Arthur Q. Bryan

            On Monday morning I was very stiff during yoga, I think because of the rain. 

            I played and sang verses four to six of my translation of “Valse Dingue” (Mad Waltz) by Boris Vian and made some adjustments to my translation. There are just two more verses and so I should have it ready to upload to Christian’s Translations tomorrow. 

            I finished memorizing “Negusa Negast” (King of Kings) by Serge Gainsbourg and found a few sites that had posted the chords. They are all the same and say that the song is just E minor and B mi-nor all the way through. I worked out the chords for the chorus and those chords are there but I also hear E seventh and G minor so far. 

            My left hand was sore during song practice, also I think because of the rain, but I was mostly able to form all the chords. It was very dark and if I’d been shooting video it would have been almost a waste of time. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the late morning, I did my laundry and took the risk of not washing my comforter this time. Since the handful of bedbugs I’ve found in the last few weeks have been hiding away sick in the walls, I assume there aren’t any living in the bed or the blankets. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 85.1 kilos at 17:10. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 17:50. 

            I reviewed four videos from June 18-21 of my performances of my song “Megaphor”. On June 18 the pop blocker was not up to my chin and I was well centred in the room. This wasn’t bad but I didn’t always hit the B chord solidly. June 19 wasn’t too bad and might be up there with June 11. June 20 was my first time recording with Ableton. I did the song a few times but the B chord started sounding dull. June 21 was one of the two recordings in Ableton that had crackling. It’s too bad because I did one half-decent performance after several tries. 

            I found a YouTube clip of the scene from Poltergeist that shows the child being touched by the skeletal hand made of electricity that comes out of the TV. I downloaded it with 4K Downloader and imported it into Movie Maker. I made a movie of it in the Movie Maker format and then imported the converted file into the Movie Maker project of making a video for my song “Instructions for Electro-shock Therapy”. I put a copy of the clip at the end of the timeline and cut out everything before and after the child is interacting with the TV. I’ll cut some more off the beginning tomorrow and then insert it into the main video to correspond with my line, “the voltage on the screen is not the voltage in the human being.” 

            I went through the second folder of writing from my filing cabinet and started a third. I separated the actual poetry from the non-poetic writing about mostly my relationship with Dorita and with myself. I’m going to have to further divide the poetry pile into stuff I wrote before the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy, the things I wrote during the Orgy, and the stuff I wrote after. I also need to keep another folder just for other people’s writing. I coated three chicken legs in olive oil, salt, and a roasted garlic and herb mix, then roasted them in the oven. I had one with a potato and gravy while watching four Bugs Bunny cartoons from 1946. 

            In the first story, Elmer Fudd is a mad scientist trying to come up with a formula that will change a normal character into a devilish fiend. He forces his latest mixture down his dog’s throat and the canine goes off to eat grass. Elmer decides to get a rabbit for a guinea pig and so he sets a trap in the forest with a carrot as bait. Bugs easily gets the carrot without tripping the trap but he decides to play along and get trapped. Elmer takes Bugs to his lab and forces him to drink a formula but it does nothing. Elmer begins to cry and so Bugs gives him a beaker of liquid to drink. It causes Elmer to go outside and eat grass beside his dog, but on the way, his bowler hat falls on a bear’s head. When the bear steps into the lab wearing Elmer’s hat, Bugs thinks the formula worked. Bugs gives the bear another beaker of liquid to change him back but it causes the bear to spit fire. Bugs runs while the bear throws the beaker at him. He escapes after the beaker explodes and destroys the front door. Then the bear grabs and starts to eat a carrot. Then Elmer comes in and when he sees the bear eating a carrot, he thinks his formula worked on Bugs. He tries to give the bear another formula but he knocks it away. Elmer gets mad until he sees Bugs come back and realizes he’s confronting a real bear and runs. 

