A song in the style of 90s-era Tom Waits

A conversation with Traci Paris reminded me I wrote this and totally forgotten about it. Since otherwise it will just collect digital dust on my hard drive, I'll present it here. No title yet.

Hetta Rose doesn’t like this water in her hair

and we’ve been in Sausalito half a week

we need to find the kerchief with the green and yellow squares

to tie the two by seven hose that has a leak

to tie the two by seven hose that has a leak

so let me have those Madeilenes  that turned a little white

and I promise that I won’t come back no more

they used to give a box of rolls to me and Jack the Turk

for cleaning all the feathers off the floor.

for cleaning all the feathers off the floor.

but Independence isn’t the kind of place it used to be

the trains don’t even leave behind the steam

the comics store gets closed up when the chickens go to bed

and a brewer leads the lineup on our team

and a brewer leads the lineup on our team

Seamus built a chapel up on Cemetery Road

and took the people in on Tuesday nights,

he prayed the angels take the bottle hid behind the seventh pew

but Saturday the house was locked up tight

but Saturday the house was locked up tight

they’d said the Waters gas machine would put us on the map

we’d bring in folks from  Memphis and Tuskegee

but if you have an open Pearl Street lot you bought in ’17

you couldn’t get eleven bucks from me

you couldn’t get eleven bucks from me

A minor complaint about Sherlock on Sunday night.

A minor complaint about Sherlock on Sunday night. There was a scene near the beginning where Sherlock says to Mycroft "I didn't know you knew Serbian," and Mycroft says "I didn't." Which is fine, they should have left it there. Got it. Mycroft is even more brilliant than Sherlock; he can learn to speak a whole language at the drop of a hat.

Instead Mycroft goes on to say that it "took him a few hours" to learn it. And that was what Scalzi would call a "flying snowman" to me; it just stretched my suspension of disbelief beyond its breaking point. If I remember, a full language has 100,000 words or so with maybe 20,000 in common use. Mycroft says it's a Slavic language, and he probably knew another Slavic language, like Russian.

But Mycroft needed to learn to speak the language as well as a native in order to fool the other guards. So he'd have to know every single difference about how any word is used. A few hours -- say four -- is 14,400 seconds. So he'd have to learn more than one word a second, not counting grammar and pronunciation, which again would have to be perfect if he's going to convince the other guard he's actually Serbian.

This crosses the line to me from utter brilliance to supernatural. And it's foundational to the universe that Sherlock's (and by extension Mycroft's) abilities must be nearly unbelievable but in the end natural. Why couldn't he have just said, "It took me a whole week?"