October 21, 1996: I posed all day at Northern Secondary

Thirty years ago today 

            On Monday I posed from 10:30 to 15:20 at Northern Secondary School. It was my first time back there since the spring.

Saffron Burrows

            On Monday after midnight I put fresh carpet tape on the edges of my mattress where it had gotten less sticky. I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and the pillow and didn’t pick up many bedbugs. I shook my sheet and comforter out on the deck, turned the heat on, and went to bed around 1:40. I slept right through to the 5:00 alarm and turned the heat off. After yoga I checked for bedbugs and there were a few below the baseboards and some stuck to the carpet tape. 

            I revised my translation of “Je trouve ça coperchic” (I Find it Super Chic) by Boris Vian and since there’s no audio for the song I didn’t bother to memorize it. I uploaded it to my Christian’s Translations blog and tomorrow I’ll publish it. 

            I worked out the chords for the first verse of “L’île enchanteresses” (The Enchanted Isle) by Serge Gainsbourg. The second verse should have the same chords and then I’ll need to work out the chorus. 

            I weighed 91.05 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice for the first of two sessions and it stayed in tune most of the time. 

            I weighed 92.3 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 91.65 kilos at 18:10. 

            I was a little behind in my journal and worked on catching up. I roasted an Australian beef eye of round and had a slice with a potato and the last of my gravy while watching season 4, episode 1 of Star Trek Strange New Worlds. 

            The Enterprise is sent on a mission to observe a category 10 interplanetary squall. Commander Pelia is the only member of the crew who has seen one before and she says she was in the police box at the time (She is implying that she was once a companion of the Doctor. This is the second time there’s been a hint that Star Trek and Doctor Who are in the same universe. In the last season of Doctor Who someone comments that that the Tardis is like Star Trek and the Doctor says, “We should visit them sometime”). They receive a distress signal from inside the storm and attempt a rescue. The Enterprise gets caught in a vortex and gets thrown to an unknown location. The Enterprise is without power and their warp drive needs iridium to be restarted. They detect some on a nearby planet and so Una, Singh, and Ortega take a shuttle to the planet. But their path to the iridium is blocked by a large life sign they haven’t seen yet. 

            Meanwhile The Enterprise is snagged in an energy field by an alien spacecraft. Pike invites the alien commander aboard the Enterprise. Spock discovers that the phenomenon actually sent them 65, million years in the past and that the planet the shuttle crew landed on is Earth. The large life form the away team detected is a tyrannosaurus rex. The aliens that have captured the Enterprise are Martians.

            Una stuns the T-Rex with her phaser by shooting it in the mouth. They are able to collect the iridium. 

            The Martian commander and her entourage do not have transporters but the Martians have developed the technology of phasing and board the Enterprise by passing through the hull. Commander Cassell says the Martians are at war with the Dol’drm who are insect-like creatures impossible to communicate with. Pike asks for a chance to try to get through to them. It seems that Cassell agrees but later she and her entourage phase into engineering and steal an antimatter storage pod, which she plans to use as a weapon against the Dol’drm. 

            Before the away team can leave prehistoric Earth they are threatened by a large dinosaur but Laan instinctively punches it with incredible strength and it runs away. She breaks her hand but feels no pain. 

           The Enterprise is repaired and pursues Cassell to the fifth planet in the solar system, which is the Dol’drm homeworld between Mars and Jupiter. Cassell fires the antimatter at the planet and Pike is prepared to destroy it but then stops and allows it to be blown up so it won’t exist in our time. 

           The explosion is what they need in order to return to their own time and so the Enterprise enters the blast. 

            Spock calculates that it is the destruction of the Dol’drm homeworld that created the asteroid belt. It is a piece of Dol’drm that hit the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs. Cassell’s actions also shifted the orbit of Mars to take away its ability to support life. In defeating the Dol’drm she doomed her planet. But M’Benga says some of Cassell’s DNA has spread throughout the galaxy. 

            Pike picks up the book A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs from his library. In the story John Carter is also transported to the distant past when Mars was thriving with life. 

            The distress signal the Enterprise investigated was their own from 65 million years ago. They created the storm that they were investigating and that both sent them back and later forward in time.

            Una is promoted to commander. 

