the goblin reservation

It can be dangerous to read a book again after 40 years, especially if it's by an author you loved, but it didn't keep me away from Clifford Simak's 1968 novel "The Goblin Reservation". I did remember that it was set centuries in the Future, I did remember that one of the main characters was a prehistoric man rescued by Time Researchers and who now went by the name Alley Oop, that another character was a ghost who didn't know whose ghost he was, and that there were goblins and trolls, but I had forgotten that these and many other disparate elements added to a slightly messy assemblage and that Simak's style could be clunky. Still, after all those decades, I vividly remembered this:

"Facing one another, dancing to the music of the fairy orchestra, were Ghost and William Shakespeare."

monkeying around

"12 Monkeys" has had two occurrences of "If I do this, it will stop the plague from happening" and, in both cases, it doesn't because the Future's historical records were incomplete. OK. The first time, it was a nice twist. The second time, I became quite annoyed. If next week's episode winds up having the ending of last night's episode turn out to be one more case of this, I'm quitting.