The grocery store threshold.

Two major motion pictures. A BBC hit with a cult following. A CBS procedural with ratings success.

I don't think anyone would dispute that Sherlock Holmes is as popular worldwide as he's ever been. So tonight, as I was out of other bloggable ideas (contrary to the opinion of many, I do hold back on some topics), I went to the grocery store to pick up milk and search for Sherlock Holmes. A test, if you will, of our hero's current popularity. Would he show up anywhere in the grocery store, that one ubiquitous crossroads of the everyday?

Well, I won't say I scoured every single aisle, or the deli, but he didn't turn up. Not among the breakfast cereals, the household cleaners, the chips and munchies, scratch-off lottery tickets, nor even books, magazines or DVDs. But I did see Superman all over the place, as his most recent movie attempt is this week. And then it struck me, the first of mountains left for Sherlock Holmes to climb: Two successful feature films, yes. Summer blockbuster? No.

If the theory is true that we can't have too much Sherlock, there are, I realized, many, many mountains left for Sherlock, even in his Sigerson persona, left to climb.

Benedict Cumberbatch may have many a girl swooning, but he's still a bit old for the teen heart-throb magazines. Sherlock Holmes has yet to conquer the country of the tweens. (And that is certainly, as the title of the movie says, "no country for old men.")

Supermarket tabloids, the former residence of Liz Taylor, now the domain of Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, and Angelina Jolie, have yet to show a Mycroft's cellulite on their covers, nor bother with one of our Irenes or Watson's marital questions. What, you say that Liz, Brad, Jennifer, and Angelina are more real than Mycroft, Irene, or John? Well, you probably didn't, but if you did, think hard on that.

A best-selling, mass market paperback like the Jack Reacher novel I picked up at 40% off . . . when's the last time we saw Sherlock Holmes in anything like that? The seventies? That was nearly forty years ago now. (Yikes!)

So if you're ever sitting around thinking, "This is as good as it gets for ol' Sherlock. I can die a happy fan now," well, you may just want to think about eating healthy and getting a little exercise. Because Sherlock Holmes still has heights we've yet to see. And you might just want to be here when he hits them.

Irregular powers.

Ah, to be imbued with the powers of the Baker Street irregulars . . .

Not as a dirty little street urchin depending upon Sherlock's shillings to feed the family or one's self. And not as an investiture-carrying member of The Baker Street Irregulars of New York. But a true Baker Street irregulars as defined by Sherlock Holmes himself with the words:

"They can go everywhere, see everything, overhear everyone."

He was speaking about the young corps of irregulars as a whole, of course. Individually, no one of them could go everywhere, etc. But as a whole, they could and they did.

If I could, indeed, go everywhere, yesterday I would have teleported out of the office and to Maryland, where the Scintillation of Scions was just starting to summon its energies. Minneapolis in August, New York in January . . . if the ability to pop in for an evening or a day without having to arrange an entire trip (with all the requisite time allotments and delegation of responsibilities needed to be away) were something one could pick up with a magical shilling, oh, the places I would go.

And this weekend, it would be the Scintillation of Scions in Hanover, Maryland. It's going to be an excellent time, because gathered Sherlockians having a bad time has been a very, very rare thing in my experience. In fact, over the course of over thirty years, nothing springs readily to mind. Oh, there might have been dinners that didn't taste very good or an over-heated, over-populated room on occasion -- minor discomforts -- but the camaraderie and conversations always win out in my memories.

"But, Brad," one might think, "you're an overly-opinionated lout of a blogger, who surely has heated disputes in large assemblages of Sherlockians, and is sure to get bopped in the beezer!" (Hey, I said "might" . . . somebody out there might have "beezer" in their lexicon.)

And that's the cool part. I've always had a few incendiary opinions and a sometimes thoughtless manner of expressing them, but my experiences with my fellow Sherlockians in travels from New York to New Mexico have never been anything but good. So while I'm a bit envious of my friends who are having a great time at the Scintillation today, the undertone of that envy is the certainty that they are having a good time. And that makes me happy.

Because, as I said, that's the thing about Baker Street irregulars, past and present. No one of us can go everywhere, see everything, and overhear everyone, as much as we might try. That would require superhuman abilities, including the power to be multiple places at once. But as a group, we can be just about everywhere a Sherlockian needs to be, and thanks to the wonders of our modern networked society, that means getting juicy tidbits in real time more than ever before. We have our irregulars, even if we can't have the powers of the whole.

