Larry Hovis

            On Friday morning I finished working out the chords for the first verse of “Calypso Blues” by Boris Vian. I also finished working out the chords for "Les femmes ça fait pédé” (Women Are So Very Gay) by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through it in French and English and then I uploaded it to Christian’s Translations to prepare it for blog publication. 

            I weighed 89.3 kilos before breakfast. 

            I made a fourth effort to clean the inside of my oven door. Progress continues but slowly. I think I might have about a third of the window cleared after using up the first of the two large boxes of baking soda that I bought. A plastic scraper helped to take off some of the black, caked in grease. I’ll tackle it again on Sunday and hopefully I’ll get half of it done. 

            I weighed 88.9 kilos before lunch. I took a bike ride in the afternoon to Yonge and Bloor. It was almost too chilly for just my spring gloves and only one scarf. On the way home along Queen Street the wind had me going so slow I could barely hold my balance. My neighbour Benji was in front of the building when I got home and so I chatted with him for a few minutes. 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos after my bike ride, which is odd because it usually drops lower in the afternoon. 

            I worked on my poem series My Blood in a Bug.

            I searched for videos that show nests of snakes that I could harvest for footage for my video of my song Instructions for Electroshock Therapy. I found on YouTube one from the National Geographic about a place in Manitoba that has more snakes than anywhere else in the world and another of the “It had to be snakes" scene of the snake pit from Indiana Jones. 

            Then I needed some software to allow me to download YouTube videos. One site explained to me how I can use my VLC Media Player to extract videos found online but when I followed the instructions it didn’t work. I suspect YouTube is hip to that trick and has figured a way to block it. The same site’s second suggestion was 4K Video Extractor and so I downloaded that and after a half an hour of installation was able to download the two videos. Hopefully they’ll be editable, since I just need small clips from each one. Next I need some footage of lightning but I didn’t have time to look much before dinner. 

           I had french fries and the rest of the chicken tenders while watching two episodes of Andy Griffith. 

           Barney is not in the first story and it is explained that he is away on holiday. Andy is looking for someone to answer the phone at the courthouse while he goes away to a sheriffs convention for a day and a half but he’s come up dry. Finally when Goober volunteers he reluctantly agrees because Goober assures him he can get away from his filling station duties for that time. But when Andy returns he finds that in order to keep his promise of being there to answer the phone he has taken apart a car and reassembled it inside of the courthouse because a customer insists there is something wrong with the engine that Goober has to fix. Andy gets uncharacteristically ugly and threatens to take one of the courthouse guns and shoot Goober if he does not get the car out of the courthouse. Suddenly Sheriff Jackson of Siler City, the head of the sheriffs association walks in for a visit and wonders how and why a car is in the office. When Goober starts talking about how the real problem with the car is that the customer, Gilly Walker is always speeding, Jackson concludes that the car is there as an anti-speeding demonstration. He thinks it’s a great idea and asks Goober to come to Siler City and do the same thing there. After Jackson leaves Andy actually points a gun at Goober to make him take the car apart. 

           Gilly Walker was played by Larry Hovis, who started out as a singer with a group called The Mascots. As a solo performer he recorded the album “My Heart Belongs to Only You” while at the same time earning a philosophy degree. He performed a few times on Broadway and then moved out to Hollywood where he started appearing on TV shows. He was on Gomer Pyle for ten episodes but he is most remembered for his role on Hogan’s Heroes as demolition expert Sergeant Carter. He later became a writer and producer. He wrote for Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In the year it received a writing Emmy but didn’t get an award because someone had left his name off the list of writers. He produced several game shows, including The Liars Club on which he appeared as a panellist for two years. In the last decade of his life he was a professor of drama at Texas State University. 

            In the second story Otis rides drunk for his Saturday night stay in the jailhouse on a cow that he thinks is a horse. Barney concludes that Otis has deep psychological problems and because he read a magazine on psychology once he figures he is qualified to fix him. He gives him a Rorschach test but when Otis says the ink blot looks like a bat Barney argues with him that this proves he is disturbed because it obviously looks like a butterfly. Barney begins to alienate Otis so much that he takes his business to Mount Pilot and sleeps in their jail instead. After a while Andy and Barney miss Otis and go to the other jail to appeal to him to come back. When the other inmate, Luke learns how well Otis is treated in Mayberry he encourages him to return. Finally Otis does so, showing up once again riding a cow. But later Luke and several other drunks from Mount Pilot show up as well, not wanting to miss out on Otis’s perks, like breakfast in bed. Otis is a pretty big guy and it didn’t look very comfortable for the cow that he was riding throughout the episode. 

            Luke was played by Frank Cady, who is best known as grocer Sam Drucker on Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. He was married for 68 years to singer and actor Shirley Jones of The Music Man and The Partridge Family until she died. He also played Doc Williams on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. 

            Just like the night before I got tired after dinner and went to bed early, but this time I hit the hay even earlier at a little before 22:00 and didn’t even bother to take my clothes off.