            Cassell was played by Saffron Burrows, who was raised by socialists. She sold the Socialist Worker Newsletter for pocket money. She studied drama since she was a child. At 15 she became a successful model. She made her TV debut in Les cinq dernières minutes in 1992. She made her film debut in In the Name of the Father in 1993. He starred in The Loss of Sexual Innocence, Miss Julie, Perfect Creature, The Galindez File, and The Guitar. She co-starred in Circle of Friends, Hotel de Love, Lovelife, Nevada, Timecode, Wing Commander, Deep Blue Sea, Gangster no. 1, Enigma, Tempted, Klimt, Reign Over Me, Shrink, Dangerous Parking, Dangerous Waters, and Canary Black. She co-starred on Boston Legal, My Own Worst Enemy, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Mozart in the Jungle, and You.

Earl Holliman

            On Sunday after midnight I put fresh carpet tape on the edges of my mattress where it had gotten less sticky and finished the roll. I would need to get some more later that day. I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and the pillow. It didn’t catch as many bedbugs as usual. I shook my sheet and comforter out on the deck, turned the heat on, and went to bed around 1:37. I got up to pee at 4:47, turned the heat off and went back to sleep until 5:00. After yoga I checked for bedbugs and there were a few on the walls above the baseboards. 

            I posted the lyrics for “She Betrayed Her Man to the Undercover Cops”, my translation of “Elle voulait toucher du pognon” (She Wanted a Little Money) by Boris Vian on my Boris Vian Facebook page and on my own Facebook page. The next Vian song on my list is “Je trouve ça coperchic” (I Find it Super Chic) but there is no audio for the song so I’ll just revise my translation and publish it on my Christian’s Translations blog without the music. 

            I worked out the chords for all but the last two lines of the first verse of “L’île enchanteresses” (The Enchanted Isle) by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I weighed 90.7 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since last Sunday. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune all the time. 

            I went over to Home Hardware and bought two rolls of carpet tape. I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room and picked up a few bedbugs. 

            I weighed 92.45 kilos before lunch. September 29 was the last early afternoon when I was so unkind to the scale but I was a lot meaner that day. 

            I weighed 91.95 kilos at 18:25. 

            I was a little behind in my journal and worked on catching up.

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, chicken nuggets, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching the final episode of the TV series Custer. This was the last episode to be taped but it never aired. 

            Dan Samuels is a former army scout who is being sent to prison for three years for stealing army food and giving it to the Cheyenne. Custer feels bad about Dan’s sentence and has some sympathy with his actions. He has also considered him a friend although we’ve never seen him before. In respect for Dan’s years of service to the regiment Custer asks that his handcuffs be removed before he is placed in the prison wagon. Also Dan’s pregnant Cheyenne wife Red Moon Woman is there to see him off and so Custer allows them a moment together. But Red Moon Woman has a horse with a rifle in a scabbard ready for him and he jumps on it. Two guards try to stop him but he knocks one away and shoots and kills the other before escaping. The tragedy is that the review board would have lowered Dan’s sentence so that he would have only served six months at the most but for Dan even half a year was too much.

            Custer wants to go after Dan alone but General Terry won’t allow it. So Custer asks for a temporary leave of absence. Terry allows him one week knowing that Custer would probably go even if he didn’t grant it. 

            Custer carefully follows Dan’s trail. He stops at a trading post where the proprietor says he knows Dan. Custer is looking for Lance Springs and the man says it’s due north so now Custer knows it’s south because he can tell he’s protecting Dan. 

            Custer finds fresh horseshoe prints so he knows Dan is nearby (But it seems to me that Red Moon Woman wouldn’t have given him a shorn horse as Cheyenne and other plains horses developed stronger hooves). 

            Dan is behind some rocks and is about to fire but Custer sees him in time and jumps from his horse. The horse is killed and Custer takes shelter behind some rocks. They shout back and forth each trying to figure out where the other is through the echoes of their voices but Custer figures it out first, sneaks around and jumps him. They fight until Custer wins. Dan says he could just let him go but he won’t. 

            Then they notice a Sioux war party that’s come out to investigate the shots. Custer has Dan at gunpoint and says to start walking. A Sioux warrior jumps Dan and Custer kills him. While Custer is looking at where the other Sioux are Dan knocks him out and takes his rifle. He kicks Custer into a crevice so he won’t be found and then leaves. 

