Ass Cannons

            On Sunday morning I finished my translation of the fourth verse of “Valse Dingue” (Mad Waltz) by Boris Vian. 

            I worked out the chords to all the verses of “Oh Soliman” by Serge Gainsbourg and one of the instrumentals. I think the other instrumental might be the same, in which case I’m done. 

            I weighed 84.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday, I finished cleaning the bottom left cabinet under the kitchen counter. Tomorrow I’ll do the area under the sink, and after that, the big job will be cleaning the four drawers under the counter on the right side. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos before lunch. I had a toasted Montreal-style bagel with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemon iced tea. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor. On the way home along Queen Street, a pigeon flew under my wheel. I heard someone on the sidewalk gasp. I didn't stop to check but I didn't feel any kind of slight bump and so I assume that what I ran over was its wing. That's what happens after hundreds of people in the city come out to feed the pigeons every day. They cause millions more pigeons to be hatched, thousands of which come out too dumb to steer clear of a thin bicycle wheel. 

            I weighed 84.5 kilos at 17:40. 

            I was caught up on my journal by 18:40. 

            I experimented with using Audacity to eliminate hum and discovered that if I ran the recording that has been noise reduced through the process again I can eliminate even more of the hum. 

            In my Movie Maker project, I removed most of the clips of shock therapy that I’d inserted yesterday into the video I’m making for my song Instructions for Electroshock Therapy. I had alternated them with one-second segments of the first instrumental in the concert video, but yesterday I realized that they made the instrumental too long, when the studio audio of the instrumental is already shorter than the concert video. Next, I’ll look at the shock therapy clips that are still in the video and decide if they are too similar to one another. If so I’ll cut some out and replace them with clips that are further on in the timeline. 

            I worked on editing the first poem from my series “My Blood in a Bug.” 

            I grilled five hot Italian sausages in the oven and had one between two halves of a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with ketchup, mustard, pickle, and hot sauce. I ate it with a beer while watching some extras that came with the Astro Boy episodes I’d downloaded. 

            The first was a tour of the Mushi studio where Atom (which became Astro Boy in North America) was created. There were a lot of people involved to create a single episode. After the animators made the drawings, they were taken to a “room full of girls” where they were traced onto acetate and then coloured. Then they were photographed on stock backgrounds. Then the actors would be recorded as they stood together voicing the scenes while watching the animation being played on a screen. 

            The second extra showed several episodes from the series in English and then in the original Japanese, to show what scenes were deleted. The US version would often diminish the violence by not showing the bad guys killing people. There was also a scene of a father slapping his son’s face that was not kept in English. Also, they often cut out the scenes that showed Atom using his butt cannons. What kid wouldn’t want to have butt cannons? They also eliminated any scenes that showed Japanese lettering on signs, documents, or anywhere else. 

            The third extra was an interview with Fredd Ladd who organized the production in English of the 104 episodes of the Japanese series. He said they initially only planned to use 52 episodes because that was the standard for any cartoon. But after Astro Boy became a hit, Mushi brought NBC an additional ninety-two episodes but they didn’t want them. It was only after Mushi threatened to sell the second season to another company that NBC gave in and bought an additional 52 episodes. 

            The fourth extra showed all of episode 34 while subtitles were shown of the animators discussing that episode as they watched it many years later. These animators were part of an independent company and it was the first time Mushi had outsourced. One of the animators said their company had six executives and one employee. The different animators recognized which animators had drawn which scenes because they had characteristic styles. One of them was more expert at drawing dinosaurs for instance. They would work on the manga during the day and then go to the studio at midnight to draw the animation. They didn’t get much sleep that month.

            I found three bedbugs before bed. One looked sick, one looked dead, and one that I found under my mattress was alive but bloodless.