Michael Rennie

            On Sunday morning I searched for the chords to “Allons z'enfants” (Join the Ranks Kids) by Boris Vian and found two sets right away. I transcribed the first and about half of the second set. 

            I finished working out the chords for “La vague à lames” (The Bladed Wave) by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through singing and playing it in French and revised my translation of the first two verses. I might have the song ready to upload to my Christian’s Translations blog tomorrow. 

            During song practice I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio electric guitar for the second of two sessions. It was a good rehearsal and I decided to change the way I play some chords on some songs. Tomorrow and the next day I’ll play my Kramer. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            I weighed 85.55 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of low sugar iced tea. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. There’s a guy that I see at different downtown locations along my route as he stands near a corner working out. He wears shoes made to look like bare feet, holds a tension band, and does squats while blasting his sound system. I had to weave around an electric bike food courier who was blocking traffic while checking his GPS. At University and Richmond the light seemed stuck at red, maybe they made it that way because there was a protest up on Queen. University was blocked off by police cars so I just went ahead against the light while everybody else kept waiting. The setting sun is now almost dead centre on Queen Street on my way home and it’s so bright that sometimes I have to guess that the light has turned green because I can’t see it at all. 

            I weighed 84.85 kilos at 18:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:00. 

            I cut the four parts of the rainbow wave into two parts each, widened each one and then loaded them in sequence into my “Seven Shades of Blues” project video timeline but it still doesn’t look like an animated waveform. I think I’ve been visualizing this in the wrong way. I’ve been too linear and thinking that if one wave up and one down repeated just moves forward it will be animated but when I think about it one wave should be gradually descending while the other is rising and at least three waves should be visible in the frame at the same time. 

            I reviewed my song practice video performances of “Like a Boomerang” and “Comme un boomerang” from September 6 to 9. On September 6 I played my Martin acoustic guitar and the take at 3:15 was the best one so far but there was horrible traffic noise. On September 8 I played it on my Gibson electric and the take at 13:00 didn’t sound good. I think the action was already low. On September 7 I played “Comme un Boomerang” on the Gibson but I didn’t get a full take until starting at 14:50 and the guitar sounded bad. On September 9 I played it on the Martin and the take at 5:15 was okay. 

            I made two patties out of the ground chicken and was almost an hour late getting them started. I had one of them on a toasted slice of multigrain bread with chili sauce, Dijon mustard, horse radish and two slices of dill pickle. I washed it down with a beer while watching season 2, episodes 7 and 8 of Branded. 

            In the first story McCord arrives at a mine looking for work but it looks abandoned. However, from inside a shack he hears arguing and knocks on the door. Someone points a rifle at him and tells him to leave. Inside three man have a man named Briswell tied to a chair and thet are trying him for a murder which he says he didn’t commit. Briswell shouts that he demands a fair trial and McCord hears him. Briswell says the evidence against him is circumstantial and McCord remembers saying the same thing when he was on trial for desertion. McCord turns around and enters the shack. He pulls a gun on the men and says he’s going to keep the trial legal. He learns that Briswell was discovered with old Jenkins’s watch and money after Jenkins was found with a broken neck. Briswell says he won the watch and money playing poker with Jenkins. He says someone else must have killed him after he left. One of the men recognizes McCord. Briswell says McCord knows how it feels to be falsely accused. Then he shocks McCord by saying that McCord is more fortunate than he is because he has a witness. Briswell claims that he saw the battle of Bitter Creek from a butte where he was prospecting and the army would have given McCord a medal if they’d seen what he saw. McCord forces the men to let Briswell free, then gives him a rifle. He puts all the men’s guns in a whiskey barrel and tosses in a match. He tells them they have ten seconds to get out and then he and Briswell run for horses. The men escape the shack just as the guns go off. When they are clear McCord tells Briswell he wants him to come with him to Fort Hobson to record what he witnessed at Bitter Creek. They camp on the way and are found by a cavalry troop. Lieutenant Shanley recognizes McCord because he once served under him. Shanley has always believed McCord was innocent and agrees to record Briswell’s deposition. In Shanley’s tent Briswell tells a colourful story about McCord’s bravery at Bitter Creek and how he was then knocked out from behind. He assumed at that point that McCord was dead like everybody else. The plan is for Briswell to hole up with McCord in Yucca City while the army waits for confirmation. Later McCord and Briswell stop to camp and McCord begins to challenge Briswell’s story. Briswell says it was daytime but McCord says the battle happened at night. Briswell admits that he lied. McCord says they are going back to the army camp but Briswell pulls a gun. He admits that he killed Jenkins as well. McCord disarms him, beats him and forcibly takes him back to Shanley. He tears up Briswell’s deposition and tells him Briswell lied. Shanley salutes McCord anyway. 

