Temperatures rising.

Stick it in your ear.

Winner of the Tom Toles Obama Birthday Cartoon Contest

Tom Toles of The Washington Post, Pulitzer-prize-winning Tom Toles, conducted another of his cartoon caption contests, this time to supply a caption for an editorial cartoon commemorating President Obama's 50th birthday. The winner is here. Four out of the top ten finalists is not bad, either.

The Greatest Woodworking Tool Ever.

It slices, it dices, it juliennes, it purees.

The Stanley "55" Plane, the Universal Combination Plane, "A Planing Mill Within Itself." The height of 19th Century manual tool invention, the Stanley 55 combined a shelf-full of molding planes with rabbet, plow, dado, filletster, match, beading, sash and slitting planes. It is certainly the most versatile hand tool ever created, and, when properly adjusted, the most useful. It is, also, unfortunately the most intimidating tool imaginable.

An elaboration of the Stanley 45, which was already an advanced combination plane (above), the 55 looks like a something from a modern steam punk fantasy.




The two fences make the plane formidable, but, although Stanley recommended that both fences be used whenever possible, the 55 could be used most of the time with one fence on the left side.

It could even be used for most purposes without the "tower", the adjustable center bottom, or skate, which provided a third supporting surface for the cutters or plane irons used in making moldings with both convex and concave profiles.

The fact that the plane could serve so many purposes meant that it had to be set up properly when the purpose changed. The adjustments were many, and precision was not only possible but necessary. This precision capability/necessity led to some people calling the plane finicky. They compared it to the dedicated molding planes, which, at most, had one adjustment, that for depth. While not really a fair criticism -- after all the plane was doing the work of a dozen or more planes, it has had the effect of giving the plane a reputation for being difficult to use. Use is seldom a problem, in fact. If the plane is reduced to only the necessary elements for the particular purpose at hand, the actual number of adjustments needed is small. Once they have been made, the plane will cut even a complex molding profile quickly and easily.

Googlenopenolifeatall.

Google is reportedly working on a solution to the problem, created by Google, and first recognized by Gene Weingarten, "humor" columnist of The Washington Post, of the evanescence of original phrasing in the English language.

In the past, a writer could invent a neophrase, a new sequence of words, and it would linger in the literary atmosphere, perhaps for years, as something unique. Then along came the Google spider and soon phrases were being sucked up into the interwebs at the speed of cyberthought, their lifeless carcases cataloged almost the instant that they hit the electronic fly-paper in the personal computer. Phrases that were not caught in Google's virtually infinitely-fine silk sieve became more and more rare and more and more short-lived (not to mention, more and more strained). Gene Weingarten recognized this fact, and coined the word googlenope for the phrase, enclosed by quotations, that returned no hits in a Google search. The word "googlenope" was itself a googlenope only briefly.

Now Google has attacked the problem with its trademark™ brutal force, and come up with the WhatNow® (Weingarten heuristic automatic thesaurus-like natural omni-phrasing wanker), a computer program that does nothing all day but create new English language phrases that can be stored in Google's computer banks, thereby rendering the googlenope extinct. "This is not a swipe at Mr. Weingarten. We are merely protecting our intellectual property," said Google's Sergey Bryn. The googlenope is predicted to have a googlenopenolife at all in the future.

Sherlock: The Blind Wanker.

I estimated in the previous post that this Sherlock had about 50 percent of the brain wattage of the real Holmes. This week I am revising that estimate downward by another 50 percent. This Sherlock makes the odd observation when it suits the plot, but when it is auctorially necessary Sherlock is conveniently blind. Three times during the episode Sherlock misses important clues that are right in front of him, in one case literally right in front of his nose. He does not see the jade hairpin in Lukis' PA/lover's hairdo, even though he is looking over her shoulder as she is working at her computer. The real Holmes would have seen and recognized the importance of the pin, especially as Sherlock was already aware that Lukis had been killed for stealing from someone on his most recent trip to China. Sherlock misses the partial translation on the photo of the graffiti. Even more egregious, in a lame PC bow to the "need" to make the female love-interest more than simply a Victorian victim, he is shown up by Sarah, Watson's latest candidate for the next Mrs. Watson, who points it out. And, then, while he is standing not twenty feet from the doorway of 221B, Watson and Sarah are abducted from the flat by Tong members who walked in by the front entrance!

