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Posts Archived Under Communism
The Milestone Mo-Tel today. Winners get one
free night. Losers get two. (That's the second
time we've used that joke today.) |
If the whole world loves a winner, we have a weekend full of love ahead of us. Let's get started!
The most obvious winners will be declared Thursday when either Clint Robertson or Brandy Kuentzel wins the right to become Donald Trump's latest Apprentice for one year. (We hope that the loser isn't stuck for two years ...) One of the three remaining teams on "The Amazing Race" will win a million smackers on Sunday. (Perhaps eating that sheep's head may have been worth it.) It's almost guaranteed that none of these winners will make Barbara Walters' list of the year's "Most Fascinating People," (most fascinating to her, anyway ...) but we’ll find out for sure Thursday. (Our guess for #1 on her list? The cameraman who smears the Vaseline all over the lens that photographs her.) And on Friday, they'll be handing out the Nobel Prizes. The Nobels aren't like the Oscars; everyone already knows who won and the winners have actually accomplished something that matters, rather than playing loveable oddballs.
Saturday we'll see some sports winners. In the afternoon, someone (Cam Newton? Andrew Luck? LaMichael James?) will win the Heisman Trophy as the nation's finest college football player, and in the evening, either Georges St-Pierre or Josh Koscheck will take the welterweight championship at UFC 124 in Montreal. We assume the combatants will not resort to wheeling around the ring in roller skates, but while it would be appropriate (given that Thursday marks the anniversary of their 1884 patent), we'd have to warn them that such a thing would be just plain dangerous.)
Sunday also marks the 10th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore, which ensured that George W. Bush became the nation's 43rd president. Whether that made the country a winner or a loser, we'll leave up to you. Falling into a similar category is Larry King's retirement from his CNN talk show on Friday. (As with President Bush, we won't say whether that's a plus or a minus.)
Weary travelers were winners 85 years ago Sunday, when the Milestone Mo-Tel, the world's first motel (short for "motor hotel"), opened in San Luis Obispo, California.
If we stretch the definition of "winner" to include those whose birthdays fall this weekend, then we're lousy with winners. For example, Thursday sees the birthdays of both Margaret Hamilton (1902) and Redd Foxx (1922). Hamilton is best known for her role as the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 classic, "The Wizard of Oz." Despite her indelible portrayal of one of the screen's great villains, Hamilton loved children and was a lifelong advocate for charities that benefitted kids and animals. Foxx was someone whose work, on the other hand, was decidedly not for kids. A veteran of the black vaudeville entertainment venues known as the "Chitlin' Circuit," Foxx recorded a series of "party records" in the 1950s that were both filthy and hilarious. He reached a mainstream fame in the '70s when he starred in "Sanford and Son," where his frequent feigned heart attacks were one of the show's running gags. In a supreme irony, he suffered an actual heart attack while rehearsing for another television show, but no one believed was it real until it was too late.
Sunday would have been the 95th birthday of Frank Sinatra. The greatest popular singer of the 20th century, Sinatra was also an Oscar-winning actor, starred in numerous TV specials that consisted of nothing but him singing with his guests, and was the biggest attraction in Las Vegas when that title actually meant something.
Monday, we celebrate the 192nd birthday of Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln who was criticized in her time for her extravagant and spendthrift ways, and committed to a psychiatric hospital by her son Robert. While she was undoubtedly depressed, wouldn't any woman who’d lived through the death of three sons and the murder of her husband (while sitting next to him) feel the same? She was eventually declared competent and released, but her health was broken, and she died three years later.
If birthday celebrants are winners, so too are those is show business who meet success, like performers and lovers of country music, who can celebrate the 83rd anniversary of the first broadcast of the Grand Ole Opry on Friday. The Opry has been a staple of radio and television in the decades since it debuted, highlighting the best in country, from Hank Williams and Minnie Pearl to Clint Black and Carrie Underwood. Someone who's appeared at the Opry (but has yet to be inducted into its member ranks) is Taylor Swift. Perhaps the Opry has been waiting for her to turn 21 - in which case, it need wait no longer! The Grammy-winning singer reaches her majority on Monday.
