Meeting Minutes CREE (2026)
Max Magee
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yvf64z5Do_1CQPVzVZhK6bNHn5VUDkVGW_VC2BRPSmA/edit?usp=sharing
Meeting Minutes
Notorious Canary-Trainers
Announcements
Show & Tell
Glen - Air Rifle of Lewis & Clark
Max - Lego (Max) Book kit & Mystery Flavored Muffins
Our Sea Monkey captain mixed up a "Black-Faced Langur" (A Dark & Stormy w/Banana Liqueur float)
Diane - Don’t care for this story even though it has some fun elements (Max was fumbling with his laptop to get a notes document started, sorry Diane, I didn’t get much more.)
Kevin - The Granada adaptation was not as good as the canonical story. “Come at once if convenient, if inconvenient, come all the same.” Dog was a nice element. Big thumbs up from me.
Mary - I’ve always enjoyed it; maybe because my background is in anthropology and having been in academia, I can sympathize with Bennet. Bazaar science-fiction in it. Like the Victorians. I liked that there was kind of a good hound this time. Holmes’ observation about dogs in the story. Some of the science is stretched pretty thin, but I enjoyed it.
Dave - I enjoyed the science elements quite a bit, and this was one where the Klinger footnotes were really useful and interesting. The detection was not very interesting—other than the 9 day cycle, they just kind of said “let’s see what happens.” The Tin Box, Watson the institution. Didn’t get too much Watson in this one.
John - I have a blend of things to say. I thought it was a fine story: I don’t look at these as needing to be mysteries, they’re strange adventures. It was fun to read through. I wanted to make 60 comments about About 60. I highly recommend The Monkey Gland Affair. The only people who refer to evolution as a belief are young earth creationists. The medical philosophy in there was poo-poohed at the time. The research was important because we did discover hormones, particularly the sex hormones.
Max - Don’t like the story, but enjoyed the read. It’s not one of the ones that is memorably bad, it’s just a middling story. Some pieces are memorable (if you were to say “langur testicles” we’d know the story in question) but the details, the characters, (even Roy!) are unremarkable. It just squeaks into the top half for me. An entree to the science of the era. It’s using gothic horror tropes as a red-herring to make the reader engage with the gothic/horror story using the conventions of one, but then solving the “mystery” through scientific investigation. It’s literary sleight of hand and it’s fun to read, even if I didn’t enjoy the plot or story as much as many of the others.
Glen - My opinion of the story—like all of us, I like them all—I’m not a science fiction lover, and this goes in my bottom 10 percent. (Cuckoo clock chime.) I love the elements of the story: There was no Baker Street Irregulars, no Mrs. Hudson, no idiot detective…In the About 60, I thought she put a hell of a lot more thought into this than Doyle did. Handsome, I usually think of that as describing a man, but Watson says that about women a lot. How dignified do you have to be to be a lecturer?
Next month's story: The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire (Jan 1924)
Yeoman Purser of the Barque of the Lone Star & Cap'n Basil's Mignonettes