            Custer tracks him to a campsite where Red Moon Woman is preparing a meal and then Dan arrives. Custer comes out with his gun trained on Dan (where did Custer get a second rifle?). He says Red Moon Woman will have to come with them until Dan is in custody. She tells Custer she will do anything to save Dan. She would even become Custer’s woman. 

            Suddenly she goes into labour and says the baby is the wrong way around. Custer has delivered a colt before that was in breach and so he does the best he can and Red Moon Woman gives birth to a girl. She’s ashamed of not giving Dan a boy but he assures her that a girl is better. He says every buck in the territory will be giving him horses because they’ll want to marry her. 

            The Sioux are camped nearby and yet the baby doesn’t cry which is pretty unrealistic. Once his wife is recovered Dan tells Custer he’s going to go with her to the Sioux camp. He reminds him that the Sioux Chief War Horse would love to carry Custer’s yellow scalp on his lance so he’d better not try to stop him. Custer lets them go. 

            They walk into the Sioux camp. Dan says he lost his horse. War Horse says the only dead horse nearby is a cavalry horse. War Horse had found a piece of Dan’s buckskin jacket near the body of the brave that Custer killed. He sees that it matches and Dan begins to fight. Custer jumps in to help him. Custer shoots War Horse but before he dies he fatally wounds Dan. Dan tells Red Moon Woman to make sure his daughter knows he loves her and then he dies. They bury Dan and then Red Moon Woman heads for Cheyenne territory with her baby. 

            Dan was played by Earl Holliman, who became interested in movies while ushering at a cinema. In his early teens he became a magician’s assistant. He ran away from home at 15 hoping to make it in Hollywood. When that didn’t work he lied his age and joined the navy. He was assigned to a navy communications school in Los Angeles and in his free time he hung out at the Hollywood Canteen. He was transferred to Virginia and became involved with theatre within the navy. After the war he studied at the UCLA Drama School and the Pasadena Playhouse. He made his film debut in Destination Gobi in 1953. He co-starred in the Rainmaker (and won a Golden Globe), I Died A Thousand Times, Giant, Anzio, Sharkey’s Machine, Trooper Hook, Don’t Go Near the Water, The Trap, Last Train From Gun Hill, Visit to a Small Planet, He starred in The Biscuit Eater, He made his TV debut on Matinee Theatre in 1957. he appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show 14 times, The $10,000 Pyramic 95 times, He was in the first episode of the Twilight Zone in 1959. He was a regular panelist on Hollywood Squares. He starred in the short-lived series Hotel de Paree and Wide Country. He co-starred in Police Woman, P.S.I. Luv U, Delta, Night Man, . He was the president of Actors and Others for Animals for 25 years.

October 20, 1996: My daughter and I played video games

Thirty years ago today 

            On Sunday it rained a bit so my daughter and I mostly played video games. I took her back to her mother’s place in Scarborough in the evening.

October 19, 1996: It was a rainy day

Thirty years ago today

            On Saturday my daughter and I began our usual weekend together. I picked her up from her mother’s house in Scarborough and took her to my place downtown. It was a rainy day so we just played computer games.

Yvonne de Carlo

            On Saturday after midnight I laid down new carpet tape all around the edges of my mattress and almost finished the roll. I’ll have to get some more on Sunday. I lint rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and the pillow. It didn’t catch as many bedbugs as usual. I shook my sheet and comforter out on the deck, turned the heat on, and went to bed around 1:30. I got up to pee at 4:15, turned the heat off and went back to sleep until 5:00. After yoga I checked for bedbugs and there were quite a few on the carpet tape and at the bottom of the baseboards. 

            I finished editing “Elle voulait toucher du pognon” (She Wanted a Little Money) by Boris Vian in French and my translation “She Sold Her Man Out to the Undercover Cops” in my Christian’s Translations blog and published them. I looked for some more photos of Boris Vian, found three and edited them in Paint. 

            I worked out the chords for the first line of “L’île enchanteresses” (The Enchanted Isle) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 91.35 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the first of two sessions and it went out of tune all the time. 

