Raserfrazarole! Summabissitts!

Alsa, this weekend is memorial weekend, apparently.

Darren McGavin has passed away.

Many people will remember him from 1983's A Christmas Story. He played a father with a passion for turkey, very pecuilar lamps, and the most effective prime-time cursing since Fred Flintstone.

While I greatly appreciate that performance and film, my own remembrance is of his turn as the shabby reporter Kolchak in the appropriatedly named televison series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. In this series, he regularly investigated murders and other crimes that invariably led back to supernatural forces, including vampires and werewolves. Any reporter would give their eyeteeth for such scoops (whatever "eyeteeth" are...they sound like something spooky from the programme - teeth with eyes or eyes with teeth) , but invariably Kolchak would come away from his encounters having defeated the force of evil, but remaining completely unbelieved by all others, including what must have been the most skeptically discerning newspaper editor in human history.

I've often thought that in Anne Rice's An Interview with the Vampire that Kolchak should have snagged the interview instead of Christian Slater (who exhibits a completely unrelated shabbiness). I've neither read the book or seen the film, though I suspect Tom Cruise does a fair bit of bouncing up and down on his coffin, but I think having McGavin's Kolchak as the interviewer would offer the dual certainty that the interview would be tough and direct ("Have you at any time harrassed or bitten the Mayor or any of his staff?" "When you turn into a bat, do you follow FAA guidelines for air travel?"), and that, at the end of the interview, the vampire would get a stake up the gizzard.

Entertaining bloke, McGavin. God rest his soul.