And as Sherlock Holmes did with the first Baker Street irregulars, we can hear what they have to say and use their leads to follow up in days to come.

Next year!

But is he "brave," "bold," or "and?"

Since Dick Sveum kindly offered to watch Elementary for me tonight, I thought I'd use my free evening to hit Netflix and watch "Trials of the Demon," the episode of The Brave and the Bold cartoon that teams up Sherlock Holmes with Batman.

"But, Holmes, are you certain it's not that Moriarty fellow?"

"Stop being an imbecile, Watson. Moriarty's weapon of choice is a unique air rifle assembled by a blind german mechanic. I fear they might be . . . supernatural."

The first two lines from Holmes and Watson is like a "spot the differences" puzzle for Sherlockians, superficially Canonical, but so, so wrong. I'll leave those for you to work out. I find at least three issues immediately, and one point of debate.

The larger question I come to first is this: How old is Sherlock Holmes in all these cartoon incarnations?  Forty? Fifty? He's not a young man, but also not a gray-headed old timer like Watson usually turns out to be. He's looking rather craggy this time out. Timeless, I guess?

Otherwise, Sherlock Holmes is apparently able to deduce hero status from the "bright colors" in Batman's outfit, and not "circus performer." But this is Batman's show, so he's quick to top Holmes's deductions, with banter at first and knowledge of anagrams later. Sherlock Holmes, one has to admit, was definitely less experienced at working out puzzle clues from riddle and joke obsessed baddies, so we'll give him that.

Holmes gets ahead of Batman after dumping Watson (with a desiccated woman in his arms, of course), but just can't cope with super-powered villainy. Apparently this is a Batman/Demon team-up and not Batman/Sherlock Holmes as anticipated, so they start hogging the stage, so blah-blah-blah, fight-fight-fight, and Sherlock Holmes stops in for the post-climax wind-up.

Luckily, this adaptation of Holmes is only a twenty-three minutes one-shot, so much can be forgiven, though mainly just forgotten. Our favorite detective was more stage dressing than an actual part of the story, which well would have proceeded the same with a Scotland Yard man in his place. An argument might be made that such appearances help draw children toward Holmes, but after seeing him come in second to Batman (or third, given the Demon's part), I think they're just going to go with Bats.

Since the advent of Netflix streaming, it's much easier to be a Holmes video completist, but boy, am I glad I'm not depending upon such stuff to keep me awake. Otherwise, I might have to turn Dick Sveum down on his offer next time.

An all-nude Canon.

I had forgotten about Mycroft.

Through a curious chain of events, I found myself watching Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows just the other evening. And as I was enjoying becoming reacquainted with how charming Robert Downey Jr. can be as Sherlock Holmes, I saw something my mind had apparently blocked from convenient memory:

Mycroft Holmes in the nude.

As much mention has been made of naked Sherlock and nude Irene in the Sherlock episode "A Scandal in Belgravia," few really want to bring back the thought of Mycroft's bare-bottomed encounter with Mary Morstan-Watson in the Holmes home. But the thing of it is, now that we've seen three nude Canonical characters across two adaptations, the collector impulse in the Sherlockian brain suddenly is inspired to want more.

Of course, some characters take more easily to naked than others. Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes both have their clothes off in the first Downey Sherlock Holmes. And Gabrielle Valladon, the almost-Irene of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes has a scene that's quite "rewarding," according to Holmes, making up for her not-quite-Canonical nature. Irene is an adventuress and Sherlock Holmes is quite beyond social proprieties when it suits him, so those two don't seem quite the big deal.

But I think it's Mycroft who is the dam-burster that truly sets the idea of an all-nude Canon in motion. It's just seems so unlike him. If he can run 'round the house in the buff, then why not Mrs. Hudson? Jabez Wilson? Helen Stoner? Why not an Oh! Calcutta! style version of . . . hmmm . . . The Hound of the Baskervilles? Really, it does have one of the more gender-balanced casts in the Canon, and enough implied and otherwise references to various sexual relationships without going full-on Gruner.

