Historian in WNC, working on nuclear war, teaching part-time at Lees-McRae, available for professional consultations, teaching full-time, opinions are definitely my own
in the sense that any divergence in WWI might well lead to a better WWII, sure - but the same could be said for a timeline where the US declares war in 1915 after the Lusitania.
I will take the panic over vomit containers over anything political. I’ll just say that what I and my family do is normal and natural, and everyone else is some kind of moral degenerate.
The people who do more than we do are obsessive germaphobes who should see a shrink, the people who do less are filthy plague merchants living in their own sewage
plot twist, somebody's planning to knife the 'softs' as soon as Biden's re-elected and wanted to make sure they were all on the record. (maybe. who even knows.)
Oh, I have no beef with the other Holmes(es?). A character that big is going to have a million different shapes. I just take the (ex galerum) position that hardly anyone has tried just regular period Sherlock Holmes because hardly anybody can beat what Brett et al. did.
This year I'm using Cheng Xiaoqing's SHERLOCK IN SHANGHAI in my World Lit class - Cheng was a huge Chinese Sherlockian and did some of the first translations, then wrote a few short stories featuring a legally-distinct-but-obviously-Holmes-and-Watson in 1920s Shanghai. Have to see how it goes.
I was going to bring up the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes but of course those are less adaptations and more "Sherlock Holmes on TV instead of on the page."
I don't know if this is actually true but I have a theory that Brett + Granada loom so large over the character (even decades on) that he's why you don't see any "Holmes played straight" productions being done with any kind of cultural force behind them.
Action! Holmes. Neurodivergent! Holmes. Lucy Liu! Watson. The Adventurous Younger Sister! Holmes. But if you want, you know, Sherlock Holmes, you just put on Jeremy Brett.
IIRC they bought Rickman into the production by promising him he could play the Sheriff however he wanted, which makes his performance all the more interesting.
in the box of - "it is probably unfair for voters to hold Biden's health against him, this has nothing to do with whether or not they will actually do it in a meaningful fashion."
Deliberately avoiding comment on the issue of the moment re:Dems, just had the thought that many people are proposing ideas that would readily sway an intelligent, tuned-in electorate. So I’ve concerns.
we tell ourselves stories about the moral depravity of the average person vs. 'everyday heroes', but really the average person is almost by definition average.
(another way to think about is that you'd have to be dopey and not paying attention to not fully grok what the Nazis were even before 1933 - but we know there are lots and lots of people like that in 2024, much less 1934.)
