Jack LaLanne

            Saturday morning began the fifth day of my cold. It was pretty much the same as the day before with the same sore throat, but perhaps there was a little more liquid lingering down there. Song practice went smoother than yesterday because I didn't even try to hit the high notes. I just murmured all the songs in a low voice and it still sounded something like singing, except on “Ne me quitte pas” which requires more subtlety that I couldn't achieve in my current state. 

            I published my translation of “Amour année zéro” (Love In The Year Zero) by Serge Gainsbourg on Christian's Translations but didn't have time to post it on Facebook. Everything, including documents and Google Chrome were loading extremely slowly today.

            I weighed 85.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went down to No Frills. They had cherries but I decided to buy grapes instead since they were small and firm. I also bought two half-pints of raspberries, a package each of spicy beef and curried chicken soup noodles, and a large container of skyr. 

           I wanted to get some zip-lock food storage bags and saw that the freezer bags cost four times as much. I assumed they are thicker but when I looked it up later I saw that they are only twice as thick. I wondered if thickness is really that much of an advantage. If one stores things in the freezer over long periods of time a thicker bag might be more durable. But for someone like me who just uses the bags to preserve the parts of one roast or one chicken after I've cooked it so it doesn't go bad while I'm finishing eating it the more expensive bags are no advantage. 

            Anybody who shops at No Frills will have heard some of the No Frills rap songs that are intermixed with the other pop music that is normally played. The No Frills songs are surprising because they are generally as good as the familiar ones. It takes a couple of listens to even notice that the songs are commercials listing the great things about what one can buy at No Frills. But one song mentions “that curried goat” and I don't think I've ever seen goat meat being sold at No Frills. Today a guy who was shopping with his girlfriend was mocking the lyrics by adding his own, “Salmonella poison.” Apparently Jimmy Fallon featured the album on The Tonight Show but was making fun of it because he thought “No Frills” is the name of a Canadian rap group that is obsessed with songs about food. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos before lunch. I had Ritz crackers with five year old cheddar and a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            I took a siesta and slept half an hour longer than usual. When I got up I decided not to take a bike ride for a few reasons: I'd already been out; I'd already gone to the trouble of getting bundled up in layers when I'd gone to the supermarket earlier; and it looked messy and wet outside. 

            I finished reading Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand. After hearing Gandhi speak, Bakha is inspired, but he is also inspired by a discussion between some people he hears talking after Gandhi is gone. The person agreed with part of Gandhi's philosophy of freeing India from the caste system and from British rule, but Gandhi also wanted to keep India out of the machine age, which seems absurd. 

            I weighed 85.1 kilos at 18:00. I started reading Season Of Migration To The North by Tayeb Salih. It's supposed to be a kind of colonial reversal of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Instead of a European penetrating the depths of Africa an Arab penetrates the depths of Europe. Although as the story begins the narrator has returned from London to his village in the Sudan and encounters a mysterious Arab who now lives in his community. 

            I made pizza on naan with sweet basil marinara sauce, a cut up burger and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of The Addams Family. 

            In this story Fester's pen pal from France, Yvette is coming to visit in two days. She works at the Folies Bregere and has told him to go on a diet and so he's begun to exercise. Gomez is an expert in Zen Yogi but apparently doesn't consider that to be exercise because when they find that Fester has been exercising with Jack LaLanne on TV they take away the television. Fester has LaLanne come to the house and the fitness guru tells him to do all the exercises from the astronaut training manual. Fester fails at all of them. When Yvette arrives she turns out to be a large and round woman. She explains that she designs the costumes at the Folies. Morticia observes that since the costumes are so minuscule she wouldn't get a lot of exercise. Yvette explains to Fester that she'd asked him to diet in order to gain weight and declares that he is too skinny for her. When she speaks French he says, “That's French!” and tries to kiss her hand. She takes her hand away and says, “What did you expect me to speak? Hungarian?” She leaves. Later they watch the moon shot and at the point of take-off Fester blasts through the ceiling. 

            Jack LaLanne played himself. He claimed that as a child his addiction to sugar caused him to have behavioural problems. The nutritionist Paul C Bragg told him he was a human garbage dump and so he changed his life. By 18 he was running a gym from home and training policemen and firemen. He started doing the Jack LaLanne Show in 1951 and it ran for 34 years. At the age of 41 he proved it was possible to escape from the island of Alcatraz when he swam in handcuffs from there to Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco. At 45 he did 1000 chin-ups and 1000 push-ups. At 60 he swam from Alactraz to Fisherman's Wharf again but this time handcuffed and shackled to a 500 kilogram boat. At 70 he swam across Long Beach Harbour while handcuffed and shackled to 70 boats carrying 70 people. He refused to eat dairy because he didn't think it is healthy for mammals after they've weaned. I used to make that argument but now not eating dairy seems to be a waste of thousands of years of evolution that made Scandinavians lactose tolerant.