Vince Barnett

            On Thursday morning it was nine days since I killed the bedbug that I probably brought home from the Vina Pharmacy after getting my covid shot. If it layed eggs it's getting close to the time when they would hatch. Hopefully it didn't. 

            I worked on placing the chords for "Des laids des laids" (The Ugly the Ugly) by Serge Gainsbourg in their proper place in my Christian's Translations blog. I should have it published on Friday. 

            I weighed 89.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the late morning I called the Remenyi House of Music and Harold confirmed that my Washburn was indeed back from Quebec after a month and a half. I said that I'd be there in about half an hour and I got ready and headed out. I'd planned on taking a bike ride downtown at that time anyway. When I got to Remenyi I found I no longer had to buzz to get in and the door was unlocked. Harold told me they'd changed all the machines, overhauled the guitar and did a set-up. I sat down, tuned it and played it for a few minutes and it didn't go out of tune. I asked Harold if he'd give me a discount on some guitar strings after all the hassle I'd been through with the guitar but he refused. He spoke as if honouring the warranty on a guitar that stopped functioning properly a couple of months after I'd bought it had been an inconvenience for them. He implied that they'd done enough for me. I'm done with Remenyi. I started going there when I bought the Oscar Schmidt because when Brian LeBlanc was head of the guitar department he'd been incredibly helpful and friendly. But after he left the place went down the tubes. I'd heard Brian went on to sell insurance but from what I can tell online he's now selling guitars for Efkay Music, which sells Ibinez guitars. I don't think he works in a store but rather travels around southern Ontario as a sales rep for the company. I sent him an email to ask for a Toronto guitar store recommendation. 

            After leaving Remenyi I rode to Yonge, south to Queen and then west. I stopped off at Freshco where I bought six bags of grapes, a bag of cherries, a pint of blueberries, a bag of kettle chips, a pack of five year old cheddar, some cheap old cheddar for cooking, two cans of peaches, a jar of honey, lemonade, limeade, two containers of Greek yogourt, one container of skyr and some 2 in 1 shampoo-conditioner. 

            The Washburn was still in tune even after bringing it home, so that's a good sign. If it stays in tune for song practice tomorrow I'll start planning to do another set of videos of my rehearsals this summer. 

            I weighed 88.2 kilos before lunch. I had kettle chips, salsa, yogourt and a glass of orange juice. I weighed 89.2 kilos at 18:00. 

            I worked on my poem series "My Blood In A Bug." 

            I worked some more on the section of my video for my song "Instructions For Electroshock Therapy" that features female ends of cords dancing from the end of a rusted pipe. I cut out more of the parts where the cords can be seen being manipulated from below to animate them. It takes a long time because I expand the timeline into microseconds and move the cursor along it to see which sections I need to remove. I also cut out the part where the pipe starts to tip over. There are more parts to delete, especially at the end. I think that once I have nothing in that section but cords that look like they are moving of their own accord I will save it as a separate movie because I think it works by itself. After that I'll have to start chopping it's part in the main music video down to about three seconds. 

            I colourized a few more bricks in my skateboarder photo. 

            I had a potato with gravy and two chicken drumsticks while watching two episodes of Andy Griffith. 

            In the first story Opie has put an ad in the paper looking for a job because he wants to save up to buy an electric guitar. The druggist Mr. Crawford's 19 year old soda jerk has moved on and he reads Opie's ad. He has misgivings about hiring a 14 year old and so he asks Andy for advice. Andy assures him that Opie is responsible and so he hires him. He works out so well that after a few weeks Crawford starts to let Opie sometimes run the whole pharmacy. During one of those times Andy comes in to buy some perfume for Helen. There's a $64 bottle of Blue Midnight on a high shelf which Opie takes down to show Andy. Andy says he'll ask Helen about it and then maybe buy it later. After Andy leaves, when Opie is putting the bottle back, it falls off the edge and breaks. Arnold comes in and Opie tells him he's going to confess the breakage to Crawford. But Arnold says he's going to Mount Pilot with his father and if Opie gives him the money he can buy another bottle of Blue Midnight there and then Opie can replace it without Crawford knowing. He does so and everything seems fine but then Andy comes in to buy the perfume and Crawford tells him he'll have to order it because the bottle is just there for display and only contains coloured water. He passes the bottle to Andy and he opens it and smells it. They both realize it's perfume and Crawford is puzzled. Later Opie confesses that he replaced it. Crawford says he'll pay him back but wonders why Opie didn't tell him. Opie shrugs and says he'll leave when he wants him to. Then Crawford "accidentally" knocks over a bottle and admits it could happen to anybody. 

            It seems odd to me that Opie's responsibility is called into question after replacing an expensive bottle with his own money. That was a very responsible thing to do. But the oddest thing is that Crawford would have display bottles of perfume filled with coloured water. Why would anyone order a perfume without smelling it first? 

            In the second story someone dies and leaves the Mayberry church $500. The church finance committee takes suggestions as to how to make use of the money. Elmo wants a pool table in the basement. Bee and Clara want robes for the choir while Howard says that a drainage ditch on one side of the church has caused the foundation to tilt. He says $500 would pay for raising that side back up until it's level again. The finance committee consists of the pastor, Andy and Martha. The pastor votes for the foundation, Martha votes for robes and so Andy is burdoned with the deciding vote. Bee says the choir plans on quitting if they don't get their robes. Andy is about to decide for the foundation when Howard suggests a way for everyone to get what they want. He says he's discussed it with an engineer and learned that flooding the other side will drop the foundation to the level of the other side. The choir gets its robes but later we learn that the other side of the church dropped 6.6 cm more than it should have. At the beginning there's a funny scene in which Andy tells Opie he can't put a Canadian quarter in the collection plate. 

            Elmo was played by Vince Barnett, known also as "old man ribber" and "the king of ribbing" was an actor but also an insult comedian and prankster like his father Luke Barnett. He got paid to insult famous people at parties and pose as a bad waiter with a thick German accent. He started out on Vaudeville and was sort of the Sacha Baron Cohen of his day as he would pose as journalists from foreign countries. He pranked Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford. He convinced Mae West he was a cop and threatened to shut down her play "Diamond Lil" if she didn't censor some of it, which she did. Clark Gable almost beat him up when pranked by him at a party. He appeared in more than 400 films between 1930 and 1975. His most famous role was as a gangster's secretary in the original "Scarface". 

            In the evening my left shoulder started aching when I moved it. It felt like the bursitis that I had a few years ago.