Thursday will see the annual airing of the Rankin-Bass animated Christmas special, "The Year without a Santa Claus," which features memorable turns by Snow Miser and Heat Miser (who are also not members of the Opry).
Friday is also the 55th anniversary of the "Mighty Mouse Playhouse's" television premiere. In TV's early days, broadcasters were desperate for material to air, so old movies and cartoons were natural fodder, and Paul Terry's "Mighty Mouse" cartoons were some of the oddest programs to come to the screen. Mini operatic melodramas, they featured the eponymous rodent singing his was through battles with the villainous Oil Can Harry. Mighty made a brief comeback in the 80s in a brilliant TV series produced by Ralph Bakshi, but he's been in retirement since self-appointed censor Donald Wildmon mistook the mouse's flower sniffing for drug use. (No, really.) Wildmon isn't the only well-intentioned, if-misguided, protector we mention, though, since Thursday is the anniversary of the founding of the John Birch Society, which has been protecting Americans from the Communists lurking under their beds for 52 years.
Legitimate do-gooders have something to celebrate this weekend, too. Thursday is the U.N's annual International Anti-Corruption Day, dedicated to wiping out, well, corruption and promoting the rule of law, and Friday is both Human Rights Day and the beginning of Human Rights Week.
We end by noting a delightful juxtaposition on Thursday. December 9, 1792, saw the first cremation in America, when statesman Henry Laurens died at his plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, and per his will, his body was burned. On the same date in 1886, Clarence Birdseye, inventor of frozen food was born. We're reminded of the choice Curly Howard was given in a Three Stooges short: to be burned at the stake or to have his head cut off. He opted for the former, on the reasoning that a hot stake's better than a cold chop. Good night!
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Quite possibly the biggest fan
of National Cookie Day
(Photo by Peter Taylor)
|
The next few days will take on a musical flavor. On Monday, jazz pianist Dave Brubeck turns 90, an event which will be celebrated with a new Clint Eastwood-produced documentary that will premiere on TCM. Brubeck (with saxophonist Paul Desmond) pioneered the cool West Coast jazz of the 1950s with such tunes as "Take Five" and "Blue Rondo à la Turk." He still tours regularly and his playing is as strong as ever. In 2009, he was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor, and this Sunday, the latest batch of those awards will be given to country singer Merle Haggard, Broadway composer Jerry Herman, choreographer Bill T. Jones, rock legend Paul McCartney, and the one and only Oprah Winfrey.
Someone who probably should have received a Kennedy Center Honor, but didn't, was lyricist Ira Gershwin, born December 6, 1896. Ira was the brother of composer George Gershwin, and together they wrote scores of classic tunes (a bare-bones list of which would include "I Got Rhythm" "The Man I Love," "They Can't Take That Away From Me," and "Someone to Watch Over Me") that have become enshrined in the Great American Songbook. The first lyricist to win a Pulitzer Prize (for 1931's "Of Thee I Sing"), he died in 1983.
Friday will mark the 42nd anniversary of Elvis Presley's "'68 Comeback Special." "The King" had been domesticated by his Hollywood career, turning out one bland movie after another, but this TV special brought back the "dangerous" Elvis of the 1950s -- in black leather! -- and led to the Las Vegas appearances and concert tours that continued until his death.
Some historical events of note on Sunday. In 1848, President James K. Polk triggered the Gold Rush of '49 by confirming that gold had been discovered in California, and in 1945, the so-called "Lost Squadron" disappeared when five U.S. Navy Avenger bombers carrying 14 flyers began a training mission from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station, from which they never returned. Perhaps they were swallowed by the Bermuda Triangle, or perhaps they were just practicing their stealthy ninja training. Given that Sunday is also the Day of the Ninja, we think that one explanation is as likely as the other.
Saturday will bring some birthdays in the world of entertainment. Not only will it be the 49th birthdays of actresses Daryl Hannah and Julianne Moore, it will also be the 80th birthday of legendary French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Godard was at the center of the French "New Wave" that took cinema by storm in the 1950s. Its gritty, in-your-face techniques have influenced directors as diverse as Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh, Brian De Palma, and Oliver Stone. Like Brubeck, Godard is still working. His latest movie, "Film Socialisme" was released in France in May, and another film (about the Holocaust) is rumored to be on the way.
