Nancy Dow

            On Monday morning I continued searching for more chords for "Love On the Beat" by Serge Gainsbourg but there were no new sets. There was only one site that repeated the chords I'd found on Sunday on Ultimate Guitar. I started to try them out to see if they worked but frankly I can't play some of those chords like Cm6, Cm#5, F#m7, F#m6, and F#m#5. My fingers just won't go there. I found it fine for my purposes to just play Cm,Gm#5, F#m and A for the intro. No need to get fancy. I'll start on the verses tomorrow. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I've been a week, but lighter than last Monday. 

            In the late morning I went and did my laundry. When I was on my way back to put the washed stuff in the dryer, I stopped at Freedom Mobile to pay for my March phone plan. 

            I weighed 84.2 kilos before lunch at 13:50. Since my lunch was late, so was my after lunch siesta. When I got up at 16:30 it was too late for a bike ride and besides that there was a snowstorm going on. I had already cycled to Jameson and back three times anyway and so I did get some exercise.

            I weighed 84.5 kilos at 16:45. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:38. 

            I worked for over an hour on the final paragraph of my Frankenstein presentation: 

            We are all the creations of the society in which we live and so society for each of us to varying degrees is our own Victor Frankenstein. When one is shut out from full participation or inclusion in society because of physiognomy the excluded victim is seen as a monster. Upon seeing his creature animated, Victor immediately makes a negative assessment of his character based on appearance. Unlike a true scientist he rejects his creation based entirely on the judgement of superficial qualities. A scientist would want to study the mind of his creation and upon even the most superficial examination of his child's awareness and mental capabilities would have observed from a scientific perspective a thing of beauty. A real scientist would try to educate such a mind, because as Wollstonecraft says, "to bring into existence a creature... who could think and improve himself" is an "incalculable gift" that should not be called a curse (Wollstonecraft 9). But Victor does see his creature as a curse and rejects it, thereby forcing it out into the world before its mind has "been stored with knowledge or strengthened by principles" as Wollstonecraft says of the educational paucity that women experience (Wollstonecraft 15-16) (Shelley 104). In making no effort to guide the powerful creature, Victor excludes him from participation in society, consequently damning him to a life akin to that of a wild animal. Any society that does this to a thinking creature, as Wollstonecraft warns, "can expect to see him at any moment transformed into a ferocious beast. ‘You have loosed the bull' she says, "Do you expect that he won’t use his horns?’"(43). 

            I had a potato with gravy and steamed lima beans while watching season 5, episode 13 of The Beverly Hillbillies. 

            In this story Jethro is frustrated by the failure of his efforts to get a girlfriend. He tries to mail himself to Paris because he thinks he'll have better luck there. 

            Since on that day Jane Hathaway's all-girl bird watching troop will be coming there to watch birds in the back yard, Jed suggests Jethro try one of those girls. But Jethro says those girls are not attractive. But then they arrive and file out of the bus like a paramilitary organization. Most of the women are indeed very nerdy looking, except for Athena, who is Jane's second in command, and beautiful. Now Jethro wants to join but Jane says it's for girls only. Jethro jumps in the pool and pretends to be drowning in hopes of Athena saving him, but a short and wide girl in glasses rescues him instead. 

            Jed is still trying to help Jethro and talks to Drysdale about it. Drysdale says he can help because he is a former Woodchuck (The Woodchucks are a fictional version of the Boy Scouts. In Disney comic books there is a group called The Junior Woodchucks to which Donald Duck's nephews belong). Drysdale arranges for Stanley, the local leader of the Woodchucks to come and initiate Jethro. At first Jethro isn't interested but then he sees Athena fawning over Stanley's badges and he wants in. Jethro tries to earn his first badge by starting an ant farm but doesn't enclose them in a glass case so they run loose and get on everyone until Jed, Jane, Jethro, Stanley, Athena and the other Bird Watchers all jump in the pool. 

            Athena was played by Nancy Dow. She appeared in a few TV series and movies. She played a supporting role in the 1969 movie Ice House. She is the mother of Jennifer Aniston. She and Jennifer were estranged after Nancy wrote a memoir that revealed details that Jennifer thought should have been kept private. Five years later, after Jennifer divorced Brad Pitt, the mother and daughter reconciled. Nancy died in 2016. 

            I searched for bedbugs and when I was poking my toothpick around the cracks in the baseboard to the right of the head of my bed, something very small seemed to crawl quickly down and out of my sight. I don't know if it was a bedbug because they tend not to move that fast. It could also have been a piece of dirt falling. For now I'm going to claim that this was the sixth night in a row of not seeing any bedbugs.