower. (Or maybe that Joan just isn't as quick-to-bed as at least one of her friends.)

After Sean Holmes's ludicrous demonstration of single-stick training this episode, however, I'm wondering if he's only doing that so he can make double-entendre references to his "stick" as he chases the ladies. He adopts a poor imitation of a fencer's stance and hits a dummy lightly on the top of the head, almost like he's pretending to do it just for Joan's benefit when she walks in. Which makes him seem all the goofier when she comes in and toys with him a bit, pretending her friend Jen might possibly be pregnant with Sean's love-child.

Writer Jason Tracey has turned in another amusing tale above Elementary's batting average this week, and I hope the show's producers have him back again soon . . . along with the one-shot Miss Hudson, who has yet to return to the show. (Yes, Clyde the turtle has made more appearances than Miss Hudson, which makes him the closest thing to a landlady or Billy the page Elementary has.)

But when all is said and done, it's still Elementary. And what that means is up to you.

Happiness is a responsive PBS.

When you bitch upon the web,
Makes no difference if tides ebb!
When you bitch upon the web,
Your dreams come truuuuuuuuuuue!

Entertainment Weekly broke the premiere date of Sherlock season three on PBS today, before anyone found out even when BBC was doing their first run, and a good date it is: January 19, 2014. Even now, eight hours later, this probably isn't news to anyone on the web. But having blog-bitched about PBS delaying the last season of Sherlock for months after the BBC premiere, as well as their potential to pull the same stunt this time around, I find I owe the Public Broadcasting Corporation an apology . . . and some money.

This is one of the big problems with blogging . . . other than the part where everybody gets to call you on your every mistake . . . is that one can definitely be held to account for statements made previously. Especially those made just three days ago.

True, technically I did say I'd be making a donation to PBS if they simulcast Sherlock at the same time, or the same weekend, as the BBC, but you know what? I'll take January 19th, without even knowing what the BBC is doing. They're getting a donation from me this year, regardless of my standing opinion that broadcast television is still the dinosaur in the room at this point. 

“We love that Sherlock fans are so passionate and eager to see Season 3,” PBS chief programmer Beth Hoppe was quoted by Entertainment Weekly as saying. 

Yes, Sherlock has fans so passionate that PBS actually acknowledges their existence and considers them in its decisions. You remember Sherlock fans? That oft-discounted-by-elder-Sherlockians group who were once seen as a fluffy flash-in-the-pan? Well, they just got us Sherlock months ahead of when we might have otherwise seen it. They did that. Not grumpy old me, bitching in my blog a few days ago. Not the gathered Baker Street Irregulars of New York, who will be meeting two days prior (and probably in transit home about the time it's going to be showing). Not any other big name Sherlockian past or present you can name.

The Sherlock fans did this. And they should take a well earned victory lap before sitting down to watch "The Empty Hearse" on January 19th. Good on you, ladies and (I know you're out there!) gents.

And thank you. Fans. PBS. Beth Hoppe. I'll just sit here being happy. Happy, happy, happy.