This is what I remember from my freshman year of college. By its fourth year, TNG wasn't just a little syndicated show anymore. When it came on, people dropped what they were doing and glued themselves to the tv.

Well, at least at the little baptist college that I went to. Student centers filled with loud students having five hundred different conversations suddenly hushed when the show was on. And it wasn't just the nerds watching it. It was everyone. Suddenly, the show was mainstream. It was kind've unnerving.

I remember a few weeks later trying the same experiment in the same Student Center, but with early 70s Doctor Who.

That didn't go over as well...

Another one of those books where the private eye exudes too much toughness and sex appeal to be too believable for me. I know, I know. I've enjoyed far more ridiculous books, but this one didn't do much for me.
It is one of the few pulps I've read to be set in Chicago, though, so every few pages I got to think "That is the name of a street that I've been on." so hooray for that.

In conclusion, here are some interesting...analogies found therein:

...she was built like a boy in the places which don't count and very much like a girl in the places which do.

Feeling somewhat like a slug in a handful of glistening nickels, Max pressed the proper button and waited.

Outside, the street was silent and dark and the stagnant night air was as warm and sticky as a young man's dream.

He...had been listening with the perplexed and faintly bored expression of a mambo trotter hearing Brahms...

The first strip was done by a chunky brunette of too certain years who took off her clothes to the beat of Sweethearts on Parade with the careless air of a chimp peeling bananas.

Oh, Wade. Never change...

I'm just sayin'...

Who: Martin Keamy
What: Kahana crewmember

Now here was a guy who enjoyed his job.

Waaaaaay too much.

Behold Professor Moriarty - the Napoleon of Neck Massages.

I have a bone to pick with Sir Arthur.

There's a whole stretch of stories - The Cardboard Box, The Yellow Face, The Stock Broker's Clerk, The Gloria Scott - where Sherlock Holmes doesn't really do anything. Oh, he appears in the stories. In all but one, his services as a consulting detective are retained. He deduces. He smokes his pipe. he plays his violin. He deduces some more. But he and Watson do nothing to further the plot while the mystery unfolds by itself. Okay, so technically in The Cardboard Box, Holmes figures out who the killer is and notifies the police. But when the authorities apprehend the killer, he's already so distraught and wracked with guilt it's a sure bet he would have turned himself in and confessed his sins sooner rather than later.
But basically you have four stories in a row where Holmes is an observer rather than a wily detective. Doesn't make for interesting reading.

So, thank goodness the rest of the stories in this collection are pretty damn good. Yes, even the one with the naval treaty.

Mea culpa: The Cardboard Box isn't (usually) in Memoirs. It definitely isn't in my copy. Its usually featured in His Last Bow, but chronologically it was printed between Silver Blaze and The Yellow Face. And since I'm that kind of nerd, that's where/when I've chosen to read it in this Holmes marathon. Aren't you glad I told you this?

Who: Cpt. Gault
What: Kahana crewmember

Waiting until the very last moment to "Do the Right Thing" makes you no less complicit of all the other shenannigans you've assisted in to this point. But at least your heart was in the right place...

It certainly looked prettier than the first two seasons, which had a flat washed-out beige quality to the film (or maybe it's just me and my cruddy contacts). But was a new lick of paint and spiffy new duds all the show needed? Nope. Maurice Hurley (who had fired Gates McFadden at the end of season one) was out, and Michael Piller (who promptly re-hired her) was in.

There's really nothing more to say other than Chief O' Brien rules; look, there's Howling Mad Murdock off the A-Team; Borg borg borg. Borg borg borg borg, borg (borg!). Borg. Kick-ass cliffhanger. The end To Be Continued...



Oh, and Allegiance is the best underrated episode of the series.

Sex. Violence. About par for a Quarry novel.

Maybe Conan Doyle was already sick of Holmes by The Sign of the Four. That's probably why he married off Watson. "He can't record anymore of the know-it-all's exploits if he's tethered to a wife, can he? I'll just scribble in an extra paragraph at the end here, send it off to the printers, and bob's yer uncle! Now I can fully devote the rest of my time to what I'd really like to write about - a whole slew of books on the Hundred Years War!"

Maybe we'll never know. Or perhaps it's easy to find out, except I'm too lazy to look it up on wiki in favor of my little comedy bit. Perhaps. Perhaps.

So then he had to keep contriving ways of pairing Holmes & Watson together again when he started writing the short stories. The obvious answer is to set some of them in the vague period of time between Scarlet and Four. But there are actually only one or two of them in Adventures that can qualify. In Scandal in Bohemia, he just happens to be in the neighborhood. In The Man With the Twisted Lip, he bumps into Holmes in an opium den(!) while looking for another friend(!!). In The Engineer's Thumb he rather unprofessionally recommends the services of Sherlock Holmes to a patient rather than sending the poor fellow to the police as he should have done. But we all know from these stories that the Yard is filled with dunces. Or maybe something else was going on?

