My brain's happy place.

Apparently I have a Sherlockian happy place.

Let me tell you about last night, to set things up. Polar vortex blowing in, which so many of us now have stories of, and here in Peoria, being treated more "kindly" than Minneapolis or Chicago, were expecting twenty below with fifty below wind chills by morning. And the icy winds were blowing in.

The good Carter and I battened the hatches, made all necessary prep, and sat down to watch a little TV and the latest adventure of Sherloque Wells. (A.K.A. CW's The Flash series this season.) When Sherloque was done, we settled into a movie, the latest Ghostbusters, which we'd both seen and enjoyed, when . . . BLOOP! . . . all the power goes out. Somewhere in the distance, something has gone wrong for about forty-seven homes, in a strip running through our neighborhood.

We're sitting in the dark, our furnace shut horribly silent, and checking with the power company to see what's up. Their robo-phone line says "A crew has been dispatched, estimated time for power to be restored, two hours." Two hours. Fine.

We play Quiddler, we have a ukelele concert, I read aloud from John Kendrick Bangs plays.

At the end of those two hours, our robo-friend says "Service has been delayed. The issue is line damage." I'm making good progress at reading Lyndsay Faye's Paragon Hotel by battery-powered lamplight, and it's distracting me pretty well.

But at the end of another two hours, robo-lady repeats the same message. And as we pass the midnight hour, it seems like a good time to try to get maybe a little rest. But the uncertainty of what's in the future of our pipes and plaster haunts me, just as the winds whistles and moans outside and the 1930s vintage house makes the old wood creaks of a sailing ship. Rest just isn't going to come.

And by the time the two a.m. hour hits, I'm really stressing. When those brave souls who tend the lines suddenly finish their work at around 2:15, the power returns, the furnace starts warming us back up, but I cannot sleep for over an hour yet . . . and the building insecurity of the past six hours has taken its toll and I just can't relax. Until about an hour and change later, I finally drift off.

Now, the human brain can be a marvelous thing sometimes. It can give us all sort of obsessive-compulsive hang-ups, anxieties we can't get past, etc., but occasionally it can just give a person exactly what they need at a given moment. When I woke up today, all the stress was not only gone, but I felt as warm and secure as could be. And much of that, I attribute to my brain finding a happy place for me while I slept.

Where was that happy place?

Well, before I awoke I was dreaming of being at the final wrap-up panel of another 221B Con, where everyone had lovely couches to sit on instead of the usual hotel chairs. The team that runs the Con was talking about how well the con had went this year, and all was just as right with the world as right could be.

As I've written many times in this blog, 221B Con is a joyful, accepting place. Those traditional Sherlockians I've found who didn't enjoy it usually aren't accepting it for being what it is, not the other way around. No matter how "fish out of water" a situation I've walked into at 221B Con, whether an Omegaverse panel or a wedding reception for Sherlock and John dolls, I've never felt unwelcome. Lacking in social skills, maybe. Not being up on some new corner of Sherlockian culture, occasionally. But never unwelcome. Even just babbling about some silly thing to strangers on an elevator, 221B Con has always felt like the kind of thing you'd expect the true Good Place to be like: A happy enclave of diverse strangers who, by the end of the weekend, feel like cousins.

So where did my brain put me, when it needed a dream of comfort and warmth? 221B Con. Which is apparently my mind palace's current happy place. And I'm good with that. Especially since April is not all that far away.

No Sherlock is bad Sherlock?

As much as I am now a card-carrying member of Doyle's Rotary Coffin, and the membership card vows to honour the code "All Holmes is good Holmes," it may be a struggle.

A.) Because it uses the British preference of "Holmes," which then includes Oliver Wendell. (Though "Sherlock" would include basketball players, etc., so it has the same deficiencies.)

And, B.) Because I know in my heart there is bad Sherlock. Bad for me, just as a meal of heavy cream sauce over deep-fried lard would be bad for me to attempt to digest.

It's a sort of ideal that one aspires to, but overall can lack as much empathy as its reverse. There are times when we don't want to insist too much on the positive as well. Shouting "SEASON FOUR OF SHERLOCK WAS GREAT!!!" is probably not going to win you any friends in some company. Even good Sherlocks had some bad Sherlock in their run, be they the sainted Jeremy Brett or the classic Basil Rathbone. And those fellows that came before Rathbone . . . well, they're a bit of a kink for a modern viewer.

