Friday, July 13, 2012

Sher Genius.

I was walking home after a jog along the M river, when suddenly I hear the bright clang of metallic plates behind me, letting me know that a cyclist was crossing the bridge and fast approaching from behind.

He whizzed past me and shortly after, my ears pricked to the clang of metal again. This time the sound was a lot more dull.

Using my Sherlock(tm)-ian powers of deduction, I surmised that the approaching cyclist was in his sixties, heavyset and a little out of shape, has a wife who doesn't love him anymore, is left-handed, and has two pet dog....

..... and that's when I jumped out of the way of the approaching park-maintenance car.

Genius, Sherlock. Seriously, if I were any stupider, I would be a butternut pumpkin (which are well documented to be the least intelligent of the pumpkin species). 

Let's not talk about my amazing powers of deduction, even my survival instincts are made of fail. 

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We have been making movie nights out of watching Sherlock, the BBC movie-length miniseries  reinterpretation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic detective.


The casting is perfect, with Benedict Cumberbatch making a masterful Sherlock, with the unassuming Martin Freeman playing the competent and endearing yet relatively duller John Watson. The cinematography is as good as anything to have come out of Britain in recent years, jumping between MTV-paced pursuits and claustrophobic suspense scenes. 

The script has been clever to the point of being breathtaking at times, and all Sherlock Holmes fans will delight in the homage paid to the original stories. 221B Baker Street has now been repackaged and reintroduced to a whole new generation of fans.

I remember reading any Sherlock stories I could come across as a child, and now I am re-reading them again on my iPhone. The words are still fresh and the images they conjure in the imagination are as eerie and  entertaining as it must have been to his readers almost 150 years ago.

Apparently the inspiration for Sherlock came from two doctors - Dr Joseph Bell, who could infer the greatest conclusions about his patients from the slightest detail, and Sir Henry Littlejohn who was a Forensic Medicine lecturer and Police Surgeon.

Which goes to show how variable the powers of observation in doctors are - I stand as evidence to the other end of the spectrum. :)

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