            Around midday I went to No Frills where I found five bags of relatively firm green grapes. I also bought a pack of blueberries, two packs of raspberries, some bananas, garbage bags, olive oil, maple syrup, honey, orange juice, two containers of skyr, a bag of potato wedges, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. I did a price match on the grapes with the Walmart price of $6.48 a kilo. My bill was still $125.

            I bought a six-pack of Creemore at the liquor store. 

            I weighed 91.15 kilos at 14:50. I had peanut butter and five-year old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade. 

            I took a siesta at 15:30 and got up at 17:00, too late for a bike ride. 

            I weighed 92 kilos at 17:20, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening since September 29.

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:55. 

            I digitized a cassette recording of me performing two poems, “Salvation Orgy” and one other the title for which I’ve forgotten, acapella at Fat Albert’s. The next tape I’ll digitize is a recording of Christian and the Lions at Fat Albert’s. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, chicken nuggets, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching the penultimate episode of Custer. It was actually the final episode that aired but not the last one to be taped. 

            Custer and Sergeant Bustard come upon a burning covered wagon and find the travellers dead. Bustard observes that the arrows are Kiowa but Custer points out that they are hunting arrows and not war arrows and that the victims were shot beforehand with bullets (There’s no evidence that the Kiowa used separate arrows for war or hunting). It’s as if the arrows were shot into the bodies just for show. Custer says the Kiowa wouldn’t be so wasteful as to shoot arrows into corpses. Bustard says that all the household goods the settlers had been carrying were stolen. Custer points out that it’s not like the Kiowa to steal goods used in white households. This is the fifth small party this summer murdered to the last person and stripped clean. 

            Suddenly there are gunshots. Custer makes his way behind the shooter and finds it’s a woman who survived the attack. When she realizes they are cavalry she gives up. She says she thought they were the raiders returning. They murdered her husband and brother. She says her name is Vanessa Ravenhill. When Custer identifies himself she’s suddenly no longer friendly and says she wishes she’d killed him. 

            Back at Fort Hays Custer is discussing the series of raids with General Terry when a Major Bentine arrives. It turns out that he was a prosecution witness at Custer’s court martial. Terry says Bentine has been sent by the war department to file a report on how effectively they deal with various First Nations out west. Terry gives Custer five days to solve the mystery of the raids and Bentine will be an official observer. Custer tells Bentine that he doesn’t hold his friend War Eagle the Chief of the Kiowa responsible for these attacks. 

            There’s a salesman named Ostler at Fort Hays, selling goods from his wagon. Vanessa is interesting in the sewing machine he’s hawking because it is identical to the one her sister in law owned. She helped her pack it in her wagon before she headed west and was in one of the massacred wagon parties. He shows her that the name “Douglas” is on the back of the machine so she says she must have been mistaken. 

            Custer and his men ride out and at a certain point tells Bentine to take charge as he and Bustard ride on ahead. Custer tells Bustard that they are being watched and he wants to take their observers alive. They jump the two young Kiowa braves as they are riding away and capture them. They ride with the cavalry to a stake in the ground with an orange flag. Custer stops the men there, saying anyone who goes further starts a war. Custer and Bustard ride on to meet with Chief War Eagle. War Eagle tells Custer that when he signed the peace treaty he broke his war lance. Custer believes that War Eagle did not order the attacks. War Eagle has his son Blue Antelope (I doubt if any First Nations person has ever had a name like that) accompany Custer as a scout to help find who is responsible. 

            Custer sets up a fake wagon train with soldiers in civilian clothing and some of them, including Sergeant Bustard, dressed as women. They head out and that night at camp they are raided. Blue Antelope is absent and Bentine is suspicious but Custer still is not. 

            Bustard discovers that Vanessa has stowed away in one of the wagons. She says she wants to be sure Custer doesn’t let the murdering Kiowa get away like he wants to. Custer says they’ll have to keep her for now but under guard. She says he doesn’t frighten her but he says she frightens him. 

            When Blue Antelope returns to the camp one of the troopers trips him. Custer allows them to fight and Blue Antelope wins but then rides away. Custer goes alone after him. He catches him and Blue Antelope tells him he knows who attacked his camp and they are not Kiowa. He knows where they hide but there are too many. 

