As we maintain no bulletin boards or chat rooms here at Sherlock Peoria, it would seem we don’t invite comment nearly as much as the standard modern blog-site. And that may be partially true . . . one doesn’t want to make things too easy for the web-wandering oaf to dash off “Sherlock Holmes sucks!” as part of his efforts to leave a mark on the world. But we have left the door open a little, and occasionally a friendly Sherlockian face stops by with some insights. This week we heard from Bruce Harris and Tim Reich.

Bruce was writing about my column on the hectic nature of life pushing Holmes out of one’s life and Stanley Hopkins’s “Is the Game Played Out.” He put forth the quote, “Trouble is that smoking a pipe, as one of mankind's most relaxing pleasures, has been hitting an uphill battle lately against the headlong tempo of our times. You can't do justice to a pipe, or it to you, when both of you are in the middle of a rat race,” and posited that, like the pipe, Sherlock Holmes was the relaxing moment we needed so much more when life moved too fast. A good point, as even Sherlock Holmes tended to crash after a particularly energetic case.

Tim Reich dropped a note from up North to let me know he had found the fabled hansom cab clock, a most fitting announcement on the weekend of a new Indiana Jones movie. In my own whimsical way I consider the quest for a hansom cab clock the Sherlockian spiritual equivalent of Indiana Jones hunting down some golden statue in a cave . . . one can almost envision a hardy Sherlockian weighing out his bag of sand, ready to balance it in place of the glowing cab clock before him. Congratulations to Tim as the latest member of our band of relic-hunters.

In other Sherlockian bits, I was at my club reading the latest periodicals and it suddenly struck me how I’m now striving to become the opposite of Mycroft Holmes. While my club, like the Diogenes, is one where the members rarely speak to one another, it’s not that we’re unfriendly, it’s that we’re working out. Instead of “comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals,” the club offers eliptical machines and the latest periodicals. And I’m sure a lot of us are there because we don’t want to get as wide as Mycroft.

And what’s this? Amazon is telling me there’s another Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine?  It looks like more of a book than a magazine, and it’s a shame that the name is the same as a well-known predecessor. But I may have to track it down, just to see a good old Ron Goulart tale, one of the featured authors whom I enjoyed as a kid.

Time to run for this week for meditation in the mountains. We’ll see what Sherlockian thoughts come back from this time up the hill.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver