Jerry Fujikawa

            On Monday morning I worked out the chords for the first four and a half verses of “Suck baby suck” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second session of two. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning in a week.

            After shaving, showering and doing the dishes I didn’t have time to paint the first coat of white gloss on the Masonite that I’d glued to the kitchen floor. So I just swept it and washed it in preparation for Tuesday. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I was humming a great melody that I thought I’d come up with but then I realized it was the tune for “Puff the Magic Dragon”. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:14. 

            I reviewed the videos of my song practice performances of “The Accordion” and “L’accordion” from August 16 to 21. On August 16 I played “The Accordion” on my Martin acoustic guitar and the take at 19:00 was good and looked good but the B chords weren’t always firm. On August 17 and 19 I played “L’accordion” on my Kramer electric guitar. On August 17 it was pretty good for a while but I think I started hitting the wrong chord. On August 19 the take at 21:30 was mostly okay, plus this is already synchronized in Movie Maker. On August 18 and 20 I played “The Accordion” on the Kramer. On August 18 the take at 24:00 wasn’t too bad. On August 20 I wasn’t hitting the right chord in the chorus. On August 21 I played “L’accordion” on the Martin and the take at 21:00 was mostly not bad but there was bad light and traffic noise.

            In my Megaphor video project I cut from the end of the timeline all of the segments that I’d edited from the video of the simulation of the formation of a spiral galaxy and pasted them into the main video. I positioned them to correspond with the line, “And all those stars are strung like beads on an invisible thread spiralling endlessly inward…” At “endlessly inward” I added a zoom effect to the last section so that the spiral comes toward the viewer. The original video was mostly green with red and yellow parts in the centre but I converted my sections to grey scale. The studio audio is up to the point when I sing “from god…”, so next I have to try to synchronize the concert video with that. I’ll work on that tomorrow and if the synchronizations go smoothly I might actually finish the whole video.

            I scanned nine more of the remaining black and white negatives. They were all outdoor shots with a couple more of the old Indian head house off Indian Road. There are seven more negatives and eight boxes of slides left to scan. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a chicken leg while watching season 5, episodes 2 and 3 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Lisa’s mother, her big dog Shawn, and her houseboy Kyoto are still staying with her and Oliver. Kyoto is an excellent chef and makes breakfast for everybody including eggs benedict for the dog, but for Oliver he makes inedible hotcakes just like Lisa makes. Oliver is getting tired of sleeping on the couch and so when the “Countess” announces that she is going to leave he is quite enthusiastic. Then when Eustace Haney and Joe Carson hear that the “Countess” is rich they get dressed up and come courting. Their competition almost leads to a fistfight and so the “Countess” decides to leave in the morning. 

            Kyoto was played by Jerry Fujikawa who was interned in a concentration camp for Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. He was released upon volunteering for the US Army and served during the war in Italy. His professional acting career began when he debuted on Broadway in the original production of The Teahouse of the August Moon. He made seven appearances as different characters on M.A.S.H. He played Uncle Matsu on the short-lived sitcom Mr. T and Tina. 

            In the second story Eb tells the story of how Gus Birnbacher of Birnbacher Pork left his $20,000,000 estate to his pig Herman. Herman has died and now there is a search for a descendant of Herman to inherit the money. Fred Ziffel believes that his pig Arnold is Herman’s descendant although he has no papers to prove it. He wants Oliver to take the case but he refuses because there is no evidence. Fred says that the evidence is that both pigs could predict the weather with their tails. After Lisa says she will take Arnold to Chicago, Oliver agrees to call Gerber, the Birnbacher lawyer. When Gerber hears about Arnold’s tail he asks Oliver to bring Arnold to Chicago. The story is continued next episode.