            While Custer is away the salesman Ostler arrives in his wagon and appears exhausted. He says he was attacked by Kiowa demanding fire water in exchange for sewing machines, coocoo clocks and other such items. Later Ostler sneaks into the wagon where they are hiding their cannon. He attaches a fuse to the gunpowder and lights it. Bustard sees him and asks what he’s doing. Ostler attacks and he and Bustard fight and it lasts quite a while and that’s a bit ridiculous because Bustard is a big, muscular man while Ostler is much smaller, pudgier, and older. Just as Bustard beats him the wagon blows up.

            Ostler pulls a gun and grabs Vanessa. He takes her hostage and they ride out together. Bentine has the men follow to the mountains where Ostler’s fake Kiowa are waiting in ambush. 

            War Eagle, Blue Antelope and the Kiowa warriors agree to help Custer fight the raiders. They arrive and turn the standoff around. Ostler is shot and killed. 

            Bentine tells Custer he doesn’t condone his methods but he admires his results. 

            Vanessa apologizes to Custer. 

            Vanessa was played by Canadian actor Yvonne de Carlo, who was born in Vancouver. Her father abandoned the family when she was three and her mother worked as a waiter. When she was seven she entered a poem called “A Little Boy” in a Vancouver Sun poetry contest and won the first prize of $5. She sang in the choir of St. Paul’s Anglican Church. Her mother wanted her to be in show business and enrolled her in dance and acting classes. She dropped out of high school at 15 to attend the British Columbia School of Dancing. They moved to Hollywood when she was 18 where she came in second in the Miss Venice Beach contest, which led to work dancing in chorus lines. She was arrested and deported to Canada but the nightclub owner told the government he would sponsor her and she was allowed back into the States. 

            Her first feature film was Harvard Here I Come in 1941. Her first role as a female lead was in Deerslayer in 1943. She starred in Salome Where She Danced (which made her famous), Frontier Gal, Flame of the Islands, Song of Sheherazade, The Contessa’s Secret, Magic Fire, La spada e la croce, Slave Girl, Black Bart, Buccaneer’s Girl, Calamity Jane and Sam Bass, Casbah (in which she sang “For Every Man There’s a Woman” which was nominated for an Oscar), The Gal Who Took the West, Hotel Sahara, River Lady, The Desert Hawk, Hurricane Smith, La Casa de Las Sambras, Blazing Stewardesses, Play Dead, and Flesh and Bullets. Cameramen voted her the queen of technicolour.

            She co-starred in Criss Cross, Brute Force, The Captain’s Paradise, Happy Ever After, The Ten Commandments, Death of a Scoundrel, Raw Edge, Silver City, Shotgun, The Scarlet Angel, Sea Devils, Tomahawk, Band of Angels, Passion, Border River, The San Francisco Story, Fort Algiers, Death of a Scoundrel, Timbuktu, McClintock, Law of the Lawless, A Global Affair, Hostile Guns, Arizona Bushwackers, House of Shadows, Munster Go Home, The Seven Minutes, Arizona Slim, The Intruder, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Satan’s Cheerleaders, Nocturna, Guyana Cult of the Damned, The Silent Scream, Liar’s Moon, American Gothic, Cellar Dweller, Mirror Mirror, and The Naked Truth. 

           In 1951 she starred in five performances of the opera Die Fledermaus at the Hollywood Bowl.

           She made her TV debut in Lights Out in 1952. She guest starred on the pilot episode of Bonanza in 1959. She co-starred in the TV series The Munsters. 

           She played Carlotta in the original Broadway production of Follies and introduced the song “I’m Still Here”. 

           Her 1987 best selling autobiography was called Yvonne. 

           She was presented to Queen Elizabeth at the Empire Theatre in London in 1952. 

           She was politically conservative and believed that men should run the world. 

           She had affairs with Howard Hughes and Prince Abdul Reza Pahlavi of Iran .

October 18, 1996: I got stood up by a stripper

Thirty years ago today

            On Friday I went back to the House of Lancaster and spent a lot of money on lap dances from Amanda. I asked her out and she said she would meet me after work. I waited and waited outside until I saw her slip into a cab and drive away. I felt like a fool.