On Tuesday morning I continued gathering images for my photo-video of the song “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg.
I weighed 92.45 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning in over a year. No wonder I’m out of breath after I do my chin-ups.
I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice and it was staying in tune about half the time until the battery died on my tuner. I switched to my new rechargeable Snark tuner for the first time and it seems more accurate. After that the guitar stayed in tune almost the whole time. Time will tell if all my tuning problems all these years have been because of a bad tuner. It may just be that the Gibson liked the damp weather today and the tuner is just a coincidence.
Around midday I finished touching up the wall paint above the top bathroom shelf and also fixed an area on the north wall that I’d smudged with pink paint. Now I’m finished with the stepladder for the bathroom and tomorrow I’ll start painting the undersides of the top shelves with the Blue Bliss paint.
I weighed 92.3 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride and found they’d cleared the snow that’s been blocking the Bloor bike lane at Shaw and Bloor but it’s still clogged up from Grace Street on. I went down Grace to Harbord, west to Ossington, south to Queen and west to home. The sun was enormous and red because of the dwindling fog. I took some pictures but it was already partly behind buildings.
I weighed 92.1 kilos at 17:55.
I was behind in my journal because I fell asleep at the computer last night. I got caught up at 19:18.
I recorded from cassette tape through audio interface to Audacity, then extracted to my hard drive side 2 of “Dancing to the Words”, which was my disc jockey audition tape for CKLN. At first the waveform died about a song and a half into the tape and so like the day before yesterday I had to restart my computer before Audacity would record the whole thing.
I deleted a few more photos from my hard drive.
I used the rest of the water in which I’d cooked the three chicken legs two days ago to boil the good parts of two potatoes. It tasted a little thin to be soup so I added some miso. That helped but not enough and I didn’t want to use too much miso. It didn’t taste like soup until I added the rest of the gravy and the last chicken leg. After that it was delicious. I had two bowls while watching season 1, episode 23 of Combat.
K company is holed up in an abandoned town when the Germans attack. They are forced to surrender and are marched to a command post where they are tied to the wooden fence of a goat pen.
A German soldier named Kurt needs a better pair of boots and sees that Kelly wears the same size. He steals Kelly’s boots and then says, “Danke schoen mister”.
The Allies begin shelling the command post and the stable catches fire. All the men but Saunders break free of their ropes and run, thinking Saunders is with them. They make it across the river and are taking a moment’s rest when Saunders emerges from the flaming stable in a state of shock with both of his hands badly burned. He crosses the river and faints just as K company moves on.
Saunders wakes and continues on. He collapses by a stream that K Company has just crossed. He finds the mud soothing and covers his hands.
That night K Company stumbles on a German campsite with a supply tent. They kill two guards and steal rations. Kelly finds boots and puts them on, telling the others he’ll catch up but he is discovered and shot by a German soldier. They escape and after they eat they wade up the river. Saunders also enters the river and collapses on a log. K Company passes him in the dark and then his log comes loose from the shore and floats downstream. When he wakes in the morning he makes his way upstream again.
He finds some leftover rations that he has to eat like a dog because he can’t use his hands. K Company finds an orchard and feasts, taking lot’s of apples with them. Saunders finds the same orchard but now all the low hanging fruit is gone and he can’t grip a stick to knock any apples down.
Weak from hunger he becomes delusional. He finds a dead German soldier and thinks it’s his brother Joey. He picks him up and begins to carry him. K Company comes across two Allied tanks and several soldiers and they are saved. A little later Saunders is found by the tank crew, still carrying the German.
This was the last episode directed by Robert Altman.
The German soldier Kurt was played by Marlene Parker, then credited as John Siegfried. She was born Siegfried Speck in Dresden in 1930 to a deaf and mute mother who could not care for her. She was placed in an orphanage and then adopted at the age of 6 by an unaffectionate family. When she was 14 the Allies repeatedly firebombed Dresden but her foster parents lived outside the city. After Germany fell the Russians were more brutal than the Nazis. She apprenticed as a hairdresser and then got work in a fashionable salon in East Berlin. Before the Berlin wall went up she and her boyfriend made the treacherous journey to West Germany. She eventually got work as a hairdresser on a cruise ship and ended up in Hollywood with many famous clients such as Doris Day. She started acting in plays at the German Club. Her film debut was in the 1959 remake of The Blue Angel. She played a German officer who is executed for being gay in the movie Hitler. She was Rock Hudson’s lover. She was on the verge of suicide before she decided to transition. After she started taking the hormones she lost a lot of work because she no longer looked like the guy they wanted for commercials. She transitioned in 1978.
