Bugs Hardaway

            On Saturday morning I finished memorizing “Strike” by Serge Gainsbourg. I searched for the chords but no one had posted them and so I worked them out for the intro, the chorus, and part of the first verse. 

            I had a pretty good song practice that made me feel like I could go out and perform these songs at a few open stages. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday, I went down to No Frills where I bought five bags of grapes, a pint of strawberries, a basket of Canadian nectarines, a pack of chicken drumsticks, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, three bags of skim milk, a carton of spoon-sized shredded wheat, and a container of skyr. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. On O’Hara, several bins of books were being thrown out. They were mostly self help and new age books, but I took Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote, Birds of Toronto by Gerald McKeating, and a collection of Oscar Wilde quotes. When I got to Yonge and Bloor a truck convoy was heading down Yonge Street blasting its horns. I don’t know how long the convoy was because I got ahead of it, but the horns were extremely obnoxious. I can just imagine having had to live in Ottawa a few months ago when the big convoy was there. Apparently this was in support of Dutch farmers who they claim are oppressed by new emissions laws. 

            In front of Old City Hall the woman who preaches there said she hopes that climate change is not someone’s agenda but suggested that it may be the wrath of god. She said she’s heard that the universe is heating up. Apparently it is heating up but that’s in space. There’s no connection between Earth’s global warming and universal warming. Our heat isn’t coming from space, other than the sun. The sun is also getting hotter but that’s not the cause of global warming either. The sun is getting minutely hotter over millions of years. Global warming has happened in decades. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos at 17:22. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:21. 

            I reviewed the last three videos of me playing my song “Megaphor” from July 13-15. On July 13, the first time seemed pretty good but maybe slightly off at the end. The last time was not as good, and a bit fast, but okay. July 14 was okay but it was clear that I almost fumbled a couple of times. July 15 was the day my strap broke. After fixing it I had one so-so run through the song in which the B chord did not always feel like it was on the money. I looked through all the notes I’d made on these recordings and italicized all the ones that I didn’t say were definitely off. So there are seventeen videos to review again, which is about half of the recordings that I made of “Megaphor”. It might take about three days for me to go through those seventeen and narrow them down again to a handful of the best. 

            I made pizza on my last roti with the last of my marinara sauce, a cut-up beef burger, and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching four Bugs Bunny cartoons from 1949. 

            The first story was one of those “wrong turn at Albuquerque” episodes in which Bugs winds up having tunneled a ridiculously long distance in the wrong direction. This time he has aimed for Miami but ends up in the Antarctic. He says Mr. Warner gave him a two-week vacation and he’s only got four days left. The first living creature he encounters is a little penguin and pursuing the penguin is an Inuit. It seems hard to believe that with all of the people involved in producing this cartoon, not one of them mentioned that there are no Inuit in the Antarctic. Or maybe they knew and didn’t care. The penguin attaches itself to Bugs and in trying to get rid of it he causes the bird to be captured by the hunter. So Bugs sets about to rescue his new friend. He dresses in drag as an Inuit woman to distract the hunter while he lets the penguin go. The hunter gives him a big fish and Bugs hits him with it. The hunter chases Bugs onto the edge of an ice cliff that collapses and they fall together. The penguin throws a bucket of water after them and it freezes to connect them again to the solid part of the cliff. Bugs reaches the surface below and the Inuit jumps down after him but falls through the ice to the ocean where he is caught on the water coming out of the blowhole of a whale and carried away. Bugs wonders what he’s going to do with only four days vacation left. The penguin tells him the days are six months long there. 

            In the second story, Elmer Fudd is using a rabbit detector, that looks like a Geiger counter, to locate a rabbit. But Bugs starts communicating through the device and guides Elmer over a cliff. Elmer pursues Bugs with a shotgun but Bugs runs to the highway and flags down a car. He doesn’t realize until they are underway that the driver is Elmer. Bugs runs into an enormous theatre. Elmer chases Bugs into the seats. But Bugs does drag as an old lady and tells the usher that Elmer is annoying her. Elmer is tossed out but he comes back. The screen shows a message for Elmer Fudd to report to the box office, but the message waiting for him is a pie in the face. Elmer gets tossed out again after Bugs switches the “women” and “men” signs on the washrooms. On his way back in he gets trampled by a stampede of theatre-goers on their way to smoke at intermission. Then he gets trampled again when they are on the way back as they see the "curtain" sign. This happens several times because Bugs is controlling the signs. Finally an usher with Bugs Bunny’s voice greets Elmer and guides him a long way through the darkness. The lights come on but Elmer is unknowingly wearing dark glasses and still can’t see. He is seated on a unicycle on top of a very high pedestal. Onstage, Bugs is announcing that Elmer is going to ride the unicycle down a cable and into a lion’s mouth. And that’s what happens. Elmer is swallowed by a lion without even knowing it and that’s the end. 

            In the third story Bugs is a barker for a Vaudeville show and the star act is Fearless Freep the high diver. But just as the show is about to start, Bugs gets a telegram saying that Freep is delayed by bad weather. Yosemite Sam insists that he sees a high diving act or else and so he forces Bugs up the ladder while following him all the way. When they are on the diving board Bugs asks Sam to close his eyes while he puts on his bathing suit. While he does so Bugs spins the diving board around so that when Bugs jumps off he lands on the platform while Sam walks away into a high dive. Sam makes Bugs climb up again and this time when Bugs jumps on the board he flips the other end causing Sam to fly over him into another high dive. Once again Sam forces Bugs up but then he can’t see him. He then sees that Bugs is upside down on the board but Bugs says, “I’m not upside down, you are.” Then Sam looks over his head and sees the water bucket below and falls. Sam climbs back up and Bugs dares him to step across a line. He does so and falls. Sam climbs again but now there is a door. Sam runs to bust it down; Bugs opens it and Sam falls. Sam climbs up and falls down a few more times. Finally Sam ties Bugs up on the diving board and saws the diving board to detach it from the platform so Bugs will fall. But when he’s finished the platform falls and the diving board stays in the air. Bugs says, “I know this defies the law of gravity, but I never studied law.” 

            In the fourth story, Bugs is back in Medieval times and is challenged to a joust. He is knocked from his tiny horse several times. By half time Bugs has been beaten but after that he starts to outsmart the knight in the usual Bugs Bunny way. He causes him to hit himself with a mace and then a club. He gets inside the knight’s armour with him and sticks him in the ass with a pin. The knight comes with reinforcements, Bugs builds a metal tank-covering for his horse. They charge at each other and there is a loud crash. In the end we see Bugs running a used armour lot. Bugs Bunny’s name was taken from that of the animator Ben “Bugs” Hardaway, but shortly after they used his name, Hardaway started working for Walter Lantz for whom he helped to create Woody Woodpecker. He wrote or co-wrote most of the Woody Woodpecker stories between 1940 and 1950 and he did Woody’s voice between 1944 and 1949. This is considered by many to be Woody Woodpecker’s golden age. While with Lantz he wrote “Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat” which was pulled because of complaints from the NAACP about black stereotypes. 

            For the sixth night in a row I found no bedbugs before bed. It’s been months since I made it through a full week, so here’s hoping.