Sam Jaffe

            On Friday morning I ran through singing and playing "Sermonette" by Boris Vian. I made a few adjustments to my translation and I'll do some more tomorrow before uploading it to Christian's Translations. 

            I uploaded "Volontaire" by Serge Gainsbourg to Christian's Translations and published my translation on the blog. Tomorrow I'll start learning the next Gainsbourg song on my 1982 list. 

            I weighed 85.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday, I spent almost ninety minutes washing the grooves where the sliding windows go in the right-hand window set of my living room. Hopefully, I'll finish cleaning them on Sunday and get at least one of the sliding windows washed. School starts on Monday and there's already homework so I'd like to get these windows done so I can focus on my studies. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. It was my first long bike ride since changing my tire yesterday. It was nice to not feel the back wheel wobbling anymore.

            I weighed 84.6 kilos at 17:00. That's the least I've weighed at that time in six days. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:42. 

            I received a general welcome email from the instructor of the course "English Language in the World". We were informed that our textbook is Concert of Voices, but it is not necessary to have it for the first week. She gave us a couple of electronic links for things to read. One is the poem, "An Introduction" by Kamala Das and the other is the first chapter of English in the World Today by Philip Seargeant. 

            "An Introduction" is about finding one's own language, suggesting that just as everyone has their own identity, everyone has their own English but also a commonality in the word "I". 

            The essay talks about the different forms of English throughout the world and that some people suggest they shouldn't be called "English" anymore. I think that's silly because English has always been a hybrid language. Just because there is a general way of speaking and even a standard doesn't mean it has to be a rule. I read those texts and so I had no time for reviewing videos or working on my Movie Maker project. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a steak while watching episode three of Ben Casey. 

            In this story, Casey's old teacher and Zorba's old fellow teacher and friend, Dr. Waldman comes to them with a problem. He has a blockage in his carotid artery that is causing blackouts and numbness. The condition is fatal without surgery but in Waldman's case, it's too risky because of his weak heart. Waldman is personally ready to die but he wants to teach a few more students so he's willing to take the risk. 

            Casey doesn't want to kill Waldman and when a patient with a healthy heart dies in surgery of cardiac arrest, he is even more reluctant. Zorba is willing to take the risk. After the dean warns Casey that performing the operation could jeopardize his career, Casey decides to do it. The operation is only partially successful and all they bought Waldman is another couple of years, but he is happy with that.

            Dr. Zorba was played by Sam Jaffe. As a young man he lived in the same Greenwich Village building as John Huston and they became friends for life. He starred in Huston's The Asphalt Jungle for which he was nominated for an Oscar, and also The Barbarian and the Geisha. He co-starred in The Scarlet Empress, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Ben Hur, and starred in Gunga Din. He was married to Bettye Ackerman, who also co-starred on Ben Casey. 

            I searched for bedbugs and for the second night in a row I found one. This one was to the left of the frame of the old exit door at the head of my bed. It was black and of the same maturity as the one I found yesterday. 

            I finished chronologizing the hard copies of my transcripts of the Gumby Bible group poem. I was able to get it done fairly quickly after remembering that in Word I can search for words or phrases in a document. So I just took a main couple of words from each hard copy and searched each of the eight digital documents that contain the entire Gumby Bible. I still need to chronologize some of the original copies of the Gumby Bible that I never got around to writing a date on.