Jesse White

            On Sunday morning I worked out the chords for the ninth verse of "Sans blague" (No Joke) by Boris Vian. 

            I worked out the chords for verses three to seven and the chorus of "Trompe d’érection" (Missed Erection) by Serge Gainsbourg.

            A young woman who might have been coming from a party came back to her car in the Dollarama parking lot with a guy but had locked herself out. They waited for the car lock technician for a while but after a while, the guy left. She went away and then after half an hour came back and waited. Finally, the CAA guy came, but when I looked later her car was still in the parking lot. An hour later I saw that a CAA truck had come and she was inside her car, but not driving away. Maybe she lost her keys. Half an hour later a CAA tow truck was there hoisting up her little SUV. She had also changed out of her short party dress into pants. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before breakfast. 

            I did a time-consuming phonetic transcription quiz for my English in the World course. It mostly involved recognizing or writing the correct International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbol for certain word sounds. On my first try, I scored .97 out of 1.05 because I had one and part of another question wrong. The second time I got .98 because I had one question wrong. I had the wrong symbol for the vowel sound of the word "goose". Logic said the symbol should be "u" but that symbol wasn't listed on the website that the professor linked us to, so I picked one from the choices listed and got it wrong. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos before lunch. That's the most I've weighed at that time in 13 days. 

            I took a bike ride downtown and back. It was warm and I was overdressed in my hoody and my leather jacket. 

            I weighed 85 kilos at 16:38. That's the heaviest I've been at that time in 15 days. 

            I took the quiz again and this time I copied the "u" from another site and my score was 100%. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:14. 

            I noticed that I'd written the wrong course code on the essay that I handed in yesterday. I emailed the professor to make sure I don't have to resubmit it. She got back to me later and said it didn't matter. 

            I wrote down some stream-of-consciousness ideas on Grendel from Beowulf towards my Medieval Literature essay: 

            Grendel is a political, economic, and class revolutionary. He could have chosen any number of peasants, farmers, fishermen, and tradespeople to attack and kill easily in their non-fortified homes. But he only attacked the nobles in the mead hall, which was the gathering place of the king's elite warriors. He only attacked the very best of Hrothgar's men and never the women. He made a deliberate choice to attack the upper class of Danish society. In Viking society, the warriors were the highest class. His was a revolution against the wealthy and those who rule. Whatever species of man Grendel was he was also serving the human poor by attacking those who ruled over them. Grendel's choice to not use weapons against armed warriors was an act of austerity. We know that he had access to weapons through his mother. We know that she could use a knife and had at least one sword, and yet Grendel chose not to use it. He was making a statement. He was fighting civilization despite being at least somewhat civilized. He chose to only fight the wealthy. If all he'd needed to do was to eat humans he could have done so without going anywhere near the mead hall. He was punishing the wealthy revelers. He was terrorizing those in power. Perhaps it was revenge against the warriors that killed off his own people. He clearly had no problem with humans or he would have simply slaughtered any humans that he could find. He targeted the elite warriors who knew how to fight. He was challenging himself as Beowulf did.

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with Basilica sauce, a beef burger sliced in two lengthwise, and seven-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 23 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            In this story, a con artist named Harry Jones comes to see Jed. He's already wanted by the police under various names. His mode of operation is to target rural types, to claim to be from their neck of the woods, and then try to sell them some large piece of property that he doesn't own, like the Hollywood Bowl. That's just what Jones tries to do. He says he's from just across the ridge from Jed's old place in Tennessee. He also flatters Pearl and makes her believe she can give yodeling concerts at the bowl. He tells Jed that he can fill the bowl with wild game and hunt or fill it with water for fishing. The family travels with Harry out to the Bowl to look at it. Jed recognizes that it would be a good place for Pearl to sing but not to hunt or fish. Harry says he'll sell them Griffith Park as well so he can hunt there. He takes them to the Griffith Park Zoo and on the way Elly is angry about the idea of hunting critters. 

            I'm pretty sure Elly's not vegan and in the first episode, she is introduced after having nearly crippled a wildcat in a wrestling match. She ate meat on the show and used products made from animals. 

            She doesn't like it when she sees the animals in cages and so she warns Harry that he has to let them go after Jed has a look at them. She goes down into a bear cage and is talking to and affectionately hugs a bear. 

           On the freeway, a lot of drivers are shouting rude things at the Clampetts and so Harry offers to sell the freeway to Jed as well so he can force everybody to be polite. They drop Pearl off at the Hollywood Bowl so she can dream some more about her future yodeling stardom. After they get home, Granny, Elly, and Jethro get guns and go back out to the freeway. They set up a roadblock and stop cars at gunpoint, making each driver promise to be nice from now on. 

            Mr. Drysdale rushes to Jed to warn him about Jones but Jed says he already knows that Jones is not a mountain man, since he got drunk on only half a jug of moonshine. 

            Harry Jones was played by Jesse White, who started out in theatre and made it to Broadway in 1943, becoming famous for his role as Wilson the asylum attendant in Harvey. He reprised the part in the film version with Jimmy Stewart. On television, he played Mickey Calhoun on Private Secretary and Jesse Leeds on the Danny Thomas Show at the same time. He was best known for his role in a long-running series of appliance commercials in which he played the lonely Maytag repairman from 1968 to 1989. 

            For the third night in a row, I found no bedbugs.