Where's Braldo? The four SH birthday dinners edition.

With January coming to a close, and the Sherlock Holmes birthday weekend festivities well in the rearview mirror, I'm finally getting to something I tried to do a few weeks ago -- dig up the four big dinner pictures from the Holmes celebrations in New York on four of the six occasions I made it to the big city. (The other two being a Baskerville Bash in 1999 and . . . well, another time that may be a memory glitch.) I was hope to find evidence of the notorious upside down table number from the 1987 BSI dinner that should have been a warning flag, but as you'll see below, no such luck.

You'll find a much younger, contacts-wearing version of me in the upper left corner of the picture. I was standing on a chair, as was Isaac Asimov, whom you'll see near the upper right corner of the photo. It was the first year of assigned seating at the dinner, and Asimov wasn't happy about it, gathering several of his friends at the table despite their assigned-elsewhere seats. Hence the upside-down table number I was looking for. But check out some of the moustaches in the lower part of the picture!

Two years went by, and I actually found myself at a table with at least a couple of people I knew.

Seated next to me in 1989 with the curly hair and moustache was Jim Duval, a Sherlockian we lost far too soon. His journal, The Quarter£y $tatement, was one of my favorites back then. There was a certain something missed from that picture and the previous one, which got me into a little bit of trouble that year. You may notice it in the next picture.

One might think getting seated in the corner of the room in 2001 was a token of falling out of favor, but if you look who else was in that general vicinity, you'll see some much more reputable Sherlockians than myself. And that previously missing element . . . ladies. The picture, you'll notice, was still in classic black-and-white.

That changed by 2003, and it may have just been to fully capture Scott Monty's boyish charm (lower left), but I think it was more probably to get Susan Rice's scarlet tresses in (Hear them both in this month's I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere! Free plug.). And I can't let this picture go by without spotting Gordon Speck in the upper right corner, a true prince among Sherlockians, who was at every one of these dinners (along with a whole lot of others). I don't know if I'd have ever gotten to New York with Gordon and his partner in crime Bill Cochran.

Forgive me this odd little photo indulgence, whose original point has been long since lost in the meandering thoughts sparked by so many familiar faces. One might understand, however, why my first impression of 221B Con a few years back was a little more positive than my first BSI dinner so many years ago . . . I am, alas, a rather superficial sort and one of those events was a lot better-looking than the other.

But onward and upward . . . .

Special Postscript for Howard Ostrom: A photo from the first 221B Con in 2013. The rest of the world got a lot younger all of a sudden!

Sunday morning with the podcasts.

The post-Sherlock's-birthday-weekend time is a good time for listening to Sherlockian podcasts. People have connected in New York in January and there are good interviews to be heard. And as I've found I enjoy listening to the major Sherlockian podcasts on the computer more than my phone, given the ease of sliding past the commercials for the same-old, same-old advertisers and the more meandering parts, Sunday mornings can be a good time to sit down and give them a listen.

The first advice I would give to anyone who has never listened to podcasts before is to start out by listening to as many different ones as you can. Podcasts are like the little conversational groups that pop up at a party. The best are like those people who are unbelievably cool and interesting, but somehow find you charming enough to welcome to their chat-circle. The worst are those droning bores that don't really care who's listening, as long as they have a target to speak at. And like the conversations at a party, you never know which ones will suit your particular tastes and which won't.

Sherlockian podcasts are few, compared to full population of the larger sea of audio they swim in, so it's pretty easy to touch base with the major ones now and then . . . like on an easy Sunday morning.

As Evelyn Herzog and Susan Rice were appearing on I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, that was my first destination this Sunday. Two Sherlockians for whom I've had great admiration and respect about as long as I have known their names, Evelyn and Susan were being interviewed on the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes was a must-listen. I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere is always a good place to get a little Sherlockian history from those who participated in it, and no part of our fandoms's history still in living memory is as important as the journey of the Adventuresses. (Though I suspect the journey we're all going on right now will one day be a milestone in its own right -- we're just not into the "history" part yet.)

Some of their stories I had heard before, some parts were brand new, but good stuff and a solid reminder of how different things were fifty(? Really? Fifty?) years ago.

