If that is the case, it’s not just some girls. It’s also film and television folks.

Nothing else accounts for the tongue-dragging slavering over Professor Moriarity.

Frankly, they should get over Moriarity already.

He was a minor character invented for only one purpose: to facilitate A. Conan Doyle’s plan to assassinate Sherlock Holmes. He was not a criminal genius; he was a tool and hit man.

The story is a sordid one.

Doyle had decided that Sherlock Holmes was overshadowing his more “serious” fiction (anyone who has read his more “serious” fiction realizes overshadowing it was not difficult) and must be done away with.

Doyle spun the tale of a mysterious shadowy criminal mastermind so he–Doyle–could pitch Holmes over the cliff at Reichenbach Falls. Moriarity never actually appears in the story, being merely an invisible red herring to distract the reader from the true assassin, Doyle himself.

Moriarity appears, again only by name and never in person, in only two of the other 59 tales of the Canon: The Adventure of the Empty House, in which Holmes, defying the malevolence of his creator, reappears, rounds up the last of Moriarity’s (that is, Doyle’s) henchmen, and resumes his career at 221B Baker Street, and The Valley of Fear, again as a mention in what is quite possibly the worst of the Canon–it’s the only one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories I have not been able to re-read, though I’ve read the rest of the Canon five? six? seven? I forget how many times.

Yet movie makers and television broadcasters keep returning to Moriarity.

(Spoiler Alert)

Even Elementary* spent the better part of this season building up to a Moriarity, quite ignoring that Irene Adler was, in actuality, Nero Wolfe’s mother, having borne him after an interlude with Holmes during Holmes’s travels following the incident at Reichenbach and before the return to London.

Please, enough with the Moriaritys already.

________________

*Although, I must say, they pulled it off, and did so more stylishly than I expected. But for Pete’s sake, it’s “I-REE-nee,” not “I-REEN.”

He has a lot of fun in the column and, indeed, sovereign citizens may reside in the “People’s Republic of Stupidstan,” as Ruth suggests, but they can also be dangerous.

Video below the fold because it autoplays.

Via The Richmonder.

Channel 2 Action News reported that the victim (an eight-year-old girl–ed.) was in bed when a stray bullet entered her family’s apartment and struck her in the leg.

Police found several shell casings from an assault rifle scattered in the parking lot of the Shawnee Apartments, according to Channel 2.

To add insult to injury, it happened on Gun Club Road.

Via Lane Crothers, also comments on the right-wing scandal machinations.

Food for thought is no substitute for the real thing.

If you get too close, the adults will lower their heads and charge you.

A 2-year-old boy in North Carolina is expected to survive after shooting himself with his father’s gun over the weekend.

Randolph County deputies said that the toddler found the handgun in his parents’ room at their home just outside Asheboro around 2 p.m. on Saturday. The boy put the gun in his mouth and fired it.