Chameleons

            On Thursday morning I finished posting “Si ca peut te consoler" (If it’s any Consolation) by Serge Gainsbourg on Christian’s Translations.

            In the late morning I used the common stepladder to climb up to see about cleaning an upper shelf in my bedroom only to discover that the shelf was already clean. The only dirty thing was the model of an antique car that was sitting up there and so I took it down and washed it. The car is also an AM radio with two of the spare tires serving as dials. I’ve held onto it for all these years with the intention of selling it but I’ve never found a buyer.

            After that I rode to Freshco and was surprised that there was very little of a line-up. I think I waited for less than a minute to get in.

            I bought three bags of grapes, some two year old cheddar and a bag of naan.

            I had a can of Egyptian spiced fava beans for lunch and some yogourt with honey.

            When I woke up from a ninety minute siesta I still felt extremely but struggled to stay awake.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story a filthy rich woman named Ramona Thompson comes to the lodge looking for Andy. When Andy hears of this he tells Kingfish that when he was nineteen Ramona had saved him from drowning and they had dated all summer. He is of the impression that Ramona wants to rekindle their romance but the truth is that Ramona doesn’t even remember Andy. She had gotten his name from the employment agency because she was looking for a gardener. When Andy learns of this he feels that his abilities as a Casanova are insulted. He is determined to win Ramona over again and so he plans to go to her estate and fall into the swimming pool so she can save him again. Just before Andy comes Ramona has the pool drained because the painters are coming.

            It seemed a bit cold and dreary out and so I didn’t take a bike ride. It’s supposed to be warm on Friday and so I'll have no excuse not to go.

            I finished editing Andalusian Dream, the last of the videos worth uploading of the videos I shot of my song practices in 2017. I uploaded it to YouTube. Once the light starts arriving earlier I’ll begin shooting new footage and I’ll eliminate some of the older songs and add more newer ones.

            I rubbed the frozen chicken breast that I’d gotten from the food bank on Saturday with olive oil, seasoned salt and cayenne and grilled it in the oven. I had it with a potato and gravy while watching one episode of the 50s game show “Take a Good Look” from December 17, 1959, hosted by Ernie Kovacs. By coincidence this is the show that directly followed the last one that I’d watched and it had the same panellists, Cesar Romero, Hans Conried and Ernie's wife, Edie Adams. The clues that are supposed to help the panellists guess what the guests did that made them newsworthy, are not much help at all. They are comedy skits, usually featuring Kovacs and Peggy Connelly. At the beginning of this game Edie continues to bug her husband about the clue of the flying carpet from the previous week and how it possibly had any relation to the fact that the guest had been the first queen of Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses. Kovacs explains to her that the magic carpet floats and that there are floats in a parade.

            The first guest was Max Conrad, the flying grandfather who set a long distance plane record flying from Casablanca, Morocco to El Paso, Texas.

            The first clue has Kovacs as the leader of a wagon train. He whips the horses to move out and he is pulled off the wagon and dragged away.

            Hans Conried somehow guesses that it had something to do with airplanes. Cesar Romero guesses that bit happened in the past month and that the man broke a record.

            The second clue has Kovacs at the piano. Peggy is sitting nearby and says, “Play it again Sam!" Kovacs plays "As Time Goes By" with two fingers while his reflection in the mirror does the same. But Kovacs misses a note and the hand in what we thought was the mirror reaches out to finish the note. Then Kovacs shakes hands with it.

            Edie guesses that the guest accomplished the feat alone but Kovacs corrects her and says, “No he had a plane with him, dear!"

            Hans Conried guesses that it was an endurance record. Romano seems sure that it took 81 hours but he is wrong.

            In the third clue a man is at the dinner table and Peggy, dressed as a little girl comes out to wish him a happy birthday, to give him a thousand dollars, and to tell him that he’s the most wonderful daddy in all the world.

            Cesar guesses that the guest is the flying grandfather.

            The second guest is a woman whose accomplishment is not revealed ahead of time.