If Inspector Clouseau can have an all-nude segment of one of his greatest cases (A Shot in the Dark will forever remain one of the movie classics of my childhood.), then why not Sherlock Holmes? If he's modest, like Clouseau, he can always walk around with his violin, as Clouseau did a guitar. (Not passing any instrument-related judgments there, of course.)

The original Canon, of course, just gives us a lot of naked feet, some naked eyes, a couple naked truths, and one naked knife, but that was the Victorian era after all. This is the . . . oh, yeah, the post-Janet-Jackson-Super-Bowl era . . . perhaps we're going to have to wait another hundred years for the all-nude Canon.

And if it's a hundred years before we get another naked Mycroft too, well, maybe that's okay.

(And yes, ladies, I'm sure fat old guys are sexy, too. Just not to me. But who knows, I might get bored in my old age. I mean, as it is I'm ending blogs with rambling parenthetical statements, and who knows what that's the first step toward? G'nite, everybody!)

Collectors, Coke, and commons.

This week's podcast listening revealed an unexpected treat. Penn's Sunday School, once you got past a lot of talk about bacon, doughnuts, nakedness, and atheism, featured Penn Gillette talking about a recent visit to David Copperfield's private magic museum. (It's at about the sixty minute mark, if you want to take a listen.) The Sherlock Holmes related part is early on, as Penn tells of how David Copperfield's collection contains both sides of the correspondence Conan Doyle had with Houdini. But if you listen further, you can hear an appreciation of one of those super-collections that a devoted collector of means can put together -- the sort of thing that one can relate to after spending much time in any great hobby.

When the discussion came around to the question of private collections versus public ones, Gillette came down on the side of private, citing the concept called "the tragedy of the commons," wherein the needs of the individual, en masse, can act counter to the good of the whole regarding a given resource.

Remember a little thing called "New Coke?" After decades of success with a specific recipe, Coca-cola decided to follow the method of its prime competitor and alter its formula to that taste that seemed agreeable to the largest share of the populace. Kind of a "lowest common denominator" of flavor. Was it an improvement? Well, as tested, probably so, if you counted all of society. But if you counted the people who really liked old Coke? No way. Eventually the cola version of pablum fell from favor and the old Coke returned.

The tragedy of the commons, at its simplest level, is that we just all can't enjoy the same resource without over-exploiting it. We have different needs and different interactions, and those can spoil a something like the taste of Coca-cola if we expect it to be enjoyed by every single person on Earth.

Which brings me back, once again, to a certain CBS television show whose ratings show it appeals to a certain mass taste. Sherlock Holmes is  a resource, like any other, and like Coca-cola and many other resources, he wasn't necessarily designed to appeal to everyone. Taking his distinctive detective flavor and altering it to fit the popular network procedural pattern, is a lot like coming out with that New Coke of earlier times. Something gets lost in trying to make Holmes palatable to the larger audience.

Of course, BBC's Sherlock maintained at least enough of the true Sherlock taste to keep this fan, and a whole lot of others satisfied, so maybe it isn't inevitable that Sherlock Holmes has to be less distinctive to be popular.  And is Sherlock Holmes a limited resource, or can he be stretched into as many weird and varied incarnations as necessary to satisfy different demographics and still remain Sherlock Holmes?

That's the true question, as we debate "all Sherlock Holmes is good Sherlock Holmes" versus "no it's not" in this modern heyday of Holmes. We shall see.

Reacting to reactions.

After over three decades of being a Sherlock Holmes fan, I find it quite amazing that I keep having several "first times" of late. Things that didn't exist in the world before keep cropping up, and as Sherlock Holmes spreads his influence so widely across our culture, when a new thing comes along, he is usually there. And, then, many months after that new thing is there, I finally stumble across it.

Thanks to YouTube, we now have this thing called the reaction video. I first ran into this phenomenon when my friends' kids had me looking into "Slender Man" to see what they were talking about a new video game many months ago. The point of the game was apparently to make you jump, and YouTube was chock-full of videos of people's jumpy reactions when Slender Man suddenly appeared out of the darkness.

Videos focus on the watcher, while what they're watching appears inset in the corner of the screen so you can see what they're seeing as they react. A little casual Google research doesn't easily turn up where such videos started happening, but they've certainly become a part of internet culture. And thanks to that, yesterday morning I found myself watching a four minute video of someone else watching Sherlock Holmes.

