Betty White

            On Sunday morning I dreamed that my computer monitor shattered. It was making clinking noises as if the screen were actually made out of glass, triangular shards were dropping off and there were sparks flying from it as well. I woke up wondering if it really was broken. 

            I finished editing the chord positions for "Au bon vieux temps" by Boris Vian in my Christian's Translations blog. On Monday I'll post a YouTube file of the song and publish it. Then I'll post it on my Boris Vian Facebook page. 

            I finished memorizing "Une chose entre autres" (One Thing Among Others) by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords. There was one set at Boite a chanson (Song Box) and I transcribed those. No one else had posted any and so I worked out the first chord for the intro. I'm not hearing Boite a chanson's E minor ninth. I picked G minor as the first chord. I'll start figuring out the rest on Monday. 

            I had a relaxing song practice while playing my Martin acoustic guitar and singing in English without any cables to tie me down. On Monday I'll begin four days of playing my Kramer electric guitar and so there'll be one cable but no microphones and wires to step over like the spider's web I had to weave whenever I played the electric for my recording project. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I've been in the morning in ten days.

            It's been a month since I've had a functioning kitchen sink. I sent the Raja an email reminding him of his duty as a landlord to see that the plumbing in his tenants' units is in good repair. His wife got back to me and said that the plumber will be here this week. 

            I sanded some more of the fibreboard that I glued down to fill the depression in my kitchen floor. It's almost level with the rest of the kitchen floor, so soon I need to start looking for tiles to glue down in that area in front of the kitchen counter. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I spent about twenty minutes chiseling black quartz from pieces of the rock that I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos at 17:30. That's the most hefty I've been in the evening in a week. 

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

            I reviewed the videos of my performances of "Megaphor" from August 11 to 14. August 11 and 12 were acoustic sets and August 13 and 14 were electric. On August 11 at 3:00 minutes in it was the best acoustic take so far. The light was great and I looked good. August 12 was pretty good but the light wasn't great. I think August 11 is better. On August 13 some of the chords sounded off. On August 14 at 3:30 minutes in it was the best electric take so far. The light was good and the distortion sounded great.

            In the Movie Maker project to create a music video for my song "Megaphor" I edited out a few more minutes of the silent film Spies by Fritz Lang. 

            I finished scanning the set of black and white negatives of shots I took of Rachel and Noah Copping when I was babysitting them in the fall of 1987. There are about a hundred negatives left to scan and then I need to tackle hundreds of slides. 

            I made pizza on seven grain bread with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 6, episodes 18 and 19 of Petticoat Junction. 

            In the first story, Janet Craig's old friend Adelle has come to Hooterville to set up a library. Joe, Sam Drucker, and Bert the barber immediately fall for Adelle. The library location is solved by setting it up as a bookmobile in the baggage car of the Cannonball. Joe, Sam, and Bert all hang around the baggage car and pretend to read just so they can be near Adelle. One day they all get dressed up and wait for the Cannonball with gifts for Adelle. But the Cannonball doesn't show. They find it on the tracks and nearby in the woods they find Wendell Gibbs the engineer reading love poetry to Adelle. A similar story was aired on an episode four seasons before this but with the difference that it was a much younger librarian and it was only Joe that was making a fool of himself. At the end of that episode the rolling library was closed when a permanent library was set up in Hooterville. These shows were never much for continuity. 

            Adelle was played by the great Betty White, whose first job in the entertainment business was at the age of 8 in the radio soap opera Empire Builders. She skipped college to take classical vocal training. She drove a PX truck for the American Women's Volunteer Services during WWII. After the war she was a DJ for KLAC radio. She made supporting appearances on several popular radio shows and in 1949 had The Betty White Show. In 1951 The Betty White Show moved to television but it was canceled after she refused to fire a black tap dancer. She was co-producer and star of the sitcom Life With Elizabeth starting in 1951 on a local LA station. From 1953 to 1955 the show was nationally broadcast. She starred in the short lived sitcom Date with the Angels. She was the host of the celebrity pet owners talk show The Pet Set in 1971. She co-starred on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. She played Ellen Harper on Mama's Family at the same time she was playing Rose on The Golden Girls. She was a frequent panelist and celebrity guest on numerous popular game shows. She didn't like doing Broadway shows because if a show bombs you're a failure and if it's a hit you are stuck doing the show for years. She co-starred on Hot in Cleveland. Her autobiography was entitled If You Ask Me (And of course you won't). She won a total of seven Emmy Awards. 

            

            

            In the second story the annual Hooterville Founder's Day ceremony is being planned. Sam Drucker and the Bradley sisters are rehearsing a song and dance routine that begins with a song from the era of the founder Cyrus Plout and then jumps to the modern rock and roll era. The girls and Sam are wearing turn of the century costumes and singing "Tell Me Pretty Maiden" from Leslie Stuart and Owen Hall's 1899 musical Floradora. It was the first hit musical of the 20th Century. Then the girls change to mini skirts and do a go-go dance. Salma Plout is shocked and thinks it's an insult to the legacy of her late husband's ancestor. But Salma's daughter Henrietta has found a secret photo album that shows that Cyrus Plout was a saloon owner who had twenty, "count'em twenty curvaceous cuties" working for him. Henrietta shows the album to Janet Craig and Janet blackmails Salma into giving in. Salma shows up at the rehearsal, says she hates to be beaten and so if you can't beat'em join'em, then she takes off her coat to reveal a mini-dress. That should have been the end of the episode but they repeated the musical number they'd started with, which is a good song but that's just overkill.