Oh, I almost forgot again. Happy Native American Heritage Month! In a five-part miniseries of Molly of Denali, she has been traveling the U.S. with her Grandpa Nat, who is making a documentary about indigenous knowledge of volcanos. This allows Molly to interact with kids of different tribes and to spotlight their culture in the live-action segments. The only downside is not much interaction with her friends Tooey and Trini back in Alaska. With the attacks on PBS's funding, I worried that the show would be canceled for DEI, but the producer says there's more:
"There’s going to be an interactive game that comes out with the ‘Epic Adventure," Evans said. "Then we have another interactive game coming out later in 2026. We have another episode that will be premiering in 2026 as well. So more great stuff to come."
Meanwhile, I finally solved a mystery from the Sherlock Holmes story "The Speckled Band"! In Roylott's room, Holmes finds a "dog lash" hanging on a corner of the bed. Watson says, "The lash, however, was curled upon itself and tied so as to make a loop of whipcord." So he clearly describes it as a small whip. But who on earth whips dogs? Is that a thing that Victorian people do? I kept imagining what context you would need a whip for. Dog racing? Fox hunting?
Some movies and other adaptations of the story treat the "dog lash" as an innocuous "dog leash" instead. But now I've found a Wikipedia article on the extinct profession of Dog Whipper. Apparently people did once use a whip on dogs who were being unruly or aggressive in church. This job eventually became obsolete, but clearly there was enough memory of it in Victorian times that Doyle felt no need to explain the existence of a "dog lash" in his story. So yes, the lash is a whip, not a leash. But now I wonder what "dog tongs" look like.
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