Bing Russell

            On Saturday morning I finished working out the chords for “Mesdames, mesdemoiselles, mes yeux" (Madames and Madmoiselles, My Eyes) by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through it in French and English and uploaded it to my Christian’s Translations blog. I put all the lines and chords in place and now I just have to check the text in the Preview to see if there are any small adjustments to make.

            Before breakfast I weighed 89.5 kilos. 

            In the late morning I went to No Frills. It’s been over a month since they've had any grapes and I wonder why. Last year this time they had lots and more than one variety. Maybe they are at war with South America. I see from the online flyer that their parent company Loblaws has green grapes from South Africa. I bought a case of eight mangoes, plus nine more red mangoes and six yellow ones, fifteen avocados, a bag of limes, a jug of orange juice and a bottle of Garden Cocktail. I forgot to buy tomatoes but I have quite a few already. 

            I sent an appeal to the head TA for Brit Lit 2 about my one wrong answer in the fourth reading quiz. I gave an argument as to why I think my answer was correct. 

            I weighed 89 kilos before lunch. This was the ninth day of my fourteen day fast and I had the usual tomatoes and avocados but this time I squeezed a lime on top and that give it a much better zing.

            In the afternoon I didn’t take a bike ride because I’d already been out to the supermarket. 

            In the afternoon I got an email from my teaching assistant Carson, approving my idea for an essay and adding some feedback and suggestions. 

            I spent about three hours re-reading George Eliot’s "The Natural History of German" life and researching and making notes on some of the things she says about peasants. She presents novel writing as a social cause. Is she being creative? She is leaning on the scale to emphasize the hardship for her readership’s awareness. It is only to the degree that she exaggerates that she is creating art. She believes that it is impossible for the poor to be virtuous, have high morality, refined sentiment, be altruistic and to care for others as long as they suffer from harsh social conditions, lack of education and want. She is a social and political reformer and it intrudes on her work as an artist. They all think alike. It could be to some degree true that those more bound to a community and culture think more as a group. Those with privilege act more as individuals. But to believe one peasant thinks “just as" another requires a distance to not see the differences, like fingerprints from the distance of a handshake. Peasants are culturally conservative. 

            I weighed 89.8 kilos before dinner. For dinner I had tomatoes, avocadoes, the chopped tip of a scotch bonnet pepper and squeezed a lime on top. I ate while watching Andy Griffith.

            In this story a road crew are dynamiting outside of town to put in an underpass and the explosions can be heard every few minutes. Andy and the mayor are sitting in Floyd’s barber shop waiting for Floyd to finish lunch but Howard McNear, the actor who plays Floyd doesn’t appear for the rest of the season because he had a stroke. Local farmer Cy Hudgins comes in to the barber shop with his goat Jimmy. He explains that he’d promised Jimmy that he’d bring him downtown. The mayor tells him he can't bring a goat into the barber shop and so Cy ties Jimmy up outside. Jimmy unties his rope and wanders around town, eventually entering a shed where the dynamite is being stored. Jimmy eats the dynamite and when this is discovered Andy and Barney put him in a jail cell. They consult Mr Burton, the foreman of the blasting crew and he says there's not much to do but feed the goat and wait. But when Andy and Barney go out to get supplies for Jimmy, Otis comes in drunk. He lets himself into his usual cell and when he discovers that there’s a goat there he kicks it out. Andy and Barney come back and Andy tells Barney to play his “french harp", which is apparently one of the names for a harmonica in the southern United States. Barney plays and walks ahead while Andy leads Jimmy out of town on a rope. 

            Mr Burton was played by Bing Russell, who was Kurt Russell’s father. He played the deputy on Bonanza and he played Robert in “The Magnificent Seven:. He was also the owner of the minor league baseball team The Portland Mavericks. He kept all corporate sponsorship outside the gates. He hired the world's first female general manager and the first Asian American general manager of a professional baseball team. They were a winning team that set records of attendance. Players from all over the world came to his June try outs. In 1979 when his son Kurt played Elvis, Bing played Elvis’s father.