An uncelebrated Sherlockian periodical

Last week I ordered the 2019 Baker Street Almanac, based on Rob Nunn's review in this week's episode of the Weekly Watsonian, which takes on the challenge of annually compiling a whole lot of Sherlockian data from each year in book form. It made me start to think about all of the great Sherlockian data sources out there that aren't in print, and, this being the first of the month, I quickly ran into one that definitely qualifies in that category:

The episode notes for the Three Patch Podcast.

Now, if you're not into podcast, you might not be familiar with episode notes. Most are just a summary of the current episode. A recent Pod Save America had two sentences for episode notes. Conan O'Brien has a similar paragraph about his podcast guest, along with contact info (stealing that idea) and links to his sponsors. My Favorite Murder gets by with a brief sentence or two.

The Watsonian Weekly for this week ran simply "We get a gathering of Watsons especially for Pride month, a Jezail bullet review, a review of the year review, a review of an Irene Adler review of Watson, and Watson behaving badly." The Baker Street Babes Podcast, with its return this week, did a better job, with a few more sentences and a link to the topic at hand. I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere has gotten very long of late, adding sponsor and Patreon info. Talk About Sherlock from Mattias Boström does a couple neat paragraphs. I Grok Sherlock does a single paragraph.

But Three Patch Podcast, with a whole month between episodes?

They use their time and numbers well. From the segment timestamps to their final APA citation "how to," it takes about seven scrolling swipes to go end-to-end of their episode notes. Comprehensive shownotes give credits to their many voices, editors, producers, and contributors, of course, but their also give you every possible link to the subjects referenced, the fics they recommend, anything and everything you could want.

If you were on a desert island that somehow allowed only one podcast, but still gave you full internet access, you could entertain yourself for the whole month with everything they give you in those episode notes. Trust me, as a person who attempted to read all of their fic recs in a single month, that is no exaggeration. And it's all formatted perfectly as well!

Ironically, the one piece of info I couldn't find as I went through this month's show notes was a credit to say who created the episode notes. It might fall under some larger set of duties, like the episode producer, and thus no one feels the need to call that person out for that job, but now that I'm producing a couple of podcasts myself, and always dropping in some last-minute bit of so-so copy for notes as I push it to the web, the document that comes out with each Three Patch has entranced me like it's most beautiful character of some fairy tale.

Take a look yourself sometime. It's really something that listeners might gloss over that should be given as much applause as a segment of the podcast itself.