Carol the Dabbler

I don't doubt that's true -- the real-world explanation seems to be mostly that he would throw in a few details as needed, so that Holmes could say or do something that he needed to say or do in order to move the story along -- and consequences be damned. The in-universe explanation offers a far wider range of possibilities (partly because they can rarely be either confirmed or denied), so I can easily understand why there's been so much activity in that area. I like that idea. After all, he admittedly allowed Watson to believe he was dead for several years. And if he's the introvert that many people take him to be, then he might easily be annoyed by Watson's public revelations.

Was there actually noise in the room?

I'd say it's plausible -- but so is the theory that there's an older brother tending to the old home place. I'm tempted to say that the latter is the simpler explanation, and thus (by Occam's razor) probably the correct one. But is it really simpler? There's simply too little data. Oh, and what if the parents made up those stories about landed squires and French artists? The "real" explanation could be extremely mundane.

Happy Thanksgiving Day to my fellow Americans! And Happy Fourth Thursday of November to everyone else!

How would you compare them to the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, if you're familiar with those?

And Baring-Gould got that whole childhood thing from a few brief comments in the original stories? I don't know whether to think that his deductive skills are amazing, or that he's good at simply making things up! I'll agree it sounds plausible, though.

Well, I think disc drives been around for a little while at least, but mostly on those older computers that took up an entire room. I once had a conversation with a programmer from those early days; she told me that in order to do maintenance they would walk inside the computer. ("Where's Charlie?" "Oh, he's over in Bit 3.") My programming experience occurred mostly in the minicomputer era (when computers were "only" the size of a refrigerator). Disc drives were very popular then. The drives we used could hold as much as 5 megabytes! And our computer's main memory was 8 kilobybtes! The systems could be used in a normal office environment, with prices somewhere in five figures (equivalent to far more now). We didn't refer to our storage devices as "hard" drives, by the way, because "floppy" discs (remember those?) weren't invented till a few years later. Of course nowadays you can go to Walmart and buy a much faster laptop with far more memory and far more storage for a couple hundred bucks.

More of a farce, I think, but funny (to me) at the time. I read a synopsis and some Amazon reviews just now, and I'm not sure I'd enjoy it as much now. It's hard to predict, though. More the latter, I think. But as you say, some humor does seem to age more gracefully than other humor. I think some of that depends on the humor being inherent in relatable characters and their relatable situations, rather than being just comedy set-ups or pasted-on gags. One more western spoof that I have consistently enjoyed: The Frisco Kid, starring Gene Wilder (as a young Polish rabbi) and Harrison Ford (as a professional bank robber). It was funny to me in the theater in 1979, it was just as funny some years later on VHS, and it's still funny today on DVD.

Hey, this is the Cute Animal Pictures thread! Where's the picture? Our cats have never been that subtle. We did have one cat who would lie down between us and PURRRRR at the top of his lungs till we woke up, but the current batch mostly just yowls. They do whatever it takes, I guess.

Thanks for trying! Maybe the Universe wants this photo to remain a mystery.

Are those mysteries? Or what?

And to think I had never heard of a Venn diagram till I was a math major in college. That's when The New Math was happening. About five years later, I walked into a first-grade classroom, and there were a bunch of Venn Diagrams on the blackboard. I had never heard of a hard drive till the early 70's, when I got a job that used them, and nowadays little kids know the term (though they may not have much of an idea what's actually in there). The future is here.

Now which one is that? *goes off to check Wikipedia* Hmm, the title sounded familiar, but the plot doesn't particularly ring a bell. If I saw it at the time, it didn't make much of an impression on me. Wikipedia describes the movie as belonging to the 60's genre of "large-scale widescreen, long-form "epic" comedies" such as The Great Race and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I did see those, and was not impressed. So, despite the great cast, I guess I'll pass. There are other western spoofs that I'd gladly rewatch, though. I have a DVD of Support Your Local Sheriff, with James Garner, Jack Elam, Harry Morgan, Joan Hackett, Kathleen Freeman, Walter Brennan, and Bruce Dern; I think it's terrific (and far better than Garner's Support Your Local Gunfighter). There's Blazing Saddles, of course (which I mostly like). And there's one I haven't seen since it was in the theaters, Texas Across the River, which I found hilarious at the time, but have no idea how well it's aged.

Of course! How foolish of me to overlook the obvious!

It's even funnier if you've seen Series 4.