Stretching the Truth

Well, my attempt to make a different peach cake recipe was not as successful. I got my measuring cups mixed up and didn't put in enough flour, and the batter didn't rise. Will have to pay more attention next time.

Glad that the last primary is done. Now there's only the convention. I read that Trump was trying to come to DFW Thursday, but got rejected by both Irving and Grand Prairie due to his last minute request. Hope he stays away. We already got nutjob politicians claiming that the Orlando victims were "Latinos" not "gays" as if the terms were mutually exclusive.

This week's Houdini & Doyle episode started out toying with demonic possession, but was really about patients in a mental asylum, and Doyle's father issues. The show pretends that Doyle's childhood home was in London, not up in Edinburgh where he actually grew up, so that Doyle can visit the abandoned house and recall memories about his mad alcoholic father. The show pretends that Charles Doyle disapproved of Sherlock Holmes and resented his son for being more talented and famous than him. But Charles Doyle was an artist who actually drew the first illustrations for Study in Scarlet. Arthur was the one who hated Holmes and wanted to turn to "more important" works of historical fiction; he didn't suffer from writer's block without Holmes, and wrote many other books besides the Boer War propaganda. Also, Charles Doyle was kept in various institutions up in Scotland, not Bedlam in London as depicted here. And I thought Doyle became a doctor to please Bryan Waller, the man who became close friends with Doyle's mother; Doyle felt ambivalent about Waller as a surrogate father. It's really strange the contortions these writers are doing with Doyle's family life. Why all the focus on Doyle's father and not on his mother, whom he was deeply devoted to? Trying not to make him seem the same as mama's boy Houdini?

I tried to enjoy the parts about Doyle talking to a patient claiming to be Sherlock Holmes, though, and it is a legitimate fear for Doyle to be afraid of ending up insane like his father. There was an important point about the two doctors featured at Bedlam, with Doyle railing against the barbarousness of lobotomies and electroshock therapies, thereby making him assume the other doctor was good, humane, and reasonable. Medical progress is ever full of quack therapies and people with good intentions.