Nook found

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.

Best HOUN

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.

Distortions

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.

Movies and Dogs

Thunderstorms have been so loud in the mornings lately that they sounded like trains roaring on tracks. Looks like we're in for more rain and cold weather next week. Well, it's better than ice and snow.

Meanwhile I've seen some small movies lately. Sarah's Oil is another Angel Studios film, a fictionalized biography of Sarah Rector, a Black girl in Oklahoma who inherited Indian land with oil on it. This is back in the early 20th Century, a bit before the Osage murders depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon. So Sarah and her family are in danger not only from swindlers but also murderers. There is a white character named Bert Smith who helps Sarah dig for the oil, but he's an imperfect ally who succumbs to greed and fear when a villainous oil company tries to cheat Sarah out of her land. For animal lovers, I will warn that someone shoots a dog off screen, then it disappears; people assume that it died but it later comes back, like a miraculous sign. Some faith-based movies are indeed heavy-handed, but this one didn't annoy me really, and they did show Bert learning his lesson and listening to NAACP people to help Sarah win.

The other movie I watched was Rental Family starring Brendan Fraser. He's a struggling actor in Japan who gets a new job with a company that sends actors to role play in real life for people. His first job is to pretend to be a groom in a staged wedding, so that the bride can marry her lesbian girlfriend and leave for Canada without her family objecting. Other roles are more ongoing, such as playing a father to a girl and befriending an old, dying man. It's a sweet film about modern loneliness, and the need for connection with friends and family. The Japanese cast is good too, and it's a really heartfelt story.

HOUN and VALL changes

I have watched a few of the old Sherlock Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Mostly they were the Universal movies set in the 1940s. They were okay mysteries, but I was annoyed with Watson being portrayed as dumb, old, and blustery. I had always assumed that the 20th Century Fox movies would be in the same vein. But recently I finally watched the 1939 Hound of the Baskervilles, actually set in Victorian times. I was pleasantly surprised that Watson is smarter here and more competent.

Though Holmes does tease Watson about his deductions being wrong, he still trusts Watson to go to Scotland Yard and bring the hansom cab driver for questioning. In Dartmoor, Watson figures out that Barryman is signalling with the candle in the window. After Selden tries to kill them, Watson sensibly says they shouldn't follow him and should return home. When Holmes appears in disguise as a peddler, Watson is suspicious, and he notices that his limp changes legs. So I appreciated these glimpses of a stronger, intelligent Watson.

However the movie changes several things from the book. The most trivial is changing Barrymore to Barryman. Beryl is made Jack Stapleton's stepsister, with no knowledge of his villainous plot, nor his secret Baskerville lineage. She's also blonde and English, clearly not the former Beryl Garcia from Costa Rica. The movie cuts the whole subplot about Laura Lyons too, and avoids any hints of adultery, unjust marriages, or Frankland being cruel to his daughter. Meanwhile, Dr Mortimer's wife is a medium who conducts a seance. The hound is suitably scary, but with no glowing phosphorus, and the dog's attack on Sir Henry lasts a long time before he is rescued. In the end, Stapleton escapes, running out of Baskerville Hall, and Holmes shrugs it off, saying he's got police waiting for him. We can only guess if he'll be arrested or die in the Grimpen Mire, like he should. Also the movie ends on an abrupt and crazy note, as Holmes says "Quick Watson, the needle!" and Watson grabs his medical bag to follow him, as if he fully approves of giving Holmes cocaine. Like, what the hell? So it's an imperfect HOUN adaptation, but better than I was expecting.

=====

Dog Lash Solved

Oh, I almost forgot again. Happy Native American Heritage Month! In a five-part miniseries of Molly of Denali, she has been traveling the U.S. with her Grandpa Nat, who is making a documentary about indigenous knowledge of volcanos. This allows Molly to interact with kids of different tribes and to spotlight their culture in the live-action segments. The only downside is not much interaction with her friends Tooey and Trini back in Alaska. With the attacks on PBS's funding, I worried that the show would be canceled for DEI, but the producer says there's more:

"There’s going to be an interactive game that comes out with the ‘Epic Adventure," Evans said. "Then we have another interactive game coming out later in 2026. We have another episode that will be premiering in 2026 as well. So more great stuff to come."

Meanwhile, I finally solved a mystery from the Sherlock Holmes story "The Speckled Band"! In Roylott's room, Holmes finds a "dog lash" hanging on a corner of the bed. Watson says, "The lash, however, was curled upon itself and tied so as to make a loop of whipcord." So he clearly describes it as a small whip. But who on earth whips dogs? Is that a thing that Victorian people do? I kept imagining what context you would need a whip for. Dog racing? Fox hunting?

Some movies and other adaptations of the story treat the "dog lash" as an innocuous "dog leash" instead. But now I've found a Wikipedia article on the extinct profession of Dog Whipper. Apparently people did once use a whip on dogs who were being unruly or aggressive in church. This job eventually became obsolete, but clearly there was enough memory of it in Victorian times that Doyle felt no need to explain the existence of a "dog lash" in his story. So yes, the lash is a whip, not a leash. But now I wonder what "dog tongs" look like.