Some Halloween

Hurricane Melissa did a lot of damage, but I read on Bluesky that Jamaica has a catastrophe bond that will pay, so hopefully they will get a lot of aid quickly. World Central Kitchen are setting up too.

Meanwhile it's Halloween, and Governor Pritzker asked Kristi Noem to pause ICE operations (because they already ruined a Halloween parade last Saturday), but Noem refuses. It's so sad that they think it's ok to just terrorize neighborhoods like this. And the government shutdown continues, with SNAP ending on Saturday. How awful.

I've been on vacation this week, and I wrote a new Holmes story, but I am feeling sad about everything else. Even political satirical humor isn't much help. I did manage to vote, though.

Fall

Well, after an October with many hot days, autumn weather seems to have finally arrived with rain lately. Such storms seem worse all the time, not just with tornado warnings, but power blackouts too. At least this time it was just a breaker that tripped.

Damnit, Apple! You're not doing anything to separate yourself from the other Big Tech companies financing the Epstein Ballroom and the destruction of the White House. Fuck.

Anyway, I got to print out my voter guide and get to the polls today. Early voting is only open until Halloween. I don't really do Halloween myself, as I don't want to contribute to the bad ethics about cheap chocolate, but I like spooky mysteries of the Scooby-Doo variety. (And also Sherlock Holmes, when the stories do get spooky-adjacent.)

If you have any elections this year, make sure you vote.

So-so sources

I'm still re-reading the canon, and possibly will have a finished chronology in a few weeks. I have to make some final decisions and figure out how I'll summarize the results. Some things still confound me, though. As an example of the problems, take the "Silver Blaze" horseracing story. The horse Silver Blaze is descended from a real horse named Isonomy, so with his age, and horse gestation taking a year, the earliest the tale could be is 1887. Then I noticed that the final horse race takes place in Winchester, not on Dartmoor where the stables were. In Trumbull's Chronology he posts this argument:

As Sherlockian Ernest Bloomfield Zeisler observed, between 1881 and 1903, the only time there was a race scheduled at Winchester was on Tuesday, July 17th, 1888. This places the beginning of the case on the previous Thursday, the 12th.

I thought, "Wow, that solves it! Hooray, something simple!" But then I asked myself, "is that true?" Why should Winchester, a town that used to have regular races every year, suddenly stop for decades and only have one in 1888? What is the source for Zeisler's observation? Did he have a newspaper account or some other historical document listing all the races in Winchester? Can I buy Zeisler's book and check his sources?

Of course I did an internet search on "Winchester horserace history" trying to find the source myself. Unfortunately, that only brings up a website talking about how Jane Austen attended races and died in Winchester. My searches also keep bringing up modern-day horserace sites, or other Winchesters not in the UK. The nearest result I can find is this City of Winchester article talking about the decline of horseracing in Winchester due to new Jockey Club rules about prizes, and it claims that the last race was in July 1887. This directly contradicts Zeisler! That website at least cites its source as a local newspaper, the Hampshire Chronicle. How did they find that, but Zeisler didn't? He thinks there were no races that year. And where is his source for 1888? So that's how frustrating and confusing chronology conundrums are. Do I follow Zeisler, or Winchester itself? Zeisler's Sherlockian book is rare and expensive where I can find it. One website lists his chronology for the stories, but it's only the dates, not the reasons or the evidence.

Meanwhile, I discovered an entertaining blog that goes through all 60 stories with An Observance of Trifles. Snell sometimes discusses differences in TV and movie adaptations too. You can go through his posts by dates starting in 2014, or you can look for the story titles themselves. On the right side menu, look for Labels, which lists each story, so you can directly get to that post. In his "Retired Colourman" post, I was glad to see I was not alone in wondering why Holmes believes Josiah Amberley's story so completely. Why are his clues like "we were" so flimsy? And why does he think the suicide attempt is "as good as a confession" of guilt? If not for the bodies being found, I would wonder if Holmes got the case completely wrong.

No surprise

I never trusted the ceasefire in Gaza to begin with, but was glad that at least the hostages were freed, and the Palestinian prisoners were released home. But Israel never keeps a ceasefire. They always break it with attacks that somehow don't count to international peace negotiators. There's no way to stop this shit until they actually get rid of Netanyahu and someone imposes actual consequences on Israel for being a rogue state that does whatever the hell it wants to do.

