Phyllis Davis

            On Tuesday morning I finished posting my translation of “Malaise en Malaisie” (Malaise in Malaysia) by Serge Gainsbourg. I’ll start learning the next of his songs from 1980 tomorrow, the title of which translates as “Ugly, Pretty Ugly.” 

            I weighed 87.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            Since this was reading week there was no Global Modernisms class today but I spent the normal time when the lecture would have happened reading “Multicentric Modernism and Postcolonial Poetry” by Stilling, the beginning of “Periodizing Modernism” by Friedman and I continued re-reading Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand. The Stilling essay talks about how Modernist poetry has influenced Postcolonial Poetry and how the latter has branched out in other directions. 

            I weighed 87.7 kilos before lunch. 

            I continued to try to figure out how to make my computer faster. I looked into disk cleanup online because it’s been so long since I’ve used it, I’ve forgotten how to find it on my system. A lot of sites offer downloads to clean up systems. That seems ridiculous. Why would I put more junk on my computer when I’m trying to clean it up? I finally found how to get to disk cleanup through System. 

            I ran it while I took a siesta, but I didn’t sleep much. I know I slept some because I dreamed about playing a very frustrating table hockey game in which I couldn’t move my goalie very well and my opponent was about to score. 

            I supposedly cleaned up about five gigs of junk, but my computer never showed that any space was freed, even after I restarted. I looked into defragging, but I think Windows 10 does that sometimes automatically. Maybe I should do it, but it looks like I’ll have to switch to Administrator to do so.

            I didn’t take a bike ride because it was raining but I spent a lot of time trying to get my computer running better. But not with any success. 

            I read more “Periodizing Imperialism” and Untouchable. The Friedman essay debates whether Season of Migration to The North is a Modernist novel. 

            I weighed 87.4 kilos at 18:00. 

            I had a potato with gravy and three pork ribs while watching an episode of Adam-12. In this story Malloy, who always does the right thing from a policeman's viewpoint, screws up a few times. 

            In the first situation, Malloy and Reed get called to a bar. The owner Cal complains that the guy at the end of the bar refuses to pay for drinks and he’s verbally abusive to customers. Malloy reminds Cal that he can’t arrest the man on a misdemeanour that he hasn’t witnessed. Cal asks him to talk to him, so although it’s against policy Malloy goes up to him and leans in only to be sucker-punched and knocked to the floor. The guy runs out the back. 

            Next, they stop a car that almost hit a pedestrian. The driver, James Walker is very cooperative but while Reed is writing him a ticket Malloy does a background check. Suddenly there is a call about a man threatening a woman with a knife and they take off without waiting for a response to the check. At the address, the neighbour says she was looking for her cat on the porch of the house across the street when she heard a man inside saying to a young woman, “I have a knife and I’m going to kill you. But when Malloy knocks on the door it turns out that the couple is rehearsing a play.

            Adam-12 gets called back to the station where they find out that the man whom they’d left for the false alarm is wanted for armed robbery. They are in trouble but told for now to go back out on patrol. 

            They get called to a rooming house where a man is trying to get up the stairs to his sister’s room, because she threatened suicide on the phone. But the landlady is blocking his way and threatening him with a broom because she doesn’t want men the women in her rooming house. Malloy has to kick open the young woman’s door, but they are too late. The young woman is dead at 24 and Malloy comments that the nasty landlady will probably live to be 100. 

            Malloy is determined to track down James Walker to make up for his mistake. He picks up a file from Flo in the records department. From it they find that Walker has three girlfriends in the area where they’d stopped him. At the address of the third girlfriend, they see his car. Malloy has Reed go to the back door while he covers them from the kitchen window. They arrest Walker and it seems to make everything okay with their superiors back at the station. 

            Some other officers catch the guy that punched Malloy and he turns out to be a little person. 

            The female actor was portrayed by Phyllis Davis, who played Betty Benson on Love American Style. She played Beatrice Travis on “Vega$” on every episode of the series. Before Hollywood she was a flight attendant for Continental Airlines. She co-starred in “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”, “Terminal Island”, She starred in “Sweet Sugar.” She had a long-term relationship with Dean Martin in the 1970s.