Watching a video of someone else watching Sherlock Holmes. Life had suddenly become an M.C. Escher painting. If I took video of myself reacting to the reaction and put it on YouTube, and someone else did the same, and on and on, things could get really strange . . . although I expect the reactions would get more dull the further away from the original, like copies of copies.

There's a temptation from the cranky old person side of the room to see these reaction videos as one more omen of society's downfall, that we've become so distanced from our fellows on the internet that now we have to watch emotions on video. But I think there's more to it than that -- we've now crossed a threshold of technology where we can communicate wordlessly across great distances. Watching the young lady in the video starting to weep over Sherlock's death in "The Reichenbach Fall" couldn't help but cause my own eyes to tear up, the sort of sympathetic response that usually happens face to face with friends or with a well done movie. But here was a normal person communicating their feelings about Sherlock from who-knows-where with the simplest of means of expression possible.

The great thing about such a reaction video is that Sherlock Holmes is still touching people's hearts enough to bring such a thing into existence. Not sure if I'm going to make such things a regular stop on my internet wanderings, but I was glad Howard Ostrom linked this one up on WelcomeHolmes just to know they're out there.

My one Sherlockian reader.

When writing this blog from week to week or day to day, I suffer from being completely delusional. Even though it's published in that very public area we call the internet, my delusion is that I'm writing to a friend. One individual who shares my love of Sherlock Holmes and pretty much gets where I'm coming from on the guy (or girl, if we come to that). Occasionally in the past, reading things that pop up in the comment section has shattered that delusion. A comment turns up from someone who plainly didn't catch my drift, or worse yet, takes words that I was sure meant one thing and turns them into something completely different. At which point I have to wonder about my imaginary one reader.

So, a little while back, I decided to try to connect with that person I'm writing this for, and see what he/she really thinks. I put out a little survey of ten questions.

And here is what my one reader told me, through many voices.

My one reader overwhelmingly is mad about the original sixty stories of Sherlock Holmes, and when not mad, likes them a whole lot. Not too big of a surprise there.

I was curious about that same reader's view of the Robert Downey, Jr. movie version of Sherlock, and found said reader to be all over the map, opinion-wise, trending slightly toward the positive, but still, loving them one moment and hating them the next. If there's a third movie in the series, I think Guy Ritchie and company have their work cut out for them winning my friend over completely.

Now, when it came to Benedict Cumberbatch, that one reader of mine seriously thought B.C. stood out among Sherlocks we've known, and was very strongly thinking he was the best one ever. The word "repulsive" never came up in a single response.

As for that other TV chap, "Mr. Elementary" as I like to call him, well . . . this blog may have skewed my friend's response a little, but that was to be expected. A quarter of the time, my one reader did use the word "repulsive," and at the other end of the spectrum, never used the phrase "my favorite Sherlock Holmes ever!" a single time. "Fun to watch" was heard as much as "repulsive," though, so my reader is of two minds on Mr. Miller . . . though neither of those minds gets too excited about him, only considering him a standout Holmes once or twice.

That "two minds" attitude was strongly reflected when I asked how my one reader felt about "anything and everything that has to do with Sherlock Holmes." "There's good and there's bad," was the overwhelming response, but there was a lot more happy scattered across the spectrum of those two minds that unhappy. My one reader is a Sherlock Holmes fan, after all, so that's to be expected.

Thankfully, my audience of one wanted a blog that was honest about Sherlockian matters, but more considerate than brutal in its wording. (Though apparently there is a time and place for brutal more than just me being nice.) My friend favored a daily blog, but would accept weekly or whenever, which I thought was nice of them. Comment moderation was encouraged.

That one blog reader that I write for feels like they've been involved with other Sherlockians for less than ten years, but half the time feels like it's been anywhere from eleven to forty-nine years. I can relate to that, as I do feel quite young in the field myself . . . until those moments when I feel ancient.

When asked who the greatest Sherlock Holmes fan in the history of Sherlock Holmes fans was, my friend kept throwing out name after name and seemed like they just couldn't decide. In the end, my favorite thing they said was "I don't really think that there is a greatest fan." (Other thoughts on the matter to come up in a future blog.)

Personally, though, I think that one hypothetical reader I write this for is the greatest fan of Sherlock Holmes in the history of Sherlock Holmes fans, but I might be a bit biassed.

And actually, quite appreciative that I have any readers at all.

Thanks for being my one reader.