Nothing, however, can compare to the idiocy of the earlier culmination of the search for the elusive witness, Soo Lin, the young Chinese woman who can provide the secret of the cipher. Having stressed the importance of finding her before the agents of the Tong can silence her, Sherlock and Watson track her back to the museum where she has concealed herself. Then, during the vitally important questioning of her about the cipher, they are interrupted by the evident arrival of the assassin. What to do? What to do? WWSHD? Well, the logical thing to do would be to fortify the room and protect their witness. Lure the assassin to them, where he might be trapped. That is what the real Sherlock Holmes would do. So no chance of this Sherlock doing it. Instead, run, run like the northwind out of the room, leaving Watson to hold the unfortified position. And what is Sherlock's plan? To dash around aimlessly while the killer shoots at him. Naturally, the killer is hopeless at shooting. And none of his shots actually cause any damage to the museum or its exhibits. They just make ping-zinging noises. And then, to top off the idiocy, Watson decides that it is more important to "help" Sherlock, by also running out, than to stay and to defend their witness. (Which, after all, is what they came to do.) How is he planning to help? He's a soldier. We have seen him shoot a man. He must have come out armed, right? No, of course not. The real Watson would do that, but this is not the real Watson. He's not even the wooly-headed Nigel Bruce, who always went armed into trouble. Watson's plan is the same as Sherlock's, to dash around aimlessly. It's a consistent plan, to be sure. The natural result is that the witness, alone and unprotected, is murdered. Brilliant! They couldn't have done better to further the plot, the plot of the Tong, that is.

And speaking of the Tong plot, really? They suspect one of three people of stealing the jade pin. So their strategy is to vandalize a museum, a library and a bank, leaving graffiti? Really? They cannot simply grab them, as they did Watson and Sarah? What does the graffiti accomplish, except to expose them to public and official scrutiny? And speaking of grabbing Watson and Sarah, really? They have observed Sherlock and Watson, and they don't know which is which? All Englishmen look alike? The Tong has never heard of the internet? Granted, Google might be censored in China, but Sherlock has a website, and his picture has been in the news online and in print. So, really, they don't know what he looks like? And even assuming that they couldn't do an online search, Moriarty sponsored their entry to the UK. He didn't send them a massive dossier on Sherlock? Really?

We need hardly mention the ludicrous and numerous Clouseau-Kato hand-to-hand battles in which Sherlock engages throughout the episode. The one in the tunnel while Sarah is waiting to be impaled by the Mwahaha villain's (the sham Fu Manchu General Shan) catapult bolt is remarkable for its silliness. (And repetitiveness, being a duplicate of the earlier strangulations.) And the Mwahaha villain's impression of Dr. Evil is spot-on. As Seth Green might say, "Just pop a cap in his ass!" And when she actually tries to shoot Holmes, what is his counter? To tell her that the muzzle velocity of her gun when calculated against the curvature of the walls of the tunnel will likely result in a dangerous ricochet, which might harm one of her henchmen. HUH? It's gibberish. What the hell does the curvature of the walls have to do with the travel of the bullet away from her? And what does one wounded henchman mean in the great Tong scheme of things?

Is this really the 21st Century's best effort at updating Holmes -- a buffoon in a parody of The Pink Panther? Yes, so it appears.

Verdict: Sinking fast.

A Study in Brown.

A Sherlock for the 21st Century IdiotIdiom.

Sherlock Holmes was to be updated, modernized, brought into the contemporary scene -- so ran the announcements late in 2009. Hardly the first time that Holmes had been brought forward from his native Victorian milieu and settled among a generation removed from that era by decades of world-altering events. Had not Universal and Basil Rathbone leaped fifty years from the paradoxical 20th Century Fox's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, set in the late 19th Century, to the series of iconic 65 minute B-movies set during the 1940s and World War II? At least twice he he had been cryogenically frozen and revived, once for a TV movie in the 1980s (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1987, with Margaret Colin as Jane Watson, and Michael Pennington as Holmes.) and again in a cartoon series set in the 25th Century.