A filmmaker who couldn't have been more different from Godard was Walt Disney, whose 109th birthday falls on Sunday. Given the distance between Godard's Marxism and Disney's conservatism, one can only wonder what the two of them thought of each other. Perhaps the brainiacs at the Encyclopedia Britannica could tell us, since Sunday is also the 242nd anniversary of the first publication of that know-it-all compendium.
Four holidays to finish out the old week and begin the new. Friday is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, this year dedicated to "mainstreaming disability in the Millennium."
Sunday is International Volunteer Day, which recognizes volunteers for their efforts and increases public awareness of their contribution to society.
Monday begins Handwashing Awareness Week, something that's always a good idea, (especially after using the bathroom). Handwashing helps prevent the spread of disease, and if you're celebrating National Cookie Day Saturday, you won't get dirt all over your delicious cookies.
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Goodnight to the creature
who swims in the lake.
Goodnight to the killjoys
who think she's a fake. |
Thursday, we noted the anniversary of Route 66, and until the federal government decommissioned it, the various highway departments in the states through which the road ran kept it in good shape. Not every such department is as fastidious, though. For example, there's the Oregon Highway Division, which on November 12, 1970, decided that the best way to destroy a rotting sperm whale that had beached itself before dying was to blow it up, an incident which led to one the greatest memes in Internet history: "the exploding whale."
While the whale parts made for a gloppy, smelly mess, the resulting patterns might well have resembled a masterpiece by Sunday's birthday boy, Claude Monet. Born in 1840, Monet was part of the revolutionary school of painting (taking its name - "Impressionism" – from of one of Monet's pictures) that was notable for depicting the effects of light on objects and places and making unique personal statements through their canvases.
Friday must be a day for creatures. In 1933, Hugh Gray took the first known photos of the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland. While some deny the existence of "Nessie," we are convinced she is alive and well.
Not so benign a creature was Joseph McCarthy, the senator who took paranoia, ignorance, and character assassination to new heights. Sunday would have marked his 102nd birthday. McCarthy was, by all accounts, an unpleasant man, and through his unceasing attempts to smear anyone who opposed him as a Communist, he managed to give his name to both an era and a political tactic. Censured by the Senate in 1954 for his actions, he eventually drank himself to death in 1957.
Almost as unpleasant as Sen. McCarthy is Yanni, the New Age musician whose calming tunes are as soporific as the situation comedies of Sherwood Schwartz. Both men celebrate their birthdays on Sunday, so perhaps Mr. Schwartz (responsible for such sitcoms as The Brady Bunch" and "Gilligan's Island") and Mr. Hrysomallis (Yanni's real name) will spend the night before their 94th and 56th birthdays, respectively, watching something more energetic, like UFC 122. (The idea of Yanni screaming himself hoarse over wrestlers is pretty delicious.)
Of course, it's possible that the men might celebrate with a trip, though we wouldn't suggest one as energetic as that begun on November 14, 1889, when pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) began her successful attempt to travel around the world in fewer than 80 days, in emulation of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg. Nellie completed the trip in a mere 72 days. An appropriate feat this week especially, as National Geography Awareness Week begins on Sunday.
Newspapers around the world covered Nellie's trip, but the BBC couldn't have - because it didn't exist. The venerable network begin its radio service in 1922, some 33 years after her voyage. They've made up for it in the decades since with continuous news and entertainment.
One of the stories we're sure they covered was the marriage of actress Carmen Electra and basketball player Dennis Rodman, wed in Las Vegas (where else?) in 1998. Unfortunately, the happy couple couldn't make a go of it, and they were divorced four-and-a-half months later.
Something else that couldn't last (in spite of surviving about 500 years) was the Inca Empire, which saw the beginning of its end in 1533, when Francisco Pizarro's Spanish conquistadors arrived in Cajamarca, Peru, to show the natives who the new bosses were - a feat not unlike that performed by single women upon single men on Sadie Hawkins Day, which debuted in Al Capp's comic strip, "Li'l Abner" in 1937. Sadie Hawkins was the "homeliest gal" in Abner's hometown of Dogpatch. When she turned 35, her father declared that there would be a race with all the town's unmarried men being pursued by its unamrried women. Any bachelor who was caught was doomed to matrimony.
