Tom Fadden

            On Thanksgiving morning I finished memorizing “Physique est sans issue” (The Physical is without Issue) by Serge Gainsbourg. I searched for the chords but no one besides the mechanical chord sites had posted them which they always do. But their software just reads every single note from every instrument and so it’s a jumble of a lot of unnecessary chords. I worked them out for half of the first verse. I could tell from listening to the intro that it has the melody of the chorus and so when I’ve worked those chords out I’ll have the intro. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second day of two. 

            I weighed 86.9 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning in a week. It would probably be less if the rain yesterday hadn’t canceled my bike ride. 

            I got a notice from the School of Graduate Studies that George Elliot Clarke had sent his recommendation letter of me to them. George emailed me and confirmed it as well. I told him whether I get in or not I’d like to buy him dinner and he said we’d set a date. 

            Besides my usual tidying up I didn’t do much work before lunch. I need to buy some construction adhesive to glue down the Masonite I cut and I assumed the hardware store was closed today. I’ll go on Tuesday. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before lunch. It’s been a week since I’ve been that hefty at midday.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I wore my leather jacket and my leather gloves for the first time since early spring. 

            I spent about half an hour chiseling black quartz and amethyst from a piece of the rock that I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:19. 

            In Movie Maker I published the video of my August 14 song practice electric guitar performance of my song “Megaphor”. Now after at least three years of doing that song every morning I’ll put it aside and start practicing my song “Vomit of the Star Eater”. 

            I searched for silent films featuring victims being tied to railroad tracks. Surprisingly there weren’t very many. The two main ones are the comedy “Teddy at the Throttle” starring Gloria Swanson, and the drama “Race for Life” starring Mabel Normand. I found them on YouTube, bookmarked them and I think I’ll download them on Tuesday. 

            I cleaned and scanned another set of uncut colour negatives. I can tell they are from the late 80s because they show my ex-girlfriend Brenda with the sculpted haircut that I gave her with a buzzer. When she started wearing her hair that way she found nobody could cut it as well as me and even after we broke up she’d come and get me to do it. Until one time I screwed it up and it was a disaster. I think a patch of her scalp was showing through. I didn’t do it deliberately but it served her right for dumping me. 

            I had a potato with gravy and three pork ribs while watching season 1, episodes 5 and 6 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Oliver has started planting seeds but he’s doing it one seed at a time. Hank Kimble comes around and Oliver asks him about his soil samples. It turns out that the jars broke. Oliver decides to deliver new samples to the lab himself. Meanwhile Joe Carson has decided that he is going to court Oliver’s mother Eunice. He arrives and invites her to play poker at the Elks Club, then to go bowling and then for Dutch treat at the diner. She is disgusted by the whole prospect. Oliver comes in with his new soil samples and puts them down while he goes to change. Eunice asks Joe to leave and on his way out he bumps against the soil samples, causing them to spill on the floor. Eunice reasons that if her son gets a bad lab report on his soil he will move back to New York. So after putting the soil back in the jars she adds talcum powder, cold cream, nail polish remover and some other items. Oliver returns from the lab depressed and ready to sell the farm. He goes to Sam to run an ad putting up the farm for sale. While he is there Kimble comes in to give him a list of what they found in his soil. With each ingredient he names, Sam is collecting an order for Eunice because she is replacing all of the items she dumped into Oliver’s soil. Oliver realizes that his mother sabotaged his soil. Oliver goes home and finds Lisa in the field. She points to the area where he’d planted that morning and there are now fully grown carrots there. Since that rate of growth is impossible and because he planted tomatoes, he knows that Lisa buried carrots in the soil. She says she rented them from Mr. Haney. Oliver punishes his mother by forcing her to go on five dates with Joe. 

            In the second story Oliver is listening to the farm report on the radio to find out the price of wheat when Lisa overloads the generator. He tries to explain to her that all of the plugs work on the principle of seven. Anything over seven is too much. The can opener is 1, the coffee pot, the electric iron, the mixer, and the toaster are each 2, the frying pan is 3, the rotisserie is 4, the dishwasher is 5, and the washing machine, freezer and refrigerator are each 6. Lisa decides to save electricity by putting the electric coffee pot on the stove. The bottom melts and fuses to the stove. Oliver has decided to plant wheat and goes to Sam’s to buy the seed. There he finds Fred Ziffle and Ben Miller arguing over which seed is best to plant right now. Fred says his wife Doris has lumbago which is a sign of a corn climate. Ben says his wife is cranky which means soybeans are best. Sam says Doris’s lumbago has brought some of the best corn crops in the valley and Ben agrees so he buys corn as well. Oliver says he wants wheat and Ben asks if Lisa has wheat bumps. Oliver comes home with his wheat seed and is visited by Hank Kimble who tells him the bottom fell out of the wheat market this morning. Lisa goes to see Doris and she confesses that she doesn’t have lumbago. She’s just faking to get out of slopping the pigs. Lisa tells this to Oliver after he’s planted half an acre of corn. He digs up all the seeds and takes them back to Sam. Fred finds out Doris has been faking and brings his corn back to buy wheat seed because Doris has bumps on her head. Sam says wheat is up but Ben Miller brings his corn back to buy soybeans because they went up higher on the news. Oliver decides to buy half wheat and half soybeans. But when Oliver comes home there is a report that wheat is down again and so he takes the seeds back to get corn. Fred and Ben bring their wheat and soybeans back to get potato seed because they found out the secretary of agriculture has a cold. 

            Ben Miller was played by Tom Fadden, who started acting in stock companies in Omaha in 1915. He went from stock to Vaudeville and then was a regular on Broadway. His first movie was a small part in I Stole a Million. Two of his rare co-starring roles were in Zanzibar and in the serial Winners of the West. He played Pa Kent in the first episode of The Adventures of Superman and he appeared on ten episodes of Cimarron City. He had steady work in small parts throughout his acting career until he died in 1980.