Roy Barcroft

            Early Thursday morning after going to bed I couldn’t sleep because of the caffeine in my system. I got up and posted my translation of "Mozart avec nous” (Mozart Is With Us) by Boris Vian and a video of a performance of the song. The wifi went down just after that and I edited some photos until 1:30. 

            I went back to bed but I don’t think I got much more than an hour and a half of sleep. 

            Later in the morning I found the lyrics for “Calypso Blues” by Boris Vian. 

            I made one more attempt to figure out the lyrics for “Retro song” by Serge Gainsbourg, then gave up and started searching for the words to his “Merde a l’amour”. I found them on the gainsbourg.net website but then got the idea to search there for “Retro song”. I erased “merde-a-l’amour” from the end of the URL and typed in “retro-song” and found the lyrics. I transcribed them and then translated the first verse. 

            Around midday I took a bike ride to Ossington and Bloor and on the way home I stopped at Freshco. The shopping baskets are usually stacked just to the left as one walks in the door but that space was empty. I asked the nice lady who seems to be the foreman of the cashiers and has worked there forever where I could find the baskets. She informed me that they don’t have baskets any more. Health and Safety determined that they were a health risk. No Frills has an employee whose job is to do nothing but sterilize the shopping baskets but maybe Freshco was too cheap to hire someone just for that. She said the shopping carts outside are free or I could use a box. I didn’t like either of those options so I just used a bag from my backpack. 

            I bought five bags of red grapes, two cans of peaches and a carton of soy milk. 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos before lunch. 

            I had a cucumber, tomato and avocado salad with fig balsamic dressing. 

            I weighed 88.6 at 17:57. 

            I worked for over two hours on my essay. I finished incorporating quotes from George Eliot into the body of my text and then pulled the most relevant quotes from Oscar Wilde nearby. Then I started inserting some of those into the text as arguments with Eliot. 

            Before dinner I weighed myself twice and the first time it was 87.5 while the second 88.9 kilos. I assume the latter is more accurate. 

            I had half a bowl of the lentil chili I’d made the night before and ate it with plantain chips while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story a state inspector is scheduled to come to the courthouse in response to Andy and Barney’s request for more funds. But meanwhile Opie brings in a stray dog that ends up leading ten more to the sheriff’s office. Barney is worried that all of these dogs will make a bad impression for the inspector. He takes them all outside of town and leaves them in an open field. First of all that would be a stupid thing to do because leaving any pack of unsupervised dogs in the country is a sure fire way of inviting them to raid farms and kill cattle. But in this case the main concern results from a thunder storm and Opie being afraid of the dogs being struck by lightning. They bring the dogs back. Mr Somerset, the inspector calls and says he’s on his way over and so Andy tells Opie to take the dogs out back. The inspector doesn’t seem to think the office needs any extra funds but then suddenly all the dogs burst in and knock him down. It turns out that he’s a lover of dogs and has three of his own. He approves them funding for anything they want. Later Andy and Barney go through the labourious process of finding homes for all the dogs. After they get back a farmer named Clint Biggers shows up and says that all eleven of the dogs are his and so they have to go and get all the dogs back. 

            Somerset was played by Robert Cornthwaite, who started out in theatre and then branched into film and television. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame for his role in “The Thing From Another World”. He said that the real creative people in film are the directors, the writers and the cameramen. He preferred theatre because the actor has more creative control. He also translated French plays into English.

            Clint Biggers was played by Roy Barcroft, who started out in theatre but later became very busy as a go to villain in western. In other genres he was the purple Martian in “The Purple Monster Strikes,” the reincarnated pirate Captain Mephisto in “Manhunt of Mystery Island” and the Moon menace in “Radar Men from the Moon.” He lied his age at fifteen and joined the army during WWI. He was wounded in France at sixteen and sent home.