We end the week by noting that Saturday is World Kindness Day, and noting the 1952 death of a woman who must have been one of the kindest people ever: Margaret Wise Brown. Brown was a writer of children's books, who, in collaboration with such artists as Clement Hurd, turned out such classics as "Goodnight, Moon" and "The Runaway Bunny," which have calmed and enriched the bedtimes of millions of children.
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"That's "Hedy," not "Hedley!" |
Tuesday:
As mysterious as Dorothy Kilgallen's death on November 8, 1965, is the 1965 blackout that overtook much of the Northeast United States and Ontario, Canada on this day. While the official cause was a series of mistakes and blown relays, there were also reports of UFOs near some of the power stations. We don't necessarily believe the reports; we're just saying ... Not all of the Northeast was affected, however, and a full moon that night kept things surprisingly safe, with New York City reporting only five instances of looting.
When one speaks of New York, it's difficult to not think of Stanford White (whose 157th birthday falls on this day). White's distinctive architectural fingerprints can still be found all over Manhattan more than a century after his death. Such structures as the Municipal Building, the Washington Square Arch, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art – not to mention many of the millionaires' mansions on Fifth Avenue - were his designs.
While White's firm designed things to be built, it's a demolished object that we take special notice of today, as it's the 21st anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wall itself was the literal dividing line between East and West Berlin, constructed to keep East Germans from escaping the Communist regime. When that government fell, so did the wall.
Something that irriatated those killjoy East German officials was rock music, and on this day in 1967, the first issue of "Rolling Stone" was published. While "Rolling Stone" was originally dedicated to rock, pop, and blues music and musicians – and those are still its primary focus – it's expanded in the decades since to become one of America's most respected magazines, known for its reporting on politics and entertainment.
Speaking of respect, we throw a little of it to the creative community today as it's Inventor's Day, celebrated today because it's the birthday of actress Hedy Lamarr. Lamarr was not only one of the most glamorous and beautiful actresses of the 1930s and '40s, but was also something of a scientific genius. In 1942, she was granted a patent for a communication system that would "hop" frequencies in order to make radio-guided torpedoes harder to detect. While the technology went basically unused until the '60s, today it forms the basis for wi-fi networks and cell phones.
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Alex had a vocabulary of 150 words.
That's more than some people we know. |
Welcome once again to The Spark, your guide to the week's events, anniversaries, and commemorations.
We'll be frank about this week in particular, though; it's always tough to find events around September 11. It's not easy to maintain our (hopefully) snarky tone around such an anniversary, but we'll do our best.
Monday:
Well, obviously, it's Labor Day, which leads us to ask just where in the world the summer went. Wasn't it Memorial Day about ten minutes ago?
We also look at a couple of deaths today. In 1901, anarchist Leon Czolgosz went to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY, and shot President William McKinley. McKinley didn't die right away; he lingered for a couple of days before passing. Czolgosz never expressed remorse for the murder and was electrocuted on October 29, 1901. So outraged were people by the murder, though, that his family was refused the right to take the body for interment, and it was buried in the prison grounds, where it was dissolved with a combination of quicklime and acid.
In 2007, Alex, the African Grey parrot who was trained by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, died of sudden and unexplained causes. Alex had a vocabulary of about 150 words, and his intelligence was rated at about the level of a five-year-old human. He could distinguish between shapes, colors, and numbers; had an understanding of the concepts of "zero," and personal pronouns; and could lie and joke.
Two TV premieres tonight. One is "The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That" on PBS. It's another one of those public television shows that teaches things to kids, but we have to ask when the Cat, who's nothing but a disruptive anarchist in his books by Dr. Seuss, became an authority figure to be listened to. The other premiere is a show on Cartoon Network based on "Mad" Magazine. Guess there's just not enough content out there for adolescents with undeveloped senses of humor. What hath Judd Apatow wrought?
