Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith for August 14, 2015
Transcript:
Well, the original Sherlock Holmes character knew nothing of philosophy or astronomy. That's true. And he also knew very little about, for example geology. Very true. In fact, he... Oh God. Oh God wait. Wikipiphany: The realization that the intellectual conversation you're having is based entirely on each of you having read the same Wikipedia article.
Conan Doyle actually knew very little about those things. And what he did profess to know, he misunderstood. He was a sucker for spiritualism and wrote a book about the existence of fairies.Houdini tried to explain how mediums used deception, but Doyle would not listen..Martin Gardner facetiously suggested that Conan Doyle was not capable of writing the Sherlock Holmes stories, that Dr. Watson wrote them. In one of the stories, Holmes actually admitted that he did not possess knowledge for its own sake, but just as it needed to be applied.