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 .



















