Strange ACD movie

I recently read something about ACD and Jean Leckie having an affair while his first wife Louisa aka Touie was alive. The affair has long been known, but ACD always claimed that he was celibate for the nine years it took Touie to die of tuberculosis. Just because the affair is emotional rather than physical is a mere technicality; ACD still went out in public with Jean and introduced her to family and certainly acted unfaithfully. Still, ACD's biographers went along with that claim of celibacy, and one book, Christopher Redmond's In Bed with Sherlock Holmes in 1984, even argued that ACD's feelings of sexual frustration and guilt showed up in his many Holmes stories focused on love triangles. It also argued that many characters, Holmes and Watson included, are projections of aspects of Doyle's personality.

So anyway, I read somewhere a post saying there was now recent proof that ACD and Jean Leckie were actually meeting in hotels with assistance from Doyle's mother, who fully approved of them together. So the whole celibacy thing was bullocks. I wanted to see the proof myself, so I did internet searches, and I found this article about Jean being a terrible stepmother according to an ACD biography by Russell Miller; I've never heard of him nor read that biography. I have read the 2008 biography by Andrew Lycett, though, but I think that one still claimed that ACD was celibate during those nine years.

=====

Chronology Conundrums

I'm still working on my own Sherlock Holmes chronology, and I found this interesting timeline by John Trumbull. He dates all but 3 cases, and he adds references to historical events like the Ripper Murders and the Titanic sinking. Not strictly relevant, but it puts events in context, I guess. I don't agree with everything he says, but it's a good effort. He also supports SIGN being in 1887 due to the six pearls Mary Morstan received. (This Sutori thing seems to be some kind of educational tool for use in schools. I'm not sure if it's worth me signing up too.)

I'm reading the stories in the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, but I wish that Klinger would stop including notes trying to identify particular place names or famous people like British Prime Ministers. I don't care about the real world, just the fiction. Besides, if we're pretending that Watson is disguising things out of discretion, one could argue that his clues are deliberately wrong to mess people up. Why, just look at the tangled mess of SIGN, and GLOR, and VALL, where the past histories don't add up to the present events of the case. Watson lies, people!

More important historical events like the Indian Mutiny, the gold rush in Australia, and the Crimean War are relevant to some stories of course, and that's where I appreciate Klinger's notes. I'm also rereading some Sherlockian books I have by John Hall and D. Martin Dakin who also did chronology, so I can follow their theories even if I don't agree. The weirdest little details don't fit, like Holmes claiming that he boxed McMurdo 4 years ago in SIGN, but McMurdo has been working for Major John Sholto since 1877, about 11 years ago. What a mess. I'm in the Return stories now, taking copious notes, and will need to consult my perpetual calendar about dates.

Fight On

So the Texas Republicans passed their stupid gerrymander. The Democrats that had been breaking quorum came back for various reasons explained by Gene Wu. I don't think that it's a surrender, just that they knew that Abbott would keep calling special sessions constantly, and they believe that blue states like California will redistrict to counteract this gerrymander.

But oh the drama when the Republicans made Democrats sign "permission slips" and locked up Nicole Collier in the Capitol to prevent her from leaving! I'm glad some other Democrats joined her, and protestors came. Keep up the good work.

Meanwhile, Washington D.C. is dealing with the troops being deployed to terrorize the citizens. Really awful and ugly. I don't know how this all ends, if they'll eventually chicken out and withdraw like from Los Angeles. Lots of blue cities have to be anxious whether they'll be next. What a hellscape.

Messy

I hope the Texas Democrats can continue breaking quorum, and that Greg Abbott does not succeed in removing them from their jobs. There are various claims on the internet that the gerrymandering could backfire on Republicans, or that it's illegal for the FBI to go arrest the Democrats, but I don't know what will happen. Everything's chaos since the Supreme Court lets Trump do whatever he wants. Abbott could keep calling special sessions over and over. Paxton is even threatening Beto O'Rourke, who's not currently in office, but raises money for Democrats.

Meanwhile I tried making pizza from a frozen pizza dough ball that I bought at the grocery store. However, I don't have a rolling pin to flatten the dough, and when I stretched it out by hand, it wouldn't be circular. Plus, I didn't realize that the unfrozen dough would now be so soft and floppy that the toppings would fall off if I picked it up. So it was a struggle to put it on a baking sheet while not spilling things. The dough did bake fine in the oven, but it reminded me that my experiments in cooking can be messy. Overall I think it's less trouble to just use naan bread to make pizzas. That bread is better than baked pizza crusts I've tried, and I can just microwave instead of bake.

I'm looking into whether I should republish my Prelude to a Partnership novella as an ebook. It was on Feedbooks in 2009 for free, and I didn't ever get an ISBN for it. But I did at least get an EPUB out of it. If I can fix it up again, I could self publish on Draft2Digital to reach as many ebookstores as possible. I need a better book cover, though.

Also I recently rediscovered the Sherlock Holmes radio dramas done by Imagination Theater (Jim French and M. J. Elliott) which cover all 60 stories of the canon.

Already August

CBS's Watson has cast someone as Sherlock Holmes for season 2. So we'll get a post-Reichenbach story I guess. I really did not understand why their season finale ended so weird with respect to Moriarty and the younger doctors. I'm not sure I'll continue with the show.

Meanwhile, I found this interesting list of queer Holmes books posted on BlueSky. I'll have to see if I can find any of these books in print. (I want to avoid ordering from Amazon.) I have of course already read Rohase Piercy's My Dearest Holmes and Larry Townsend's gay porn Sexual Adventures. I didn't really review Townsend's book, but I mentioned it here.

I do really wish a Holmes adaptation would finally have him and Watson be in love. Why do we have to keep putting up with queerbaiting, and Holmes in love with Irene Adler?

Meanwhile, one of the new Star Treks apparently claimed that Spock's ancestor was Arthur Conan Doyle. Some people are excited, while some people wanted to think that Spock's ancestor was Sherlock Holmes, and are sad now that he's fictional in Star Trek's canon. But wasn't he already a fictional character when Data played him on the holodeck in Next Generation? Really, all this started because Nicholas Meyer, a noted writer of Holmes pastiches, also wrote and directed Star Trek movies. In the 6th movie, The Undiscovered Country, Meyer had Spock quote Holmes's "eliminate the impossible" maxim and claim that the phrase belongs to his ancestor. He didn't actually specifiy whether he meant ACD or Holmes, but most fans wanted it to be Holmes. I don't care either way. Whoever the human ancestor is, they must be related to Spock through Amanda Grayson, his mother from Earth.