From MacGyver to Grigori

Yesterday or the day before, while I was out on the road, I suddenly thought for no apparent reason of the TV character MacGyver. I never watched MacGyver growing up (we watched very, very little television) but had a general idea of who he was. My wife was a big fan of the show, though, and shortly after we got married -- so around 14 years ago -- we rented and watched all seven seasons together. At that time, I had looked up the lead actor on Wikipedia, but yesterday I found that I couldn't remember his name, only that his first name might have been Richard. I also remembered that Wikipedia had said that before he played MacGyver he had been in a soap called General Hospital, which I had never even heard of. That one biographical detail, and nothing else, had stuck in my mind all these years. For a few minutes, I was repeating "MacGyver, Richard, General Hospital" in my mind, hoping the rest of the actor's name would come to me, but it never did.

Later that day, I saw on the news that an actor known for being in General Hospital -- all the headlines mentioned the show -- had been shot dead in an attempted robbery. Had I not looked up the star of MacGyver all those years ago, I would not so much have suspected the existence of a TV show called General Hospital.

This morning I checked blog comments and found a new one on my latest post, "Giant undead vultures and Bretonnia Spears." Jason had this to say:

The Aztec lizardman appears to have a facial horn, like Gregole (Gregor as pronounced by the Japanese) from the anime Guyver, https://monster.fandom.com/wiki/Gregole

Guyver is an alternate spelling of Gyver, as in MacGyver. I hesitated to click the link, though, because most anime triggers a mild (and sometimes not so mild) disgust reaction in me.White guys who like anime are called weebs, and I remembered once saying in an email that "whatever the opposite of a weeb is, I'm that." Today, I thought, "Well, what is the opposite of a weeb? Weeb spelled backwards? Beew?"

That reminded me of my recent post "There's more than one way to spell a bee," in which the idea of a "mirrored bee" came up. Weeb is almost a mirrored bee, except that there's an extra w thrown in.

Eventually, I got around to looking up those two General Hospital actors. The guy who played MacGyver was Richard Dean Anderson. The one who was recently shot was called Johnny Wactor. That's right, he was an actor whose surname was just actor with an extra w thrown in.

Wactor comes from the German Wächter -- which means "watcher" and is the German name used for the Grigori, the Watcher angels from the Book of Enoch. In other words, it's a German translation of the name Gregory/Gregor/Grigori.