Joan Marshall

            On Wednesday morning I finished searching for the chords for "Que tu es impatiente, la mort" (Death You're So Impatient) by Boris Vian and I worked the first two out for the intro. 

            I memorized the second verse of "Lulu" by Serge Gainsbourg and made changes to my translation. There's only one verse left to learn. 

            I played the acoustic guitar for the recording of song practice and after a few takes made it through Megaphor and Sixteen Tons of Dogma without any major mistakes. I might have also recorded a half decent take of "L'accordion" and maybe "Joanna". I'll watch and listen later to find out for sure. I know now after the accident yesterday to be more careful with the guitar cable because it's connected to an interface that can get knocked over and hit other things like a monitor. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            The landlord said he would be here in the morning to fix my kitchen sink and so I couldn't get any work done gluing boards on my floor because after doing so I'd have to put my concrete block on top and that would be right in front of the doors that lead beneath the sink. So instead of working I watched the rest of the partially downloaded episode of Arrest and Trial that I'd started. 

            Telly Savalas is getting back at a gangster for putting his wife in the hospital. He disguises his newspaper delivery truck with a termite exterminator sign and goes with a gun to the estate of the big boss and shoots him in his pool. He gets arrested and charged with murder. John Egan (Chuck Connors) defends him pro bono. I had to look up the rest of the story at IMD because there's no sound and it's all in the courtroom. Savalas is willing to face the music until he realizes he'll be leaving his family without support. Finally there is a hung jury because they couldn't decide if he'd done anything that they wouldn't do. 

            The landlord didn't come. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before lunch. In the afternoon I took a bike ride and stopped at Best Buy to look for a new monitor and a new mouse. The old mouse hasn't been scrolling properly and what's being scrolled bounces partially back up when I'm trying to go down. Somebody approached me to serve me within a couple of minutes and directed me to their Asus VG27A, which is 68 cm, the next measurement up from my old one. I figured if I have to buy another monitor at my age I might as well upgrade. A couple of years ago I would have just lived with the vertical lines, but I have more money now that I've retired so why not live a little? I also got a new Logitech mouse. 

            When I went to pay I looked at the box and saw that it said it's a gaming monitor. I said I didn't ask for a gaming monitor, but the sales person and the techy customer at the counter said that a gaming monitor is just a higher quality of monitor. I asked why they don't just say it's a higher quality of monitor. I suggested that a lot of people who aren't gamers might look at it and decide not to buy it because it's called a gaming monitor. 

            The box had a handle but it was too cumbersome to take it that way on my bike. I took out my jackknife and cut open the box. I put the monitor in two large PC recyclable bags and I put everything else in my backpack. I folded up the box and stuffed it into the bag with the monitor on the bike side so it would be a barrier against the me bumping the monitor as I rode. I had to leave the foam padding on a tree planter because there was no garbage bin nearby. I had to grip the right handlebar tight to keep the shopping bag with the monitor in it safely on the handlebar. My hand was losing circulation and so at the traffic light at Queen and Bathurst I was glad it was a long red light so I could flex my hand and get the blood pumping into it again. 

            When I got home I went back out to the local market and bought two bags of cherries. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos at 17:45.

            I spent about an hour setting up the new monitor. The instructions for assembly are not very detailed so I had to mostly figure it out for myself. Once I had it on I had to change a lot of my settings. My Word document showed six pages at once and it took a while to set it so I could only see one page at a time again. Even though the monitor is only seven and a half centimeters larger than the old one it seems enormous. 

            I only had time to post my blog before dinner. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 1, episodes 18 and 19 of Petticoat Junction. 

            In the first story Billy Joe still wants to go to Hollywood while Kate keeps trying to discourage her. She consults with Dr. Depew in Hooterville. He suggests that everyone start telling Billie that she doesn't look well. Eventually she'll think she's sick and go to bed. They do this and it works. Then the young and attractive Dr. Harris is brought in to treat her. Then Kate writes a fake gossip column in Sam's paper with only one printing. It says that Dr. Harris is being romanced by several young women from Pixley. Suddenly Billie decides she has to rescue Dr. Harris and she also tells him that she's going to study to be a doctor. 

            In the second story a famous Hollywood actor named Lane Haggard comes with his secretary Lucy Wayne to the Shady Rest to get away from all of the women that are always chasing him. But Billie, Bobbie, and Betty and to some degree Kate all go after him. Lane has a habit of always saying the most charming things to women without being aware of them. Kate is worried about her daughters and so she pretends to respond to Lane's charm in an aggressive manner and tell him they have to get married. Then Joe comes in with a shotgun and Kate says there's only one way he can get out of marrying her and that's if he marries someone else. He immediately proposes to his secretary who he's always had feelings for. The wedding is held right there with Sam Drucker officiating. 

            Lucy was played by Joan Marshall, who auditioned and was hired to be a showgirl at Chez Paree in Chicago when she was only 14 but so well developed that no one could tell. At 16 she was appearing as a showgirl in Vegas, got married and had a child. Three years later she had a second child and moved to Hollywood. In 1959 she co-starred in the TV drama series Bold Venture. In 1961 she starred in the now cult film movie Homicidal in which she played two characters, one male and one female. In the 1970s she became a script writer for sitcoms. She married film director Hal Ashby who turned some of the details of her life into the screenplay for the movie "Shampoo".