Skunk

            There was such a strong smell of skunk when I got up on Thursday that I wondered if a stink badger had actually somehow gotten into my place. The odour went away after a while though.

            I recorded another song practice, this time of mostly the French songs and one of mine. A couple of the French songs might have been mistake-free, but I would need to check to be sure. Later I matched up the titles and dates of my video files with my voice recorder files. I saw that the video for July 15^th was the one in which the top of my head was cut off, so I moved that one to my external hard drive and freed up space to upload the one that I’d recorded that morning. I decided that I might record one more to take advantage of the daylight, but I would start picking one of the videos try to synchronize with the voice recorder in Movie Maker soon. That might be a time consuming process, at least at first. Hopefully I can keep both the audio from the camera microphone and the voice recorder audio.

            I’ve been trying to write an English version of a song by Serge Gainsbourg that is full of plays on the sounds of words, so a direct translation would be nonsense. I’ve needed to find English words with a hard “C” sound at the beginning that will sound like a person’s name without the “C” but the word will be completed when it follows another word that ends with a “K” sound.  For instance, a person’s name might be “Ocoa”, but it sounds like “cocoa” when it follows “Fuck Ocoa!”

            There was a 40% chance of rain that afternoon but I hadn’t gone for a long bike ride in a couple of days so I went. I rode up to O’Connor and St Clair and then explored all the streets between O’Connor and Westview until Westview ended, and then I kept going up O’Connor until Sunrise and went across to Victoria Park. I then travelled south to the next right, which was Parma Crescent. There I found the Parma Housing Complex with what looks like a city of identical three story buildings. A search of the place immediately turned up a feud between a gang that lives at Parma and another complex in Scarborough. A month or so ago the Parma boys went over and shot up the other complex.

            The next street south of Parma took me back to Westview, which I followed back to St Clair and then I went back down O’Connor to Woodbine. I stopped at Starbucks to use the washroom.

            Throughout my ride, especially at the far end, I noticed my pedalling wasn’t smooth. There was definitely something wrong but I didn’t think it was the crank arms like last time. Maybe the ball bearings in the bottom bracket needed to be replaced. It felt like it got worse on the way back so I’ll have to take it to Bike Pirates as soon as possible. The only problem is that I won’t have any money till next Thursday, so hopefully it won’t get too much worse.

            The second season of Maverick is much better than the first. The stories are much more entertaining. The one I watched that night had Bret and Bart Maverick, each with a $10,000 draft cheque from an express company that had just gone bankrupt. They were informed though by an ambitious young woman that there was one office of the company that had not received the news because they had no telegraph wire and so they could cash only one of the cheques there because there was only $11,000 in the safe. In exchange for the promise of $1000 when the cheque was cashed she told them that the office was in Deadwood. Since only one of the cheques could be cashed, this set the brothers to tracking one another along the way so the other could get there first. The woman managed to be with whichever one was out in front most of the time. When she was with Bret they were captured by bandits and so Bart had to rescue them. Then Bart and the woman were captured by Indians and Bret had to rescue them. Finally they decided to stay together. When they got to Deadwood though there was only $87 in the safe of the express company. Bret though went across the street to the saloon and convinced the manager that the Sundown Gang were planning on robbing the place and so they needed to put their money in a safe. With the money in the safe, just as the stagecoach was arriving with the man who would give notice of the bankruptcy, the woman stalled the official long enough for both cheques to be cashed.