Jack Bailey

            On Saturday morning I finished working out the chords for the first verse of "C'était une pauv' gosse des rues" (She Was a Poor Child of the Street) by Boris Vian. I started on the second verse and it sounds like all the verses have the same chords. 

            I worked out the chords for “L'amour de moi” (The Love of My Life) by Serge Gainsbourg. Before I upload it to Christian’s Translations though I want to work out the chords for the second and fourth verses of “L'amour de moy”, the 15th Century song from which the melody for “L'amour de moi” is taken, except that Gainsbourg only uses the melody for the first and third verses. I won’t memorize “L'amour de moy” but I’ll work out the chords, translate it and upload it with the other song as a matter of interest on the blog post. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar for the first song practice session of four. 

            The heat came on for the first time in a week near the end of song practice. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went to pay for my November phone plan but Freedom Mobile was closed. 

            I went to No Frills where I bought five bags of grapes, a kilo of strawberries, a pack of raspberries, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, Basilica tomato sauce, Miss Vickie’s chips, a jug of orange juice, and two containers of skyr. 

            I was unlocking the door of my building when someone called my name. It was Donna Bartkiw who I hadn’t seen in well over five years. She’s still teaching dance and movement. I put one of her performance pieces from 25 years ago on YouTube. She told me that at first she was embarrassed and was going to ask me to take it down but then some people told her it helped them. I met her mother more than ten years ago. Donna says her mother hates people but she loves me. She gave me her email and so when I got home I sent her the links to some of my YouTube videos. I recall though that we exchanged emails last time we ran into each other and she never returned a single communication. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before lunch. I had Cheezit crackers and five-year-old cheddar with a glass of limeade. 

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

            I spent about twenty minutes chiseling black quartz from a piece of the rock that I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:11. 

            In the Movie Maker project for my August 19 song practice I worked on synchronizing the audio and the video. But the video always starts with "Megaphor" while the audio recording always begins earlier. So I always have to delete bits of the audio until they are lined up. However in this session there are a lot of takes of Megaphor and so it gets confusing which audio take is lining up with which video take. I had to jump ahead to “Le temps des yoyos” to see that the audio was still at least thirty seconds behind. I’ll probably have them synchronized on Sunday. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song "Megaphor" I continued to edit the clip from the movie Ziegfeld Girl. Yesterday by cutting sections from the end and placing them one after another at the beginning I was able to make the closing curtain look like it’s opening. The end shows all the dancers on the stairway after the camera had moved back. I continued to remove the end clips to follow the others at the beginning so it looks like the camera is zooming in. But in that particular part of the movie everything stands still for several seconds and so I didn’t get a reversal. I probably will tomorrow. 

            I cleaned and scanned another set of negatives. This one was mostly shots of Sunnyside Beach and of an art exhibit. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 2, episodes 14 and 15 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Oliver wants a proper weather report so he can know when to plant his tomatoes. But the TV station only relies on a little mechanical weather house in which the woman comes out of one door with an umbrella if it is going to rain or the man comes out of another door without one if it is not. Oliver refuses to accept that it’s going to rain. But the singing weather man on the radio says there’ll be a drought. Oliver plants his tomatoes and there is frost and so he digs them all up and puts them in the house. Hank Kimball says the almanac predicted the frost but that it’ll be fair the next day. Oliver goes with that and replants his tomatoes. The next night there is another frost. Oliver uses Lisa’s hotcakes as smudge pots and saves his tomatoes. Lisa’s hot cakes are good for everything but eating. 

            The TV announcer was played by Jack Bailey, who started as a musician on vaudeville and was also a barker. He was the radio announcer for The Adventures of Ozzie an Harriet. He was the host of the game show Queen for a Day, which started on the radio and moved to television. On television it started as a local show and then went national. It was on TV for a total of sixteen years. He also hosted Truth or Consequences for two years. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. One for radio and the other for television. 

            In the second story Lisa decides to bake bread. She buys several loaves of bread from the store and removes the bread from the plastic bags. Then she puts the dough in the bags to bake them so the bread will be already bagged when it’s done. Oliver suggests that Lisa take a cooking course at the local high school. Lisa enrolls at Hooterville High but finds she is required to take not just cooking but a full program. In Home Economics she is disruptive because she always has something to say from experience about marriage. In chemistry class she blows out a window. In history class she knows more about Hungary than the teacher. In driving class she goes through the wall of the gym. She is finally expelled.