Nasty Backpack

           

            My internet connection has been getting weaker and weaker. On Saturday August 27th I tried taking my wi-fi adaptor out of the window and placing it in the middle of the floor to see if it picks up the wi-fi from downstairs better. I found that gmail still wasn’t working at all, but it worked right away after I cleared my browsing data for the previous hour.

            I’ve been trying to track down some obscure songs by Serge Gainsbourg that aren’t readily available on the internet. These are songs that he never recorded himself, but wrote for other singers, who recorded but never released them. One is “Le Cirque” by Catherine Sauvage. I spent some time on Saturday trying to track it down. It’s on a box set of called “Serge Gainsbourg: Avec Amour” that was released in 2012. It’s not available on Pirate Bay. A site called Deezer has a clip from the song, but it’s not complete. I listened to it several times and copied out the lyrics. I had thought that “Cirque” would relate to circuses in some way, but it seems to be called such because of its circular lyrics, such as “L’amour de la femme mon amour a il femme … C’est l’amour de la femme de l’amour de la femme de mon amour la femme de mon amour…” It will be very difficult to do an English adaptation of that one. I finally found the full song on a Russian site and listened to it several times until a window came up telling me that only Russian and Ukrainian browsers could listen to the song and after that I was blocked. I certainly wasn’t going to download anything from a Russian site so I moved on. I’ve almost got all the lyrics. Maybe eventually someone will upload “Serge Gainsbourg Avec Amour” to Pirate Bay.

            As I was riding north on Brock Avenue that  evening, I felt something needle sharp digging into my back. I stopped to check, but I couldn’t find anything inside my backpack that could have been sticking through, like the end of a guitar string. I rode on but the sharpness was still there. I reached behind me to the exact spot and then stopped to check my backpack at that spot. I ran my fingers over it and there was a little blue thread sticking out from the padding of my pack that felt as sharp as a sliver. I tried to pull it out with my fingers, but I couldn’t get a grip. I resigned myself to going home to find something that could grip the thread, and started in riding home, but before I got to the street before the underpass I suddenly remembered that I had a pair of pliers in my backpack. With them I was able to remove the nasty blue sliver and continue on my way with my back unstung.

            At Dufferin the Bloorcourt Arts and Crafts Fair was going on, so I rode north and took the next right in hopes of bypassing it. I came back down to Bloor on Dovercourt, but the festival was still there, as far as the eye could see. I went south and took the next alleyway east. I had to follow it all the way to Shaw before the Bloor Street was back to normal.

            I went to Cosburn and Coxwell and headed home. It was a pleasant day for a ride, and certainly not as hot as it’s been lately.