But see what I just did there? I went from the a fairly agreeable statement (All long-running Holmeses can have clunkers.) to a rather obnoxious statement about other Sherlockians (Fans of old movies are kinksters.). And that's where the trouble starts. I am probably more guilty of that than anybody. (No, I don't still think Elementary fans are "zombies." And I have built up my resistance to adding "but . . ." to that statement.)

We need to retain the ability to point out flaws or things about a Sherlockian work that disagree with us. Though we'd like all Sherlockiana to be "critic-proof" in terms of box office, ratings, or sales, at the same time we still need to be able to state our personal reaction to a given work. There are those fans of anything who are so intent on their love of it that any negative review is going to push them into pain or anger, but at the same time, any Sherlockian who loves Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story so much that they can't see how it might negatively affect another Sherlockian is surely a sociopath.

Dammit, I did it again. I'm sorry, sociopaths.

Social media has offered us some real challenges as it has opened our windows to the rest of humanity. The greatest of these has to be accepting that another human being has a view we, in our very hearts, think is wrong, wrong, wrong and not going to war against them unless they're actually hurting others. And that always has to be our line in our reviews, even though it's a line that can geta little hazy: Is this going to hurt someone?

On the other side of things, there's a response to criticism that I've been hearing a lot of lately, and it's one I've started using myself: "That's fair." Because sometimes we aren't doing our best work, sometimes the points are valid, and sometimes the food is just too spicy for someone else's tastebuds. Finding enough common ground to agree on even one point in a work you have different reactions to is a healthy start to a conversation, and a conversation, as opposed to an argument, is even healthier still.

Is all Sherlock good Sherlock? Well, I see your point, and yet . . . .

Opening day for a new podcast!

We got a brand new podcast this morning, and its first episode was something of a delight. Mattias Boström, the author of my favorite Sherlockian book of recent memory From Holmes to Sherlock, released Talk About Sherlock, a thoughtful, twenty-five minute podcast.

For a single-speaker podcast, I find twenty-five minutes to be about the right length, and better still was the subject matter: A full consideration of something that happened in the world of Sherlock Holmes within the last month. We, quite naturally, tend to focus on the distant past in this Sherlockian hobby of ours, even in current interviews with current Sherlockians, and it's easy to get a little bored by the same old topics. In his first episode, Mattias analyzes the virtual lynching that seemed to spring up around the latest Sherlock Holmes movie's release. ("Virtual lynching" is my biased coloring of the Holmes and Watson incident, not his.) And while it might be hard to keep every episode on such a current event in our culture, it was a quite refreshing change to kick off a show with.

Early on, our newest podcaster asks us to "excuse my occasional mistreatment of the English language," but like the early episodes of The Baker Street Babes podcast, I found that hearing spoken words from a non-American voice adds just that much more spice to what's being said. (There's a reason so many popular YouTubers are out of England or Australia. Sorry, Canadians -- just not different enough!) The host being from Sweden doesn't hurt Talk About Sherlock in the slightest. In fact, it's sure to give the podcast a valuable perspective for those of us who don't get out of our country much.

As our list of Sherlockian podcasts gets longer and longer . . .  side note, someone needs to come up with a short history of Sherlockian podcasting at this point, so I can say with authority whether I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere was first . . . the variety that we're getting . . . excuse me, another side note, bring back Sherlock and knitting, you-know-who-who-is-probably-too-busy-right-now-but-it-still-needs-to-be-said . . . is really quite lovely . . . do I have an attention deficit issue? JUST END THE SENTENCE, BRAD!!

Anyway, as I was saying, great new podcast, worth a listen even if you don't fully trust mad bloggers. You'll want to get in early for this one.

Weather we read this tale or that

As we go from very cold to very, very, very cold in parts of the country this week, an important question arises: Do we turn to the bitterly cold stories of Sherlock Holmes, or turn to the warmest of the tales in hopes of some illusion of comfort?


