Well, as much as I hate to add another week of odd little thoughts to this collection of blog-amentary essays, a full ten days on the move have left me as disjointed as the night-after-night changes in lodging that the good Carter and I have seen during that time. So, as time is of the essence, let’s get to it:

Driving from Boulder to Colorado Springs, I wound up behind a car with the license plate “221 BTU” and had to wonder: Vanity plate or randomly assigned characters? One could imagine a Sherlockian with either the initials “T.U.” or a specialty in heating and cooling.

On interstate 70, heading up into the mountains from Denver, we passed exit 221 for Bakersville. Almost 221 Basker Street, almost Baskerville, almost worth starting a Hobbs-style road sign collection!

The very best part of our trip was a certain little bundle of happy called Ada. I had to inquire if there was any connection to a certain Ada Lovelace, whose acquaintance I first made in that educational pastiche, Elementary Basic by Henry Ledgard and Andrew Singer. (I always want to call her “Ada Babbage” due to her connection with Charles Babbage.) Indeed there was.

Books on CD are a favorite drug for making long hours on the road tolerable, and after a horrific reacquaintance with former vampire-slayer Anita Blake (now sex-addict vampire lover, it seems), the good Carter and I settled in with a book called Anansi Boys. The good Carter laughed at a funny double Sherlockian reference to both the dog in the night-time and the parsley in the butter in the same dialogue, not knowing that the writer was Baker Street Irregular Neil Gaiman. Or should I say “Neil Gaiman, who just happens to be a Baker Street Irregular.” Unlike some of us, Neil gets a lot more points for just being Neil than being a BSI. Anansi Boys is a great book, by the way, so give it a shot if you haven’t already.

Could the Dark Lantern League see a revival one day soon? A re-purposing of that society once imagined as a semi-historical re-enactment group has been crawling around my thoughts. Stay tuned.

Well, that’s it for this time out. Hopefully, I’ll get back to single topics next week!

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver