Ronald Long

            On Monday morning I finished working out the chords to “Baille baille Samantha” (Yawn Yawn Samantha) by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through singing and playing the song in French then I revised my translation of the final verse. Tomorrow I’ll run through it in English and then I’ll upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog.

            During song practice I played my Kramer electric guitar for the first of two sessions. 

            I weighed 86.5 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning in 42 days.

            Around midday I went over to Best Image to pick up the negatives that I had developed. It looks like they didn’t turn out at all. When I came in the owner was trying to do a passport photo of a Tibetan woman and he was trying to get her to let her hair down. She let it down and then tied it back again while he shook his head in frustration. Tibetan women rarely wear their hair down. I told him that I’ve had hundreds of rolls of film developed and I’ve also worked in photo finishing but he’s the first person who I’ve ever had ask me to pay in advance. He said he does it for everybody. 

            I didn’t have time to put another coat of primer on the Masonite in front of my kitchen counter but I put another row of painter’s tape around it and above it along the base of the counter. 

            I weighed 86.2 kilos before lunch. That’s the most I’ve weighed at midday in a month. 

            I took a siesta and slept almost a half an hour longer than usual so I was twenty minutes late starting my bike ride. I wore my lined Blondo boots instead of the Blundies. One zipper handle has broken off and so I had to use pliers to zip it up. I’d planned on wearing a second pair of socks but was in a hurry to get going. I think tomorrow I will and I’ll also wear my long underwear. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos at 17:30. 

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

            I reviewed the September 15 video of my song practice performance of “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” on the Kramer electric guitar. The take at 14:00 wasn’t bad but there were some wrong chords at the end. 

            I compared my August 9 acoustic performance of “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” to the one from August 11. There’s more traffic noise on the 11th. Otherwise they are close to equal, so I think I’ll go with August 9 in this round. There are ten more videos of the song with the acoustic guitar to compare and eight with the electric. 

            I imported a copy of the 1934 film Death Takes a Holiday into my “Megaphor” video project. I placed it at the end of the timeline and cut it down to about a minute and three quarters. I only need about four seconds and so I’ll edit it further tomorrow and perhaps insert it into the main video. 

            I ran three strips of the educational slides through my scanner. Two of them had images of classical art and I scanned some of those. One was part of the series of slides about China and I threw those in the garbage. There are five strips of the educational slides left. 

            I grilled two striploin steaks and had one with a potato and gravy while watching season 4, episodes 14 and 15 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Oliver decides to raise chicks and orders 1000 of them and a brooder from Sam. Sam has been watching a soap opera in which a character did the same thing as Oliver. He thinks Oliver should watch the next episode before making the purchase but he doesn’t agree. The chicks and the brooder arrive. Lisa names each of the 1000 chicks. That night the brooder breaks down and Lisa saves the chicks by putting them all in the bedroom under the electric blanket. Sam can’t get another brooder for a week and so Oliver calls the Columbia Broadcasting System to talk with the lady on the soap opera and find out what she is going to do next. 

            In the second story Lisa and Oliver have been arguing. She suggests they take vacations from each other. Oliver thinks it’s a great idea and so now she’s mad because she thinks he wants to get rid of her. They decide she’s going to spend two weeks in New York but she starts calling Oliver even while she’s on her way there. He never gets any rest because she’s constantly calling. She calls from her hotel room and doesn’t know what to do. He tells her to have dinner. She calls from the dining room to ask what to order and so he tells her while he’s standing on the top of the pole in a downpour. Then she decides to eat in her room. Since he can’t get any rest he finally decides to go to New York to meet her but when he gets there he finds she’s checked out and gone home. But when he gets home he finds she went back to New York to meet him. He calls the hotel in New York and is told she left for home. Then he gets a call from her in Miami because she got on the wrong plane. He tells her to check into a specific hotel and to wait for him. But his plane is hijacked and lands in Cuba. He calls and says to wait but when she looks at his picture it has a Castro beard. 

            The waiter in the dining room was played by Ronald Long, who acted in London in the 1930s, off Broadway in the 40s and on television in the 50s. His first film appearance was in Two Loves in 1961. He played Evans Baker on the soap opera Love of Life for four years. He appeared six times on Bewitched as six different characters. He played Admiral Zahrk on Lost in Space and Karnaby Katz on Batman. He appeared in a commercial for Sunsweet Pitted Prunes.