Why Sherlockians Are Jerks

 You know how the day job goes. Management can just be really stupid.

I was pondering that everyday irritation today, and my mind wandered to Sherlock Holmes, as it often does. Like so many that come to Sherlock Holmes fandom, something in Holmes feels relatable, a kindred spirit, who likes to solve a problem, maybe do a dramatic reveal, or just spend some relaxing time wading through some books and papers looking for patterns and revelations. And, like Sherlock Holmes, I don't really want to lead or follow, just see where the road takes me.

But those who do decide to lead, whether for ambition, salary, or both, are not often Sherlock Holmes. And a Sherlockian mind, given to analysis, finding the hidden problems, the flaw in the master plan ... well, if there's a criticism to be found, a Sherlockian mind will find it.

In at least one adaptation, a point was made that Sherlock Holmes's powers of observation could be a curse, as he constantly was taking in too much information. That bit overlooked his great ability to focus his attention, as symbolized by the iconic magnifying glass, and ignore the rest. But as the same time, if cracks in anything were in front of him, he was going to see it. Sherlock Holmes saw a lot of stupid.

But he was also kindlier than we shall ever know. He didn't mock everyone he met, and a lot of times did it in clever, under the radar ways. He certainly could have been a lot more of a jerk than his worst screen portrayal, because he had the ammunition. So much ammunition. But he kept his quip-shooter holstered more times than not. Even if it could be devastatingly penetrating when it was used, the silence of its non-use was much more common.

We're not all like that, or relate to that, of course. There are plenty of sweet and kind Sherlockians out there. Some who love Holmes as Watson loved Holmes, admiring without identifying.

And then there are the jerks. Sherlockiana has more than a few jerks. And we attract jerks, because the light bulb to our moth-like path is Sherlock Holmes. And while we all know we're not as smart as Sherlock Holmes, though we aspire to be, we don't all know that we're not as kindly as Sherlock Holmes. Some of us as quite blind to that side of self-awareness. 

And you know who really, really hates the jerks among us? 

Other jerks. Because when you see the flaws in every diamond, you can't miss the big shiny showstopper with a big old glob of yuck on it.

Yet Sherlockians all are we who do love Mr. Sherlock Holmes, whatever the reason. Just some of us are jerks. And the title of this essay really should have been "Why SOME Sherlockians Are Jerks," because so many among us are just sweeties. But I used the shorter, click-bait version to get you to read it, because, you know . . . I'm just a jerk.

"Sherlockian, Promote Thyself!"

Y'know, an introvert can fake extroversion, but inside the charade, does one ever actually change? 

One of the regular features of the Sherlockian Zoom meeting has become the open announcements segment, where events, club meetings, new offers, and general promoting can be done. And I avoid those like the plague. Not that I'm not doing things people might want to know about on occasion. I just don't want to talk about it. 

The reasons for promoting things is obvious: You want to increase the involvement or participation on a thing, be it selling a thing, getting attendance for a thing, or just trying to get people to know a thing exists. Increasing the numbers. But here's the thing . . . Sherlockiana is not a hobby that typically generates big numbers for deep dives. Sure, you can get a whole lot of people to watch a movie or TV show with Sherlock Holmes if it's well done. But how many people actually read an article about the types of Victorian pipe tobacco that Sherlock Holmes smoked in a particular pipe, no matter how cleverly it's written? You can't even go by circulation counts on that for a given journal or newsletter, as not every subscriber reads every article. It's not a number that gets many digits.

And the algorithms do not favor Sherlockiana, in an algorithm based internet.

Be niche enough, unique enough, and the searches may just find you. Or pretend to. There are ways to do such things, but is this hobby really so important it needs all that effort spent on pushing when you could spend the effort doing something you enjoy.

The thing is, after a time, you notice that we're all in a small pond where the biggest fish aren't that much bigger than the other fish. Sure, you can say "Oh, this celebrity from the world outside comes into our pond sometimes!" (Or a lot, if they're really cool.) And they can seem like a bigger fish in our small pond. But the pond is only so big. And a lot of fish in the pond are actually purposefully ignoring that parts of the pond exist, for whatever reason.

