The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 1.7
Featuring Cretaceous Period dinosaurs, 80s body-swap movies and the fourteenth commandment
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Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Mortimer returned for his stick
And now, the story continues…
“A presentation, I see,” said Holmes.
“Yes, sir.”
“From Charing Cross Hospital?”
“From one or two friends there on the occasion of my marriage.”
“Dear, dear, that’s bad!” said Holmes, shaking his head.
Dr. Mortimer blinked through his glasses1 in mild astonishment. “Why was it bad?”
“Only that you have disarranged our little deductions. Your marriage, you say?”
“Yes, sir. I married, and so left the hospital2, and with it all hopes of a consulting practice. It was necessary to make a home of my own.”
“Come, come, we are not so far wrong, after all,” said Holmes. “And now, Dr. James Mortimer—”
“Mister, sir, Mister—a humble M.R.C.S.3”
“And a man of precise mind, evidently.”
“A dabbler in science, Mr. Holmes, a picker up of shells on the shores4 of the great unknown ocean5. I presume that it is Mr. Sherlock Holmes whom I am addressing and not—”
“No, this is my friend Dr. Watson6.”
“Glad to meet you, sir. I have heard your name mentioned in connection with that of your friend. You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic7 a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development8. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure9? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull10.”
Blinking through one’s glasses was a beloved parlour trick at the time, suggesting that for celebrations and other socialising, Mortimer would have been a highly marketable raconteur.
Doctors of the era would be forced to leave hospitals because of the grave risk of them stumbling into an adulterous affair with a nurse to whom they weren’t married. ‘Troth before treatment’ was most hospitals’ motto.
Marketable Raconteurs for Celebrations and Socialising.
A ‘picker up of shells on the shores’ was considered an introductory tongue-twister for novices in the tongue-twisting arts. Other introductory tongue-twisters included ‘Peter Piper picked a tomato from a vine’ and ‘I scream, you scream, we all scream for a slice of vanilla cheesecake.’
Danny Ocean.
Clients confusing Watson with Holmes would become a running gag in later stories, to the point where, as part of the great body-swap movie craze of the 1980s, Paramount executives pitched a film called ‘Holmes-ward Bound’ in which the two switched minds during a fog-addled cocaine deal. Initial scripts were described as ‘diabolical even for this genre’ and swiftly shelved.
A dolichocephalicus was a plant-eating dinosaur of the Cretaceous Period who wouldn’t shut up about veganism
In the book, movie and Broadway musical, The Martian, botanist Mark Watney is left stranded on Mars, leading to a smart joke in which the rest of his crew comment that their spaceship is now an ‘unMarked supra-orbital development’.
This request was heavily censored in the original printing of this story, lest it cause ‘untoward consequences upon the gentle constitutions of London’s virtuous maidens’.
‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s skull’ is the little known fourteenth commandment. (Eleventh: ‘Thou shalt not refuse a waltz with thy aunt’, twelfth: ‘Thou shalt not instigate a plot by forgetting thy walking stick’ and thirteenth: ‘Backup thy hard drives on a regular basis’.)