Joe Mantell

            On Friday morning I worked out the chords for the chorus of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. Tomorrow I’ll tackle the first verse and that should set the pattern for the whole song. 

            I weighed 89.5 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice and it went out of tune on every song just like my Kramer did yesterday. My guitars don’t like the current weather despite how much I humidify them.

            Around midday I touched up the pink that I painted on the bathroom exhaust fan yesterday. Next week I’ll fix the blue on the front and the frame. After that I have to bring out the purple wall paint to cover the blue and pink smudges under the fan. Then it’ll be back to the blue to paint the shelves, the door and the door frame. 

            I weighed 89.9 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride. I thought I might try to take the hill on Brock but there was some slight slippage as I crossed Seaforth from O’Hara to Brock and so I didn’t want to risk slipping on the incline. I rode around the block and then up the street to Freedom Mobile to pay for my February phone plan. 

            I weighed 90.1 kilos at 17:20, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening in a few years. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:22. 

            I recorded from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity and then extracted to my hard drive side 2 of the finale of my second 20,000 Poets Under the League slam, hosted by Cad Lowlife. I then digitized in the same manner side 1 of the recording of the CIUT radio interview of me, Raven and Denise Naples to promote my first 20,000 Poets Under the League slam. 

            I moved more than 700 photos to my SSD and deleted them from my hard drive. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of roast pork while watching season 1, episode 5 of Combat. 

            We learn that Lieutenant Hanley’s unit is called 2nd Platoon, K Company and their radio callsign is King 2. 

            They are making their way through the brush when they are ambushed by a big machine gun. Private Grady Long takes out the machine gun nest with his Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) but is killed in the process. Sgt. Saunders is particularly upset about the loss of Grady because they had become close (although we never saw him).

            Kirby thinks that he will be inheriting the BAR, the most powerful weapon in the unit because he knows how to use and care for it better than anyone else. But Saunders gives it to the new recruit, Delaney. Adding insult to injury, Delaney has been serving as an assistant cook, he’s 40 years old, and has never seen combat. There is resentment of Delaney because of this, especially from Kirby. Some of the men warm up to him when they learn that unlike most of them, Delaney was not drafted but rather volunteered. 

           They travel to an abandoned town to watch for a heavy concentration of enemy armour that they think is nearby. When they see it they can call in the coordinates and have it taken out. The Germans arrive in the town and K Company plans to hide in one of the buildings to wait for them to leave. But by chance they occupy the loft of the building where they are hiding and so they are trapped. If they call for the attack they will be in the middle of it but now they have no choice. When the attack begins they have to run for it. They have to cross a bridge where a machine gun is mounted. Delaney freezes and hides. Saunders confronts him and says he could be responsible for all of them dying and so he rises to the occasion. Delaney gets shot while trying to take on the machine gun but manages to throw a grenade that takes it out before he dies. 

            Saunders feels bad that he never learned Delaney’s first name. He makes up for his mistake with the next new recruit. He also admits he was wrong to give the BAR to Delaney. He did it because he didn’t want to lose another one of the men he’d come to know well. 

            Delaney was played by Joe Mantell, whose credited film debut was in Barbary Pirate in 1949. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his supporting performance in Marty in 1955. He starred in the Twilight Zone episode “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” and co-starred in the episode “Steel”. He played Ernie Biggs in the sitcom Pete and Gladys and Albie Loos on Mannix. He played Lawrence Walsh in both Chinatown and The Two Jakes.