On Saturday morning I fell short of
memorizing another four lines of “Le bras mécanique" by Serge Gainsbourg.
Whenever I thought I'd nailed them and then ran through the song again, some of
the lines were gone from my recollection. I’ll get them in my head on Sunday.
Around
noon I headed down to No Frills where I found the biggest line-up so far. There
were about fifty people ahead of me and the line went from King Street to the
parking lot and then doubled back to the store. The woman directly in front of
me was vaping a concoction that smelled like burnt strawberries and the wind
was blowing it right in my face despite my keeping a social distance of more
than the required two metres. I was glad when the line turned and I was upwind
from her.
After
about half an hour, when I was about tenth in line, a scruffy looking young guy
with curly reddish brown hair and wearing a surgical mask and blue surgical
gloves, who had been thirty places ahead of me in line, left the store carrying
only a small container of kitty litter. That’s a long time to stand in line for
just one item that he could have probably gotten elsewhere for just a little
more money.
In
the store they had cut off the southeast end of the store from the other aisles
so that one had to go back to the front and down one of the other aisles to get
to the other side of the barrier. I couldn’t figure out the logic of the
restriction.
From
produce I got two half pints of raspberries and a bag of grapefruits. The
grapes were all too soft and so I didn’t get any. I bought cinnamon-raisin
bread, mouthwash, tofu, kettle chips and soymilk. I also grabbed a carton of
something new called oat milk, which is advertised to work well as a coffee
creamer.
For
lunch I heated the soybean stew that I’d made the day before and had a bowl.
I
discovered that season one and two of Benny Hill that I’d downloaded were not
from the 1950s as I’d thought but from the late 60s and early 70s and so I
deleted those. I found a torrent for a selection of shows from Benny Hill’s
“Lost years” from 1958 to 1968 and started downloading that. I also started
downloading more of 50s TV series “The Adventures of Robin Hood” starring
Richard Green.
In the late afternoon I lost my wifi
connection. I assume it’s because other people that are closer to the signal
are crowding me out.
I worked on writing practice answers
for some of the twenty-five short answer exam questions, of which a random ten
will be on the exam. But without an internet connection I couldn’t research and
fine-tune any of my answers.
I had the rest of my soybean and
mushroom stew for dinner with plantain chips while watching the first two
episodes of “Noggin and the Omruds”. The story begins with Olaf the royal
inventor lamenting to Noggin that the kingdom of the Nogs is now perfect and so
his life as an inventor is over. Suddenly there is an explosion and a little
man comes flying out of the hill. He lands in the river and is about to be
swept over the waterfall. Noggin sends to Olaf to rescue him, which he does
just in time. They learn from the grateful little man that his name is Groot
and that he is an Omrud, one of a race of little beings that have their own
kingdom underneath the kingdom of Nog. Olaf also hears that Groot, like him. Is
an inventor and it was his latest invention that sent him hurtling up from
underground. Later Groot brings Olaf the plans for his invention as a reward
for saving his life. It takes a while for Olaf to make sense of the plans but
he eventually blows a hole in the wall of the castle and goes shooting through
it. The invention is what Olaf calls a fire machine but it seems like what we
would call a steam engine. Olaf uses Noggins birthday procession as the means
to introduce the engine. He uses it to pull Noggin’s royal carriage but the
lever becomes stuck and it pulls Noggin and Nooka so fast that in order to save
them Thor Nogson cuts the rope between the engine and the carriage. Meanwhile
the out of control engine carrying Olaf is heading for the cliff. Graculas
flies to pull Olaf off just in time. Olaf is crying because of the loss of his
machine but on the hill he sees three Omruds laughing at him. Angry over being
mocked he chases them into a cave but does not come out. Noggin goes to
celebrate his birthday with his subjects but later when Olaf still has not
returned he and Thor go to the cave where an Omrud with a lantern leads them to
their subterranean land where they meet the king of the Omruds. The king
explains to Noggin that Olaf and Groot are working ion a shrinking formula that
would make life more tolerable for the Omruds. That way they could have small
trees, crops and livestock that will be more manageable for them. But when Olaf
demonstrates the potion it turns out to make things bigger rather than smaller.
Noggin, Thor and Olaf go back to the surface with the bottle of growth serum
but when Olaf demonstrates on a potato plant to show Graculas how it can make
things grow, a crow that has been watching sweeps down and steals the bottle.
Graculas pursues the crow into the mountains but after following the thieving
bird into a cave Graculas is captured by Nogbad the Bad. Graculas escapes but
the potion is left behind. Shortly after that several giant crows fly to Nog
and take over Noggin’s castle, shutting Noggin and Nooka out.
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