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.
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.
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.
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.
After over a year of being lost, I found my Nook Glowlight Plus from 2015. It was in my car the whole time, having slipped under a seat and being buried under stuff. I'm trying to erase and reregister it again. I think it is technically still supported by Barnes & Noble, but we'll have to see if I can get it to download new content. If not, it is 10 years old, and time to upgrade to a newer device. It's just, I would like to wait until next year, just in case a new Nook is released then.
Meanwhile, Jasmine Crockett is running for Senate! Especially with the Texas gerrymander going into effect, she may lose her House seat, so this could be a good place to go. I don't care about the other guy running in the primary. If he can win the primary, fine, but otherwise there's no proof yet that he can do any better than Beto did in his Senate run.
I've watched various versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles over the years, since Jeremy Brett's version on the Granada TV series. (It did try to be faithful, but it felt slow and awkward. They kept trying to fake us out with glimpses of Holmes seemingly in London instead of on Dartmoor. They made Dr. Mortimer weird, shooting rabbits with a big gun, and joining the manhunt instead of Inspector Lestrade. Also, Selden has been lobotomized and made "like a child" which is why his sister can't abandon him.) I remember watching the Matt Frewer version of Hound too, followed by the 1968 TV version with Peter Cushing and Nigel Stock. Then I saw Ian Richardson's 1983 Hound, which I hated. I don't remember when I first saw it, but I watched the 2002 version starring Richard Roxborough and Ian Hart. I particularly liked Ian Hart as Watson, but felt meh about Holmes. The story was altered considerably, dropping Frankland and Laura Lyons. The case was set around Christmas time and includes a seance. Most terribly, Stapleton actually kills his wife before anyone can rescue her. Really depressing.
I've now listened to the BBC Radio versions of LAST, ILLU, and BLAN. Bert Coules wrote the first two of them, while another dramatist Roger Danes wrote BLAN. These adaptations depart quite a bit from the original stories, and not for the better.
I was prepared to find LAST sad and nostalgic in the usual "there's an East Wind coming" way, but Bert Coules made it fucking depressing by writing that Watson hasn't seen Holmes in ten years other than one weekend visit to Sussex. One. Coules has reduced "an occasional weekend visit" to one only, and he implies that Holmes's lack of invitations is the reason it's only been once. (Whereas in the "Lion's Mane" story, Holmes implied that Watson's absence was because he was busy in his life, not that Holmes didn't want to see him.) So that's an unhappy distortion of their drifting apart. We find out this info because Watson meets with Stamford at a New Year's 1914 party and agrees to give some public talk on Sherlock Holmes to some young doctors. Watson confirms to them that Holmes is retired to beekeeping, but he thinks Holmes is just going through a phase; he'll ache for brain work again and eventually unretire himself.
