Cut to the Chase

            On Wednesday morning I finally finished memorizing "Sermonette" by Boris Vian. I searched for the chords and found one set, so I copied them and pasted them below the lyrics in my document and started placing them in their proper places. That will probably take a few days at ten minutes a day.

            I finished working out the chords for "C'est comment qu'on freine" (That's How You Slam On the Brakes) by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through the song in French and English. I adjusted one of the lines of my translation and then uploaded it to Christina's Translations. I'll probably have it published on the blog tomorrow. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I removed the sliding windows from the right-hand window set in my kitchen, laid on my back on a pillow, stuck my head outside and cleaned the big outer window with a squeegee four times as best as I could. Then I started washing the grooves for the sliding windows. As with the left side, the grooves are extremely dirty and so I didn't get it done today. I left the sliding windows out, taking advantage of the warm weather. Hopefully, I'll get the grooves clean tomorrow and at least one of the sliding windows. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before lunch. I had five-year-old cheddar on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with a glass of lemonade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 85 kilos at 17:00. That's the lightest I've been at that time in six days. 

            I was caught up on my journal at around 18:45. 

            In the Movie Maker project for my June 19 song practice I got the video and the Audacity audio almost synchronized to the point when there's a strong echo effect. I'll edit it some more tomorrow to hear if some echo works or if I need there to be none at all. After synchronization, I'll create a separate project for my song "Sixteen Tons of Dogma" and then isolate it from the rest of the session. I might even have time to render it as a movie and then upload it to YouTube. 

            In the Movie Maker project for my song "Instructions for Electroshock Therapy" I edited further the vintage video of convulsion therapy and inserted a short clip into the main video to correspond with the line, "We're looking for the threshold ..." The clip went for longer than the line, so I cut some off the end. Next, I started shaving away the part of the concert video where I sing that line, so I can synchronize the concert video with the studio audio when I sing "shock therapy" again. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching The Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Movie from 1979. 

            Most of the ninety-minute movie consisted of Bugs Bunny shorts that I'd already seen. It begins with new animation of Bugs Bunny in his palatial home (modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water) house, as he introduces the film and each segment. He starts off talking about the post-Big Bang beginnings of the universe and then focuses on the planet Earth. It shows a caveman and woman sitting in their home looking bored as one of them asks, "What's on the wall tonight honey?" They move their heads back and forth very quickly while looking at the cave paintings to animate them. Flash forward to the early 20th Century and a similar couple is watching a silent movie, but they are still bored. And so, comedy was invented, and comedy begat pratfalls, custard pies, double takes, and most of all chases.

            Then we see the first clip, which is one of Elmer Fudd chasing Bugs Bunny. 

            Then we see Bugs Bunny's encounter with Marvin the Martian on Marvin's space station. 

            This is followed by Daffy Duck's encounter with Marvin in an episode of Duck Dodgers in the 24th Century. Dodgers is summoned by Dr. I.Q. Hi, the Secretary of the Stratosphere, on the 17,000th floor, because the world's supply of aludium phosdex, the shaving cream atom, is alarmingly low. The only remaining source is on Planet X and Dodgers is tasked with finding Planet X. Accompanying Dodgers on his quest is the ever-faithful space cadet, Porky Pig. Porky provides the solution to finding Planet X. He says they should just follow Planets A, B, C and so on until they reach X. Dodgers plants a flag and claims X in the name of Earth, but seconds later Marvin the Martian arrives and claims the planet in the name of Mars. Marvin points his disintegrator gun at Dodgers, but Dodgers tells us he is wearing his disintegration-proof vest. Marvin fires and Dodgers is disintegrated but not his vest. Porky fires a re-integrator gun to put Dodgers back together. Dodgers confronts Marvin with his own disintegrating pistol, which then disintegrates itself. Marvin chases Dodgers to his spaceship where Porky hands Marvin a lit stick of dynamite wrapped in a ribbon and says, "Happy birthday!" Marvin takes it and blows up. Dodgers seeks to observe Marvin with his super video detecto set. Marvin appears on the screen, aims, fires, and hits Dodgers. Dodgers uses his secret weapon, which fires an explosive net over Marvin's ship. But Marvin has the exact same weapon and does the same to Dodgers' ship. They each detonate their weapons and destroy the Planet X. All that is left is a basketball sized piece of the planet on which Dodgers is standing while Porky and Marvin hang on underneath. 

            Then we see the segment in which Daffy plays a bumbling Robin Hood. 

            This is followed by the cartoon in which Daffy is victimized by an animator who turns out to be Bugs Bunny. 

            Then we see the story of Bugs as a bullfighter. 

            After that is the tale of when Bugs and Daffy find the treasure of Ali Baba. 

            Then one of the stories in which Daffy tries to get Elmer Fudd to shoot Bugs Bunny. 

            Then Bugs introduces Pepe le Pew, who he says lives in France, "where all good Americans go when they die." We see two stories blended together in which a female cat gets a stripe painted down it's back and so Pepe thinks she is a skunk and amorously chases her around. 

            Then back in the present, Bugs plays the Minute Waltz in thirty seconds. 

            Then we see the story of the opera singer who breaks Bugs's banjo, leading to Bugs sabotaging his concert. 

            That is followed by the famous cartoon, "What's Opera Doc?" 

            After that is one of the stories of Wile E Coyote's pursuits of Bugs Bunny. 

            Bugs says that since Wile E couldn't catch him, he decided to pick on someone his own size, the Roadrunner. The last twenty minutes of this movie then is a collection of Wile E's many futile attempts to catch the most annoying cartoon character of all. To summarize, there are many incidents of Wile E running or stepping off cliffs, being surprised by "Meep Meep"s and jumping up into overhanging rocks, setting traps that backfire and catch hold of boulders that fall on his head, uses various gadgets to propel himself after the Roadrunner but instead slams into walls of rock, eats vitamins that make him super-fast but then he slams into one of his earlier traps that didn't work before, gains the ability to fly with a bat costume but also slams into a wall of rock. In the end, he tries a rocket sled which goes up instead of forward, then explodes and he becomes the Hunter constellation. 

            The final message is that chases are funny and maybe the whole universe is just one big chase. 

            I learned later that the phrase "Cut to the chase" comes from silent movies where the most exciting part of the film was the chase scene. 

            In the end, we see Bugs lying on his stomach on the Warner Brothers emblem and saying, "Eat your heart out Boit Reynolds!" Clearly a reference to Burt Reynolds's nude centerfold in Cosmopolitan Magazine. 

            I did a search for bedbugs and found none. I get tired of these pre-bedtime hunting expeditions because if the pattern holds, in a day or two I'll find one and I'll have to keep searching. I want to find none for a month and then stop looking.