I weighed 87.3 kilos before breakfast.
Around midday, I worked on trying to scrub the rust off my big steel square rule. I used baking soda, Comet, steel wool, and a metal brush, and I got a lot of the rust off but after almost an hour I decided it wasn't worth spending all that time. Tomorrow I'll do the same thing with my handsaw and then try to sharpen it. After that, my next project will be cleaning above, on, behind, and under my fridge. I guess it's due for cleaning inside as well.
I weighed 87.5 kilos before lunch. I had saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemonade.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 86.4 kilos at 17:00.
I got caught up on my journal just before 18:00.
I reviewed five of the seventeen videos of my performances of "Megaphor" that I had narrowed down from all of the recordings I made since June 8. On June 9, I was off on the B chord more than once and so I can eliminate this one from the next round. June 11, upon a second listen, was still pretty good. June 17 was definitely not better than June 11, so I can scratch it out of the competition. June 19 was up there but probably not as good as June 11. However, I will keep it in for the next round. June 23 was at least equal to June 11, so I'll definitely keep it in for now.
I found two videos featuring hallucination segments from the Ken Russell movie "Altered States" that have images that might work for my video project. I downloaded them both with 4K Downloader, but when I tried to import the videos into Movie Maker it couldn't do it. That was weird because I've done it several times in the past with 4K downloads. But I used Total Video Converter on the downloaded videos and converted them to AVI, and Movie Maker accepted those. I put both videos together and had Movie Maker render them as one movie. Then I imported that movie into the Movie Maker project for creating a video for my song Instructions for Electroshock Therapy. I copied it to the end of the timeline and started cutting out the parts that don't feel like they'd fit my vague imagining of what should correspond with the line, "meditate on the golden mean of shock therapy". I'll continue editing the video tomorrow.
I finished going through another folder of writing. This was mostly my own handwritten poetry. Now I have three folders for the pages from the filing cabinet: one for my poetry, one for my non-poetic writing about myself and relationships, and another for other people's writing. The next folder I free up will be for holding all the poetry I wrote and referred to as "commentaries on The Gumby Bible" during the seven years I hosted and ran the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy.
I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with Basilica sauce, a cut-up beef burger, and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching four Bugs Bunny cartoons from 1949.
In the first story, Bugs is in what looks like the Hollywood Hills playing banjo and singing, "A Rainy Night in Rio" by Leo Robin and Arthur Schwartz.
But nearby in a bungalow, an opera singer named Giovanni Jones is trying to practice "Largo al Factotum" from The Barber of Seville. He finds Bugs's singing and playing very distracting and so he comes out and destroys Bugs's banjo. Jones goes back to his rehearsal, but then Bugs begins singing "My Gal is a Highborn Lady" by Barney Fagan and Gustav Luders while playing the harp.
Jones goes out and sticks Bugs's head between the strings and then collapses the frame on him. Jones returns to practice but then Bugs begins playing "When Yuba Plays the Rhumba on the Tuba" on a sousaphone. Jones reaches into the bell of the sousaphone and out through the mouthpiece to grab Bugs and pull him through the horn. Then he ties Bugs's ears to a tree limb and pulls his body down and releases it so that his head repeatedly hits the limb on the return. After Jones walks away, Bugs says, "Of course you know, this means war!" That night at the amphitheater, while Jones is giving his concert, Bugs begins to sabotage the show by sitting on top of the shell and hitting it with a hammer. It causes the stage to vibrate until Jones is lodged in a tuba. Bugs pulls Jones out, takes him to the dressing room, and sprays his throat with alum, causing him to sing in a high voice. During an intermission, Bugs comes in drag as an adoring bobbysoxer asking Jones for his autograph, but the pen is a stick of dynamite. Then Bugs walks onto the stage disguised as a famous conductor that everyone recognizes named Leopold. The other conductor respectfully steps aside and Bugs proceeds to direct Jones through a roller coaster ride of vocal gymnastics and leaves him on a high note that causes his tuxedo to rip off and eventually collapses the amphitheater.
