James Franciscus

            On Thursday morning I memorized the third verse of "Sans blague" (No Joke) by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized the fourth verse of "J'envisage" (I Imagine) by Serge Gainsbourg and finished revising my translation. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            I re-read aloud about half of the Old English poem "Judith". It seems fairly obvious that it's meant to be Christian propaganda and not really of pre-Christian origin. It's interesting that no one is really visually described other than to say that the enemies are drunk and the hero is beautiful. Most of the adjectives are simplistic descriptions of internality. The hero is good and the enemy is bad and these qualities are described in various and sometimes repeated ways. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 84.2 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at around 18:15. 

            I finished reading "Judith." It's pretty violent, and during the battle, when the enemy is in retreat they are attacked from behind. Then when they are dead, the good guys loot their treasures, and this is all presented as Christian behaviour. 

            I read the first branch and about half of the second branch of the collection of Welch tales called the Mabinogi. There is a lot of magic that isn't even called magic but is just treated as normal. King Sage is hunting with his dogs when he sees someone else's dogs take down a stag. The dogs are white with red ears. Sage allows his dogs to also eat the deer but then the other king arrives and says that's rude. Sage asks how he can make it up to him and the king tells him how. The king is the ruler of the Otherworld and he asks Sage to replace him for one year. He makes him look like him and himself look like Sage. The thing is that in one year the king must fight a duel. But the king of the Otherworld has fought this man before and made the mistake of striking him twice, which causes him to recover. Now that he knows this it can't be reversed and so someone else needs to act on it. Sage spends a year as the other king and sleeps with the other queen without having sex. After a year he successfully fights the duel and the Otherworld is saved. 

            Then Sage sees a woman on horseback and tries to get his servants to catch her with his fastest horse, but there is magic and she is always ahead. Finally, Sage tries to catch her but also can't. Then he calls out to her and she stops to ask why he didn't do that in the first place. Her name is Rhiannon and she wants to marry him but there's a guy trying to force her to be with him. She says she'll marry him in one year, after a wedding feast. But a year later at the feast, a man approaches Sage for a favour and without knowing what it is, Sage tells him he'll grant him whatever he wants. Rhiannon tells Sage he's an idiot because that guy is the one that wants to marry her and now Sage has to let him. Rhiannon tells the other guy she'll marry him in one year and then tells Sage what to do then. At the wedding feast in a year, Sage comes in disguise with a magical sack that can't be filled. He asks the guy for food to fill the sack and it is granted but it can't be filled. He is told that a noble has to step on the stuff in the sack and so he does. When he does so the sack is pulled over him and tied. Then everyone is told there is a badger inside and so the guests play beat the badger. Sage and Rhiannon get married and in those days there was no ceremony, so after the feast the couple just had sex to be wed. She has a baby after three years but it disappears. The baby's caregivers cover their asses by pouring blood on Rhiannon and claiming that she ate her own son. She pleads guilty to avoid hassle and is punished by having to sit outside the gate of the castle and offer to carry on her back anyone on their way to court. Meanwhile, another couple finds Rhiannon's son and raises him as their own but when they realize that it looks like Sage they know that it's the missing boy. So they return him and are rewarded with great wealth and told they could raise the boy anyway. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of roast pork while watching the penultimate episode of the first season of Ben Casey. John Wickware has been in a near catatonic state for eight months. Before that, he was a chemist and a genius. John changed while his wife Betty was away for one day. Betty is trying to stick by him but her parents want John committed. John has an accident and hits his head, so he is taken to County General. 

            Casey is convinced that there is something physically wrong with John but none of the tests show it. He thinks something must have happened to him on the day when Betty went away. Dr. Zorba orders John to be taken to the psychiatric ward. John begins to write down simple math equations and that shows a small improvement. Zorba is not impressed and orders John committed. But Casey and the psychiatrist try one more thing. The psychiatrist hypnotizes Johnny and takes him back in his memory to just before he changed. It turns out that he was working on his car in the garage with the motor running and the doors closed and got carbon monoxide poisoning. Now that Casey knows the problem he can tell John's wife that it's just a matter of time before John gets better on his own. 

            It seems unrealistic that a chemical genius would make the mistake of working on his car in a closed space with the motor running. 

            Betty was played by Carol Eve Rossen, who played supporting roles in several movies and TV series. She was married for 17 years to Hal Holbrook. 

                        John was played by James Franciscus, who co-starred in the 1961 TV series The Investigators. He starred for two seasons in Mr. Novak, about a school teacher. In 1971 he starred in Longstreet, about a blind detective. He co-produced the movies Heidi, David Copperfield, and Jane Eyre. 

            I looked for bedbugs and found another that was the same age as the small ones I found last night. This one was in a crack in the plaster on the left side of the frame of the old exit door. Then I saw a tiny one that looked almost transparent like glass. Neither of them had fresh blood inside.