Watson just needed an excuse to visit his best friend.

I'd have to think that Mary Morstan Watson was getting pretty cheesed off at this point. The unspoken truth of it all hit me as I was reading the final story of the collection - The Adventure of the Copper Beeches. In it, Watson is obviously living at Baker Street. He sleeps there. In fact a whole fortnight passes between Holmes' initial meeting with the client and the conclusion of the case with Watson residing at 221B. This has got to be set before his marriage...

Except it isn't. Two continuity references to cases that featured a very married Watson are made in the course of Copper Beeches, so what's going on here?

Oh, listen to you with your reasonable explanations of continuity errors! "Watson said he was shot in the shoulder while he was in Afghanistan in one story, but in another it was his leg!" "Wisteria Lodge was set in 1892, despite the fact that Holmes was believed dead from '91 to '94!"

It's not a continuity error!

Mary kicked him out.

She got so sick and tired of the silly bugger making any old excuse to visit his playmate, that she kicked the fool out for a short period (more than a fortnight, I'd think). Even the above cover image supports my theory. Look at Holmes' expression. He's sizing up his client. Now look at Watson's. It plainly says, "Why did this frightful creature have to bother us on bridge night? Why?"

In fact...well, I didn't really want to announce this here, but it seems the appropriate venue, I suppose. I recently found in a dusty old portmanteau a dispatch box filled with some of Conan Doyle's old scribblings (I know! Shocking!), and crammed underneath The Adventure of The Forty-Niner's Bedpan (a story the world is not yet prepared until I get my finder's fee) is the original unused beginning to the Copper Beeches. It starts thusly:

     It was an unusually sweltering evening in September of 1893. I was walking home after assisting my good friend Holmes. He had had a sizeable amount of roommate applications to sort through and I was able to eliminate them all as possible candidates. Every man-jack of them a complete rotter! Perhaps next week he will have better luck, I thought, and in my absentmindedness tripped over something in the lane. When I looked down, I was surprised to see it was my very own brass-plated stethoscope. I looked up just in time to be clobbered with a handful of my winter underthings. My beautiful wife's usually pleasant features - now twisted with rage - were regarding me from our second storey window.
     "Mary!" I cried. "Whatever is the matter?"
     "You've been off with him again, haven't you?" she shouted. "I rang you at your practice to see what you'd like for supper, only to discover that you'd left it unattended again! You haven't made a farthing in three weeks and the landlord says we're two months due!"
     "But, Mary! Holmes-"
     "I wouldn't mind so much if the great detective let you share in his stipend! We could've hocked that blue carbuncle, you know!"
     "Sweetheart!"
     "Don't you 'sweetheart' me! In fact you can stay with your other sweetheart until you come to your senses!" She raised her arm, getting ready to lob something else into the street. "And you can take this with you!"
     "Not my ovaltine!" I ejaculated.

There are just some things a Victorian gentleman doesn't write about.

It is humongous and one day it will transform into an evil Go-Bot and murder us all.

You just wait and see.

Who: Alex
What: Other

Nothing stupid or snarky to write about this time as it was just about the worst thing ever.

Who would after Episode III?

     "Here I thought you were going to make believe I was a medicine ball," I said. "You shake hands. You speak politely. Now what? You offer me money?"
     "We lead up to it first," Mann said. He sat down in an upholstered side chair and waved me to a bed. "But now that you brought it up, what were you thinking in the neighborhood of?"
     "In the neighborhood of nothing. I've already got a client."
     "Stanley," Mann said to his employee in the glasses. "Just once."
     The big man took a quick gliding step and pushed his knuckles at my head. I rode with it, taking it high.
     "What do you want me to do, say ouch?" I said.

Witty banter is wasted on hoods. Likewise, Ben Gates' intelligence is wasted on them.

That's the general feeling I get from Terrall's novels featuring the character. Everyone - clients and suspects alike - tend to underestimate his intelligence and resourcefulness. Nothing so minor as being sapped on the head in Albany, and then waking up in his birthday suit in Italy is going to put him off the scent.

It's a shame there's only one more of these books left in the series. I've really been enjoying them.

Who: Danielle Rousseau
What: crazy castaway

C'est la mort. Quelle bummer.

Cheesy, gory, funny, 80s-drenched fun, Night of the Creeps was actually there before Evil Dead 2 (by about a year, but still). It finally gets its much-needed DVD release today. Unfortunately, the marketing wizards decided not to use any of the cool-looking poster art for the cover case.

Regardless, go buy/rent/steal it. 'Tis the season, so to speak...