            Briswell was played by Michael Rennie, who worked at various jobs in his early life and didn’t decide to become an actor until the age of 29. His first acting job was as a stand-in for Robert Young in Hitchcock’s Secret Agent. His subsequent film efforts were not successful and so he decided to learn acting from stage work for a few years. He strove to perfect a mid-Atlantic accent so he would be understood by both British and US audiences. The result was that people thought he was Canadian. He co-starred in Tower of Terror, I’ll Be Your Sweetheart, The Root of All Evil, White Cradle Inn, The Idol of Paris, Golden Madonna, The Thirteenth Letter, Phone Call from a Stranger, 5 Fingers, Sailor of the King, Dangerous Crossing, The Robe, King of the Khyber Rifles, Princess of the Nile, The Gladiators, Mambo, Désirée, Seven Cities of Gold, The Rains of Ranchipur, Island in the Sun, Omar Khayyam, Hotel, and The House in the Square. He starred in Uneasy Terms, Miss Pilgrim’s Progress, The Body Said No, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Les Misérables, The Third Man on the Mountain, The Lost World, Cyborg 2087, and Dracula Versus Frankenstein. He starred for six years in the British detective TV series The Third Man. He played the Batman villain Sandman in the TV series. 

           In the second story McCord finds his old partner Pitkin with a stalled wagon in the middle of the desert. He says he won an undertaking business in a poker game. Pitkin’s initials are “R.I.P.” and he has it written across his wagon. But one of his horses died and his single horse can’t pull the wagon. On top of that he has a corpse in the wagon and it’s going to be a hot day. Pitkin wants McCord to hitch his horse to the wagon but McCord is reluctant because his horse is the best saddle horse in the west and it would break his spirit. He finally gives in but when they get to Cutbank McCord discovers that the harness cut into his horse’s hide and so now he can’t put a saddle on him until he heals. After the coffin is placed in Pikin’s funeral home and left alone, it opens up and a man emerges, then sneaks away. Then a gold shipment arrives in town worth $100,000 (which would be over $3 million today). Meanwhile Roy Barlow, the man from the coffin and his two partners Fred and Marty are watching from a hotel room. Roy is a notorious safe cracker wanted all over the country and that’s why he was snuck into town in a coffin. The gold will be in the hotel safe directly below their room. They plan to cut a hole in the floor, lower Roy down, open the safe, take the money, then put it in Roy’s coffin. They let Pitkin bury it and then come back in a month to dig it up. Roy recognizes McCord as the so called coward of Bitter Creek and gets Fred to start a fight with him in the saloon. It escalates into a brawl from which Fred sneaks away. The noise serves as a distraction while Roy cracks the safe. They steal the gold and put it in the coffin. But later Pitkin and McCord find the gold and figure out how it got there. The coffin is scheduled for a burial service at dawn and Fred and Marty who are posing as the bereaved ones are going to be there. The next morning Roy, Fred and Marty are waiting at the gravesite when Pitkin arrives with his wagon. He asks them to help with the coffin but inside the wagon is McCord. The crooks try to resist but McCord and Pitkin knock all three into the grave. McCord leaves and lets Pitkin take the credit for capturing the robbers.