Indeed, breaking out the Mace in the restaurant is described in "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent & Depraved", but there again - as with most everything in Dr. Thompson's overtly gonzo pieces, whether that actually happened is debatable.

For that matter, Thompson said himself on several occasions that I know of (including in a BBC documentary he is visibly just barely tolerating the makers of) that he got very tired of people expecting him to be as crazy as Raoul Duke.

(Which doesn't stop the UF version of Raoul Duke from being as crazy as Raoul Duke, so I suppose if HST were still alive and knew about that he'd probably kick my ass, but oh well. I don't expect many of my idols would actually like me if we met. Theodore Roosevelt certainly wouldn't. :)

>Just from the Starkwire posts, call me crazy, but Stark is beginning
>to have this Kolchak the Nightstalker* flavor to him, except
>instead of pursuing the supernatural, he's trying to expose GENOM for
>the threat it is...and everybody thinks he's nuts.

Well, sort of. There is a certain thematic similarity there, yeah - Stark's a bit of a crusader in a world where the power structure doesn't have much use for crusaders - but a pretty broad stripe of the general public is perfectly willing to accept that GENOM isn't all its management claims it is, that corporate shenanigans are going on in orbit, and so forth. And he's certainly got a lot of support for his insistence that the Knight Sabers, contrary to the Mega Tokyo city government's official stance on the subject, do exist.

Also, it's not like the only thing he does is sit and spew forth screeds against GENOM. He does well-regarded "event-driven" reportage (covering wars, natural disasters, and so forth) as well as his long-term investigative stuff, which does tend to focus on the dark side of the Boomer Revolution and related topics.

So yeah - he's Kolchak-like (and that's a comparison I don't mind, since I'm a big Darren McGavin fan), but is held in somewhat higher esteem by the world at large.

(Trivia: Kolchak: The Night Stalker wasn't called that because Kolchak was supposed to be a "night stalker"; it was called that because it was a followup to a TV movie, The Night Stalker, in which Carl Kolchak first appeared. In it, he was after a vampire. The vampire was the night stalker. So the TV show's title actually has jack to do with anything actually going on in the show. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/