Babalu

         

            On Sunday I finished re-reading Jacques Derrida’s “The Ends of Man”. One must speak several languages at once. Easy for him to say. I also started re-reading Emmanuel Levinas’s “Is Ontology Fundamental?” but at the same time I was trying to find a version of that text that I could transfer from PDF to document format. II remembered that I’d downloaded a version of ABBYY Fine Reader, so I tried to run it, but a window opened with Russian text that asked me “Yes” or “No”. I clicked “no” and deleted the whole download, then started downloading a different version. I kept typing out the text for the Levinas essay and then pasting in whole paragraphs. After about a page and a half of typing and pasting I finally found a copy of the essay that I could paste into Word and then finished reading it. It is impossible to want to kill someone with whom one is relating.

            After that I turned to look out the window and saw that it was snowing. It’s been a funny beginning of the year for weather. February thought it was March, March thought it was April and now April thinks it’s January. I assume we’ll be having Christmas in May next like they do in Australia.

            I watched two episodes of Love Lucy from the first season.

In one, Lucy went on a radio quiz show to try to win a thousand dollars. She was told that a man would show up at the door that night and if she introduced him to Ricky as her first husband and kept up the ruse till midnight, she’d get the money. The problem was that a bum showed up at the door first and Lucy thought he was the guy from the quiz show. She had Ricky convinced that he was her first husband until Ethel revealed that he was a tramp and they kicked him out. Shortly after that the other guy came. Lucy won the thousand dollars but Ricky took the money because Lucy was three months behind on paying their rent and the other bills.

            The other show was a repeat of the lost pilot episode, except that instead of Pepito the clown they had Boffo the clown who wasn’t very talented and probably wasn’t even a clown. The only thing better about this version was Desi Arnaz performing Babalu. This really was one of the best shows ever on television because of the combination of his musical talent and Lucy’s comedic chops and both of their abilities to cross over into each other’s fields of expertise.