Sometimes it's enough to just let your friends know about something, because that's who you did it for anyway. Even introverts like their friends. The rest of humanity can just get annoying, and who wants to do customer service for those bits of humanity if they aren't getting what you're doing?

Of course, the flip side is that one could be nice and just let people know about a thing they might enjoy, even if you aren't looking for fame and fortune climbing Sherlock's coat-tails. And that's really the reason to promote a thing to fellow fans of the great detective. That's just being a good person.

Which one has to occasionally talk one's self into, even if it means writing a blog post to do it. 

Will I even post a link to this blog post on my own social media? We shall see.

That BSI Thing 2026

On Friday night, the Baker Street Irregulars held their annual dinner meeting at the in New York.

Now, for some of us, whether by choice, lack of invitation, or price tag, we don't wind up participitating. Does it make us less a part of the American Sherlockian community? Not in our eyes, but in the past, it really has seemed like there were those Sherlockians who felt that if you didn't do New York, you weren't a true Sherlockian. Manage to get invited to the dinner, get to New York, dress up, and show up there until those who make the choice decide to make you a member of that group or cease to invite you. 

It wasn't always so. The very first year I attended the event, I got to get on the pay phone next to the restrooms and tell my friend back in Peoria that he had been made a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, even though he had never attended a single dinner. It was a great acknowledgement of his contributions to the Sherlockian community of that time. And it came with no price tag, no mandatory attendance, but with the idea that the Baker Street Irregulars was about all Sherlockians, and not just those who could manage a trip to New York. 

I've always held on to that idea, even though I've been told that's not the case on more than one occasion. Sometimes you want to believe in the big tent and the better angels. And those kind of beliefs can make you snarky and cynical on some days, but inside, you still believe, or else you wouldn't be so.

The BSI weekend in New York has become so much more than the BSI dinner. Calling it "the birthday weekend" is probably more appropriate as group after group has staked claims to this meal or time for their part of the weekend. You can still go and enjoy New York and Sherlockians without ever being invited to the elder, original Sherlockian society. And people do.

But a little New York vacation, for those who aren't within a few hours of the city, is a definite luxury. When folks wish we had more younger Sherlockians, we don't account for said younger Sherlockians starting careers, raising kids, or generally living lives that don't include the travel budgets of retirees who have just finished successful careers. I can think of a few younger Sherlockians off the top of my head, as worthy of recognition as anyone inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars this year, who just won't be seeing New York for a while. It just seems like there should be a place at the table for them, even if they can't come to an actual banquet table in New York City.

I've written something similar to this editorial for decades. It probably hasn't helped matters, as a little pushback often makes gatekeepers just fortify the gates. But it has to be said.

Just because there aren't enough seats in a New York banquet room on a given night of the year doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge that "Baker Street Irregulars" as our forebears called all fans of Sherlock Holmes are everywhere on that single Friday night of the year.

Sherlockiana and the changing technosphere

 I let the devil into a John H. Watson Society meeting today.

Since we started the JHWS Zoom meetings during Covid times, they've been a chatty, free-flowing thing with whatever agenda item I happened to throw in for a given month. Not a good ritual sort, so I'm really not the guy you want hosting regular meetings, but you know how Covid was. We all got out of our routines a bit. The world changed on us.

And for the December meeting, I had decided to do an adaptation of "Blue Carbuncle," as one does around this time of year. But as the meeting grew closer and my adaptation was only half done, I had one of those moments of weakness where temptations find easy prey. 

I wondered how AI would do at adapting "Blue Carbuncle." And Google Gemini was right there on the browser. So I asked it to do a modern adaptation. Then I asked it to set it in Texas, and it rewrote the script to take place in Austin. Then I got crazy and went "Give John Watson a love interest," and Mary Morstan suddenly appeared in the story. And it seemed like a fairly competent script. But I knew . . . I knew . . . this would be very controversial.

But my Sherlockian career has never been about playing it safe. So I decided to let the thing play our as a reader's theater and then have the discussion of how well the AI did after it was received with the thought it was human-produced. But that discussion never happened, as, like so much of modern life, the battle lines have already been drawn with respect to those softwares we group up under the name "AI."

My career working with medical software is a place with AI cannot be denied. Doctors are already cutting hours out of their workday as it helps streamline their note-taking, a usage that's valuable and actually helps them spend more time with patients. And like every other business in America, the upper management is pushing for more AI use. Denial is not an option in most workplaces. The beastie is here and we have to adapt and deal.