Holmes has survived his creator's attempt to kill him with some risible prose and a plunge over Reichenbach falls, hundreds of mediocre or worse adaptations and pastiches, parodies and dotty impersonators (Judge Justin Playfair of They Might Be Giants being among the better versions of a mad Holmes). And then there are the imitations that are spread across current television channels.

Foremost among the imitations is Dr. Gregory House, M.D., who practices medicine and Sherlockian inferences on House, M.D., oddly enough, on Newscorp's FOX, the modern incarnation of the great studio. House not only has taken possession of Holmes' old address, but he takes over Holmes' source, Dr. Joseph Bell, the mentor of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle. It was Bell who astounded the young Doyle with his perception and deductive ability, as he accurately read his patients' jobs, habits, places of residence and familiar relations from clues gathered by quick examinations of their persons. Second among the current imitations is Patrick Jane, The Mentalist. Jane exercises the same perception and penetration, but with crime-solving rather than medicine as his field. He is mocking and heedless of authority, even as he works with the police. He sees to the bottom of the criminal rather than the crime. It becomes a test of minds for Jane, who delights in outthinking murderers. A true spiritual son of Holmes. Least of these is Adrian Monk. If these copies can succeed in the modern world, despite all the advances in technology and information gathering, why not, then, the original, the Master Detective himself?

All the old cautions apply, beginning with the one, "In theory..." Yes, it could work, and you would imagine that, having come up with the notion of re-creating Holmes in the present, the idea would be auto-completing, like the software that intuits your typing on Google. But it's not that easy. It takes a visionary mind to translate Macbeth to another culture. It takes a mediocre mind to advance Sherlock Holmes a century within his own culture. The type of mind it took to produce "Sherlock" is mercifully hidden from me.

One would expect the modern Holmes, or Sherlock as we must henceforth call him, to possess the same character traits -- the comprehensive genius, the obsessive concentration, the scalpel-like incisiveness, the shortness of temper that comes with a mind that is always straining against the plodding of mundane reality, but expressed in the idiom of today. All the long-cherished features of the character would beam out in a new and shinier 2.0 release. Whatever. What we get is a collection of tics passed off as traits. Or, to continue the software metaphor, we get all the bugs and none of the features. The new Sherlock owes more to Adrian Monk than to his forebear. And if that were not sufficiently annoying, the production delights in its debt to Numb3rs, from which its visual style steals all the gimmicks but none of the solidity. We see Sherlock observing and examining, and, for some unfathomable reason, each observation and factoid must be labeled on-screen for those in the viewing audience who cannot wait thirty seconds. Yes, because in thirty seconds Sherlock will explain everything he has seen and all that he has deduced during his examination of the scene. What, then, do the labels accomplish? They provide a display. For viewers with an attention span conditioned by the refresh rate of an LCD pixel, there must be some ever-changing optical stimulation, lest they become comatose before the character can speak.

But that's not all! There's less! Not satisfied with reducing Sherlock to a narrow set of quirks, the producers have deprived him of about half the wattage of his massive brain. Sherlock has not gone Green. No, he has gone brown, as in brownout, or the color of diarrhea. Whereas the original Holmes could divine the essence of a case in the bare clues of the Lauriston Gardens murder, setting his snares and revealing all only after the criminal had been captured, the new Sherlock has to have the crime explained to him by the killer himself. Sherlock blunders ahead, making the trademark brilliant observations about everyone and everything, but completely in the dark about the criminal he is supposedly searching out with laser-like intensity. Holmes knew everything about Jefferson Hope after a few minutes in A Study in Scarlet. In A Study in Pink, he knows nothing until the last few minutes. Even the basics of human nature, which Holmes understood with clinical precision, and knew to be necessary to the understanding of the criminal mind, elude Sherlock, who finds such essentials of criminal investigation "boring." And then there are the outright stupidities. The most glaring of which occurs when a policeman calls Sherlock "our favorite psychopath." Sherlock, in a frenzy, wheels upon him and shouts, "I'm not a psychopath, Anderson. I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research." Do your research, indeed. Apart from the redundancy of "high-functioning sociopath," that line reeks of TV profiling, wherein some writer has taken the catchy "high-functioning schizophrenic" and combined it with the ever-popular sociopath to form what sounds like a convincing classification of psych disorder. The real Holmes, the real modern Holmes, would know, would be intimately knowledgeable about, the DSM IV psychiatric diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is the real term used by real doctors to classify the popularisms psychopath and sociopath. This Sherlock is not the great detective with the scientific method coded in his DNA and expressed like bioluminescence. This Sherlock is a mutant, whose defective genes are coded with some weird albinism that mimics brilliance.

