Owen Bush

            On Wednesday morning I revised my translation for a few more verses of "Au bon vieux temps" (In the Good Old Days) by Boris Vian. 

            I pretty much finished working out the chords for "Le Couteau dans le play" (The Knife in the Play) by Serge Gainsbourg. I just need to make sure the ending is right. I'll have that finished on Thursday and I'll probably have time to run through it in French. Then I might have to revise my translation a bit. 

            I audio and video recorded song practice while playing my Martin acoustic guitar for the first time in five days. As usual my fingers had partially forgotten where to find the chords after playing the electric for four days. On top of that my hands were sweaty from the heat and that caused some fumbling as well. I made it through "Baby Pop" and was playing "Comme un boomerang" when the camera timed out. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I called the Parkdale Community Dental Clinic about an appointment for September 8 that I booked four months ago. The receptionist confirmed it's at 8:30 but she asked me if I've received a card for this year's senior's plan. I told her no. I played dumb but I actually did receive a rejection letter last year saying that my income was too high for the program. It's bizarre that the extra money the government gives me because I'm poor makes me too rich for a dental plan for the poor. I'll go on Friday anyway and see what happens. Supposedly the federal dental plan for seniors will begin in a few months although no solid announcement has been made yet. I might have to go to Smile City again to fix my front fillings and to get another cleaning. 

            I tried one more time to clear my kitchen drain with baking soda and vinegar but it didn't work. The landlord is being a total asshole about fixing it. 

            I put another guitar hanger on the western wall of my living room and hung up the fake Gibson.

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before lunch. I had whole wheat crackers with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I stopped at Freshco where I bought two bags of grapes and some mouthwash. 

            I chiseled some more black quartz from pieces of the rock that I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 86 kilos at 17:30, which is the heaviest I've been in the evening in a hundred days. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:30. 

            I reviewed this morning's song practice video. I think at least one chord was off on "Megaphor" and I definitely fumbled with both my fingers and my mouth on "Sixteen Tons of Dogma". A lot of the French songs seem to have come out okay though. 

            I searched for free CD ripping software and found Fair Stars, which worked fine. I extracted the three drum tracks for "Megaphor" but so far I haven't noticed much of a difference between them other than that the third track is quieter. I imported the drumless "Megaphor" master track into Audacity along with the first drum track. I lined up the beginnings of the two tracks and they sounded good together because the master track has louder vocals. But they go out of synch after the instrumental and so next time I'll have to do a trickier synchronization. I can see the matching waveforms on the two tracks and so I think I just need to cut out 0.6 seconds of the calmest part of the drum track's instrumental just before the vocals begin again so I can line up the waveforms. I'll try that tomorrow. 

            I scanned the rest of the negatives and slides that I found at the bottom of a file folder in my photo drawer. The last few strips were all slides and those were mostly street shots of buildings and people, and the rest were pictures of my ex-girlfriend Brenda. What's left in my photo drawer are seven plastic photo sheets and the next one contains all single black and white negatives. 

            I made pizza on seven grain bread with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 5, episodes 26 and 27 of Petticoat Junction. 

            In the first story, Joe's latest gimmick is a pneumatic tube system between the front desk and the rooms but so far it only sucks things off the dressers in the rooms and shoots them down to the desk. Later while Bobbie Joe and Jeff are lamenting that nothing newsworthy ever happens in Hooterville, Sam Drucker and Joe are being held up by a masked gunman at Sam's store. The thief is mad that Sam only has $6 but Joe tells him there's more in the post office section. The robber hops the Cannonball and gets off at the Shady Rest where he checks in. When asked he says he's a greeting card salesman. The next day Joe is at the barber shop in Pixley and so is the sheriff when they learn the Pixley bank has been robbed. The sheriff deputizes a reluctant Joe. Back at the hotel Joe has been given the serial numbers of the bank bills and suddenly money with the same serial numbers comes shooting onto the desk from the robber's room. A frightened Joe goes to his room to get his gun but that's where the crook is hiding. But the thief accidentally trips a self inflating raft and is trapped against the wall. The crook takes Joe hostage until Ellen comes up behind him and pokes him in the bum with a hat pin. She struggles with him until the sheriff arrives but she tells the sheriff that Joe is the real hero.

            In the second story the Cannonball is suddenly for sale and Homer Bedloe is behind it. He already has the first bid in a sealed envelope but won't tell them what the bid is. Steve is willing to sell his plane and his and Betty Joe's house. Sam Drucker is going to sell his store. They've raised some money but it would help if they knew the first bidder's offer. Everybody has tried to butter Bedloe up in the past but Ellen does something no one has ever attempted. She flirts with him and gets him to take off his jacket so she can feel his muscles. While his jacket is off she removes the envelope from his vest pocket, takes it to the kitchen and steams it open. The bid is $8,500 and impossible for them to match. Joe has a plan for him and Sam to go to Chicago to meet H. Greene the bidder and pose as equally rich businessmen. They arrive in a limo. H. Greene turns out to be Henrietta Greene. Joe and Sam are unable to answer any of her questions about the business empires they claim to have. Finally Sam confesses the truth. When Henrietta realizes they were willing to sacrifice their livelihoods for the Cannonball she decides not to purchase it. Bedloe says he is relieved because without the Cannonball he'd have no one to fight with. 

            The limo driver was played by Owen Bush, who in the late 40s became a radio announcer. In the early 50s he was a TV sportscaster. He started doing some acting in small films and caught the attention of a young Robert Altman who gave him a small part in his first film, The Delinquents. Later Altman asked him to be in his TV series "The Troubleshooters". He became a popular radio personality and acted for Altman in various TV series that he directed. He had a regular role in the soap opera Passions. He co-starred in the last two Prehysteria! films. He became an insurance agent.