Marty Ingels

            On Sunday morning I mostly had my voice back during song practice, although I got a little hoarse in the beginning in places. I still have to spit up phlegm from time to time and I sneezed in the middle of one song. 

            I worked out the chords to the first verse and a bit of the chorus of “Jet Society” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before breakfast. 

            I finished re-reading “An Image of Africa” by Chinua Achebe in which he declares that Joseph Conrad was a racist. He doesn't take into account that the first reference to darkness in the novel is in England among the English. Conrad speaks of a frightening but cherished sense of kinship with the African because of that ancestral memory. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before lunch. I had Ritz crackers and five-year-old cheddar with a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Bloor and Ossington. The temperature was about minus six and so I didn't bundle up as much. There had been a small amount of melting and so there were thin halos of puddles around the snowbanks. The way was fairly clear and I didn't slip and slide anywhere. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos at 17:00. 

            My computer was very slow in the evening and it took an extra half an hour to post my blog and get caught up on my journal. 

            I re-read over half of Laura Winkiel's “Modernism and Empire.” I'm sure it's valuable to read again but I am mostly on the lookout for material to use in my presentation a week from Tuesday on Primitivism and Picasso. There doesn't seem to be anything I can use in Winkiel's essay. 

            I copied the text of Heart of Darkness from the pdf and pasted it into a document so I can better use it for reference and make notes. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with sweet basil marinara sauce, a cut-up burger patty, and extra old cheddar. It was a very big patty and so the meat was piled so high on the bread that it didn't resemble even bread pizza. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of The Addams Family. 

            In this story Kitty Kat the lion has no appetite. They can't get the family witch doctor in Africa to make a house call but he tells them part of the cure would be to burn down their house. They decide to try a local veterinarian and settle on Dr Gunderson. Gunderson comes to see the patient but when he realizes it's a lion rather than a house cat he faints. Morticia decides that Gunderson's problem is a lack of confidence and so she arranges for him to treat various members of the family. They are pretending to be sick and then cured by Gunderson with the goal of building up his self assurance. First he is asked to treat Itt but he doesn't even know which end to start the examination. After Itt eats the thermometer he feels better. He then has to treat the African strangler plant Cleopatra. After avoiding being choked by her he waters her and she recovers. Then he has to treat Fester who is pretending to be dying. Morticia and Gomez decide that's not working but they can't get Fester to stop performing so they threaten to call the undertaker and he recovers. Finally though when they take Gunderson to treat Thing, upon seeing that Thing is a disembodied hand the doctor high tails it out of there. In the end it's discovered there is nothing wrong with Kitty Kat after all. He had no appetite because Pugsley had already fed him. 

            Gunderson was played by Marty Ingels, who co-starred with John Astin in the sitcom “I'm Dickens, He's Fenster.” He married Shirley Jones and became the stepfather of Shaun Cassidy and his brothers. In the 70s he started an agency called Ingels Inc that matched celebrities with advertizers. He was the voice of Autocat in the Motormouse and Autocat cartoons. He was Beegle Beagle on The Great Grape Ape Show and of Pac-Man on the cartoon series. He was so famous for suing people that it was part of his eulogy.