Tuesday:
In 1921, 16-year-old Margaret Gorman won the Golden Mermaid pageant in Atlantic City, NJ. The pageant was a publicity stunt designed to keep tourists in the city after Labor Day, and officials, no slouches when it came to hyperbole, named Gorman "Miss America." The pageant, which morphed from a beauty contest to a scholarship event, used to be a major part of American pop culture, but in recent years has faded to become a failed reality show followed by yet another Vegas spectacle. Sic transit gloria mundi. (Though we don't know if she ever won the crown.)
On this day in 1930, the "Blondie" comic strip debuted. We've all run across "Blondie" in our time, but we'll wager you didn't know that Blondie's maiden name was Boopadoop, that she started out life as a gold-digging flapper, or that Dagwood was the son of a millionaire, who disowned him for marrying Blondie. Regardless, the Bumsteads have been married since 1933. That’s a heckuva lot of sandwiches.
Wednesday:
So, Monday, we were talking about Leon Czolgosz, and today we'll mention the 169th birthday of Charles J. Guiteau, who shot President James Garfield in 1881. Guiteau was probably the craziest of all Presidential assassins, shooting Garfield because he had never been appointed consul to France, despite his lack of any qualification.
Speaking of unusal political figures, Lyndon LaRouche turns 88 today. LaRouche, is a perennial Presidential candidate who holds, shal we say, "unique" views, including his belief that Queen Elizabeth is the head of an international drug cartel.
While it’s easy to laugh at LaRouche for the wrong reasons, it's also the birthdays of two men at whom it's easy to laugh for the right reasons: Sid Caesar (1922) and Peter Sellers (1925). Caesar was a television superstar in the 1950s, headlining two comedy programs that, thanks to writing staffs that included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, and Larry Gelbart, turned out 90 minutes of classic live comedy every week -- just like "Saturday Night Live," only funny!
Sellers came to fame as a writer and actor on the legendary "Goon Show," whose crazy comedy paved the way for "Monty Python’s Flying Circus," among others. He soon moved on to films, playing multiple roles in such classics as "The Mouse That Roared" and "Dr. Strangelove," before finding film immortality as the blithely incompetent Inspector Clouseau in the "Pink Panther" films.
A couple of musical anniversaries today. In 1932, Patsy Cline was born. Her soulful singing style made her one of the first country singers to cross over to the pop charts. Unfortunately, she was killed in a plane crash at the age of 30. In 1935, a 19-year-old Frank Sinatra made his radio debut as part of the "Hoboken Four" on "Major Bowes' Amateur Hour." The Amateur Hour was a fixture of American entertainment for nearly 40 years and was the "American Idol" of its day; the only difference being that Major Bowes’s contestants were usually talented.
Speaking of talent, it was on this day in 1504 that Michelangelo's "David" was unveiled in Florence. The 17-foot-tall statue on a naked male soon became iconic, and has probably been as mocked and imitated as any work of art since.
While the David was quite an invention, it's not quite as useful as Scotch tape, which made its debut in 1930, when Richard Drew was trying to come up with a product that would allow the painting of sharp lines on automobiles.
In 1892, an early version of the Pledge of Allegiance appeared in "The Youth's Companion" magazine. Suffice it to say, the original did not include the phrase, "One nation under God," which was added by Congress in 1954 at the height of the Red Scare, in order to distinguish America from the Godless Communists of the Soviet Union. Those very Communists were provided with some kind of help -- divine or not -- starting in 1941, when the Siege of Leningrad began. For 872 days, the second-largest city in the Soviet Union was held under siege by the German army. No supplies got in or out, and Leningrad's citizens were forced to scavenge everything they could in order to survive harsh winters and constant bombardment. There are stories that they even had to resort to cannibalism. Regardless, their withstanding of the Nazis is one of the great stories of perseverance in world history.
Not as heroic, but certainly persistent and hard to avoid is "Star Trek," which premiered in 1966. Trekkies may be nerdish and obsessed (for example, we're sure there are those of them who would object to not being called "Trekkers"), but they're certainly literate. And they may well be celebrating International Literacy Day today.
Finally, we note that it's Rosh Hashanah and the beginning of the Jewish high holidays.
