Simplicitee Shirt
Broth is to Cereal as …
As part of my holiday readings, I opened a gift from a few years ago. I wish I could remember who gave this to me. It is a Sherlock Holmes book entitled The Sign of Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. By the fifth page, I realized how much a simplicity-buff Sherlock Holmes really was. I guess the famous phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” might just as easily have turned out, “Simplicity, my dear Watson.” I think I need to go and grab my bent Briar pipe now …
4 Responses to “Simplicity, my dear Watson.”
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But the best one is:
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
It encapsulates both simplicity and acceptance of the inevitable!
Steve Krug mentions Conan-Doyle in “Don’t Make Me Think”: “I’ve always liked the passage in ‘A Study In Scarlet’ where Dr. Watson is shocked to learn that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know that the earth travels around the sun. Given the finite capacity of the human brain, Holmes explains, he can’t afford to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
Ross and Robert, I’m glad to join the band of Sherlock fans out there with you. Best wishes for ‘07, John
The Profound Holmes - from A Case of Identity
“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
This and the one mentioned earlier are some of my favorite Sherlock Holmes quotes.
Andy