MYCROFT HOLMES

I don’t give a rat’s ass about basketball.   I have never played basketball and would never watch it.  To me it is on the same interest scale as golf.   I can only name three basketball players: Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  All three seem good men, but I have a special feeling for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who like Mohammed Ali, had the grit to openly flaunt criticism and declare his faith to Islam.  

Even though Ali and Abdul-Jabbar were athletes, I feel they paved the way for a President named Barack Hussein Obama.

Something I do care about is Sherlock Holmes.

I first read Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Speckled Band when I was about fourteen and in high school.   It was the only Holmes book in the school library and I read it many times. 

As I got older I would purchase any Holmes story I came across and amassed a small collection (this of course was before the internet, and book stores were not that available.)   Finally, I was able to find and purchase Baring-Gould’s annotated Sherlock Holmes – all the stories – and I read and reread the stories until the book was (and is) well worn. 

I am a member of the Occupants of the Empty House, a scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars, and I have written a number of monographs on Sherlock Holms. 

Where am I going with this and what does basketball have to do with Sherlock Holmes? 

Yesterday my wife and I went to Augusta.  We ate at Longhorn Steak house, shopped at Home Depot and made our regular pilgrimage to Barns and Noble Book Store.

I dislike Holmes knock off stories even when written by a favorite writer like Stephen King.    However, while browsing the mystery section I came across Mycroft Holmes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.  My interest was piqued and I bought the book.

 

Last night I read the first seventy-five pages and I am hooked.  If you are a Holmes fan you might want to take a look at Mycroft Holmes - though not true to the canon it is still a ripping good read.

the Ol’Buzzard

MY FRIEND AND ACQUAINTANCE SHERLOCK HOLMES

Sherlock Holmes has been an acquaintance of mine for many years:  Like a friend I had growing up with, moved away, but still keep in touch with at sporadic intervals.  

I am a member, at large, of The Occupants of the Empty House, a scion society of the Baker Street Irregulars.

My first introduction to Holmes was in the school library in my early teens when I read The Speckled Band.    It was many years before I could obtain the complete works, but over the years I reveled in finding new adventures which I would read over and over. 

A Study in Scarlet was my first purchase, and I remember underlining Watson’s observation of Holmes:

“My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.   That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

 

‘You appear to be astonished,’ he said, smiling at my expression of surprise.   ‘Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.’

‘To forget it!’

‘You see,’ he explained, ‘I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with furniture as you choose.  A fool takes in all lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out…….   It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.  Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.”

What a revelation!   However, since that time I have stocked my attic with such miscellaneous trivia that now, when my attic is full, I can afford to lose prior knowledge without any remarkable results.  

The Occupants of the Empty House have a website that might interest those who would love to visit London where it is always 1894.

http://sherlockinsouthernillinois.blogspot.com/

the Ol’Buzzard