Meow-lementary, my dear Watson.

There was a teensy bit of Sherlockian cat conversation on Twitter today, which eventually came to a comment from Lyndsay Faye that read, "God, we all do have cats, don't we."

And my mind went straight to a certain fellow's "cat-like love of cleanliness."

Because we all have cats. Even John H. Watson.

Yes, yes, Watson tried to be a dog guy. Gets along great with Toby, kept a bull pup . . . though probably keeping it for someone else, which, thankfully, gets it out of Baker Street alive. But in the end, John Watson had a cat.

Yes, just google "Sherlock Holmes was a cat" and you get pictures of cats in deerstalkers, cat Sherlock fan fic, as well as Conan Doyle's "The Story of the Brazilian Cat," which made me wonder for a moment if it might have contained a were-panther Holmes a la the movie Cat People, but the cat's name was "Tommy." And all of this reminded me of The Serpentine Muse's Annual Birthday Challenge (open only to Muse subscribers, but you may subscribe now to enter) to write an under-300 word story to go with a Laurie Manifold illustration of Baker Street populated by cat-characters.

Of course, Sherlock as a Cat People were-panther has me going down a road that doesn't really fit the cutie kitties of the Muse art. In fact, it just meandered me off an entire blog-post that was supposed to be about comparing Sherlock Holmes to a cat.

Well, you know, Sherlock Holmes was kind of a cat. He did cat stuff. There.

Sigh. This is why I'm a blogger and not saving any of these golden words for marketing somewhere. "I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather -- that is, when the fit is on me, for I can be spry enough at times," as Holmes said of himself.

Kind of like a cat. See?