            The first clue shows a person posing as a statue of Horace Greely, who said, "Go west young man." Kovacs comes up and notices that the statue is not pointing west and so he tries to redirect Greely’s arm but Greely taps Kovacs on the shoulder and points again. Kovacs sees that he is pointing at Peggy, who is sunbathing in a swimming suit.

            In the second clue Ernie jumps out of a plane and takes the time to pour a beer while he is falling. When He pulls the ripcord it Breaks off and he finds a sign on the parachute that reads, "Floor Model, Not to Be Sold".

            In the third clue Ernie is crawling through the snow in the northern wilderness and he calls out that he hasn’t seen a soul in 38 days. Suddenly a phone rings. He digs the phone out of the snow and answers it. He bangs on some wood and says, “It’s for you." Peggy comes out from behind the wood. He crawls to a St Bernard and pours himself a beer from the barrel around its neck.

            No one has a clue who this woman is and so Kovacs reveals she is Mrs Murray Scott, who was judged the fastest gal with a gun in Tucson, Arizona’s fast draw contest. Ernie explains that the clue with the parachute was a play on words, as in "chute" and "shoot". That seems to be the case with most of the clues. Mrs Scott then gives a demonstration of her quick draw.

            I watched the second part of David Attenborough’s “Quest to Madagascar”.

            At the northern tip of the island David observed mud skippers, which are common throughout the edges of oceans around the world. They breathe in the water through gills but breathe in the air through their skins like frogs. It seemed to David that they only come out of the water in Madagascar to mate.

            David went out on a French research boat that was trying to catch sharks for study, but they caught mostly tunny, which would at least be good for food.

            He went to a research centre where he saw the remains of a coelacanth. Until 1938 scientists only knew the coelacanth from fossils and believed they went extinct 60 million years ago. But a living one was caught off South Africa but it was barely alive. It wasn’t until 1952 that another was found in the Comoro Islands off Madagascar. It turned out that fishermen in that area had been catching a couple of them a year for a long time but since they didn’t taste good they threw them away. Scientists theorize that it's from living fossils like the coelacanth that all amphibians, reptiles and mammals are descended. Their fins are like rudimentary legs and inside they have the beginnings of an air breathing lung. 

            David went with one of the scientists from the French research station to hunt lizards in a northwestern forest of Madagascar. George caught thorny tailed lizards from the tops of trees with a long stick holding a noose. David went to catch chameleons,. Chameleons look in two directions at the same time but that makes it hard for them to judge distances. They adjust to this by rocking back and forth and so a cricket they are trying to catch will appear to be moving more if it is close. They have rolled up tongues that can shoot out further than the lengths of their own bodies. It’s not really a tongue but rather a hollow tube encircled by rings of muscle. The end is sticky and so it can’t catch anything in the rain. To catch chameleons one often has to climb high in a tree but then usually all one has to do is hold out a stick and it will walk on to it and thereby be caught. Chameleons are some of the most colourful of reptiles. There are a larger variety of chameleons on Madagascar than in all the world put together. The larger kinds will eat other reptiles and mice. Madagascar also has the smallest chameleons, which are the smallest reptiles in the world. The chameleon’s ability to change colour is not so much for the sake of camouflage but rather to reflect their mood. For instance, when they are angry they can turn black. They do this by pushing out or contracting certain pigment cells in their skins. The natives consider them to be evil and so David was able to successfully use them to protect their equipment when they had to leave it alone. They would leave a chameleon on top of their cameras and so any thieves were scared away.

            Most of Madagascar’s native trees have been cut down and replaced by eucalyptus from Australia. In the forest David found some tenreks, of which the adults look like baby hedgehogs. Tenreks are only found in Madagascar. Tenreks roll themselves into balls when frightened and locals are afraid to touch them because they think what they see as the Tenreks' cowardice will be transferred to them. David brought several kinds of Tenreks back to London and some of them bred immediately. Tenreks are the most primitive of all living mammals. They also hold the record for giving birth to the most babies, with the record being thirty six. Tenreks with spines tend not to bite whereas those few without spines defend themselves with their teeth. Madagascarans hunt the larger tenreks with dogs because they consider them very good to eat. The only relatives of tenreks are solenodons which can be found in Cuba and Haiti.