Chronology part 19

Chronology of these short stories.

• SIXN - June 1900
• PRIO - May 16, 1901

Now we come to SIXN, first published in April 1904. Watson informs us that Inspector Lestrade is now a friend who sometimes drops by Baker Street just to chat in the evening. One such night, Holmes prods him to talk about his latest case. Lestrade laughs, then tells them, "Although it is trivial, it is undoubtedly queer, and I know that you have a taste for all that is out of the common." Lately there is a burglar who breaks in to places and smashes busts of Napoleon Bonaparte. Watson suggests that the vandal suffers from an obsessive hatred of Napoleon, but Holmes can see that the criminal has a method to his madness. It's another charming tale like BLUE, where a trivial incident leads to a serious crime.

Wishes and rants

In TV news, there's a new series in development called Sherlock's Secretary, based on the fact that Abbey National Bank occupied 221B Baker Street and hired a secretary to deal with all the Sherlock Holmes mail they received. Besides fanmail, some letters were actual requests for Holmes to solve cases. Andy Berman is apparently writing it to star a female secretary who decides to go investigate those cases, so it'll probably be a quirky procedural like Monk or Psych. The premise sounds interesting to me, and I wonder if they'll set in the past and/or acknowledge that the Sherlock Holmes Museum fought with Abbey over the address, eventually winning the right to 221B.

But still, I hope someone will finally decide to start making a straight book-to-TV series based on the original canon. It's public domain now; please try, and for God's sake, please have Holmes/Watson together at last. See how well Heated Rivalry did? Get some of that hot fanbase genuinely, instead of queerbaiting.

Color Harmony

I did a bunch of furniture moving, so now I'm sweaty and hot. My hot flashes haven't gone away either. I'm trying to buy more linen and cotton clothes lately for breathability. I never realized that all the synthetic rayon and polyester stuff I wore made me sweat excessively even if the fabric looked light and thin. I was sweating buckets in synthetics even when I wore anti-perspirant, so I wondered if there was something medically wrong with my lymph nodes. But no, when I wear natural fibers I do better. Naturally, I will still sweat some on a hot day, but not dripping wet down my skin and shirt. This apparently is why Victorians didn't overheat in their layers of clothes, because they wore natural fibers. What a difference the natural fiber makes!

Meanwhile I was researching colors, looking to adjust colors on my blog, but then I fell down a rabbit hole about hexadecimal code, old websafe colors, and named colors for browsers.

Plus I discovered the difference between violet and purple is more than semantics. I also realized that my vocabulary of red colors is confused. I somehow thought "vermilion" and "scarlet" are dark bluish red colors like "crimson" and "maroon" but they are actually more red-orange. I think maybe I got vermilion and scarlet confused with darker "cadmium red" in painting TV shows. Oh well.

Thabo and the Rhino Case

I finally found this 2023 movie on streaming! It's a kid's movie about an 11-year old boy in Africa investigating the murder of a rhino on the local nature reserve. Apparently it's adapted from a book series about the boy detective, but I don't know if there's an English translation available. In the film, Thabo's uncle is a park ranger who drives tourists around, while Thabo helps narrate the tour. There's also a German lady Agatha who lives nearby, and her young niece Emma is visiting.

After the dead rhino is discovered, Thabo and Emma try to find the poacher who cut off the rhino's horn, while also worrying about the rhino's orphaned baby. Based on a footprint near the corpse, Thabo's uncle is accused of the crime and arrested by the local police. So Thabo works to clear his uncle's name, and he enlists help from his friend Sifiso too. Sifiso is an older boy raising his younger siblings Pilot and Lemonade as best as he can. There's a couple of tourists who are constantly posting videos on the internet, and it seems like most everyone has cellphones. I believe that is common in Africa, as they use phones for banking in a way that's more prevalent than here.

I was able to predict the twists in the mystery, but I liked the film for showing the beautiful landscape and promoting wildlife protection. The reason that Thabo and Sifiso have time to solve cases is sad. Agatha tells Emma that Thabo's mom, and Sifiso's parents, are dead from AIDS. Even though life-saving medicines exist for that disease, not everyone in Africa can afford them, so it's common for kids to be orphaned. That's chilling, and nowadays it makes me think of everyone who died because DOGE killed USAID. Still, the movie overall is light and heartwarming, as the friends work together and learn lessons about trusting the wrong people.

Meanwhile, I keep seeing Halloween stuff on sale in stores lately. It's only August, so they're trying to force Halloween early, since Christmas started swallowing up Thanksgiving and Halloween? So annoying.

Disappointed

I found out this weekend that Hugh Jackman is conservative and apparently friends with Rupert Murdoch. The only bad rumors I heard about him previously were concerning him divorcing his wife for an actress, which I shrugged off as being his personal business. But if people had told me his politics, that would have made me pay attention to them boycotting him. He's apparently been this way for years, but I thought if he had been rightwing, that it would be mentioned all the time, like with the actors Kevin Sorbo and Kirk Cameron.

This sours me on The Sheep Detectives, but at least that's an ensemble film. If it ever becomes a franchise with sequels, his character is already dead, so they may focus on the daughter character instead. I guess this was the risk I took watching an Amazon film anyway. Makes me glad that Sam Neill was always so genuine.

Meanwhile it's been difficult to sleep lately due to the Texas heat. I keep waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep. All this week will be in the 100s too, and my hot flashes make it worse. At my office I'm hot and cold constantly. I guess I should be glad I'm not near any of the Canadian or European fires.

Chronology part 18

Chronology of these short stories.

• DANC - July to August, 1898
• RETI - summer 1898, there is now a telephone installed at 221B

DANC was published in December 1903, and most Sherlockians agree that the case took place in July 1898. It also features the stick-figure cipher which Holmes solves with his cryptography skills. This story needs the hand-drawn images, so it loses something in audio-only adaptations.