I guess it seems a little unseemly to say this, but wow is this really cool!

Wow, what a weekend for losing well-known actors and writers:

• Don Knotts and Darren McGavin passed away over the weekend.
• Dennis Weaver, of Gunsmoke and McCloud, has died after a battle with cancer.
• And sci-fi author, Octavia Butler, died from a fall outside her home.

Don Knotts I’ve written about previousy, but McGavin is best known for two roles:  the dad in A Christmas Story and for playing Kolchak on Night Stalker, a show that was an inspiration for Chris Carter to create The X-Files.

If you haven’t read Octavia Butler’s science fiction, then you should.  I first discovered her after coming across Kindred at a yard sale.  At first, it seemed like any other time travel story, but the twist here was that a young black woman and her white husband were being pulled back in forth in time between the present and the pre-Civil War South.  She used that setting to touch on a lot of subjects and I was hooked.  The rest of her science fiction was, for me, less accessible, but it as certainly original and groundbreaking.

Take a look at this little piece of our nation’s history.  And to think, they were sitting in a box, hidden away for 50 years!