Zipping back to the present for a second podcast, the Baker Street Babes were talking to Bert Coules. In this case, I was coming in more for the Babes than the guest, as I am, sadly, not as Bert-Coules-aware as many of my fellow Sherlockians. That quickly changed as the podcast rolled along, as the Babes in full bloom can bring out the best in a guest. It was especially delightful to hear Kristina back on the podcast (she tends to wander off to Mongolia or some other remote destination), as her spark always takes a Babes podcast from good to great. Bert's observations about the Sherlockian Canon from an dramatiser's point of view bring points one would never get from one's own readings.

Bert's point that "the friendship is what the stories are about -- the cases are incidental" actually makes a real point about modern fanfic without directly addressing it. A lot of us old school Sherlockians are a bit taken aback by the romantic/sexual relationships between Sherlock and John that newer fans love to dive into, but if you consider Holmes and Watson's relationship to be the most important part of the stories, taking them down those more involved relationship roads seems quite natural, now that society is becoming more accepting of male/male romance.

Which brings me to the third major Sherlockian podcast I like to listen to these days, the Three Patch Podcast. If you want to go into relationships between Sherlock-related characters, Three Patch is definitely the place to go. It's a HUGE podcast and dives deep into BBC Sherlock fandom, so one has to be prepared for all of that. In their latest episode, they even discuss how they've drawn out an awfully lot of content for a series that only produced about ninety minutes of new content in the last year. I didn't start really listening to this podcast until I'd seen everything Sherlock fandom was bringing to the table at 221B Con, so I wouldn't recommend this one to a classic Sherlockian without some transitional airlocks to deal with the change in atmosphere.

To this day, Sherlock fandom feels more to me like we discovered a whole new planet of Sherlock Holmes fans, rather than just fans more focussed on a particular show like the Jeremy Brett days. They have a culture and customs much unlike the planet some of us came from, yet are definitely intelligent life forms and seem to be wielding more advanced technologies. I've heard the opinion expressed that, like the previous Brett wave, this new culture will lose its energy and wander elsewhere, with its few remaining members being absorbed by the old Sherlockian world, but as I said . . . a whole new planet. Something on that scale changes life as we know it, no matter what happens to that planet's own culture as time goes on. And I definitely don't see it going away.

I didn't get too far into Three Patch this morning, as like I said, it's HUGE. But will whittle away at it over time. There are a couple of newer podcasts I wanted to get to today, but only so much morning to go around, and I'll have to get there later. It is Sunday morning after all, and a time for a relaxing listen with no pressure.

Which is a nice way to start the last day of the weekend.

A very special edition.

Publishers like to come out with special editions of classic books. Barnes & Noble has a track record of putting out some quite lovely ones. Yet there are other editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories that become even more special to a Sherlock Holmes fan due to the circumstances that surround their time with that particular volume. A childhood gift from a parent. A first-encounter copy on a friend's bookshelf. Such special editions and their reasons are as varied as Sherlockians themselves.

And almost all of them have stories attached. The kind of stories that an aging Sherlockian might tell again and again, even if you're already heard it. And, of course, that means I've got one of those and I'm going to tell it again.

I found myself writing about a particular tale this week, and in selecting where I was going to re-read it from, I decided upon this humble little paperback:

And the memories started coming back . . . .

It was the summer of 1977. I had just finished junior college and was working my familiar summer job before heading to the state school down the interstate to get a B.S. I have a lot of good stories from that summer, but where this book comes in was after the invitation from my grandparents Keefauver to spend a week in a Minnesota fishing cabin with them, my brothers, and my aunt.

Now . . . fishing cabin . . . if you've read much of this blog, you might have developed a view of me as not a real outdoorsy sort, and you would be right. In the mornings when all of the family fishermen would load up the boat and head out on to the lake for a day's fishing, where would I wind up? Not in that boat. 

I'd head down to the beach and try to emulate Patrick Duffy's dolphin swim from Man from Atlantis, hang out with my grandmother, find something to eat . . . really just doing a whole lot of nothing. And that started to get boring very quickly. So on a trip into town to buy groceries, I found a spinner rack of paperback books in the grocery store and started combing it for a diversion.

Now, I already had been reading a lot of Sherlock Holmes pastiche at the time, and had written a term paper on him that required a complete read of the whole Canonical sixty. But I was not yet enough of a Sherlockian that I carried a copy of the Canon with me on trips. Finding that paperback edition of Casebook, already a decade old even though it was being sold new (you used to find brand new old books in bookstores, back in the day), seemed like a minor miracle.