Thursday:
A number of birthdays today, including two that run from the sublime to the ridiculous -- which man fits into which category, we leave to you. Colonel Harland Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken was born in 1890, and Mario Batali, the chef who revolutionized American cooking, by, for nothing else, his use of offal and internal organs in his recipes.
To our uncultivated palates, such a diet would lead to a mutiny, which is ironic in that it's also the 256th birthday of William Bligh, whose harsh treatment of his crew led to the mutiny on HMS Bounty. On the other hand, such victuals may well have appealed to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the diminutive French artist who died in 1901. (We can’t speak as to whether such a diet led to either his diminished stature or his death. We just report 'em.)
In more baffling events, the NFL season begins tonight with the Minnesota Vikings taking on the New Orleans Saints. (It's baffling because football is a sport for the fall and winter months, and we're still a couple of weeks from the Autumnal Equinox). Also, the new season of "The Vampire Diaries" begins tonight, and we have to wonder just what we have to do to stop this mania for vampires and zombies! Enough already! (Although, maybe Viking quarterback Brett Favre's eerie longevity is due to his being either a vampire or a zombie. Just sayin'.)
Friday:
It's a day for things we like and admire. For example, it's Raymond Scott's 102nd birthday. Scott was a composer and bandleader in the 1930s and '40s who wrote avant-garde songs, many of which (most notably "Powerhouse") were used by composer Carl Stalling when writing the scores for Warner Bros. cartoons. We're also glad to celebrate the big 5-0 with actor Colin Firth, who always turns in good work, but who especially endeared himself to many a Janeite with he portrayal of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1995 version of "Pride and Prejudice." Musician Jerry Lee Lewis will perform on Broadway tonight with the cast of "Million Dollar Quartet."And we like the "Stand Up to Cancer" telethon, which will take over the television airwaves tonight in order to raise funds to beat cancer.
Of course, not everything today is likeable. For example, you may recall that last week we mentioned the anniversary of the shooting of Louisiana politician Huey Long. Well, after a couple of days of being hospitalized, Long died-- though whether the fatal bullet came from the alleged assassin or his own bodyguards, no one knows.
Saturday:
As we alluded to earlier, it's hard to be snarky this week, and this day, especially, but we'll try.
First of all, we note the coincidence of ground being broken on this day in 1941 for the construction of the Pentagon, when 60 years later, it would be attacked along with the World Trade Center.
When we were kids, we all knew the words to "Oh, Susanna." (You know, "I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee ...") Well, it was first performed by its composer, Stephen Foster, in 1847 at the Eagle Saloon in Pittsburgh, PA. And how was Foster paid for the song? With a bottle of whiskey, which is an ending appropriate for the work of O. Henry, the writer who specialized in twist endings, and who was born in 1862.
Sunday:
We have a mixed bag to end the week.
First, the birthdays of two groundbreaking men. In 1880, H.L. Mencken was born. Mencken, "the Sage of Baltimore," was a reporter, critic, and etymologist, who acid coverage of politics and the Scopes "Monkey Trial" alone would have assured him immortality, but who crowned those accomplishments with his investigations into the roots of American English and by coining such maxims as "No one in this world, so far as I know -- and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me -- has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." -- usually misquoted as "No one ever went broke underestimating the good taste of the American public."
The other is Jesse Owens, born in 1913, Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, forever destroying Hitler's dream of using the games to establish his myth of Aryan superiority.
As groundbreaking as those men were, though, their accomplishments fade in contrast to the French artisans who, 17,000 years ago created a series of cave paintings in Lascaux, France, that were discovered in 1940. The paintings, which depict thousands of human and animals, give paleontologists irreplacable insights into the lives and psychology of paleolithic humans.
Speaking human psychology, we’ll note that today in Russia is the Day of Conception. The Russian government is encouraging citizens of the Motherland to propagate today in hopes that there will be a baby boom on Russia Day, which is nine months from now on June 12.
We'll close this somewhat somber week by noting the 1995 death of actor Jeremy Brett. Brett labored in relative obscurity until in 1985, when he was cast as Sherlock Holmes. Almost overnight, he became the definitive Holmes for many of us, as his strong and quirky characterization matched the downright oddness of the literary Holmes.
See you next time.
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