Bettye Ackerman

            On Friday morning I memorized the fifth and sixth verses of "J'envisage" (I Imagine) by Serge Gainsbourg. There are about two more to learn. 

            During song practice, I saw for the first time a squirrel fall from the wire to the street. It was attacked by another squirrel and knocked off. But after it hit the concrete it was still able to run to the sidewalk. It sat for a while among the weeds growing just in from the corner of the sidewalk and then moved on. Apparently, a squirrel can fall thirty meters and still be okay. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            I finished reading the second branch of the old Welch collection of tales called The Mabinogi. The Welch king's sister had married the Irish King but his people had pressured him to punish her because her half-brother had disfigured his horses. So she was forced to cook for everyone and a butcher with bloody hands had the task of punching her in the face every day. She trained a starling to carry a message to her brother and so Wales invaded Ireland. Since the Welch king was a giant he served as a bridge for his armies to cross over. 

            I couldn't access the third and fourth branches in this translation and so I downloaded two different versions. One is a little too poetic to follow the story but the other seems straightforward. In the third branch, a Welch couple is in England and they try various trades like shield making, saddle making, and shoe making. The problem is that they are so good at all of these trades that they destroy the market and make the other tradespeople violently angry. So each time they have to move on to another trade, with the same result. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 84.5 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:30. 

            I started researching for the English in the World assignment that is due on Saturday at 14:00. This time we need to find articles on English in what is known as an "Expanding Circle" country, which is a place where English has never been the native language and yet it is nonetheless widespread. Since I'm half Swedish I decided to pick Sweden and since I'm a songwriter I decided to look at the Swedish music industry. I found an interesting article on how Swedes have a reputation for swearing in English. Here's what I have so far: 

            Sweden currently ranks in eighth place globally in the EF English Proficiency Index of non-native English speakers. This shows that Swedes are highly proficient English speakers. But despite the Swedish proficiency in English, English words, particularly those that are considered to be "swear" words have less emotional impact for Swedes than they would for native anglophones, and therefore they are considered to be less offensive. There is far less chance of someone swearing in Swedish on a Swedish prime-time television show than in English. 

            I had a potato with gravy and my last slice of roast pork, with a beer while watching the first season finale of Ben Casey. 

            Alma Gardner is brought in with a gunshot wound to the head, which, according to the detective in charge of her case, was self-inflicted after she murdered her husband. Alma is a friend of Casey because her husband was also his friend when he was a resident at the hospital before going into a very successful private practice. Alma has already confessed to having shot her husband and says she did it because she couldn't stand the abuse any longer and because she wanted to protect her daughter Melanie. Melanie comes and says she walked in and saw her father had been shot and then she called the police. 

            X-rays show that Alma has a bullet lodged in her frontal lobe and so surgery is immediately called for. Alma is high on the pain killer she has been given when Dr. Maggie Graham comes in to anesthetize her. Alma is ranting about her husband having hit Melanie before she killed him. Maggie points out to Casey that this statement doesn't fit with what Alma told the police. She had previously said that Melanie entered the room after the murder. Casey thinks Alma was just speaking incoherently but Maggie tells him he should pass the information on to the police. Casey tells her to keep out of it.

            The surgery is a success. Maggie keeps bugging Casey about the information. Finally, Casey goes to visit Melanie and asks her if she was in the room when her father was shot. She won't answer and he tells her she leaves him no choice. She tells him that when he walks out the door she will call the police and tell them that he tried to blackmail her. He asks, "You would do that?" She says, "If I would shoot my own mother and father I certainly can't care what happens to you." Detective Martinez comes in and arrests Melanie, saying that Maggie told him the whole story. 

            Melanie was played by 60s teen idol Tuesday Weld, who I already wrote about in my blogs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. 

            Maggie was played by Bettye Ackerman, who was married to her Ben Casey co-star, Sam Jaffe. He was 33 years older than her but they were married for 28 years until he died. She was on Ben Casey for five years. In 1970 she played Anne Frazer on Bracken's World. In 1974 she played Constance McKenzie on Return to Peyton Place. 

            I searched for bedbugs and might have seen a baby. If I did it was too young to even have blood inside of it. That would mean eggs have hatched but maybe they would have been born already infected by the spores that pest control sprayed to kill them. If only I could get the landlord to take them seriously.