Karen Knotts

            On Sunday I woke up a little past 3:00 and after going to the washroom I did a search for bedbugs. I found none around the bed or pillow and there were none crawling on the baseboards and walls. I grabbed my skewer and dug it into every hole and crack on the walls and baseboards near the bed and was relieved that no bedbugs were hiding in any of those places. That seems like a pretty good sign to me that most of the bedbugs might have been in the old pillow and that I killed them when I washed it. In two days the exterminator is coming and I'm really hoping to nip this infestation at the bud before school starts. I went back to bed at around 3:15 but I didn't get to sleep until 4:00 because my searching for bedbugs had woken me up. 

            I found another set of chords for "Le java des chaussettes à clous" (The Dance of the Studded Stockings) by Boris Vian. I copied them from the France Tabs website and pasted them into my document. But when I opened it later I saw that Open Office hadn't saved them.

            I worked out the chords for most of the third verse of "Manu Manuréva" by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 89.5 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the late morning I finished cutting out all the wood in the hole in the bedroom floorboard that was preventing me from fitting it with the piece of floorboard that I'd cut yesterday to fill it. I used a razor knife and a straight screwdriver to get it all out. Then I used wood glue and slipped the piece in. I put a large brick on top to weigh it down for a while. It's not perfect but one would barely notice while standing over it while before one could see the unsightly hole from anywhere in one's line of vision.

            Then I took a smaller piece of floorboard to fit into the tiny hole at the north west corner of the bedroom and sawed a little bit off. Then I used the razor knife to whittle it down each time I tried to fit it into the hole only to find it was still too big. I still have more to cut off and hopefully it will be made to fit tomorrow. Then I'll glue that down as well. Those holes have been bugging me for years. 

            I weighed 89 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride. There weren't a lot of cyclists out and I didn't come across any to pass until around Ossington and Bloor. There was a young cyclist reluctant to pass a very slow elderly cyclist in the bike lane. I got ahead of both of them by leaving the lane and cut back in between two posts just in time. I weighed 89 kilos when I got home. 

            I worked on my poem series "My Blood In A Bug." 

            I edited the video I'm making of my song "Instructions For Electroshock Therapy." Yesterday I'd inserted a clip of someone getting shocked, and shaved that down to half a second of the patient jerking his head upwards. But then I had to cut out some of the concert video that precedes it so that after the shock clip the concert video would be in sync with the studio audio when I sing, "for shock therapy." I sing it slightly slower in the concert video and so I couldn't get them precisely together but I think I got them close enough. After that however when I start singing, "We'll strap their legs and their arms" I don't think I can synchronize it and so I need to find another YouTube clip to fill in. Perhaps the clip of Randall McMurphy getting strapped down prior to receiving his shock treatment in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." I know that there's a YouTube clip of that. I'll look for something less well known but if I can't find anything else I might settle for that. 

            I colourized three more damage spots on my photo of the skateboarder. 

            I made two pork burgers and put olive oil, salt and pepper jelly on them before grilling them. I had one in a sandwich topped by mustard, ketchup, salsa and dill pickle with a beer while watching the 1986 TV movie "Return to Mayberry." It featured all the main characters from the Andy Griffith Show who were still alive at the time. 

            The story begins with Andy returning for the birth of his first grandchild. He has car trouble and so he stops at the G and G Garage, which is owned by Gomer and Goober Pyle. He goes to the office of the local paper which is run by his son Opie. Howard Sprague works for the paper as a columnist while at the same time still being the county clerk. Another reason Andy has come back is to run for sheriff but when he learns that Barney, the acting sheriff is running, he says he can't run against Barney. He meets Otis, who is now an ice cream truck driver and no longer drinks. Andy goes to visit Barney at the courthouse and we learn that Thelma Lou is back in town. While they are reminiscing there is a rock attack by Ernest T Bass, who is more unhinged than ever. He recites a poem in which he mentions a monster. Then Opie's wife Eunice, who is pregnant and late to deliver, suddenly goes into labour and the time of birth comes before they reach the hospital and so Andy has to deliver the baby. Later we learn that Ernest T is working for the young man named Wally Butler who now owns what used to be the Chinese restaurant where Andy and Barney met the Fun Girls. Butler has a plot to put Mayberry on the map by creating a monster hoax at Myer's Lake. Ernest turns a crank from a shed and a fake monster rises from the lake to scare people. Gomer is the first one to see it and takes a fuzzy photograph. Barney learns that chickens and dogs are disappearing and he starts to believe there's a monster, when in reality the thefts are being done by Ernest T. But Barney's main competitor for sheriff is using Barney's belief in the monster against him and aims to make people laugh him out of the competition. When Andy, Helen, Barney and Thelma Lou go for dinner at Butler's restaurant, Andy sees some photos on the wall from the prior Chinese restaurant and one of them shows a dragon's head as part of the decor. Andy goes to visit the Darling family and discovers that Ernest T is living with them and that all the missing chickens and dogs are there. After a song Andy tricks Ernest T into revealing the name of his employer. The next day Barney tries to catch the monster from a boat on the lake. But meanwhile Andy goes to the shack where he catches Ernest and Butler. Then he makes everyone believe that Barney was just pretending to believe in the monster as a ruse to catch the real culprit. For some reason Butler gets off with a warning. Barney announces that Andy is going to run for sheriff and that he will be his deputy. In the end Barney and Thelma Lou get married. 

            I was disappointed because I'd expected more. For one thing it was too busy with characters and the effort to fit them all into the story just rendered it clumsy. The plot itself was a little too "Scooby Doo Where Are You?" and very predictable. Apparently though this was the most successful TV movie of 1986 in terms of viewership. It could have been the pilot for a new Andy Griffith Show but Andy was too busy with Matlock at the time. 

            Aunt Bee is dead and Andy visits her grave. 

            Ron Howard as Opie was under-used in this story. 

            Opie's wife Eunice was played by Karlene Crockett, who played Muriel Gillis for five years on the soap opera Dallas. She won an Emmy for her role in the ABC After School Special "A Matter of Time."She costarred in the film "Return." 

            Opie's receptionist was played by Don Knotts's daughter Karen Knotts, who starred in "Occurrence at Black Canyon." Her father didn't want her in show business but supported her when she chose to do so anyway. She's a stand up comic and wrote a one woman show called "Tied Up In Knotts" about her childhood. She is also a playwright and has written "Dates From Hell: The Musical", ""But We Open Tonite", and the one woman play "Roger and Betsy." Twenty years later the Dillards as The Darlings played even better than before.