After yoga I continued working on memorizing the tenth verse of “Ballade de la chnoufe” (Ballad of the Snuff) by Boris Vian.
I continued trying to memorize the final monologue in Zizi Jeanmaire’s performance of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. There’s a good chance I’ll have it nailed down tomorrow.
I weighed 88.75 kilos before breakfast.
I played my Martin acoustic during song practice for the first of four sessions. It went out of tune several times but not to the frustrating degree that the electrics have been misbehaving.
The bike post ring in front of my building has been knocked off its post, perhaps by a snowplough. It was lying on the street side of the snowbank so I brought it up to my place. Maybe I’ll call the city to see if they’re going to fix it. If not I wouldn’t mind keeping it because those old ones are pretty cool. I’d rather have it in front of my place and functional though.
Around midday I rode down to No Frills. I bought two bags of green grapes, a bag of red grapes, two bags of cherries, two packs of raspberries, bananas, a pack of three chicken legs, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, mouthwash, tomato pesto, three bags of skim milk, a jug of iced tea, a jug of orange juice, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips.
I weighed 89.8 kilos at 15:00. I had saltines with peanut butter, five-year-old cheddar and a glass of iced tea.
I took a siesta from 15:30 to 17:00 and it was too late for a bike ride.
There was an email from the landlady about a complaint about the loudness my music from my upstairs neighbour Jacob. That’s rich coming from someone who often plays music louder than I do, plus stomping and shouting, and in the nighttime. Nonetheless I’ll lower my top listening volume to minus 5 from minus 4 and see if that shuts him up, though I’m sure it won’t.
I weighed 90.05 kilos at 17:20, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening in a few years.
I was caught up in my journal at 18:32.
I recorded from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity and then extracted to my hard drive tape 1, side 2 of my third 20,000 Poets Under the League Slam, hosted by Mark Critoph. These digitizations I’m doing from my Sony Dolby player are sounding much better than the cassette-to-MP3 convertor that I got through Amazon and there are no glitches. The recordings skipped in places after conversion by that device.
I edited more of my Photos folder, deleting a lot of images and putting others in sub-folders.
I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, tomato pesto, oven wedge fries, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching the penultimate episode of Car 54 Where Are You?
Judy is a hairdresser who works at Antoinne’s where most of the precinct officers’ wives get their hair done. She asks Toody to help her stop Antoinne from becoming a boxer even though he’s already won his first four fights. Toody agrees that Tony is a sweet guy and says that when his wife Lucille comes home from the beauty parlour it takes hours for her to get mean again.
Muldoon and Toody get the idea that what Tony needs is to be knocked out to discourage him from fighting. They offer to take Tony to Waxey Kilroy’s gym. They convince Waxey to have one of his best fighters go in the ring with Tony. Waxey tells Spider to make it quick but as soon as Tony steps into the ring he roars like an animal and tears into Spider until he’s down. Now Waxey wants Tony to be one of his fighters.
Muldoon and Toody know that if they got Sugar Ray Robinson to fight Tony he’d be able to knock him out but that wouldn’t discourage Tony because Sugar can beat everybody. They go and convince Sugar to let them get a police disguise artist to make him look like an old man. Then they talk Tony into fighting him. The disguised Sugar knocks Tony out right away and after that Tony gives up boxing. But then he loses his sweet disposition and starts being mean to his customers.
Judy appeals to Toody and Muldoon to help Tony again. Muldoon realizes that Tony needed boxing for an outlet and now he’s taking his frustrations out on everybody else. They get the undisguised Sugar Ray to come and tell Tony that he was tricked and so he starts fighting again. In the end we see him take on three guys at once.
Tony was played by Rocky Graziano, a former middleweight champion who really was knocked out by Sugar Ray Robinson.
Sugar Ray played himself. His birth name was Walker Smith. He started using the name of Ray Robinson when he was an amateur so his mother wouldn’t find out he was boxing. He was undefeated as an amateur in all 85 of his fights with 69 knockouts and 42 of them in the first round. As a pro his first loss was to Jake LaMotta but he beat LaMotta five times after that. He was world champion six times in his 25 year career with over 100 knockouts. He knocked out Jimmy Doyle in 1947 who died as a result so he bought Doyle’s mother a house. In 1949 he was on a European tour and knocked out Gerard Hecht with a kidney punch, which would have been legal in the US but not in Europe and so he was disqualified. In 1952 he retired and spent two and a half years as a singer and tap dancer. He returned to boxing in 1955. He fought in a variety of styles depending on who he was fighting. He retired at 45, with almost no money after having spent millions on a lavish lifestyle and having been ripped off by his accountant. He is still considered to be the best boxer of all time and was idolized by Muhammed Ali who fought in a heavier weight class. He was friends with Frank Sinatra. He owned an entire block in Harlem. He always travelled with an entourage of twenty and paid all their bills. These included a secretary, a masseur, a barber, beautiful women, a dwarf mascot, and a voice coach. He always owned a brand new pink Cadillac convertible. During WWII he was drafted into the US army and served by doing exhibition boxing matches for the troops but refused to fight for segregated audiences.
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