Olan Soule

            On Saturday morning my knee was still too bruised to press it onto the floor but a little less so than yesterday. I was also a bit more flexible during yoga. 

            I looked for the chords for "C’est rien, je m’en vais, c’est tout" (It’s Nothing, I’m Done, I’m Gone) by Serge Gainsbourg, but no one had posted them. I worked them out for the intro and all the verses. All that's left to do is figure them out for the instrumental before the penultimate verse. 

            During song practice it wasn't as uncomfortable to stand evenly on both legs but I wasn't dancing much. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            I went to the Vina Pharmacy to ask them to fax my doctor about renewing my Betaderm prescription and then I stepped over to Freedom Mobile and paid for February's phone plan. After that I rode to No Frills. 

            Yesterday it hurt a bit to pedal my bike around the block but today I barely noticed the aftermath of having slammed my knee into the pavement on Thursday. I notice it more when I'm sitting down or getting up from a chair at home. 

            At the supermarket I bought five bags of expensive cherries because the grapes were all soft, a bag of potatoes, two bags of kettle chips, a jar of salsa, and some skyr. I forgot to buy shaving gel. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos before lunch. I had rice crackers with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            Since riding to the supermarket and back hadn't taxed my knee I decided to try another bike ride in the afternoon. But this time pedaling bothered me like it did at the same time the day before, so I just rode around the block again. I'm guessing that riding bothered my knee more in the afternoon because I'd just gotten up from a siesta and my knee hadn't received full circulation. When I went to No Frills at noon I'd already been up and moving around for seven hours. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos at 16:15, which is the most I've weighed at that time in seventeen days. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:00. 

            I got up to page 758 in David Copperfield. David has become a successful author like Charles Dickens. He and Dora are being continuously ripped off by any servants they hire and there is this classist notion that the solution is to take a firm hand with servants. Emily is found and then confronted by Miss Dartle who thinks she seduced Steerforth. At the page where I left, David and several other characters are engaged in confronting Uriah Heep and exposing him as a forger and a criminal. All of the people confronting Heep are of a class above him and all judgements about Heep's character up until this point have been mostly based on his appearance. I find that very disturbing. We have been groomed throughout the novel to distrust Heep based on a physical description of his body and mannerisms, and reminders that he is a class upstart. If David distrusted him the whole time and he turns out in the end to be a criminal, it doesn't mean that David was right about him. It's just another one of the many coincidences that happen in this novel. In many ways the good natured Micawber is far more dangerous than Heep because of how he is repeatedly financially ruining his family. Also ironically if not for Heep's employing him Micawber probably would have ended up once again in debtors prison. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with Basilica sauce, a ground chicken patty cut in half edgewise, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 4, episode 15 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            In this story Granny hears that Mr. Drysdale has a cold but is disappointed he goes to Dr. Clyburn instead of her, since she has a cure. The last time she encountered Clyburn she treated his baldness and grew a big mass of hair on his head, which since then has fallen out. She says she can only grow it but she doesn't have time to garden it. Clyburn throws Granny out of his office. She gets Drysdale to let her have the penthouse in his bank building for a doctor's office. He gives it to her but since she doesn't have a license he doesn't let any patients go up there. Granny goes back to Clyburn's office and gives a drug distributor exclusive rights to distribute her cure. But when she's asked how the cure works she says take one spoonful, rest, eat sensibly, drink plenty of fluids and in a week or ten days your cold will be gone. Most colds would be gone in a week or ten days anyway. 

            Booth the drug salesman was played by Olan Soule, who started working on stage in Chicago at the age of seventeen. In 1933 he started in radio and performed for eleven years on the radio soap opera "Bachelor's Children". Starting in 1943 he played the male lead in all of the plays presented for the eight year run of the radio show "First Nighter". He played such a range of characters people were always surprised to see that he was a skinny little man. He played Agent Kelly on the "Captain Midnight" radio series and later when it became a TV cartoon series he played Tut the scientist. When he moved to Hollywood he became a regular on "Dragnet" and later on "Dragnet 1967". He was the first actor to do the voice for a cartoon version of Batman and did so for 15 years on various animated series such as "Super Friends". 

            For the fourth night in a row I found no bedbugs.