            In the second story, Bugs moves into an abandoned house and goes to bed. But while he’s sleeping, a couple of mobsters, Rocky, who looks and talks like Edward G Robinson, and Hugo, who looks and talks like Peter Lorre, enter the house to escape from some other gangsters. There is a shootout that wakes Bugs up. Rocky and Hugo fight off the other gangsters and then sit to divide the loot. But Bugs keeps changing costumes at different sides of the table and asks Rocky for his cut. Bugs ends up with a large share of the cash by the time Rocky realizes he’s been scammed. Rocky tries to force Bugs to tell him where he put the money but he refuses and so Rocky tells Hugo to take Bugs for a ride. But Bugs comes back alone. Rocky tells Bugs to give him the dough and Bugs says okay but first, he’s got to close his eyes and count to ten. While Rocky is counting Bugs goes to the kitchen and mixes some dough, then when Rocky opens his eyes and says give it to me, Bugs throws the dough in Rocky’s face. Bugs runs through a door and Rocky opens it to go after him but on the other side, Bugs is dressed as Muggsy the gang boss that Rocky betrayed. Rocky backs away and Mugsy says, “It’s curtains for you Rocky!” Then he puts curtains on him. Then Muggsy leaves and Bugs knocks hard on the door saying, “This is the cops!” Then Bugs tells Rocky he’ll hide him from the police. He puts Rocky in a trunk and then pretends to be both the cops and Bugs confronting them. Rocky hears Bugs and the cops fight over the trunk, knocking it up and down the stairs. While Bugs is pretending to fight with the cops he opens the trunk and hands Rocky a bomb, telling him to hold his watch. After the explosion Rock staggers from the trunk. Bugs says the cops are gone and Rocky asks which way they went. Bugs points and Rocky runs in that direction screaming, “Help! Police!” 

            In the third story, Bugs is a concert pianist performing in a fancy hall. He takes off several layers of gloves and mittens before he starts playing. He gets his gloves caught in the keys at one point. During the concert, there is a mouse inside the piano that keeps trying to participate and Bugs tries to get rid of it while playing at the same time. While Bugs is playing the Hungarian Rhapsody by Franz Liszt, the phone rings and he answers it. Bugs says “Franz Liszt? Never heard of him. You’ve got the wrong number.” At one point the mouse is running over the keys and playing the bass part of a boogie-woogie number as Bugs plays the melody. Then the mouse finishes the classical piece on a toy piano that sounds like a grand. 

            In the fourth story, Elmer is hunting Bugs as usual. A familiar gag is used of Elmer chasing Bugs into a hollow log only to have the log turned out over a cliff several times. Finally, Elmer says he quits. He says he gets the worst of it in all of these cartoons. Elmer tears up his Warner Brothers contract and says from now on it’s nothing but fishing for him. Bugs pleads with him, “You can’t do this to me! You can’t break up the act!” But Elmer leaves. Next, we see Elmer relaxing by a fishing hole. Elmer goes to sleep and Bugs emerges from Elmer’s basket singing Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer.” Bugs takes a sleeping pill and sails in a boat to Elmer’s dream while singing “Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat.” Bugs grabs a can of Nightmare Paint and starts to paint Elmer’s dream. The dream becomes somewhat surreal as Elmer starts seeing a colourful parade of neon rabbits. Then Bugs ties Elmer to a railroad track and says, "The Super Chief is coming!" But the Super Chief is Bugs wearing an Indigenous chief’s headdress followed by a train of little rabbits. Elmer begins to chase Bugs but he is nearly naked and Bugs asks, “Are you cold? I’ll fix that.” Bugs dresses Elmer in buxom drag in a long, tight green gown with a voluptuous body and a wig and lipstick. Suddenly wolves start chasing him. Elmer runs and asks the fourth wall, "Have any of you girls ever had an experience like this?” Bugs helps Elmer escape but leads him over the edge of a cloud and they are falling to the Earth. Elmer asks, “What do we do?” Bugs says, “I don’t know about you” and then drinks a bottle of “Stops Falling Hare.” When Elmer lands he wakes from the dream. He goes back to the hollow log, glues his contract back together and resumes hunting Bugs. Bugs says, “I love that man!” 

            Elmer Fudd’s voice was created by Arthur Q. Bryan, who started out as a singer and sang on the radio with The Seiberling Singers and The Jeddo Highlanders. He worked as a radio announcer for several years and then in 1940 he debuted the voice of Elmer Fudd in “Elmer’s Candid Camera”. He continued voicing Elmer until he died nineteen years later. He also did the voices of two characters on Fibber McGee and Molly and its spin-off show “The Great Gildersleeve.” He played Major Hoople on “The Charlotte Greenwood Show” and Lieutenant Levinson on “Richard Diamond Private Detective”. 

            I did a search for bedbugs before bed and found none.