Look at what they did to Greta Thunberg for being in the flotilla, and wonder how much worse it is for non-famous people they torture and kill. People who have no access to the media.

No doubt Trump and his fucked up State Department will be as incompetent about this resumed war as they are about Ukraine. They only got this ceasefire in the first place because Biden's administration had been negotiating it before, and Netanyahu held out until Trump was in power. I'm not sure why he waited this long to get back the hostages, but I guess he had more killing to do. No one's getting a Nobel Peace Prize out of this. Fuck them. I can only hope that Europe and other countries might do something since they more clearly see that Israel has been guilty of genocide all along.

I'm glad at least that the No Kings protests went well yesterday, but I worry about what the Supreme Court will do with their new voting rights case. Early voting for November's election will start tomorrow on Oct 20th.

More Chronology

On my reread of the Holmes canon, I've finally reached the Casebook stories, so I'm in the home stretch at least. It annoys me, though, that the last short story collection jumbles up the stories; they're no longer in order of the Strand publication dates. They're just random now, and I have to check Klinger's annotations to read them in the proper order.

Speaking of Leslie Klinger, I'm amused that his website calls him the World's First Consulting Sherlockian :) He provides his Table of Major Events online, but note the asterisk! Lots of these events are taken from Baring-Gould's imagination about the biography of Sherlock Holmes. That's fanfic, not data provided in the canon. In the Table he includes dates from real history and Conan Doyle's life too.

I also found an old discussion of Problems of Chronology, and it confirms what I thought, that The Date Being--? book is just a list of dates without justification; if you can't read past theories, then it's basically useless and not worth trying to buy somewhere. There's a list of links on that page, but some are broken, as Sherlockian.net is now just preserved as an archive, and not updated any more.

I'm confused by someone trying to move STUD out of 1881 to 1883. As if Holmes would wait that long to tell Watson his profession or invite him to a case. Watson makes it seem only a matter of weeks or months, not years. I can certainly see the argument that the "Book of Life" conversation doesn't need to take place on the same date as the Jefferson Hope case starts; Watson may have combined the 2 days in poetic license to move the story along. But a difference of years? Wow.

221B Layout Problems

When rereading the canon for chronology reasons, you also notice references to the layout of rooms in Baker Street. Most of the time Watson's room is referred to as upstairs, while Holmes's room is on the same floor as the sitting-room (i.e. seventeen steps above ground floor). However, this is not consistent, because in the "Beryl Coronet", Holmes goes to his "chamber" upstairs, then returns in disguise. In "Thor Bridge", Watson says that he can see a solitary plane tree in the backyard, so his bedroom is presumably in the back of the house, not the front. In "Black Peter" Holmes has two sailor guys wait "in the next room" so he can prevent them from going downstairs again and warning away the killer he intends to capture. But does Holmes mean his own bedroom next door? Surely Holmes wouldn't invite random people to walk into his bedroom and use it as a waiting room? (Watson offers to wait in "the next room" in The Red-Headed League" but he's not a stranger.) Holmes's room is not like a normal bedroom, what with its pictures of criminals on the walls, and it's probably as big a mess as the sitting room. So what is this, an extra room? Or, *gasp* has Holmes moved upstairs, nearer to Watson and converted his previous room into something more nondescript? Hmm...

Anyway, there have been numerous attempts to draw the layout of the sitting room and Holmes's bedroom. (Most illustrators ignore Watson's room altogether and just make a note that it's upstairs.) This image is an example from a graphic novel of Hound of the Baskervilles by Edginton and Culbard.

Another example is Russell Stutler's floor plan, which he's done 3 versions of over the years. I bought a copy of the 2nd version, which I think has been featured in several Holmes publications. Stutler helpfully wrote up all the details in the canon which describe the Baker Street rooms. His final plan seems to show that Holmes's bedroom has 3 separate doors, one from the sitting room, one from a secret set of stairs going to the street, and one to the little curtained alcove in "The Mazarin Stone." That's an astonishing amount of doors for a bedroom. Though I applaud his effort to be complete, it seems unrealistic and bizarre to me.

Besides, all these floor plans have the same problem, that they are not deep enough for a building in Baker Street. I recently found a different floorplan (apparently from a law firm's website) which takes into account the whole building, not just these couple of rooms.