News You Can Bruise for 2005 July 14

Sumana said I should "blog" this, so here goes.

Let me quote the noted sage, "earlier version of myself":

Entry with link in it to follow.

Found from the Project Gutenberg feed: The Pursuit of the House-Boat is an early piece of fan fiction starring the ghosts of various historical and fictional characters. It is little better than a hypothetical Hanna-Barbera cartoon dealing with the same subject, but the clever part is that it features Sherlock Holmes, freshly dead from his trip over Reichenbach Falls.

The author figured that since Conan Doyle was sick of using the Holmes character, he could just steal it and use it in his own works (I wonder if you could use Holmes this way today.) But then the story's canonality was invalidated when Conan Doyle started writing Holmes stories again, claiming that Holmes didn't actually die. Retcon is a cruel mistress.

As previously noted, the illustration captions make a good story on their own:

“‘DR. JOHNSON’S POINT IS WELL TAKEN’”
“‘WHAT HAS ALL THIS GOT TO DO WITH THE QUESTION?’”
“POOR OLD BOSWELL WAS PUSHED OVERBOARD”
“THE STRANGER DREW FORTH A BUNDLE OF BUSINESS CARDS”
“THREE ROUSING CHEERS, LED BY HAMLET, WERE GIVEN”

but I think this container ship might carry too many shipping containers.