Jimmy 2026

Oh I forgot to say, Happy Native American Heritage month!

Meanwhile I saw the new Jimmy Stewart biopic. It got mixed reviews but I liked it, and the actor did a good accent to recreate his voice. Sometimes you just want something with simple nostalgia. Jimmy focuses on his military service during WWII, and has a composite character for his love interest. He goes on many flight missions with his crew, but feels guilty when they die. Also, his duty is to write condolence letters to family for any men under his command, and he seeks comfort in the local church, where he meets the lady. Stewart also relies on a Psalms book that his father gave to him when he left for the war.

After the war, Stewart returns home to his parents in Pennsylvania, where he struggles with his traumatic experiences. His father says the country needs him back in Hollywood. Eventually Frank Capra talks him into starring in It's a Wonderful Life. We see Jimmy film several scenes, but he's rather intense in the dramatic moments and is clearly still dealing with PTSD from the war. He works through it, but the movie rushes through the happy ending with him meeting his eventual wife Gloria Hatrick, a divorced mom with two sons. At least the ending credits showed several photos and clips of Stewart in his later life with family and friends.

I didn't know until afterward that the director is a faith-based guy, but the movie doesn't hit you on the head with Christian preaching. Also the trailers advertised a charming movie called Flavia, Girl Detective. I'm looking forward to seeing that. Apparently it's based on a book series by Alan Bradley; according to Wikipedia, he's the same Bradley who co-authored the Sherlockian book Ms. Holmes of Baker Street. (It theorizes that Sherlock Holmes was a trans man, without using that exact phrasing.)

Sherlock Holmes: The Unauthorized Biography

I found this 2005 book by Nick Rennison in my library (in the fiction section, but not near Doyle's books in mystery fiction) and checked it out. It's about 250 pages of him playing the Game and constructing the ancestry and biography not only of Holmes and Watson, but even "George Lestrade" and theorizing about "real people" hidden behind pseudonyms in Watson's stories. I'm only about half way through the book, but like the blurb from Rebecca Loncraine on the dustjacket, I have become "dizzy with confusion about what came from Conan Doyle's pen and what 'really' happened in late nineteenth-century London."

I recognize that Rennison is making up parents for Sherlock and Mycroft, but I'm not sure if he's also making up all the baronets in Yorkshire going back to medieval times, or if he's picking historical people who happen to have the name Holmes, to graft onto their ancestry. I can also recognize some Sherlockian theories that I've read before, like Dorothy Sayers claiming that Holmes went to Cambridge, and that Watson's middle name is Hamish, but Rennison doesn't explicitly cite his sources so I don't know where he's getting everything else from. He does include a couple of pages of Bibliography of various Sherlockian books, but I notice that he doesn't include Dorothy Sayers on that list despite using her ideas.

Texas Turns Blue

Hooray for the midterms results! I admit I was skeptical that Talarico could do it; I feared that he would fall short just like Beto O'Rourke did when he ran for Senate. Even if Talarico won, I worried that he wouldn't have any coattails for other Democrats downballot. I was wrong, and happily we swept the statewide races. I had also feared that misogyny would doom our women candidates for Governor and Lt. Governor, but nope, they both won. I'm so proud and happy.

There are also good results nationwide, though of course some states are still counting ballots and some races are too close to call. But at least we know that Democrats will control the Senate and the House. And there's new govenors and state legislatures! What an embarrassment of riches!

Vote!

Well, I finally had a chance to early vote on Saturday. This is the only weekend of early voting available in Texas. They don't allow using cellphones at the polls, so if you have a list of candidates, make it a paper note you can refer to while at the booth. I voted blue all the way, only skipping some races where Republicans ran unopposed. There were a few "nonpartisan" races but I had researched the candidates ahead of time so I could pick the ones that weren't MAGA.

If early voting is happening in your state, please get out there and do it! Then the candidates stop spending money trying to urge you to vote, and they work on other people instead. Unfortunately, I think it doesn't make the fundraising emails stop.

Reset

My laptop died on September 29; it would no longer turn on or charge the battery. Some friends said that maybe I need a new charger or new battery, so I tried Best Buy, only to learn that my computer is so obsolete, they don't sell those parts anymore. So I went to eBay, where I could find the exact parts. Meanwhile a week went by, and I tried to open my emergency MacBook Pro, but couldn't find the charger slot. It's a MagSafe, so the slot looked like a weird USB slot, and it didn't have the circle that I was looking for. I thought I had the wrong power cord. Finally I got it plugged in and running, though it's out of date too. Can't upgrade past MacOS Catalina.

So I've been doing without my main computer for almost 3 weeks and unable to access my most important files. I did have a backup to the cloud, but only up to May. I'm trying to figure out if I can access the laptop hard drive another way to get my files from the summer.

Sherlock Ramblings

Oh finally I'm able to log on! The past couple of days the computer has been plagued with slow windows updates, and when I opened the browser, it keep crashing over and over. Took me 3 hours to get a functioning browser. Due to the computer issues, I wasn't able to get any writing done lately, even on my chronology. I did discover that some Sherlockians including Zeisler were using Whitaker's Almanack for their weather data. But don't almanacs just give weather predictions for the upcoming year? Not data on actual history? You can certainly predict moon phases, tides, and sunrise/sunsets, but not actual weather like rain and snowfall. What were they thinking?

I did a rewatch of the Guy Ritchie sequel Game of Shadows and still ache for a 3rd film in the series. Although I'm still annoyed at how RDJ's Holmes treats Mrs. Hudson. There's not even the excuse that he's jealous of her, like how he's jealous of Mary Morstan. I just need to see Jude Law's Watson again and see if they bring back Moran, or do a totally different revival story.

I also rewatched the Granada TV version of "Speckled Band" with Jeremy Brett. I'm still annoyed at various changes they did to the story text, like cut the "very sorry to knock you up" remark in the bedroom, and make the Stoner sisters not twins, and make the Roylott manor house too pretty. It should be a crumbling ruin, and should have two wings, like the claws of a crab, per the story. More forgivably, they give Watson some of Holmes's dialogue and have him investigate Roylott's history in India instead of Helen Stoner disclosing the death of the butler.