SOUNDTRACK: “Elementary, My Dear” (1973).
You have to have a particularly cruel heart if you don’t love School House Rock.
All of the songs, well, most of the songs, are super catchy and by golly if you don’t learn a lot.
And they attack problems in an interesting way. The premise of using Noah’s Ark to show how to multiply by 2 is genius.
You’ll get that “elementary, my dear” section stuck in your head. But I’m also impressed at the way the song goes into unexpected chords for “you get an even number.” And I love the way Bob Dorough really gets into it (whooping it up at the end).
Few people would think that the 2 times table is hard, but man is it fun to sing along to.
This song is not as popular as some of the other ones, but it’s still great
[READ: April 14, 2014] “A Study in Sherlock”
A while back I wrote a post about Sherlock Holmes on TV (Sherlock and Elementary) and in the movies (Sherlock Holmes). I had read a few stories and so I did a brief comparison of the shows. Since then while I have continued to believe that Sherlock is the better show, I have really grown to appreciate Elementary a lot more. They almost seem incomparable because they are so very different in structure and intent. Elementary has actually been a little more satisfying lately because it has so many more episodes that it allows the characters to develop and fail in interesting ways–something that the three episodes of Sherlock simply won’t do.
Laura Miller has done a similar thing with this article. Although in fairness she did a lot more research than I did and talks a lot more about the original books and stage and early film adaptations, and she talks a lot less about the TV shows. And no she doesn’t cite my post.
This was an enjoyable piece because it goes beyond the commonly known elements of Conan Doyle–how he did not like Holmes and tried to kill him off twice, that he wanted to write more important fiction–and into what Holmes was like after Doyle was finished with him. Holmes has entered the public domain in both England and America, and so he is basically free for everyone to use, much like a classic myth or a fairy tale. The big difference is that we know his origins.
What I especially enjoyed was that so many things that we think of as quintessential Holmes are actually not from Doyle. His deerstalker hat was added by a book illustrator but is never mentioned in the text. The calabash pipe came a decade later when a stage actor used it so that the audience could still see his face. Conan Doyle was still alive while these changes were being made. Indeed, when a play of Sherlock Holmes was written, the playwrite called and asked if he could give the man a love interest and Conan Doyle replied, “Marry him, murder him or do what you like with him.” (more…)
I Just Read About That... 