But he is modern, with all the vapidity that the term implies. I give him that.

A footnote: The business of the police mistakenly calling the string of murders suicides is lifted from the Rathbone movie, The Spider Woman, one of the better entries in the Universal series. You would think that, what with the Holmes canon being in the public domain with the lapse of 75 years since Conan Doyle's death in 1932, the producers would have plenty of material to pollute without dipping their feet into movie adaptations, but they seem to have sunk well below even such low expectations.

"Sherlock" at PBS Masterpiece. Sunday Oct. 24, 2010.

The Fiddler in the Subway: A review

Print journalism is dying, they say. The evidence is all around us. The shrunken corpses of once mighty newspapers lie crumpled and discarded, soon to vanish on the next puff of wind. Great buildings that once had throbbed with huge machinery, devouring paper forests and drinking ink rivers, are veritable whited sepulchers, empty and silent, empty even of echoes. The universe, too, is winding down, if we are to believe the reports. Nothing lasts forever. But there are yet bright spots in the darkness. That is one of the corollaries of entropy. Some papers are still turning out thoughtful work. The Washington Post is one of those bright spots. Yes, it has suffered along with the rest of the industry, but it has fought back. There are still reasons why print journalism matters. Gene Weingarten, more often than not, is one of those reasons. The articles collected in this book demonstrate why newspapers were and continue to be necessary. Nowhere else can you find writing this good about subjects that, however unlikely to warrant attention some may seem, should be noticed. Newspapers make this kind of writing possible.

The topics run the gamut from b to b, baseball to babies. Well, there are some other letters, too. There is great reporting in The First Father, an investigation that begins in the dark, literally, and ends up bringing to light the hidden story of Bill Clinton's biological father, W.J. Blythe. There is the search for the Armpit of America, in which our intrepid reporter has to stumble upon something nice to say about Battle Mountain, Nevada. And then there are the two pieces for which Pulitzer prizes in Feature Writing were awarded: the title story, The Fiddler in the Subway (originally titled Pearls Before Breakfast), the story of what happens when an audacious but simple stunt turns into a wildly successful feature, reprinted everywhere, and Fatal Distraction, an unflinching look into a grievous modern-day trend, the deaths of children through inattention.

Those are the topics, but the real subjects of all the included articles are lurking in the background. They are two, the more potent of whom is Time. For it is Time that stalks through each of these journalistic essays. Journalism is, after all, the record of what happened in the day. Time the patient, inexorable hunter, whose arrows fly but one way, straight into the heart, is the prime mover of all these works. The time since Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth's single season home run record. The instant of time it takes to forget a child in the back seat of a locked car. Time to stop and listen to the falling of the rose petals of a violin concert, the notes almost drowned out by the tread of the mundane. And the second subject? Time has a companion, a bloodhound, who lopes along before his master. But the bloodhound likes to pause and circle and backtrack when it comes upon an interesting scent. It likes to dig in the most peculiar places, and often in the most disgusting messes. Its gait is loose, sloppy, leisurely. It is the reporter. You glimpse him now and then, but it is his voice that you hear downwind, seemingly far off at times, but insistent. Yes, it is the reporter and Time who are the real subjects. So, when the obituary for print journalism is finally written, there is one person who should be chosen to write it: Dave Barry. Gene Weingarten will be busy sniffing under some rock, trying to make sense of it all.