Nina Shipman

            On Thursday morning I finished posting my translation of “Calypso Blues” by Boris Vian. The next song of his I’ll be learning is “La java des chaussettes à clous” (The Dance of the Studded Stockings). 

            I spent an hour and a half looking for a recording on line of all four verses of the original French version of “O Canada”. It took half an hour just to find someone singing the second verse and later I found one of someone singing the first and fourth but I am shocked that there is nothing of anyone singing the third which declares that Canada is an enemy of tyranny. Maybe Canada wants to keep its options open so that later on it might decide to be a friend of tyranny. I’m sure that recordings exist of the third verse but it looks like no one has uploaded it anywhere. I want to be able to learn the whole song but if I can’t find it then I may just have to improvise and figure it out based on the versions containing the first, second and fourth verses. 

            During song practice my high E string broke and so I changed it. Now the only old strings on my old Epi are the two lowest ones. The high E sounds dull though and I think it’s because the action is too low. The problem is that I don’t know how to adjust the neck. 

            I weighed 89.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the late morning I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor. Along Bloor I was riding beside a car that had a woman’s voice on speaker phone saying, “You’re a loser. What else is there to say? You’re a loser. What ELSE is there to say? You’re a loser and I hate you.” That was poetic and would make a great chorus for a song, but I would add at the end “Just stay out of my way.” 

            I stopped at Freshco on my way home and bought seven bags of cherries, a half pint of raspberries, a pint of strawberries, a pint of blueberries, a bag of potatoes, a bottle of extra virgin olive oil, a pack of ground beef, a pack of five year old cheddar, three bags of skim milk, two cans of peaches, two containers of Greek yogourt and a jug of limeade. I also got a watermelon and explained to an African guy how to pick out the best one by sounding it on the yellow spot and selecting the most resonant sounding one. 

            I weighed 89.2 kilos before lunch. I had kettle chips, salsa and yogourt with a glass of orange juice. 

            I worked on my poem series “My Blood in a Bug.” 

            I weighed 89.2 kilos at 18:00. 

            I worked on my Movie Maker project and removed the first two videos I’d made of the animated cords because they were from a distance and didn’t fit well with the close-ups of the snakes. I cut up split second bits of the third cord video and inserted them between split second clips of the snake pit from Indiana Jones. I only did three in this session but I'll continue intermixing the snakes and chords until the snakes run out. There’s a lot more video of the cords and I might replace some parts I’ve already inserted with other parts. I might also save some of the more animated cord footage for later in the main project of making a video for my song “Instructions For Electroshock Therapy.” 

            I colourized a bit more of one of the brick walls in my skateboarder photo. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of pork for dinner while watching two episodes of Andy Griffith. 

            In the first story some relatives ask Aunt Bee to take care of their nine month old baby for two weeks while they go to a wedding in New Jersey. Bee is very excited about having a baby in the house but once it is there she finds that every time she picks her up she cries and then stops crying whenever anyone else takes her. She concludes that the baby hates her and whenever she needs to be fed she always gets somebody else to give her the bottle. At one feeding time she calls Goober and tells him she wants him to deliver a can of oil and she even brings a travelling salesman in to feed her after he rings the doorbell. One day when Opie and his friend are alone with the baby they decide to give her some of the filling from the blueberry pie they are eating. The baby loves it but when Bee gets home she panics when she sees the baby has turned blue. She picks up the baby and wants to take her to the doctor but Andy informs her about the pie and also points out that the baby isn’t crying now even though Bee is holding her. Andy's theory is that before Bee was nervous but this time she picked her up without self consciousness and the baby sensed that. 

            The baby’s mother Martha was played by Candice Howard, who played a supporting role in Hopscotch and made guest appearances on Mr Novak and Gidget. 

            In the second story Andy takes some accident reports to Howard Sprague, the county clerk. In the office next door is Irene the attractive new county nurse. Howard has always kept to himself and he's a bit of a nerd. Helen gets the idea to fix up Howard and Irene. Andy doesn't want the hassles of getting involved with other people’s lives but Helen forces him through passive aggressive manipulation. The main factor that that stands in the way of Howard having a good time is the fact that he lives with his overbearing and emotionally needy mother. She makes Howard feel guilty about leaving her all alone by pretending to have a pain in her neck. Howard has a good time with Irene but he also keeps calling his mother to check on her. He cuts the evening short to go home and care for her. Helen compels Andy to have a talk with Howard’s mother. He convinces her that she also needs a social life but she misunderstands that Andy is asking her to join the two couples on their date. The show ends with Helen talking about fixing Howard’s mother up with a man her age. 

            Howard was played by Jack Dodson, who became a regular cast member and later co-starred in the spin-off series “Mayberry RFD.” Later still re worked again with Ron Howard when he played the father of Ralph Malph on Happy Days. 

            Irene was played by Nina Shipman, who signed with 20th Century Fox in the 1950s. She was the granddaughter of Ernest Shipman, Canada’s most successful producer of silent films and of Nell Shipman, who worked with Ernest in production but also wrote and acted in films. She became the host of Contemporary Health Issues and the author of “How To Become an Actor in Television Commercials.” 

            Howard’s mother was played by Mabel Albertson, who started out in Vaudeville and became a radio star. She was not successful in films until she turned fifty and became typecast as overbearing mothers. She played Jerry Lewis’s mother in Don't Give Up The Ship, George Hamilton's mother in All the Fine Young Cannibals, and on television she was the mother of Darren on Bewitched and of Dick Preston on The New Dick Van Dyke Show.