October 22, 1996: I hosted the launch of Cad's Jizz Magazine

Thirty years ago today

            On Tuesday I posed in the morning at Northern Secondary School. I usually posed nude at that high school but this time I was asked to wear a G-string but I’m not sure why. Maybe it was an exhibition day and there were guests visiting. I wore my leather jock strap for the first time. 

            In the evening as always I hosted my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage in the Art Bar of the Gladstone Hotel. Our feature that night was the launch of the first issue of Cad’s Jizz Magazine, put together by Cad Lowlife (who now calls himself Cad Gold Jr.) and Bruce March. In addition to the regular open stage there were readings by Cad and maybe by me from the magazine. It was racist, sexist, and despite all that it was not politically correct, but it was kind of funny.

Cathy Cavadini

            On Tuesday 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 picked up a few bedbugs from the curtains. I shook my sheet and comforter out on the deck, turned the heat on, and went to bed around 1:40. I got up to pee just before 3:00 and turned the heat off. That way it wasn’t so obnoxiously hot when I got up at 5:00. 

            I published “I Find it Super Chic”, my translation of “Je trouve ça coperchic” by Boris Vian on my Christian’s Translations blog and posted the lyrics on Facebook. The next Vian song on my list is “C’est ici” (It’s Right Here) and there’s audio for that one so I’ll start memorizing it tomorrow.

            I worked out the chords for the second verse of “L’île enchanteresses” (The Enchanted Isle) by Serge Gainsbourg. I established the first chord for the chorus. 

            I weighed 90.55 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since October 11.

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice and it went out of tune about half the time.

            I lint-rolled the curtains between the bedroom and the living room, the top of my bed and my pillow. I shook out my sheet and comforter. 

            I have three storage containers full of images I’ve collected for collage. I went through one of the containers and got rid of about half. 

            I weighed 91.3 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on the way back. I picked through their grapes and managed to get two bags of red ones and one of the green that were relatively firm. I also bought two bags of oranges. 

            I weighed 90.95 kilos at 18:25. October 4 was the last evening when I was so easy on the scale. 

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

            I made a fresh batch of gravy from roast beef drippings and had some with a potato and a slice of roast beef while watching season 4, episode 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. This was a spooky story. 

            Spock and La’an are in a shuttle bringing Kirk back from a leadership conference when they discover the long lost USS Griffin floating dead in space. They beam aboard to investigate. There are no life signs, no life support, and there is no power and yet Kirk hears a baby crying. Power and life support comes on. La’an sees a woman who calls her by name and says she’s been waiting for her, before disappearing. 

            Spock detects negatively charged ions, which in pseudo science indicates the presence of ghosts.

            Spock investigates sick bay while La’an and Kirk head for the bridge. Kirk is scheduled to meet his newborn son David and tells La’an that his relationship with the boy’s mother Carol didn’t work out because she’s afraid he’ll die in space. 

            They access the ships computer and learn that the woman La’an encountered was Security Chief Rose Harper. She reported erratic and violent behaviour among the crew and beamed all the officers off the ship. 

            Meanwhile in sick bay, while at first it was empty, suddenly there are bodies covered in sheets on all of the tables and one of them sits up. It’s his fiancé T’Pring who is as surprised to be there as Spock is to see her. She says moments ago she was on Vulcan. He tells her she is not real but a projection of his mind. She pulls a phaser and shoots him. 

            Outside the ship they see that their shuttlecraft has been destroyed. 

            Kirk thinks his son David is inside the communications equipment and begins tearing through wires to try to reach him. 

            La’an is surrounded by zombies that used to be the crew and they tell her she’s one of them.

            T’Pring has strapped Spock to a biobed and and tells him he needs to come closer to his human half and so she cuts off the pointed tips of his ears. Then she plans to move Spock’s heart to where a human heart should be but Captain Pike, Una, Uhura, Ortegas, and Kirk’s brother Sam beam aboard the ship and stop her. 

            La’an tries to take the turbolift to the bridge but it keeps taking her to deck 17 where she finds Harper’s quarters and while watching her video log entry she turns into La’an. La’an breaks the screen. Uhura and La’an try to beam Ortegas back to the Enterprise but something goes wrong. Uhura accuses La’an of beaming Ortegas into herself. She says she put her in the buffer for her own safety. 

            Una takes a scalpel and begins cutting open her own stomach. 

            There is a crack in the window and Sam is sucked out into space, blood first. 

            Spock seems to transport himself back to the Enterprise simply by repeating a Vulcan mantra.

            Pike starts chopping off his own fingers with a kitchen knife. 

            La’an stabs Kirk and then they are both beamed back to the Enterprise. Pike, Uhura, Una, Ortegas and Sam were never on the Griffin. Spock’s ears are fixed. It seems he cut them off himself in momentary madness. 

            La’an watches the Griffin being towed away and thinks she sees Harper in a window gesturing towards her. 

            The voice of the Griffin computer was done by Cathy Cavadini, who made her film debut in Starchaser: The legend of Orin in 1985. She did the voice of Blossom in The Powerpuff Girls TV series and the movie. She sang “Dreams to Dream” in An American Tale: Feivel Goes West, which was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Song. She was the speaking and singing voice of Mary in the animated feature Babes in Toyland.

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.