Scary Times

It's been freezing cold in the mornings lately, which makes it hard to get out of bed in the mornings, especially with the frightening, hellish news lately.

Apparently the Golden Globes awards were on Sunday, with Sean Hayes, Will Arnett and Jason Bateman on as presenters. I'll have to look later to see if they had any amusing jokes. I've only listened to a couple of their Smartless podcasts before losing interest. So many times they start to tell a funny story, then interrupt each other and derail it.

Applause to the host Nikki Glaser for taking a jab at CBS on the show, and to Wanda Sykes for supporting the trans community.

Anyway, I hope no more invasions, kidnappings, and murders happen. Stay safe.

Mixed Emotions

Happy Epiphany to those who celebrate. Sherlockians also traditionally celebrate January 6th as Holmes's birthday, but it's based on silly reasoning; they claim that Holmes and Watson have hangovers on January 7th in Valley of Fear because they apparently got drunk the day before. But why couldn't they have got drunk over celebrating Epiphany aka Twelfth Night that Holmes loves to quote from? Maybe Holmes just loves that Shakespeare play because of all the cross dressing disguises, or because he acted it on stage once. It doesn't have to be his birthday. Sherlockians make such strange leaps of logic. But I don't want to be a nitpicky killjoy, so I let Sherlock fans online celebrate as they wish.

Of course today is also the anniversary of the January 6th attacks on the Capitol. And they still haven't put up the plaque commemorating it. Plus Trump has attacked Venezuela and is claiming that we'll run the country to steal its oil. It's all madness, and to probably distract from the Epstein files again. I can't stand that political blogs like Daily Kos are sitting around arguing over whether we're at war or not. Technicalities don't matter. We need some idea of what we can do, other than wishing that Canada or somebody decide to intervene in the US to stop the madness.

Anyway, yesterday I went to see Song Sung Blue starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson. I understood that it was not an biopic of Neil Diamond himself, but of a married couple who had a Neil Diamond tribute act for years. I enjoyed the many songs, and they did find obsure songs that I had never heard of before. I was shocked by the traumatic things that kept happening to Claire Sardina; the film deals with her sudden injury and her post-amputation depression. Ella Anderson is interesting as Claire's daughter Rachel dealing with the blended family and her own pregnancy. The movie compresses all the drama happening over only 3 years or so, when in real life this stuff happened over two decades. That's Hollywood for you, trying to make things more heightened and tense. Overall an enjoyable movie if you need a distraction from the madness of the world.

New Year's Eve

Chilly temperatures returned to Texas this week. What an end to the year!

I've finished listening to the final 3 stories of my BBC Radio dramas: VEIL, SHOS, and RETI. Although Wikipedia says they actually did HOUN and VALL afterward. These are just the final short stories. Book-wise, these are indeed the last published stories by ACD.

Season's Greetings

Two days after Christmas, and the radio is still playing holiday music. Are they going to keep this up all weekend? Well, Watson did go to wish Holmes "compliments of the season" on Dec 27th in Blue Carbuncle. But of course, back then, Christmas lasted 12 days until Epiphany. I guess I can tolerate it for now.

I've cooked new recipes lately, a crockpot chicken stroganoff and a crustless mushroom and onion quiche. I wanted to put in spinach too, but there was no room. It loses some flavor without the flaky crust.

I had to work through Boxing Day, so finally I can take a rest and catch up on some chores. I wonder if the stores will be crowded this weekend? I wanted to shop a little at after Christmas sales. Maybe I'll try to see a movie instead. I hope I get my holiday pay before I get the big bills.

Meanwhile, the Centriq app I was using is shutting down so I exported my data. Now I've got to find a new home inventory app. It's so annoying. Plus only now I find out that Tivo stopped making DVRs and is now a software-only company. The end of an era, and I didn't know.

Knives Out 3

I've been so focused on Holmes lately that I haven't had time to review the new Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man. I did see it in a local theater, and I was very disappointed that the major chains didn't carry it. Now it's streaming on Netflix, and I suppose I would have to resubscribe to rewatch the movie. Lately Netflix is also trying to buy Warner Brothers while facing interference from Paramount. Any huge media merger is bad, of course, yet you root for the lesser of two evils.

As for the movie, I enjoyed it a lot, though I don't care for Blanc's new hairstyle. But that's me being shallow. I did like his fashion; he rocks a classic suit. Father Jud was very charming and sympathetic as the protagonist. I enjoyed the film both as a clever locked room mystery and also as a meditation on faith and religion. See, there is a way to wrestle with moral questions without being fucking hamfisted, like Suchet's later Poirot movies including Murder on the Orient Express. He was shoveling his religion in where it didn't belong. But I digress.

Plaidder has a good analysis of Wake Up Dead Man, that includes her perspective from growing up Catholic. I grew up Buddhist, though I didn't understand a thing in Temple because I didn't know the language, nor did they try to teach me anything theology-wise. So I remain ignorant and mostly agnostic now. Of course one cannot escape the dominant Christian culture in America, especially with the rightwing GOP acting holier than thou and bleating constantly as if they were the oppressed victims.

Meanwhile,  I was searching the internet for help in trying to do my chronology timeline, and I came across this Queer History of Sherlock Holmes, which is useful. If you click in the timeline and drag it around, it even mentions my old college essay "Validity of Interpretation in Sherlockiana" from 1998! How flattering. It's offline now along with the old Sacrilege website. I haven't reposted Validity as I thought nobody was still interested in my college essays, but I still have the text on my computer. So I reread it and noticed typos and punctuation errors that I never corrected. Is it worth cleaning it up and posting it again? I had referenced numerous posts on the Hounds of the Internet listserv, though I've no idea whether any of the old links on the Works Cited page would still work.

More BBC Radio Holmes

I've continued listening to more of the Casebook stories, and I'm nearing the end of my CD boxset. I've gone though MAZA, 3GAB, SUSS, 3GAR, THOR, CREE, and LION. I don't remember which ones were written by Bert Coules, but I think other writers like Roger Danes wrote some of these radio-play adaptations. Their version of LION wasn't as bad I feared it would be, but it was a strange way to force Watson into the story.