I got up on Boxing Day at around 5:00.
About half an hour later I heard a woman talking to someone very loudly outside
the Coffee Time. She was swearing a lot and I realized that she actually wasn’t
in conversation with anyone and that her voice sounded familiar. I looked out
and, sure enough, it was the tall homeless woman that pushes her cart around
Parkdale, screaming at no one in particular various expletives, of which her
favourites seem to be “Cocksucker!” and “FagOTT!” This time she was standing in
front of the donut shop, which is closed at that hour but there must have been
people inside that she was indirectly addressing. I shot a video of her with my
camera. I’m impressed that this little Kodak picks up sound fairly well. I
might try it out at a poetry reading one of these days.
I
had the idea to add a soundtrack to the first video I shot of the running shoes
swinging in the wind, because the sound of the wind was loud and annoying. I
was thinking that my song, “The Next State of Grace” was not only thematically
appropriate for a Parkdale street scene, but that the tempo almost fit
perfectly that of the swaying sneakers. I haven’t tried to extract audio from
the CD that Brian and I recorded for a long time and the audio extracting
software that I’d had gave me a message that I had to buy it now. Fat chance! I
looked around in my system to see if any of my own players like Windows Media
or VLC had options for ripping. Media Player seemed to let me rip the song, but
it wouldn’t let me access the file with Movie Maker. Finally I downloaded Audio
Grabber. It just took five minutes to get it and after ripping the song it
automatically showed up in my options in Movie Maker after I clicked “add
music”. Movie Maker also allowed me to turn down the recorded audio of the
video and the first verse and chorus fit almost perfectly into the one-minute
video. It was also a fast upload to YouTube. So the actual audio/video
synchronization didn’t take any time but my morning had been taken up by just
finding the right software. Audio grabber also has a cool animation when you
want to rip a sound file from a CD of DVD. You click “grab” and a hand reaches
out towards you in a grabbing motion.
In
the evening I took a bike ride. Less than a block north of my place on O’Hara,
I passed some boxes that looked like they had glass inside. I stopped and went
back to find some fairly high quality items, like a glass mixing bowl and a
couple of thermal coffee flasks. While I was looking, a drunken woman in an
electric wheelchair came up and wanted to look as well. She kept calling me
“Hon”. She had been looking through one box while I checked out the other two,
then we switched. From deep down in the box I pulled out a small, cylindrical
stainless steel bottle in a leather casing. She said, “What’s that?” I opened
it up and under the cap were stacked small glasses. She said “Oh! That’s a
flask! Can I have it?” I said, “Okay.” And gave it to her. It was probably the
most valuable of the things in the boxes but she’ll probably get more use out
of it than me, though a greedy part of me regretted having given it to her.
I
continued on my bike ride. On Bloor Street I passed the marquee of a club that
had the message, “Merry Christmas Ya Filthy Animal!”
I
passed through Koreatown and, looking at the outline of the map of Korea that
is displayed in white lights at every corner, it suddenly dawned on my how much
the map of Korea looks like a bunny with a hard-on.
Yonge
and Dundas was super crowded with shoppers. One guy was carrying a big-screen
TV on his bike and another guy was walking in the cold while eating ice cream
in a waffle cone.
I
made a great turkey gravy and cooked the squash that I got from the foodbank.
I
watched the sixth episode of the recent season of Doctor Who. The Doctor had
previously saved someone’s life by making her immortal. Then he met the person
800 years later and saw the consequences of his actions.
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