I took Casebook back to the fishing cabin and devoured it, then decided I would use it to fashion my own Sherlock Holmes tale. But what part of Holmes's life could I find completely detailed in that one lone volume without the rest of the Canon? His retirement to Sussex, of course, written up in "The Lion's Mane." So I picked through that story some more and wrote "The Sussex Irregular," the first thing I ever had published in a Sherlockian publication. A pastiche, of course, which is what we used to call our fanfic back in "fancier" Sherlockian times, but fanfic it was.

So it is that a Berkley Medallion paperback edition of The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes with a lizard, a jewel, a vase, and a deerstalker on the cover became a very special edition to me. Some day maybe I'll write another pastiche featuring a lizard, a jewel, a vase, and a deerstalker in tribute to it.

(That lizard is the puzzling part . . . does it tie to "Sussex Vampire?" Who knows, at this point.)

Morlamentary. Or Morland-momentary. Or OMMMMMMMMM.

If you blinked during the fourth minute of this week's episode of Elementary, you might have missed the abbreviated version of the Emmy-nominated opening credit sequence. That is, assuming you were watching and not just getting your reportage here as some do.

It's been a rather dull week, and I heard Mr. Morland Holmes was making another appearance on the show, so I thought I'd look in and see what he was up to, since he teased a whole lot of evil in the final moments of the mid-season finale. Sneak peeks on the internet today found more to tease about Mr. Elementary having both a fight and sex with someone he was questioning, but that tease was the show's tease, and he merely told Joan about his sexual exploits . . . as is about par for their relationship.

But here's the thing about Elementary . . . it is often the case that what they aren't showing you is more interesting than what they are. Mr. Elementary has a conversation with Papa Morland at the show's beginning about an attempt on Morland's life, then sets about investigating it, even though we never saw the attempt on Morland's life and Morland disappears as we head into the episode, so there's not a lot of tension worrying about future assassination attempts.

And there's the other murder procedural plot that Joan has to deal with on a separate track. And it's kind of a real snoozer this week. Halfway house call center, snobby rich people, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz . . . .

Ah, 9:25, Morland Holmes is back.

Mr. Elementary decides "why you never asked me, the finest detective you know, for assistance" and accuses his father of suspecting Mr. Elementary of being the one who tried to kill him, then brags that Morland knows he didn't attempt patricide for one simple reason: Morland is still alive. Mr. Elementary seems to be channeling Donald Trump ego this week to make up for Trump not appearing on the Republican debates on another channel.

Okay, so we were left thinking Morland Holmes was so evil he'd kill children if it suited his purposes last month, and this month we find out his son could plausibly want to kill him. So he could take Morland's fortune to feed his heroin addiction? I'm just not getting that plot twist, but then, maybe the call center halfway house plot has left me dozey enough that it slipped by.

Wow, this is a really good Arby's commercial. They're selling something besides sandwiches and the announcer is pretty baffled at what that something is. One thing about Elementary, it really makes you appreciate the joy to be found in a good commercial.

Ow, I hope that's not my appendix. Probably a bad bit of beef. Oh, to drop dead during an episode of Elementary. I could become a Sherlockian urban legend and get a Snopes article. (Status: True)

At 9:44, Morland is back again. Maybe he'll explain something.

Everybody speaks so softly on this show. It's very soporific. Gently being lulled into slumberland. For a man suspecting his own son of trying to kill him, then deciding he was wrong and they should patch it up, even though he is kind of tossing that last part in as a passive aggressive parting shot . . . zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Oh, Joan has headshots of telemarketers spread out on the floor. Things are really getting lively. Aaand a Powerpoint presentation. Mr. Elementary is hijacking a Powerpoint presentation. (The remote hijacking of a car last week had a lot more panache.) Wait . . . the turning point clue was a clan tartan?  Well, toss my cabers! And, the murderer in Joan's procedural was the snotty rich guy we knew did it from the moment he popped on the screen.

Mr. Elementary has a little more rough fight-sex off-screen (though we get to see the tough blonde this time, at least), and . . . .

