Alan Reed

            On Monday morning I got up to pee at around 4:00 and saw a bedbug crawling in the top right corner of the old exit door at the head of my bed. It seems that the full-grown adults love that area while the smaller ones tend to hide themselves in cracks on the lower left side of the door. 

            I finished memorizing "Babe alone in Babylone" by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords. I found one set on Ultimate Guitar and started transcribing them. I'll have that done tomorrow and look for some more. 

            I weighed 84 kilos before breakfast. 

            I spent two hours on my final English in the World essay and made some progress. I have four research sources of the minimum six and I'm only 300 words short of the minimum word count. I'm starting to think that I might be able to finish the paper by the end of Tuesday and then get on with my holiday. 

            I weighed 83.7 kilos before lunch and that seems to be a record low for that time. 

            I took a siesta from 14:00 to 15:30 and while lying in bed I had some good ideas for organizing my essay. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 83.4 kilos at 17:00, which matches the record low from five days ago. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:06. 

            I spent about two hours on my essay. I've now got quotes from five sources and my word count, without including the citations, is about 1800. I'm still hoping to finish it by the end of tomorrow. 

            I had a small potato with gravy and my last pork chop while watching season 3, episode 8 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            Jed gets a call from the Widow Poke back home and she says her son Johnny is on his way to Los Angeles. This puts Granny in a bad mood because she considers Johnny Poke to be one of the laziest no-accounts there is. She starts whooping Jethro in advance to prepare for when Johnny gets there to become a bad influence. She's lecturing Jethro in the kitchen but when her back is turned he sneaks out. Granny starts telling god that Jethro should be punished. A puppy comes in and sits in the chair where Jethro had been. Then a jet breaks the sound barrier and Granny turns around to see the puppy and thinks god has transformed Jethro. 

            Jed thinks Johnny Poke will be coming in on a box car and so he has Jethro drive him down to the freight yards to pick him up. Meanwhile Johnny is riding an expensive private train and signing autographs. It turns out that Johnny is an Elvis type teen idol with hit records. The main difference between him and Elvis is that Johnny needs an echo chamber because he can't sing. His train is approaching LA for his concert that night at The Hollywood Bowl, but so Johnny won't be torn apart by teenage girls at the station, Johnny's manager makes him put on hobo clothes and get off the train at the freight yard. 

            When Jed and Jethro find Johnny in old clothes at the freight yard they don't believe his talk about being rich and famous. They make him come back to the mansion and write a letter to his mother. When they get there Johnny doesn't want to stay. He says, "What I need is a good stiff belt!" Jed misunderstands but he thinks it's a good idea, so he takes off his belt. Johnny says he'll stay. Once he sees how Elly May has grown up and out he wants to stay even more. He tells Elly he wants some action and so Jed makes him chop wood. Johnny tries to sing and play guitar to prove to the Clampetts he's a star but he's horrible. Granny says Johnny needs punishing, then while Granny's back is turned Elly's pet skunk comes in and Johnny runs out. Granny's jug of moonshine pops and she turns and thinks she's turned Johnny into a skunk. 

            Johnny was played by Jesse Pearson who played a similar character in the hit musical Bye Bye Birdie. 

            Johnny's manager Eddie Colton was played by Alan Reed, who majored in journalism at Columbia and then got into acting. He became a master of dialects and worked steadily on Broadway. He was a frequent guest on the top shows of the radio era. He played Pancho Villa in Viva Zapata. He played J.B. Hafter on Mr. Adams and Eve and on The Bob Cummings Show. In 1960 he created the voice of Fred Flintstone and invented the catch phrase "Yabba dabba doo" when he was only asked to say "Yahoo!" 

            I searched for bedbugs and didn't find any. 

            I worked on my essay before bed. I've got the required minimum six research sources and the required minimum word count. All that's left to do is use my writing skills to combine my first essay with my presentation, and the new sources into an argument and hopefully have it done before the end of Tuesday.