Jeff Corey

            On Thursday at about 0:30 I did my usual search for bedbugs before going to sleep and found none crawling. But when I started poking into little cracks and holes I speared one that had been hiding in a tiny hole at the southern end of the western baseboard near the foot of my bed. It didn't look all that well and didn't have my fresh blood inside but was rather brown and greasy when I crushed it. That was the first bedbug I'd seen in five days but I didn't find any more. 

            I worked on revising my translation of "La java des chaussettes à clous" (The Tap dance of the Hobnail Boots) by Boris Vian but I'm stuck on the third verse I need a word to rhyme with "ridicule" that indicates time. 

            I searched for the chords for "Bébé Polaroid" by Serge Gainsbourg, but no one had posted them and so I worked them out for the intro and the first two lines. 

            During song practice the neck end of my guitar strap broke. There was another one inside the gig bag of the Gibson electric knockoff my neighbour David gave me and so I put that on and shortened some of my songs to make up for lost time. The new strap is more slippery than the old one and so I had to keep changing the position of my guitar to adjust. I found another one later that feels like it's made of cloth, plus it's all black, so I'll try switching it before tomorrow to see if that holds better. 

            I weighed 89.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I mixed some polyfilla in a coffee can and applied it to the southern half of the western baseboard in the bedroom where I found the one sick bedbug after midnight. After the plaster was used up I spent some time scraping the bottom of my square baking pan. I scraped about a centimetre off all the way around starting from where I'd left off last time. If I hadn't needed to do the plastering I might have finished it. 

            I weighed 88.1 kilos before lunch. 

            Shankar's network had no internet at lunchtime. 

            I changed the strap on my guitar to the black cloth one but it was too short. The leather one for my electric is also short but long enough that when I tie it to the neck with a long shoelace it's long enough. I just tied it the wrong way around so the shoulder strap that holds it from slipping was in the wrong place. I'll have to switch it around. 

            After I took a siesta the wifi was still down so I knocked on Shankar's door. He said he'd been having problems too and I suggested he restart his router. I guess he did because about five minutes later it was back on, so I could post my blog. 

            I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor in the 30 degree heat. On the way back I stopped at Freshco where I bought five bags of grapes, a basket of nectarines, a pint of blueberries, a half pint of raspberries, a pack of ground beef, a bag of naan loaves, five year old cheddar, skyr, orange juice, lemonade, two cans of peaches and a six pack of Sponge Towels. I weighed 88.2 kilos when I got home. 

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

            In my Movie Maker project of making a video for my song "Instructions For Electroshock Therapy" I inserted the clip of the second shock from the 1940s video of real shock therapy into my main video at the point just when I'm sustaining the note on the last syllable of "shock therapy" at the end of the first chorus. I trimmed out everything but the initial shock and jerk of the body and left the sustained convulsions for later in the video. There are only about ten or eleven beats of instrumental between the end of the chorus and the beginning of the second verse when I sing, "Undress the patient and then lay them down just like a sacrifice." I trimmed some of the concert video after the chorus towards synchronizing it with the studio audio. I'll have to trim a bit more tomorrow to get them lined up. But I think the videographer Aldo Erdic had expected a longer instrumental because he is still shooting my hands and my guitar when I begin singing and only shows my face when I'm singing "just like a sacrifice." The shots of my hands and guitar don't really match how I'm playing in the studio and so once I've got the vocals and my face in sync I'll have to look for some other video that fits the line "undress the patient and then lay them down" to replace the guitar shots leading up to "just like a sacrifice." I'll probably look through the 1926 silent Japanese film "Kurutta Ippeji" (A Page of Madness) to see if there's anything there before I start searching online. 

            I rubbed 12 chicken drumsticks in olive oil, salt and chili powder and grilled them in the oven. 

            I worked on making the graffiti clearer in my "Anti Gravity's Rainbow" photo. 

            I had a potato with gravy and two chicken drumsticks while watching two episodes of Gomer Pyle. In the first story four army dogs are brought in to help train four Marines in how to control attack dogs. Gomer and Johnson volunteer to be the Marine from Carter's platoon. Johnson argues that one has to be a monster to the dog just like Carter is to his men, so Carter picks Pyle. Gomer gets a German shepherd named Killer who is the meanest of the four. At first he refuses to obey Gomer but Gomer is so nice that the dog finally lets his guard down. He begins to obey Gomer without punishment but then when Killer is called to attack during inspection he doesn't. The trainer says Gomer has ruined the dog. But when Carter starts yelling at Gomer up close the dog moves to attack Carter. The colonel says this is a success but that the dog may not be fit for combat. He has the dog given to the child of another officer and Gomer is allowed to visit. It wasn't much of a story. 

            Johnson was played by Paul Trinka who co-starred on "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea" and at the same time worked as a maitre d' at a hip health food restaurant called The Aware Inn. 

            In the second story Sergeant Singer is the supply sergeant for the base. His friend Carter says he has the easiest job and so they bet a month's salary. Carter says any knucklehead can do the job but Singer says they can't. Gomer is picked and Singer goes away to visit his newborn grandson. There is chaos immediately and Gomer is lost to know where anything is. But with Singer coming back the next day, Gomer learns that Carter is about to lose a month's salary and so he works all night. He organizes everything by animal, vegetable and mineral and suddenly he's on top of everything. Singer comes back and feels useless to know someone else can do the job and so he considers retirement. Carter doesn't want to lose his friend. Suddenly however Gomer is back in chaos because some items don't fall into any one of the three categories he came up with. Carter happily helps Singer return to his old system.

            Singer was played by Jeff Corey who went to acting school and then became a theatre actor. In the 40s he appeared in a few well known films but then joined the Navy Photographic Service and served in the Pacific on the carrier Yorktown. He earned three citations for his filming of a kamakaze attack on the Yorktown. Returning to Hollywood he played a psychiatrist in "Home of the Brave" to critical acclaim. He was blacklisted for refusing to testify before the Hollywood Comminist witch hunt and missed out on work throughout the 50s. During this time he studied speech therapy and acting at UCLA and then formed his own school, becoming one of the most renowned acting coaches in Hollywood with students such as James Dean and Jack Nicholson. Once the blacklist lifted he became a sought after actor again in films and on television and even directed some TV shows. Since last night I couldn't delete the fourth episode of the second season of Gomer Pyle. 

           I tried it again tonight several times to delete the avi file but it seemed really stuck somehow. I had to go online and there were all kinds of complicated solutions such as deleting it in the Registry or downloading software such as "File Assassin". One person said simply go to Task Manager and end Windows Explorer, then open files and new task and then browse for the file and delete it. But when I did that I couldn't find any Gomer Pyle files at all. When I closed Task manager though and opened Windows Explorer the files were there and the one I wanted to delete was in the recycling bin. I don't exactly know how I did it.