I'm much too strong not to compromise

After Midnight With Boston Blackie wastes no time introducing Barnaby, who looks like Ray Walston three years after he died, being released finally from prison so he can violently cough into a handkerchief. Meanwhile Inspector Farraday intercepts a train porter's message for Blackie, and to show that Blackie somehow handcuffed the inspector's ankle to the train seat regardless of how impossible that would be. Farraday stops in to deliver generic warnings to Blackie. This all ought to set up needed exposition but it more kind of fills time while stuff gets going. It doesn't get going until the train ride is over and Blackie learns from Barnaby's daughter that Barnaby's gone missing.

( I'm rather better, regarding the cold, though I had to miss the day of work, and of writing. On the bright side I have all sorts of other things to write about now. Anyway, another Boston Blackie movie, but be warned, this is an entry featuring blackface because ugh. On the bright side, I finally notice that Inspector Faraday's assistant, Matthews, is the secret genius behind Faraday's indifferent career. Plus: Will Blackie's sidekick Runt get married to this woman we never saw before? The answer … will probably not actually surprise you.  )

Some folks are fickle.

Trivia: To defuse the tension in the White House while waiting for the returns from the state elections of 11 October 1864, Abraham Lincoln read aloud from a pamphlet with the latest writings of humorist Petroleum V Nasby. Source: Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin. (And apparently he drove Stanton crazy by doing so.)

Currently Reading: The First Space Race: Launching The World's First Satellites, Matt Bille, Erika Lishock.

Somebody must have written the alternate history where Lincoln goes into the humor business, instead of politics, possibly as a Nasby-like writer, possibly as a Dan Rice-like superclown. Mustn't they?