The Return of Holmes

After a "Great Hiatus" I'm returning in a similar fashion to the brilliant Sherlock Holmes! Only I didn't fake my death after taking out the biggest criminal in London. I just spaced blogging because my little brother came to visit me here at Manchester for the weekend. Oh, and then the season four premiere of Game of Thrones was on Sunday, so I had a pretty distracted weekend.

This past week I've been busy with new papers and research and such. But this past week I also read of the glorious return of Sherlock Holmes (after spending about two weeks reading Dracula) in "The Empty House." It's really hard to not compare reading Conan Doyle's stories to what happened in season three of BBC's Sherlock, especially since I watched Sherlock before I read anything of Conan Doyle's. 

After the drama and brilliance of Sherlock's return in "The Empty Hearse" (can I just point out how clever they are to rework the titles?) I was pretty disappointed about how nonchalant Sherlock was when he revealed himself to John in "The Empty House." I mean he was in a very clever disguise, but he basically just walked in and told John how he fooled him. With "The Empty Hearse" on the other hand, you're never quite sure how Sherlock deceived everyone. Even when he tells Anderson how he supposedly got away with it, you're still not sure if he was just playing.

After at least three weeks without Sherlock in my life, I've been thrown in full swing. I've read"The Blue Carbuncle," "The Six Napoleons," "The Solitary Cyclist," "The Man with the Twisted Lip," "The Dancing Men," and "The Musgrave Ritual" in the span of two days. With all this exposure to Sherlock's methods in these stories and with The Hound of the Baskervilles coming up this week, I have a pretty big question in my mind: how on earth do I still not catch all these details that Sherlock does?!

(An even more important question might be: when is season four coming out??)

The Smallest Victories Count the Most

I’m feeling a little bit like Manchester University’s Innovator of the Year today. A bit of background info: every year Manchester honors a person who recognizes a problem and develops an innovative solution. Just last month, the 2012-2013 Innovator of the year, Temple Grandin, came to campus to speak.

I’m not quite up to par with Temple, but I did have a couple small innovative victories today. I have this cute little robo-dwarf hamster named Khaleesi (after a Game of Thrones character). Khaleesi is a runner. She’s on her wheel non-stop. It’s one of those metal wheels, and since it’s been about six months since we got her the wheel all the paint has worn off the axles. Every time she gets on the wheel it squeaks. Actually, I’m understating how loud and annoying that wheel has been. It was worse than scraping a metal fork on a ceramic plate.  

I’m proud to say that today I found a solution! I’ve tried a couple things before. I got one of those “silent” wheels, but immediately discovered that wouldn’t work. I couldn’t get the wheel to sit up on the fluffy bottom of her cage, but mostly it wouldn’t work because it grossed me out that it didn’t have the convenient spaces that the metal one did so when she pooped while she ran it would just fall out. After that, I thought about putting WD 40 on it but was too afraid because I didn’t want to put something in her cage that could make her sick. Today, after someone begging me to take her wheel out, I thought to myself, “Hey! Why not try vegetable oil? Surely that can’t hurt her if she can even get to it.” And it works! I can see her running her little heart out, but can’t hear a thing! Amazing!

That was probably my best idea of the day, especially since the only other idea I had was to play Minecraft instead of working ahead on homework or reading more of Dracula. Minecraft is where I found my other innovative spark today. As a child, I always wanted a horse (like almost every other little girl at some point in childhood) but never even got the chance to ride one. I found horses on the Minecraft world I was playing on on today and thought to myself, “Hey! You’ve never ridden a horse in real life, why not try it on the computer?” I got a bunch of materials together, made a lead and a saddle, and tamed a horse so I could ride it! And it was actually kind of fun since I had to put in a lot of work to be able to do so.

Though my innovations were small and only really affected me, I felt pretty good. I’ve never had the chance to ride a horse so I invented a new (digital) way for me to do so, and I didn’t want to make my hamster sick so I used resources available to me to come up with a new way to grease her wheel. I would say that under the circumstances, I was pretty innovative. Maybe MU could start offering students small awards for small accomplishments like that? I think an ice cream cone would suffice.

Ok, So Dracula Is Actually Scary

Well, it has been a very busy past few weeks! I feel really bad that I haven't written since before I went on spring break, but Spectrum (literary arts magazine) is in the final stages before being published, and a lot of professors are throwing mid-term papers at us. I was always told that junior year is the hardest and I haven’t been let down yet. Reading is a really good counterbalance to the all the writing and projects.

At the moment I’m reading Dracula by Bram Stoker, and might I say wow! Do you ever have those books that just effect your mood while you’re reading them? Only three chapters in I’ve discovered that Dracula is one of those books for me. Spending time in that giant castle in Transylvania just seems to make me paranoid in real life.

I’m actually really surprised with myself that I haven’t read Dracula before. But now that I’ve started I’ve found that it’s pretty hard to put down. I’ve seen images of the count in pop culture growing up. Count Chocula, NBC’s Dracula (who is played by John Rhys Meyers), and countless portrayals of vampires in books and tv have really impacted my inner-picture of Count Dracula. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen an old Dracula movie.) When I read the actual description of Dracula, I was completely shocked. If you don’t know, he’s described as older, aquiline, and, even more impressively, has a white moustache.

Did anyone else ever picture the brooding, terrifying Dracula having white moustache?! I sure didn’t. And it kind of ruined my picture of him as some kind of monster. Like, yeah, the pointed ears and reddish eyes are scary, but the moustache just makes me think of him as a frail old man. Granted, the farther I read and more active Dracula becomes in Jonathon Harker’s story, the more evil he becomes. But why is it always that pop culture images I have of the classic stories never fit in with the author’s actual picture? (This same thing happened when I read Frankenstein last year) It really beats me why people change these amazing literary creations so much that when people read the novel, it’s hard to recognize. But true to my English major heart, I think the books are better than any recreation I have seen.