Joan Fontaine

            On Saturday morning I put new batteries in the remote that came with the Yamaha SR-300 receiver that I bought a couple of weeks ago, but it still didn’t work. I noticed that the buttons on the remote look like they are more for a home theatre receiver like my previous Yamaha. I decided to take it back to the Queenglad pawnshop to see what they could do about it. The guy that was running the front this time said that any Yamaha remote should work. I told him that my old Yamaha remote doesn’t work with the new receiver either. He got the old guy that helped me test the receiver when I bought it to test the remote. I feel dumb now for not getting him to check the remote when I bought the receiver. He took the remote into the back room and came back after a few minutes, saying he’d cleaned some of the connectors and gotten the red light to go on with some of the buttons. Then suggested that I take it home and come back if it didn’t work. I asked him hat the point would be of taking it home when only some of the buttons are working. He told me to go for a coffee and he would clean the rest of the connectors. I walked over to Freshco to buy grapes, mangos and tomatoes, and then I walked back to Queenglad. The old man was still in the back. They had a big screen TV they were selling tuned to CNN and they were reporting about a secret service agent having shot himself in front of the White House. One would hope that the United States Secret Service would have had enough training in not shooting himself that they could rule out the possibility of shooting oneself by accident. The old man came back out and said that he’d gotten most of the buttons to turn the red light on. The other guy took a couple of remotes from the top of other receivers they were selling and asked if those worked any better. They were all identical remotes to the one I had brought back. The old guy said for me to take it home and if it didn’t work I should bring the remote and the receiver so they could find a solution. When I got home I found that despite the red light going on for the tuner, the CD (which is where I plug my computer) and the volume control. The remote does nothing to the receiver. I thought about right then taking the receiver back to see what they could do, but then I decided that would probably be very time consuming when I should be at home and writing. I looked at my receipt and saw that the warranty runs till the 20^th of March and since I hand in my essay on the 14^th I could take the receiver to them on the 15^th without worrying about losing essay work time.

            That night I watched an Alfred Hitchcock Hour about a well intentioned but damagingly overbearing woman who makes the lives of everyone around her a living hell by always knowing better what is best for them. Her sisters and her brother can’t stand her but she doesn’t realize it. Finally her husband poisons her to put an end to her meddling. And that’s the end. The actress was Joan Fontaine, who was quite good as the over the top busybody. She was the sister of Olivia De Havilland and they are the only two siblings to have both won an Academy Award for acting. Fontaine is the only actor to win an Academy Award for acting in a Hitchcock film.