In the world of arts and literature, there's a thought that this beastie can be dealt with by just refusing to deal with it. Climb to the moral high ground and outlast the flood. But as much as some Sherlockians would like to remain in a Victorian mindset, be a happy Luddite, and leave it at that, the shifting technological world has already hit us, hard.

Publish on demand printing has yielded more books on Sherlock Holmes in the past few years than ever before. Anyone can publish a Holmes pastiche, regardless of quality. Anyone can publish a book of Canonical commentary, Sherlockian chronology, Holmes fandom memoirs . . . anything. And that was just people who can write.

Now we have a software imp that can let anybody write a book. All you have to do is have an idea and the proper wish given to the genie. All of the arguments against AI -- the somewhat dubious way it grabs its knowledge, the horrible drain on natural resources humans need to survive, that it will steal more jobs than an immigrant force ever imagined -- all of that falls away when the right person is offered the right wish by this new magic. We are, after all . . . human.

I did violate a certain trust in rolling an AI-created script out for a Sherlockian audience without advance warning, even if I did have full intentions of revealing after. Even as an experiment -- my subjects did not volunteer for this experiment. There's definitely some smut on my aura, to use a metaphor from a certain demonic novel series. But the monster is here.

Whether it's publish-on-demand, 3D printed creations, AI-generated video, or a simple reader's theater script, we're living in the future now, and are all going to have to figure out just how that's going to work for us. How we screen what we take in, where each thing can actually serve a useful purpose, and how we stem the flow of garbage that can come from any one of those innovations. 

2026 is nigh, and a future none of us expected. Even here in the Sherlockian world.

Mediocrity and Genius

 "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius . . . "

-- John H. Watson, The Valley of Fear 

That quote from Watson's introduction of Inspector MacDonald in The Valley of Fear has always stuck with me, even though I often forgetfully attribute it to Sherlock Holmes. It sounds so very much like Holmes, that one can be sure between listening to the man and quoting him, Watson could not help but pick up his friend's tone.

We tend to see a lot of mediocre minds who somehow think they are the standard for great intellect, especially in the personal bubbles that social media creates. Business enterprises are hamstrung again and again by dullards who somehow rise to a hiring position and staff with even duller dullards. But when Sherlock Holmes actually encouraged John Watson to return to 221B Baker Street when both men could well afford to pay rent on individual establishment . . . well, it's a pretty good sign that Watson was a little be brighter than the Nigel Bruce version of the character. (Who never seemed to marry, and thus never left 221B to provide an opportunity for a return, so Rathbone Holmes was pretty well stuck with him.)

The statement can even be a little bit humbling.

On those days when you definitely feel like the smartest person in the room, recalling that quote can make you step back and go, "Wait, am I just mediocre? I know of nothing higher than myself today!" In that little bit of self-check, one can feel a little bit of the Watson humility coming to the fore. 

Watson was constantly recognizing the genius of Sherlock Holmes, but never admitting to his own talent, which that quote would definitely assign to him. He does not suffer nearly so much as Antonio Salieri in the movie Amadeus, where the talented Salieri is constantly frustrated by the fact he can recognize Mozart's genius but never attain it himself.  The final scene of Amadeus, where Salieri is wheeled through the asylum absolving all the mediocre humans as the patron saint of mediocrity, would almost seem the climax of a story inspired by Watson's line. 

There are much deeper waters to John H. Watson than we often realize, and that one line from The Valley of Fear is, indeed, a valley worth thoughtfully gazing into.

The Dangling Prussian Virtual Pub Night 2026

Well, here we are again.

We've been forced to listen to our Sherlockian friends who plan their NYC vacations around that January weekend for months now. And like the Grinch sitting on far-off Mount Crumpit, we might, in a couple weeks, hear their distant singing "Mah-who-Morley, mah-Mic-Sorley . . ." if the algorithm winds carry that tune our way. But, as we have since 2022, the unconventional among us will be gathering again at that mind-tavern of lore, the Dangling Prussian for the annual meeting of the Montague Street Incorrigibles and other indulgences.

