Law of Nations

            On Sunday morning I forgot that I have a new faucet in the kitchen and I ran my three glasses of cold drinking water in the bathroom.

            I copied the chords for the Am version of  “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian and started on the ones in C7.

I finished working out the chords for "Titicaca" by Serge Gainsbourg and began posting the song on my Christian’s Translations blog.

It’s nice to be back in control of the hot and cold water in the kitchen.

I finished my second reading of Treaty 6. If one eliminated every repeated phrase the 19-page document would be a paragraph.

I did my laundry and the Laundromat was more crowded than I’d ever seen it. There were no free double-sized vertical loaders but the two cheap ones at the back looked like they were finishing. I put my jeans and sweatpants in a top loader and got my change. The top loaders take ten minutes longer and so I started the cold wash and by that time the back washers were done. I had to ask the attendant to try to find the customer but he couldn’t locate him. The guy whose clothes they were only came from the other side just as the attendant had taken his clothes out. I always leave and go home but I’m still back in time to take my clothes out. It’s hard to imagine me being late to do so if I was already waiting in the laundry.

I was finished by 13:10.

            While I was unlacing my boots I was trying loosen the laces by pulling them in the middle without unlacing them so as to loosen the boots and I wound up bending back my index fingernail and cracking it and it was bleeding underneath a bit. It smarted for the rest of the day.

I had ramen noodles with a piece of chicken for lunch. The noodles were a bit stale.

In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish and Sapphire are invited to a high-class function but Sapphire doesn't have a new evening dress. She tells Kingfish she wants to rustle when she walks into a room. Kingfish suggests that she tie some paper bags under her old dress. Kingfish convinces Andy to let him buy Sapphire a dress on his charge account on the condition that they return it the next day. But when Kingfish is trying to impress Sapphire by using a pen to change the price from $39.50 to $89.50 he spills blue ink on the pink dress. Kingfish and Andy try to cut the bottom part of the dress but it keeps coming out uneven and so they have to keep cutting it several times at the front and back. Finally when they try to return it to the store they refuse to refund it but a woman sees the dress and likes it. She buys it from Kingfish but the next day tries to bring it back. They refuse to give her a refund and so she leaves it with the clerk and goes to talk to the manager. He refuses to refund it too. When she goes back to get the dress it's already been sold because Sapphire bought it.

I wrote a page and a half of notes towards my final Indigenous Studies essay comparing The Indian Act to Treaty 6.  I typed those notes into a document and began expanding on them.

I grilled two burgers and had one for dinner with ketchup, mustard, relish, hot sauce and a beer while watching Zorro.

The story begins with a crowd of citizens gathering under the balcony of the magistrate’s office to ask him to return their illegally taken tax money. An appointed spokesman named Paco makes a humble plea. The governor has already ordered that the money be redistributed to the people but the magistrate has delayed this, claiming there is a legal process involved. Suddenly a member of the crowd throws a rock and breaks the magistrate’s window. The magistrate orders that the man be shot but Sergeant Garcia diverts the rifle to the sky so that when it fires the crowd disperses. Later we see that the man that threw the rock was hired by the magistrate to do so. The magistrate pays the man again to rob a wealthy landowner and his wife and to mention while doing so that he represents the people. Diego’s father Don Alejandro witnesses this attack and it convinces him to join the other landowners against these revolutionaries. Paco is arrested on the charge that he threw the rock, even though Garcia insists that he did not. Paco is sentenced to die by firing squad but Diego’s father assures him that they do not intend to shoot Paco and that it is merely a trap for Zorro. But the magistrate really does intend to shoot Paco. But Zorro has anticipated this and replaced all of the firing squad rifle bullets with blanks. Zorro has Bernardo dressed as Zorro distract the soldiers by riding in circles around the fountain while the real Zorro has a brief swordfight with his own father before rescuing Paco.