There are three of Watson's chronicles which are not only cold, but bitter cold: "Charles Augusts Milverton," "Abbey Grange," and "Blue Carbuncle." How cold was Watson's bitterly cold?

Early scholars, who liked to use old weather reports to help date the stories, put Milverton starting on an 18.9 degree February day, that being the low temperature for the day, and probably the week. (The great thing about being an American Sherlockian is that the Victorian era was still using Fahrenheit temperatures -- no conversions necessary!)

At the other end of the spectrum is "Cardboard Box," where "It was a blazing hot day in August," and "Baker Street was like an oven." Watson then talks about the brickwork across the street, and, having stayed in St. Louis on a blazing August weekend, I will attest that nothing heats up a city like brickwork. There's a reason people make brick oven pizza.

It's in "Cardboard Box" that we learn Watson had trained himself in India to tolerate heat better than cold and that "a thermometer at ninety was no hardship." As humans, I suspect we all can tolerate an uncomfortable ninety degree heat over a chill of eighteen degrees . . . one of those two things can kill us overnight, the other just makes us grumpy. (One old NASA experiment reported that over 40 and under 95 is where we humans can live just fine.) So Watson definitely didn't like those eighteen degree mornings . . . especially considering the heating technology of the 1880s.

With Wednesday's high predicted at negative eleven degrees here in Peoria, I think I'm going to drift toward the "Cardboard Box" end of the Canon temperatures for a time. And not complain too much, because we have Sherlockians in Minnesota and Canada who always have it worse.

The dangerous affection of John H. Watson

A trip back through any Sherlock Holmes story always gives new benefits, and this week's look into "The Adventure of the Empty House" at our monthly discussion group was no different. Our limited time kept us from fully exploring a few of the wonderings that popped into my head as we moved through the text, but one of the lines that stuck with me the most is worth a second thought.

When watching a dramatized version, certain parts of the original work don't have the same impact, and I suspect that is the case with Sherlock Holmes's return from the dead. One theme that comes up time and again in this century is the thought that his allowing Watson to think he's dead is both callous and somewhat cruel. And Holmes's initial reasons certainly hit that mark -- he uses Watson:

"I owe you many apologies, my dear Watson, but it was all-important that it should be thought I was dead, and it is quite certain that you would not have written so convincing an account of my unhapppy end had you not yourself thought that it was true."

Which is interesting because Watson had not published any of the short stories at that time. A Study in Scarlet saw print in 1887, and The Sign of the Four in February of 1890, leaving well over a year -- a year in which Holmes and Watson saw very little of each other -- in which Watson writing about Holmes and publishing the stories was something Sherlock Holmes seemed to have little thought of.

Unless, of course, Watson's continued publication of Holmes's work was part of the wedge that came between them in addition to Watson's marriage. Watson was writing and wanting to publish, but The Sign of the Four may have showed just enough popularity that Holmes wanted no more of his biography in print just yet. But Watson was persisting enough that even after a year or so of not being that close, Holmes still knew his death would open the floodgates for Watson's literary career . . . as it did.

From the publishing side, Holmes using Watson this way makes a certain sociopathic sense. But it's the second part of the hoax that makes Sherlock Holmes seem a little less cruel, and makes one wonder a bit about Watson.

"Several times during the last three years I have taken up my pen to write to you, but always I feared lest your affectionate regard for me should tempt you to some indiscretion which would betray my secret. For that reason I turned away from you this evening when you upset my books, for I was in danger at the time . . . ."

Like its predecessor, "The Final Problem," "Empty House" short-changes us on so many details of Sherlock Holmes's battle with Moriarty and his minions. Even though Scotland Yard thinks they've caught the whole gang in "Final," the conditions of Holmes's return tells us that they definitely did not. We know of Moran and Parker still working together, and there are hints that enough of Moran's associates are still out there that Holmes cannot show his face in London until the head of their gang is lopped off. But whatever danger exists for Sherlock Holmes, it seems extreme to Holmes himself, that Watson would definitely betray him. And Sherlock Holmes was not a man who did things for no good reason.

