Song practice didn’t go well, mostly because I broke my G string early on. I tried to pause the audio recording on Ableton but when I restarted it the program tried to record over everything from the beginning. I stopped it and held the “right” arrow on my keyboard until the needle on the Ableton timeline was past the point where I’d left off. This time when I hit record it didn’t try to start over again.
It seems like my song “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” is jinxed. I made it through again to the final verse with no extreme mistakes but then suddenly I hit a wrong chord again. There’s nothing different about the last verse from the others and so it’s weird that it falls apart at that point almost every time since I’ve been recording it.
I weighed 85.2 kilos before breakfast.
In the late morning, I continued scrubbing the final uncovered part of my kitchen floor at the northeast corner of the room. It’s quite a squeeze getting at the last few floorboards near the northern wall, especially when I’m reaching under the radiator to the eastern wall and the corner where they meet. It’s also a particularly black area and I dirtied four buckets of water. It’s going to take at least one more session to finish that part of the floor and then I’ll clean the end of the counter and the wall in that corner.
I weighed 84.8 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. The city did a pretty good job cleaning up after the Pride parade. There was no trace of it on Yonge Street, even though when I walked through there yesterday the street was littered with cans and bottles.
I weighed 85.1 kilos at 17:25.
I was caught up on my journal just before 19:00.
I cut up a whole chicken and coated the parts in olive oil, salt, paprika, and chili flakes, then roasted it in the oven.
In the Movie Maker project of creating a video for my song “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy” I synchronized the concert video of me singing the words “raise the church …” with the studio audio. After that, in the concert video, I spend a little more time strumming the guitar before singing “… of shock therapy” and so I need to delete that and insert a quick clip, perhaps of a notorious mental hospital to represent the church of shock therapy.
I had a potato with margarine and a chicken leg while watching the first four episodes of The Archie Show.
The intro of all the episodes had The Archies singing a type of roll call, “Archie’s here, Betty’s here, Veronica too, Reggie’s here … Hey Jughead where are you? We wanna dance and we wanna sing, have some fun and some adventuring. All our friends are here but it ain’t complete. We ain’t the Archies without the Jughead beat.” Then the first part is repeated until “Hey Jughead where are you?” is replaced by “Here comes Jughead and Hotdog too.” The thing is there are drums playing on the song from the beginning before Jughead shows up.
Each story is introduced with Archie talking to the audience to set it up.
In the first story, the gang is dancing while they think of how to raise money to hire entertainment for the school dance. They decide to go to a local island to look for treasure. Meanwhile, Reggie is jealous that Archie is getting all of Veronica’s attention and so he uses dried-up grass and disguises himself as a hairy monster. Then he chases Veronica, Betty, and Jughead. His plan is to take off the disguise and pretend to save them all from the monster but he can’t get it off. Then a female monster sees him and starts to chase him with amorous intentions. Archie saves the day by banging out a beat on an old barrel and the female beast begins to dance. Then a real male monster arrives, punches Reggie out, and begins to dance with the female.
After each story, there is always a dance of the week and in this episode Jughead demonstrates the Bubblegum. It just consists of making little circles with the index finger, followed by a bigger circle with the hands and then the biggest circle with the arms.
The dance is followed by a song by the Archies, and I remember loving this one when I was thirteen. It’s “Bang Shang-a-Lang” written by Jeff Barry.
In the second story, there is going to be a talent contest at Riverdale High and everyone is practicing but Jughead. He’s in the lab trying to develop an enlarging paint to make the food he eats twice as big. But he turns out to develop by accident an invisibility paint. Reggie steals the paint so he can make the others disappear and then win the talent show. Reggie paints Archie’s bottom half and Jughead’s top half except for his crown hat. So when Principal Weatherby walks by they have to put their visible halves together. Then he paints Veronica’s bottom half and Betty’s top half so they have to come together for Weatherby as well. But then Weatherby looks and sees a top half floating and a bottom half without a top and he thinks he might need new glasses. In the end, Reggie performs as an Indigenous person and recites, “Behold the vanishing American” just as an invisible Jughead comes out and paints him so that he vanishes.
In the third story, Veronica is on a chivalry kick and so Reggie challenges Archie to a joust on unicycles holding lances with boxing gloves at the end. But Betty distracts Archie by telling him to be careful and so he turns his head and gets punched off his steed. Reggie wins a date with Veronica and so Archie ups the ante by putting on a suit of armour and riding Bess the old plough horse. But Reggie attaches a stick to Bess’s collar with a carrot dangling on a string and so she takes off out of control through the town with Archie on top. Veronica says it was a dirty trick but Reggie assures her he washed the carrot. Finally, Archie gets grabbed by a magnet and dumped in the junkyard. Veronica runs to him and covers his face with kisses and so he feels it was all worthwhile. Jughead says it’s a flaky way for a knight to end a day.
The dance of the week this time is The Jughead. Close your eyes like you’re half asleep, and hardly move your body while you shuffle your feet.
Then the Archies sing “Boys and Girls” which was also written by Jeff Barry. Betty has some sexy hip motion while playing that tambourine.
In the fourth story, Reggie enters Fou-Fou, his aunt's prize-winning poodle in a dog show. Fou-Fou can dance and act. Jughead thinks that Hotdog could do just as well. Reggie is so arrogant the gang decides to give Hotdog a beauty treatment. It’s a fight to get him to take a bath but they are successful. At the show, Fou-Fou looks like she’s going to win as she balances on a beach ball but she loses control and is about to crash when Hotdog comes to the rescue and catches her. Hotdog not only wins first prize for his heroism but he also wins Fou-Fou.
Jeff Barry was born Joel Adelberg in Brooklyn. He quit engineering school to become a singer and changed his name. He signed with RCA and also began writing songs. His first success was "Teenage Sonata" for Sam Cooke, but then he had a big hit when he co-wrote “Tell Laura I Love Her” with Ben Raleigh. His next songwriting partner, Ellie Greenwich eventually became his wife. In the 60s the pair joined forces with Phil Spector to become the powerhouse songwriting trio that wrote, “Da Doo Ron Ron", "Then He Kissed Me", "Be My Baby", "Baby I Love You", "Chapel of Love", and "Christmas (Please Come Home)". Then Barry and Greenwich wrote "Hanky Panky", "Leader of the Pack", "Doo Wah Diddy", and "Look of Love". Barry and Greenwich divorced in 1965 but continued to work together. They discovered Neil Diamond and produced and sang backup on his first hits. Teaming with Spector again they wrote "River Deep, Mountain High", and "I Can Hear Music". Barry became the musical director and the main songwriter of the Archie Show, writing the theme song, the dances of the week, and their biggest hit, “Sugar Sugar”. He continues to collaborate with others, writing songs for movies and TV. His most recent project was writing songs for the Lego Movie in 2019.
Before bed, I searched for bedbugs but found none.
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