At 9:56, Morland is back to get a new clue on his attempted murder from Mr. Elementary, and a promise from that "finest detective he knows" that he'll find his attempted murderer. Morland gets a funny look . . . maybe because he's actually evil, but who the hell knows at this point.

Sooooo . . . I started this by saying it was a rather dull week, right? And Elementary has gotten me stirred up on occasion, which might have been nice. I mean, here's a show referencing the name "Sherlock Holmes" and "Watson" with no other connection to the Sherlockian Canon whatsoever for an hour tonight, right? But curiously, it's been nothing but a calming influence, mellowing out any harshness of the week.

What am I doing here again?

Just between you and me.

Blogging is a very interesting experience, no matter what your subject.

You have your regular readers, your usual daily number of hits. And then you see a spike in the numbers, for no expected reason. Mention a group or person with a lot of Twitter followers, get re-tweeted, and the numbers spike. That sort of thing happens. But then there's this other thing . . . .

A few comments pop up, just to let you know that you're getting some new readers, and that some of those readers pretty much knew they disagreed with you before they even got to your stuff. Which means somebody out there is pointing at you and saying something. It's a devoted paranoid's dream.

But this, happily, is the Sherlockian world and not the larger one. We're worldwide, but not the world. We're a dedicated, ongoing group of fans, but we pale in comparison to those of any major sport. Even now, our community isn't nearly as large as it could be. Which lessens the impact of our teapot tempests a little bit, but still, to anyone who isn't a true sociopath (and not a TV character who merely claims to be one), you feel those impacts. We have no demons in our Sherlockian world, just people.

People with individual points of view. Individual. None of us speak for all of us, not the head of the largest and oldest group of Sherlock Holmes fans, not the most flamboyant member of the most popular podcast, and not any random Sherlockian who has an occasional moment that gets a bit of a firebrand tone to it. That last one is me, by the way.

This is where the blogging gets tricky. I want to write something that's just between you and me, even when I don't know who you are. And for those who come back to this blog, month after month, to check in, that's who I'm writing to. Those who come around for a post or two, go "I can't stand this guy," and zip off to some other part of the net . . . well, I can't write for them, because they're everybody. And if you try to write for everybody, you often wind up writing nothing worth reading by anybody.

So the disclaimer I'm trying to write here is simple, and one we should all know by heart. One blog, one opinion, one human being among billions on our planet. Just one. Not an army of old school Sherlockians who are rallying against you. Not a radical faction trying to tear down all the traditions of old school Sherlockiana. (It sure seems like I'm in the wonderful position of being intensely disliked by a few folks on both sides.) Just one person recording their reactions to the Sherlockian life just in case someone cares to read it.

Yes, yes, I do say things the wrong way sometimes. I'm married, I get that a lot in non-blog life.

But I pretty much just keep it here, where you can come see the verbal trainwreck if you want, and if you don't want, that's fine, too. I don't promote this, try to purposefully raise readership, any of that. Those who wander here and come back again for reasons other than stirring up their blood in place of morning coffee are much, much appreciated. And they're some lovely people who don't seem to mind that I . . .

. . .  don't really like Elementary.
. . . never have been into the way the Baker Street Irregulars is run.
. . . question commonly accepted things at random, like William Gillette's acting ability.
. . . use too damn many ellipses.
. . . change my mind on occasion, or contradict something I previously said.
. . . can come off as a tremendous asshole in print.

And I like leaving this here for those people. Leaving words laying around in public like this is going to get you in trouble now and then, as you never know who is going to find them. Someone looking to stir up sympathy for their own pet peeve. Someone who wants to foster a feeling that they're all out to get us. Or someone that just needs a weird kid in the schoolyard to mock for their friends.

That's the price of being able to write for those of you that do find a few thoughts you can empathize with here, or the chance to go, "Hey, it isn't just me!" But, as I've learned when the blog hits number goes up sometimes, it's sometimes better if we just keep this between you and me.

Please allow me to introduce myself, my name is Sherlock Holmes.

Okay, we've seen our share of almost-Sherlocks on television lately, but tonight's entry into the TV detective sweepstakes is freaking me out a little bit. He's just a little too much like Sherlock Holmes.

"What?" you ask, "How could any TV detective being like Sherlock be a bad thing?"

Well, what if our latest heir to the amateur detective throne was, himself, a bad thing.

