David Ketchum

            On Saturday morning I revised my translation of the ninth and tenth verses of "Au bon vieux temps" (In the Good Old Days) by Boris Vian. There are just two more to work out. 

            I finished revising my translation of "Le Couteau dans le play" (The Knife in the Play) by Serge Gainsbourg. I didn't quite have time to run through singing it in English. I'll have that done on Sunday and then upload it to my Christian's Translations blog. 

            I audio and video recorded song practice while playing my Kramer electric guitar. I was trying to keep the volume down and so I could barely hear the guitar while I was playing "Megaphor" but I think it might have turned out all right anyway. "Sixteen Tons of Dogma" didn't sound horrible in the playback. For some reason I kept hitting the A chord instead of the B flat while playing "The Accordion". 

            Then once I started getting it right and was almost finished my high E string broke. I grabbed the fake Gibson (Fibson) and put the Kramer strap onto it but this time I connected it to the top of the neck with a shoelace making it much more comfortable than last time when it was twisted onto the button at the bottom of the neck. I was able to get through a few more songs and the camera timed out while I was playing "Post Colonial Breakdown". When I'm playing the Fibson it feels and sounds very different from the Kramer but on the playback I can't really tell the difference. On Sunday I begin a four day stretch of playing my Martin acoustic guitar and then I'll finish up this year's recording project with two days of playing the Kramer again. 

            I weighed 84.2 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I've been in the morning in a month.

            Around midday I went down to No Frills where I bought five bags of green grapes, a pack of pork chops, a loaf of cinnamon-raisin bread, a bag of Miss Vickie's chips, a box of Earl Grey tea, and a container of skyr. When I got home I went back out to buy a six pack of Creemore. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before lunch. I had whole wheat crackers with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

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

            I chiseled some more black quartz from a piece of the rock I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos at 17:30. 

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

            I reviewed this morning's song practice video. Even though I could barely hear myself playing "Megaphor" the take I did seems like one of the best I've done. "Sixteen Tons of Dogma" wasn't too bad. I'm getting frustrated with the Kramer always breaking strings. I haven't broken a single string on the Martin since I bought it more than four months ago. I don't recall the Kramer breaking strings this much during the ten years I was actively playing it two decades ago. It wouldn't be so bad if the Fibson sounded good but it doesn't so I'm considering getting a new electric that doesn't have the complicated Floyd Rose system. I like the whammy bar for some songs but only use it a lot on one. I don't think I got any good takes today with the Fibson. 

            I imported all of the images I have depicting gods into the Movie Maker project for my song "Megaphor". I've placed about seven of them at the beginning of the video and cut them so each one appears for the length of one beat, lined up with the wave forms below them. So far it's working great. I searched online and collected a few more god images: Ganesha the elephant god, one of Michelangelo's depictions of the Christian god, the Egyptian and Japanese sun gods, and the Celtic god Arawn. I'll insert all those on Sunday and search for more. 

            I scanned seven single black and white negatives of shots of my daughter when she was close to newly born. Most of the rest of my negatives have been cut into singles. 

            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 2 and 3 of Petticoat Junction. 

            In the first story a theatrical agent named Ted Swift is driving in the country when he hears the three Bradley sisters singing on a local radio station. Right away he wants to sign them and so he finds Hooterville and just happens to meet the girls' Uncle Joe at Sam Drucker's store. Joe signs a contract without consulting the sisters and books them onto the Buddy Buster Show in Omaha. He doesn't take into account the fact that Betty Joe is very visibly pregnant and just a couple of weeks away from coming to term. Swift threatens to sue and so they do the show anyway. They sing "Up Up and Away" and use guitars and balloons to block the audience's view of Betty's belly. But these efforts don't work and it becomes obvious, but the audience doesn't mind at all. 

            Buddy Buster was played by David Ketchum, who had his own radio show for seven years in San Diego. He played Agent 13 on Get Smart (the agent who would always be hiding in ridiculous places like inside of mail boxes), Counselor Spiffy on Camp Runamok, and Mel Warshaw on I'm Dickens, He's Fenster. He co-wrote a script for the TV series Classification: Dead. He released a comedy album entitled The Long Playing Tongue of Dave Ketchum. 

            In the second story Steve is starting to feel left out as part of the team that made and is going to raise the baby that will be born soon. He gets mad when people talk about Betty Joe's baby as if it wasn't also his. The women around Betty get to share more attention than he does. On Joe's advice Steve makes himself scarce so he will be missed. They go fishing but get caught in a storm. They get home late and soaking wet and they do get some extra attention and sympathy as a result.