Portable Junk Island

            I’d thought I’d heard everything but on Sunday a read a comment from someone on social media that believes that evolution is a leftist conspiracy. That would mean that 97% of scientists are liberals, which I doubt is the case.

            In the afternoon I tentatively started out for a long bike ride but there were still lots of puddles on the street from the rain that came down earlier and so I just went up Brock to Dundas, east to Gladstone and then south to the Freshco. The main thing I needed to buy was milk because that morning I opened my last bag and it was sour. I sort of guessed that was the case because the bag was bulging like a balloon before I opened it. So I got milk, but also one container of yogourt. I only got one yogourt but I should have gotten more because I didn’t find out until later that the yogourt that I’d bought on Saturday was vanilla rather than plain. It’s harder to tell with the Liberté Greek yogourt because the colouring of both the containers of the plain and the vanilla are the same colour. I also bought paper towels and a four litre jug of vinegar so I can continue soaking my amethyst rock.

            Outside the supermarket and parked beside the cars was a cute little pedal-powered two-person buggy with a roof. I doubt if it could go very fast but it seems to me it would be more romantic than a bicycle built for two. In the case of the buggy the couple are at least beside one another. Most couples wouldn’t stroll together with one walking behind the other.

            On the way back I stopped at the streetcar stop at the area known as the Parkdale amphitheatre behind the westbound Queen streetcar stop at Dufferin. It looks kind of like an amphitheatre and it's shaped like one but I've never seen it used as an amphitheatre. It's mostly used as a skate park and there are spirally rows of concrete benches where people sometimes sit. I stopped there to take pictures of a massive portable junk island that someone had parked there. It was kind of like a shaggy train with all of the stuff piled up on what might have been various carts. It didn’t look like it was made of stuff being collected to sell so much as a homeless person’s moveable house.

            I had an egg and my last two parathas for dinner with a can of Creemore while watching two episodes of Dobie Gillis.

            In the first story an escaped murderer holes up in the Gillis residence and Dobie and his father do a lot of fainting out of fear of being killed. Maynard thinks the convict is their cousin and so he is totally unafraid of him and even intervenes in several plans to overwhelm him because he thinks the Gillises are just being rude. The killer’s girlfriend arrives as well although she seems to be more leopard print eye-candy than part of the story. She was played by Joyce Jameson.

            In the second story Dobie becomes the campus radio station disk jockey. Zelda Gilroy makes a jazzy record of the 1954 hit “Make Love To Me” and sings it quite well and so Dobie promotes it. 

Meanwhile some payola crooks approach Dobie about playing a record by a woman named Fifi Lavern who changed her name to Prudence Virtue to become a country singer. He says he can’t play the record right away but they start giving him money and presents, which he accepts because he thinks they are just generous people, but he still doesn’t play their record. Even though Dobie doesn’t do anything for the payola, when he realizes that he accepted gifts he confesses to it on air. He is told he has to talk with the dean and asks Zelda to go in and sing live over the air while he’s gone. But Fifi runs into the studio as well and they both start singing their very different songs at the same time. “Baby baby kiss me once again before you say goodnight ... Got my fella and I'll never let him go ... Take me in your lovin arms and squeeze me tight ... yes I got my fella and I’ll never let him go ... Put me in a mood so I can dream all night … Never never let him go ... Everybody's sleepin so it's quite all right ... ya tried to keep him but I told ya so ... Come a little closer, closer, closer, closer, make love to me … Never did but I tried I told you so!” It sounds strangely harmonious and becomes a hit.

            Both Fifi’s payola crook boyfriend and Dobie propose after their performance but Zelda and Fifi sing “Get lost!” and walk off together arm in arm.

            They dressed Zelda and had her move in a much more flattering way than in previous episodes.

            Fifi/Prudence was played by Carole Cook, who was a protégé of Lucille Ball. Lucy was the matron of honour at Carole's wedding in 1964 and she is still married to Tom Troupe.