Arnold Ziffel

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the third verse of “L'amour de moi” (The Whole of My Love) by Serge Gainsbourg. There’s just one verse left and I doubt if I’ll have any problem nailing down the whole song tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first day of two. I weighed 85.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I researched the books of poetry published by Guernica Editions to get a handle on what to write in a cover letter if my manuscript isn’t accepted by Ekstasis. The only two books that I think my book Paranoiac Utopia would compliment are Downtown Flirt by Peter Jickling and Songs and Ballads by Frederico Garcia Lorca. Downtown Flirt is very urban and somewhat streetwise like my poetry and Lorca’s works echo mine in that they were meant to be sung or at least spoken. About Ekstasis, I had asked Albert Moritz if I should move on to the next publisher since they haven’t responded to me since I sent my manuscript to them more than four months ago. He had said that would probably be a good idea but that he’d email the publisher first. He found out that the publisher has been sick and fell behind by a year. He told Albert he would look for my manuscript. I think Guernica’s window for submissions is the month of February so I have some time to wait anyway.

            I thought about going to the hardware store to buy some molding for the space between the Masonite that I glued sown and the bottom of the kitchen counter cabinets. Then I realized that I already have some molding that I bought about twenty years ago. I measured the length that I need and cut it. I’ll need to buy a small tube of construction glue to secure the molding in place. Then I have to think about painting. 

            I weighed 86.1 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I spent about twenty minutes chiseling black quartz from a piece of the rock that I found six years ago. I finished that piece and started another one that still has some amethyst on it as well.

            I weighed 84.7 kilos at 17:30, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening in twenty eight days.

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

            In the Movie Maker project for my August 11 song practice I managed to synchronize the video and the audio. Then I saved it as a new project called “Le temps des yé-yé (acoustic)”. I deleted everything but that song. I set it so it has only the audio from my Audacity recording because the camera microphone picked up too much traffic noise. Tomorrow I’ll look into adding a fade to black effect at the end and maybe another effect. I might also have time to upload it to YouTube. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song Megaphor I eliminated just the right amount of the concert video of the instrumental so it ends with me beginning the last verse and it’s synchronized for my line, “Behind the tango between Venus and the planet Mars…”. But it goes out of synch for the next, “…twists a Ziegfield folly of a zillion stars”. At this point I want to replace the concert video with a clip from the Ziegfield follies, preferably with the dancers descending a stairway. I did a bit of a search and found a couple of Ziegfield Follies clips but not exactly what I’m looking for. I’ll try again tomorrow. If I don’t show a clip very few people will get the reference. 

            I cut a chicken into legs, breasts, wings and the spine and roasted it. I poured the drippings into the gravy that I made too thick yesterday. I had some with a leg and a potato while watching season 2, episodes 6 and 7 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Oliver gets a letter telling him he owes $12.03 for the State Farm Unattached Duty Tax. Nobody knows what the tax is for but they pay it anyway. Oliver however wants to know why his money is being taken so he calls up the state capital. He asks for the State Farm Unattached Duty Tax Bureau and is told they closed at noon and will be back in a year. They just run the names through the computer once a year to mail out the taxes. He wants to talk with his community’s assemblyman but nobody knows who he is. He learns that the last person to run for Assemblyman was Sam Drucker in 1922. Election day is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in September but the word got around that it was the first Monday after the first Tuesday and so everybody showed up to vote too late and no assemblyman was elected. Oliver says that since they don’t have an assemblyman they shouldn’t be paying taxes because taxation without representation is tyranny. Oliver and Lisa go to the state capital so he can talk to the governor but he can’t get an appointment for months. Lisa finds Oliver dictating to a stenographer a letter to the governor but she tells her to leave. Lisa calls the White House and talks to Lady Bird Johnson, then seconds later the phone rings and it’s the governor telling him he’ll see him right away. Oliver suggests to the governor that everybody in the Hooterville Valley should get a tax refund for all the money they’ve paid since 1922. They all get cheques and shout hooray for Oliver. But then the governor sends everybody in the valley a bill for all the work the state has done there for infrastructure such as bridges and roads. The bill amounts to more than half a million dollars per citizen so now they want to tar and feather Oliver. 

            In the second story Oliver is reading a book called “40 Years a Farmer” and tells the story to Lisa. Gus Thompson settles on land in Kansas and sends to Hungary for his childhood sweetheart Gladys. But Etta comes instead because Gladys is married in Hungary. So Gus marries Etta and they build a farm. She pulls the plough because Gus has no horse. When he almost has the money for a horse she insists on a new dress so he spends it. As the years go by they have seven kids and the farm prospers. But then they are wiped out by a flood. The children move away but Gus and Etta stay and have fifteen more kids. It ends with them old but together. Lisa says she still doesn’t want to be a farm wife. 

            Arnold Ziffel was played by several piglets over the six years of Green Acres. If they’d used the same pig it would have grown too big to be cute in a few months. Most of the time Arnold was played by a female pig. Arnold’s trainer, as for most of the animals on Green Acres, Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies, was Frank Inn. Inn said that pigs require delicate psychology to accept training. If they are forced or reprimanded by a trainer a pig will refuse to even take food from them. Arnold received a lot of fan mail and also won an Emmy Award for best performance by an animal.