What indiscretion did Holmes think Watson's "affectionate regard" would bring out? Surely not an article in The Strand Magazine going, "Hey, everybody, HE'S ALIVE!" A sudden trip to Montpelier, France to see Holmes seems more probable. But was Watson prone to other indiscretions that we don't know of? Gossipy with his billiards buddy Thurston, or the boys at the club? Sure to tell Mary, who was the real big mouth of the couple?

As always, there are depths to these texts of which we may never know the full extent.

Bonesaw Watson

Tonight's meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Story Society at Peoria's North Branch library was a lively discussion of "The Empty House" and other Sherlockian topics, but one little subject change at the last drew me immediately back to my lodestone of late. What topic? What lodestone?

Well, one of our number who is associated with the Peoria Riverfront Museum, was talking about a medical history exhibit coming to the museum and a book she'd read called The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine By Lindsey Fitzharris. While Lister's career preceded that of John H. Watson by some years, the point brought up was that surgery in the Victorian era tended more toward amputations than actual work in the torso.

And even though Watson came along after antiseptic and anesthesia were both being used, the fact that he was an army surgeon brought back one very grisly probability: Watson was very familiar with, and certainly capable at, performing amputations. It is not an act one wants to readily associate with our lovable teddy bear of a constant companion, but battlefield surgery had long had one major component, and that was . . . well, yeah . . . .

But, the good side!

Holmes and Watson, that merry lark of a movie which I have been rolling in like a hog in cool mud on a summer day, features one scene where Holmes calls upon Watson to get out his bonesaw, which the good doctor seems to have at the ready. At the time, it seemed just one more part of a wacky lark, involving Queen Victoria and "Toilet-sized chunks!" But with tonight's reminder that John H. Watson was, indeed, a Victorian battlefield surgeon, that's just one more insight toward what a well-considered exploration of the doctor and the detective Holmes and Watson actually was.

The Watson portrayed by John C. Reilly not on seems to have that Canonically Watsonian talent on his resume, he seems also used to fighting with amputees, as he announces when the one-armed man they're searching for tells the duo they'll have to fight their way out of the octagon. In Holmes and Watson's universe, did the one-legged Jonathan Small require more of a tussle with Watson in his capture?  Or was it just trouble with those Afghan war patients?

In any case, as always, John H. Watson has just so many aspects to learn and re-learn over time, which makes him an evergreen sort of companion, doesn't it?

As Holmes himself said, "I never get your limits, Watson."

A banner day for nominations and acceptances

Today was a banner day, a trifecta, if you will, for the devoted fan of Holmes and Watson and its like.

Early in the wee hours of the morning came the Oscar nominations, and Bohemian Rhapsody got the nomination for best picture. And, as any serious film buff knows, Alex Basham, the practical electrician for Bohemian Rhapsody also worked as the practical electrician on Holmes and Watson. So it was great to see some of the talent that went into my favorite Sherlockian movie of last year getting some recognition.

And then came the evil twin of the Oscars, the Razzies. And there was Holmes and Watson with six nominations! There were snubs, of course, as the patriarchal Razzies sought to honor Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly without recognizing the magnificent work of Rebecca Hall, the inimitable Lauren Lapkus, Kelly Macdonald, OR Pam Ferris, each of whom did splendid work in the film. And while Etan Cohen got the directing nod, his amazing screenplay went un-nominated. But you know how these award shows are . . . so whimsical in their selections!

And then, to top all of that off, Paul Thomas Miller opened up memberships to Doyle's Rotary Coffin for simply sticking a coin in the nearest charity tin and printing out the ID card and personalizing it.

This newest Sherlockian society is described as "A society formed for the sole purpose of whole-heartedly and contrarily enjoying supid Holmesiana regardless of how canonical others consider it to be." While Holmes and Watson is sure to cause the formation of other such fan clubs and appreciation societies, Doyle's Rotary Coffin has pride of place as the first sparked from that film. What will its members be called? "Spinners?" "Coffin Nails?" "Doylerotisserie Chickens?" "Worms Unknown to Cinema Science?" Tis hard to say, so early, but there are at least three known members at this point.

And with a proper Sherlock Holmes hat as demonstrated in Holmes and Watson, and its appropriately Texas-sized membership card, affixed with a lanyard, here is a photo of its latest sign-up.

It has been quite a day.