Making a Movie

            On Saturday I got up to pee a little after 2:00 and when I came back to bed I did my usual search for bedbugs. I didn't find any on the bed, the pillow or the baseboards but up near the top of the old exit door under the frame there was one that was barely visible. It was the sixth one I'd seen since July 27. When I killed it, unlike the other five there was no fresh blood inside. I felt somewhat encouraged that it hadn't been feeding and that I'd found so few in four days. Also the fact that the exterminator is coming on Tuesday makes me hopeful. Seven years ago it took the landlord two months to catch a clue and to get pest control here. 

            I looked for the chords for "Le java des chaussettes à clous" (The Dance of the Studded Stockings) by Boris Vian and found a set right away but it took ten minutes just to copy and paste them into my Boris Vian song document. I still need to look for more and hopefully my computer won't be so slow next time.

            I worked out the chords for the second verse of "Manu Manuréva" by Serge Gainsbourg. I weighed 88.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            It had been cool and hazy in the morning and so I'd thought that I might take my bike ride early. But around noon when I would have gone it got hotter and the sun got brighter so I decided instead to go to the supermarket. On the way I stopped at Freedom Mobile to pay for my phone plan. After tax it costs $28.25 but the closest I had to exact change was $40.25. The clerk said he couldn't change it so I went to the supermarket. 

            At No Frills I bought five bags of cherries, a watermelon, a pint of blueberries, a basket of peaches, cinnamon-raisin bread, a pack of chicken drumsticks, orange juice, lemonade, Greek yogourt and skyr. I went back to Freedom with $30.25 and he still had my account up on his computer. He gave me eight quarters back. 

            I weighed 88.7 kilos before lunch. I had rice crackers with four year old cheddar and a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor. It had cooled down and gotten cloudy but it was still okay for shorts and a tank top. I weighed 88.7 kilos when I got home. 

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

            I imported the electroshock therapy video that I'd downloaded from YouTube yesterday into my Movie Maker project of making a video for my song "Instructions For Electroshock Therapy." I put it at the end of the timeline and edited it down to just the part where the patient gets shocked for the first time and his head is shown jerking upwards. I inserted that part into the main video at the point in the concert video just after I finish repeatedly downstrumming the A minor chord. Then I shaved off every part of the clip except where the patient's head is rising. Next I need to cut out a little more of the pause in the concert video after the A minor so that the jerking upward of the patient's head corresponds to the studio recording of the bass sliding up an octave before I sing, "for shock therapy." 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilicata sauce, Italian sausage and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching the last two episodes of Mayberry R.F.D. 

            In the first story a city planner is coming for a week to assess Mayberry's potential for development. Millie knows Sam is going to be busy and so she decides to take a holiday out of town for a week. Just before Millie gets on the bus an attractive woman steps off and after the bus is gone the woman tells Sam she is looking for Sam Jones. It turns out that Terry is the city planner. Sam spends a lot of time with Terry and they have a good time while still getting work done. He takes her to dinner at Morelli's to show her Mayberry's finest restaurant. After dinner Gino the maitredee shows them their latest feature, which is a photo booth. Terry and Sam get their pictures taken in one of those silly set ups where their heads are on top of full figured comical cartoon images. But the machine malfunctions and so they don't get the photos. Terry is clearly attracted to Sam and as Millie is coming back soon he lets Terry know that Millie is his girlfriend. When Millie's bus arrives Terry discretely gets on and is gone. Millie and Sam go to Morelli's and after their meal are told the photo booth has just been fixed. They take pictures but when they come out of the machine, Sam's pictures with Terry are on the same strip. Millie calmly puts the strip in her purse and tells Sam she's going to hold it over his head for the rest of his life. 

            Terry was played by Ruta Lee who was from Montreal and co-starred in "Seven Brides For Seven Brothers." 

            Suddenly Morelli's is in Mayberry. On previous episodes of The Andy Griffith Show Morelli's was halfway between Mayberry and Mount Pilot. 

            In the final episode Emmett gets notice that one of the many inventions that he patented in the 1930s is going to be bought by Amalgamated Dynamics. The invention is something that came about when he was trying to fix an old crank operated phonograph and hit it with a hammer. The result was that the crank no longer overwinds. Emmett had someone draft a plan for the mechanism, which he sent to the patent bureau. But when the representative comes he says that they don't plan on using his invention. It's just that the drawing of the plan looks similar to something they invented and so to avoid litigation from a nuisance case, they give Emmett $400. Since most of Amalgamated Dynamics' work is with the space program, Emmett had been bragging that his invention was going to be used toward that purpose. But nowEmmett is ashamed and to save face he's planning on leaving Mayberry. Millie persuades Sam to go and tell the president of Amalgamated Dynamics that they've hurt Emmett's feelings. The president is surprisingly sympathetic and writes Emmett a letter acknowledging the importance of his invention. That makes Emmett feel good and he frames the letter in his fix-it shop. 

            It wasn't much of a series finale but I suspect they didn't know they were going to be canceled. It was part of a famous purge of rural themed shows like "Green Acres" and "The Beverly Hillbillies."