So what's on tap for this year, come the evening of Friday, January 9th?

7 PM EST, 6 PM CST, etc. will start the evening with the "Always 1895" Happy Hour, where the Dangling Prussian has always existed since 1991, from it's inspiration in 1914. (Just try to figure that one out, AI, you tinpot toolbag.)  Prepare yourself for more 1895 than you've ever 1895ed before in that first hour of the evening, where we'll be sipping facts instead of drinks as we converse about that world before it all went awry.

8 PM EST, 7 PM CST, etc. shall be the appointed hour for the gathering of current Montague Street Incorrigibles and those who now deign to take the oath of membership as ritual demands and be awarded their official certificate of membership (via email the next day). All you have to do is show up.

9 PM EST, 8 PM CST this year will the the first ever live recording of the Sherlock Holmes Is Real podcast, where you'll get the chance to meet host Talon King, and for the first time, his panel of experts, Dr. Janet Peters, Mrs. Horace "Thingie" Thimbleburger, and Mr. Shecky Spielberg, as we watch and dissect Dr. Watson's actual documentary footage of one of his adventures with Sherlock Holmes.

Sometime after that gets done, in the darker hours of the night . . . our spies will hopefully be reporting in, if they haven't been taken out or incapacitated with something in their drinks (most likely alcohol).  Eventually we'll call it quits, but you never know. We've booked the Prussian until midnight or thereabouts.

You never know who will turn up at a Dangling Prussian pub night. or what may occur. A certain simian professor? Sherlockian bees via YouTube? Guests from far off lands? It'll be a new year and if the last year was any indication, we just don't know what to expect anymore!

Here's the registration link: The Dangling Prussian Virutal Pub Night 2026

Looking forward to it!

Lost Over Canyon Paperless

 When I look 'round the room which houses the collected Sherlockiana that I've picked up over the years, there are shelves of books, yes, but also other gatherings of printed pages.

Journals, newsletters, flyers, monographs, note cards, copies of talks read at meetings. Not always well organized, and always with the knowledge that more lies unseen, in boxes tucked away elsewhere in the house. One likes to think of such things moving to archives somewhere, or to the collection of another Sherlockian when you're gone. But both of those thoughts have one unspoken condition: Someone has to find these things worth storing, and such storage implies that someone will want to read these documents in some future time. That someone will want to spend some of their precious lifetime reading and reviewing the accumulated by-products of your precious lifetime.

Scanning such things into searchable digital form might be fun. And footnote fans love to have a prior instance of some thought like "Nathan Bogspar suggested Watson's gout in a 1975 issue of The Garrideb Gazebo." But at the end of the day, most of this paper was created just to entertain ourselves in the moment, for the writers and readers of that day. And in this day, so many of our Sherlockian writers and readers have gone paperless . . . look at these very words, which shall never see a printed page. 

If you've ever been involved in the sale of used books, you know that even books, that most hallowed of print forms, don't all end their lives gathering dust on shelves. Very popular authors of their year never become classics or even cult favorites, simply because their works were entertainments of the moment. And that's life. That's the ongoing evolution of our culture. Those ideas entered the human hivemind, influenced those who read them, for better or worse, and then were not needed any more. Citizens of a future world had new things to contend with, new entertainments to indulge in.

And consider our newfound frenemy, the artificial intelligence software. It can scour the internet for data, form its conclusions, and learn for its next attempt. But it doesn't have all of the info, does it? It doesn't know some things even exist that didn't make Project Gutenberg or were otherwise noted on Wikipedia or somewhere. And even digital information can wind up unretrievable. Even AI is a thing that lives in the moment.

It can seem so depressing, this ongoing march of history and all it leaves behind, but really, I think it just reinforces what Zen masters have always taught us: Be present in the moment you're in. Enjoy this moment. Let the past go when it doesn't serve future needs. That might seem counterintuitive when enjoying a hobby that is all about a figure from the past, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. History entertains Sherlockians, even the history of Sherlockians themselves. But we can't carry it all into the future with us, and we can't expect others to bear that load for us. 

Sherlock Holmes had the luxury of all his papers and books being contained in stories that continue to be retold. His move to that cottage in Sussex was managed with just a few words on a page. The rest of us aren't nearly so lucky, but that's life. Literally.