I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio electric guitar during song practice for the third session of four. For the first 2/3s of the session it continued to have tuning problems but settled down for the final stretch. I audio and video recorded the session as I will every day until October 15. I almost made it through “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” on the second take and then hit a wrong chord. After a couple more fumbled takes I finally got through but fumbled a word and probably got a chord wrong. I’m almost halfway through the project and I don’t know if I’ve gotten one good take of that song.
I weighed 88.35 kilos before breakfast.
I weighed 89 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. On Yonge Street a skateboarder jumped off his board in front of me and I almost hit it but he grabbed it just in time. On the way back I stopped at Freshco where the grapes were $8.80 a kilo but I found a flyer for No Frills that shows them for $3.17 a kilo. Since I knew I could do a price match I got seven bags of green grapes. I also bought two packs of raspberries, bananas, a small whole chicken, a pack of ground sirloin, a bag of crinkle cut fries, two packs of Full City Dark coffee, and a jar of salsa.
I weighed 88.2 kilos at 18:00.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:15.
In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Me and Gravity” I worked on synchronizing the old concert video with the studio audio. The original Christian and the Lions band at this El Mocambo concert in 1994 played the song more slowly than Brian Haddon and I did in the studio. To line the video up with the audio throughout most of the song so far I’ve just had to cut out small sections of the video timeline. This time I started with the third line of the second verse. I made cuts before “and on and on”; “from coffeeshop”; “sometimes I think”, and “one millisecond”. That synchronized them up until “careening into limbo”, which are the last three words of the second verse and which are also behind in the video. I’ll cut out about half a second before those words tomorrow and that should line things up leading to the second chorus.
I uploaded today’s song practice video but didn’t have time to review the rest of September 9. I’m still converting the MP4 videos the camera makes to H264AVI format. I should have all the September 11 videos converted by the end of the day and convert part A of September 12 overnight.
I sautéed the ground sirloin and added a jar of salsa. I had a potato with gravy and a ladleful of the sirloin chili while watching episode 11 of The Big Valley.
Mariano, a childhood friend of Nick is the son of a woman who cleaned the Barkley house. When they grew up Nick gave him a calf. Mariano moved back to Mexico and became a rancher. Now he has returned to Stockton, having crossed the border with 93 head of cattle to take them to market. Nick inspects his herd and says they need to be fattened. Mariano has a week before the market opens and so Nick offers to rent him the north pasture at a penny an acre. After moving his cattle there one of them dies. His main hand Rico says it’s anthrax but Mariano refuses to accept that. He says it’s Trail Fever and tells them to bury the animal and keep quiet about it. The next morning Eugene Barkley tells Nick and Heath that one of their hands counted Mariano’s cattle this morning although not on the family’s orders, perhaps expecting to find more than 93 because of theft. But what he found was that when he counted there were 91. When Mariano sees the second cow dead Rico again declares that it’s anthrax. He believes there is a miasma in the pasture that is causing it and wants to move the herd out before more are killed. Mariano insists to all his men that it’s not anthrax but rather trail fever. Nick and Heath go out to Mariano’s camp to investigate. They see a dead cow and agree that it’s anthrax. Nick says not to move a single cow out of that pasture. Nick and Heath gather their hands and make sure they all have rifles and send them out to surround the pasture where Mariano’s herd is grazing. Mariano tries to move his herd out but they stop him. Nick tells him that anthrax spreads like a brushfire and could kill 3000 head in less than a week. Nick walks through the herd and sees another one drop. He says the herd has to stay behind the fence but Heath says they have to be shot. Mariano again tries to move them out but Nick says they will kill every one that leaves. Mariano thinks it’s the pasture that is causing the deaths. Nick says no one knows how anthrax starts and sometimes it suddenly stops. That evening at the Barkley residence the butler Silas says everything is going to be fine and that he has seen anthrax suddenly disappear. Heath confronts Nick and insists that Mariano’s entire herd has to be shot. Nick says that when he and Mariano were ten years old Mariano used to come with his mother when she scrubbed the floors. If he played with Nick his mother made him call him “Senor Nick”. That night at dinner, Eugene brings up the idea of vaccination but nobody else in the family has heard of it. He says they are experimenting with it at his university. It’s a new technique developed by a scientist named Louis Pasteur. Eugene says he’s seen it work. Hawthorn, one of Eugene’s professors has been injecting anthrax germs into healthy cattle. The others don’t know what germs are. Eugene explains they are so tiny they can only be seen under a microscope but they cause anthrax and other diseases. Heath makes fun and suggests the germs are something like faeries. Eugene leaves for Berkely. The next day there is a standoff. The Barkleys and their men won’t let Mariano’s cattle out and Mariano won’t let anyone in. Eugene returns home with Professor Hawthorn and the vaccine. Victoria takes them out to Mariano’s herd and gets Mariano to lower his rifle to talk with her. The idea that anthrax spreads from cow to cow is new to Mariano because people at that time believed that it came from the ground. Mariano says there is only one way he will believe the vaccine is safe. If the Barkleys inject it into their $10,000 prize bull (It would be worth more than a quarter of a million today). They bring the bull but Mariano insists further that the vaccine could be water and so they need to bring the bull in to mix with his herd to prove the vaccine can work. They bring it in and as soon as the bull collapses the professor injects it with the vaccine. Shortly after that however the bull dies. Mariano is about to begin shooting his own cattle when suddenly the bull comes back to life and stands again. Mariano’s herd is saved and everybody is friends again.
This was the most interesting episode so far.
Rico was played by Rodolfo Acosta, who was born in Chamizal, Chihuahua, which at the time was considered US territory but is now part of Mexico. He studied drama at UCLA. He won a scholarship to the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico. He was married to Jeannine Cohen but she divorced him in the 50s when she found out he was secretly sharing an apartment in Mexico City with Ann Sheridan. His film debut was in Soy un Profugo. He appeared in several Emilio Fernandez films. This led to work in Hollywood. He starred in The Tijuana Story. He was typecast as mostly villains. He played Vaquero the ranch hand on the first two seasons of The High Chaparral but was fired because of drinking.
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