On Monday I finished typing all my
handwritten notes on the essay topics into a Word file. I then began reading
them aloud and organizing them into a more academic format, adding things as
they came to mind. I still however haven’t figured out which one will be my
essay topic. Hopefully it will come to me soon, as I have an appointment with
my TA on Thursday to discuss it.
I listened to two episodes
of the Amos and Andy radio show from 1944. It was actually a very well written
show. The story entitled “Mistaken Identity” was especially good. A criminal
who looks like Andy intercepts a letter to him from an old girlfriend who has
come into some money and is coming to New York to invest it. Impersonating
Andy, he convinces the woman that he is going to invest her $1500 but he runs
off with it. Andy is arrested and when he is placed on trial, the courtroom
scene is hilarious, especially when Kingfish tries to serve as a character
witness.
When
I was heading out in the evening for my bike ride, my next-door neighbour,
who’d just come from the advance-voting poll, started talking to me. He said
he’d gone there because he thought he’d beat the rush but the place was
crowded. I was surprised that they had voting it on a holiday. I’ll just vote
on Election Day. He told me he thinks that Stephen Harper’s reasons for coming
down so hard on terrorism are personal because two assassination attempts have
been made on his life. I don’t know if it’s been proven that any specific plot
to kill Harper has ever been put into action. We talked about Pierre Eliot
Trudeau and the War Measures Act. My neighbour said that there is a difference
between refugees and immigrants and that whichever one is, stays on one’s
citizenship records for the rest of one’s life. By the time we were done I was
more than twenty minutes later for my ride than usual, so I just rode up to
Bloor, across to Yonge, back down to College, west to Beverley, south to Queen and
then home.
I
watched two short silent films by and starring Buster Keaton. The first was
called “The High Sign”. In it he reads a wanted ad for a crack shot in a
shooting gallery but he doesn’t know how to shoot, so he steals a pistol from a
cop’s holster and replaces it with a banana. He turns out to be a lousy shot
but manages to trick the employer into thinking he has a dead aim. He is so
impressive that a wealthy man’s daughter hires him to be her father’s body
guard because his life has been threatened with a note that reads, “Dear
August, Three times we have demanded $10,000 or your life. Now August, unless
you come across today, the first of September will be the last of August.” But
it also turns out that the shooting gallery owner is the leader of the group of
assassins that has sent the note and they have forced Buster to join their
brotherhood. Mr August’s house has been equipped with a lot of trap doors and
secret passages to allow for comic chase scenes as Buster turns the tables on
the bad guys.
The other movie was
"The Playhouse", and the first ten minutes of it are genius. All of the dancers,
the musicians, the conductor and the actors in the theatre, as well as every
man, woman and child in the audience, are played by Buster Keaton. But then he
wakes up and it just becomes another one of his cleverly comical movies.
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