A very bad thing.

As in Lucifer bad thing. As in formerly-of-Hell and making-deals-for-souls Lucifer.

But . . .

British accent, good at getting to people's hidden truths, amusing lack of adherence to social norms. Remind you of anyone we like a whole lot?

Lucifer on Fox is the latest in the terrific string of comic-book-spawned movies we've had lately, with the Devil leaving Hell to solve crime in California. Sure, he's not Sherlock Holmes, but think about it.

Who has a vaster knowledge of criminal history than Sherlock Holmes? This guy.

Who has a brother (or heavenly host of same) who works for the current "government"? This guy.

Who administers his own justice outside the courts on occasion? Okay, well, a lot of occasions . . .

This guy.

And this new TV Lucifer immediately finds a Watson to whom he's not sure exactly why he bonds with, but who helps with his humanity all the same. I'm certain this show will find its fans among the Sherlockian contingent of TV viewers, just as House, Monk, Psych, The Mentalist, etc., etc., etc.

But doesn't it bother you just a teensy bit that our hero, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, bears a little bit of a resemblance to . . . wait a minute, what was it Holmes said in The Hound of the Baskervilles?

"In my modest way, I have combated evil, but to take on the Father of Evil himself would, perhaps, be too ambitious a task."

Note the "perhaps." Sounds like he was thinking about it.

Crossover, anyone?

Those awkward aliases.

"No, no, the real name," said Holmes, sweetly. "It is always awkward doing business with an alias."

Yesterday, I mistook someone's real name for an alias. Why would anyone do such a thing? Well . . .

Sherlockians have liked their aliases for a very long time. Going back as far as the first issue of The Baker Street Journal, you can see Sherlockian founding fathers using a pen name on occasion. And once the Baker Street Irregulars started handing out investiture titles, the idea of Canonical nicknames among Sherlockian societies spread far and wide.

We like our Sherlockian nicknames, and they've been used in some odd places over the years -- one of the oddest was when an article in The New Yorker decided to spread dark rumors about a particular Sherlockian and use his B.S.I. investiture as a coy "we're not really saying his name" ploy. Which may have made their subject anonymous to the general public with no time to Google search, but to the rest of the Sherlockian community? Pretty obvious who they were casting aspersions about.

Because we never really hid behind our nicknames from the Sherlockian Canon.

Pen names still came up in places like the BSJ over the years, as some professionals felt writing about Holmes might reflect negatively on their professional lives somehow, but that practice went to a whole new level when BBC Sherlock came on the scene.

I remember the surprise at the very first 221B Con, both to many of the organizers and classic Sherlockian attendees, when a goodly number of the attendees wanted to be identified on their con badges by their Tmblr handles. The world of internet fan fiction, with so much of it "scandalously" erotic in nature, had brought a new reason for pen names, and many a new Sherlock Holmes fan was known only by a pseudonym. And that all made sense . . . in that circumstance.

But where it starts to get awkward, as Holmes would say, is when we start to deal with each other as human beings, outside of that specific context. If "carbunclebleucheese" suddenly shows up on your web doorstep with no bonafides, how seriously should you take them?

A few months back, I had a Sherlockian take issue with the way I expressed something in this blog, and, in addition to staying behind an alias, actually had their thoughts forwarded via a second aliased Sherlockian's e-mail, who added their own thoughts wrapped around the other alias's message, which changed the tone of the whole communication. What might have been one considered opinion turned into a couple of masked thugs jumping out of my e-mail to beat me about the head and shoulders.

It made things rather awkward in a situation that was awkward enough to begin with, and very hard to reply.

But one can't even single out the newer fans for the amount of alias-play strangeness these days, as one sees books and organizations expressing opinions and having personalities on Facebook and other social media quite a bit. Which, like the pen-names, makes sense to a degree . . . until it goes a bit too far and doesn't.

I'm not about to raise a cry to abandon aliases. They're a fun little part of our hobby. But like every other toy in our toybox, they have their time and place. But when one wants to be taken seriously, and have an honest discussion, the first thing one needs to be honest about is who they are. Especially when it reaches the point where one can not be sure what's an alias any more and what isn't, as happened yesterday.

Because as the great man once said, "It is always awkward doing business with an alias." Always.