Giovanni Jones was played by Nicolai Shutorev, who was not known to have had any formal training but sang with the San Francisco Opera Company and the Los Angeles Opera Company. He was un-credited for this cartoon until it was released on DVD. In the late 1940s, he joined the Comedian Harmonists, and they began a world tour, but in Norway, he died of a stomach rupture.
In the second story, Bugs Bunny winds up on a Riverboat where he disguises himself as a southern gentleman and meets the poker challenge of the gambler Colonel Shuffle. Shuffle starts out with all the chips but soon Bugs has them. At the end of the next hand, Shuffle has five aces but Bugs has six. Shuffle challenges Bugs to a duel. They stand back-to-back but when told to take ten paces, Shuffle walks forward while Bugs steps backward. Shuffle turns and shoots over Bugs's shoulder and Bugs kisses him on the mouth and then puts an exploding cigar there. Bugs gets the stunned Shuffle to dance to Camptown Races and then guides him through a gate in the railing of the boat to fall into the Mississippi. Shuffle is lifted back on the boat by the rotating paddle and then comes after Bugs with a pistol. But Bugs pretends to be a barker for a show called "Uncle Tom's Cabinet." Shuffle buys a ticket but when Bugs directs him through a curtain it leads overboard again. Shuffle chases Bugs with his pistol and pursues him to the boiler room where Bugs tricks Shuffle into running into the furnace. Shuffle chases Bugs into a cabin where Bugs is suddenly in drag and begins hitting shuffle with her umbrella. Then she runs to a big southern gentleman and asks him to save her. The man tosses Shuffle off the boat. But then when he sees that the belle he rescued is a rabbit, he jumps into the river as well. Bugs says, "Oh well, we almost had a romantic ending."
In the third story, Bugs is reading federal bounty signs posted in the forest. He sees that a fox is worth $50, and a bear is worth $75, but a rabbit is only worth 2 cents. Bugs is offended and so he goes to Washington to complain. But the game commissioner explains that rabbits are harmless and so the bounty stays as it is. Bugs sets about to prove to the United States government that he is not harmless. He paints the Washington Monument like a barber's pole; shuts off Niagara Falls; gives Manhattan back to the Indians, except they wouldn't take it unless he threw in a set of dishes; he saws Florida off the Unites States and lets it float to South America, and he fills in the Grand Canyon. The result is that the United States declares war on Bugs Bunny and a $1,000,000 bounty is placed on his head. Then the armed forces attack and Bugs is placed in Alcatraz where he decides that he might have carried things too far.
In the fourth story, Bugs pops out of the ground at the greyhound racetrack and decides he wants a piece of the action. But after the race starts, Bugs sees that the dogs are chasing a cute female rabbit. Not realizing that it's a mechanical decoy rabbit, Bugs sets about to rescue her. He enters the track and comes up behind the last dog, beats him up, and ties his tail to the fence. He jumps on the second dog and guides him to crash into a wall. He hogties the next dog. Tackles another dog. Then he causes all the dogs to collide in a big pile. He sees the mechanical bunny come down the track and holds open his arms only to be knocked over, thinking that she's playing hard to get. Bugs lures almost all of the dogs off the track and into a taxi. He tells the cabby to take the dogs to the pound. There is one big, tough dog left. Bugs has him play fetch with a stick of dynamite. Then the dog charges like a bull while Bugs holds a red cloth. On the other side of the cloth is a fire hydrant and the dog hits his head and is knocked out. Bugs tries to stop the mechanical bunny on the track but it causes her to give off sparks. Bugs thinks those are the effects of love.
Before bed, I checked for bedbugs and just like a week ago when I was hoping to have made it a week without seeing one, behind a little protrusion in the wall a meter above the head of my bed, my toothpick smeared a little black one. I didn't see it moving and so it may have already died. Although I've uncovered a handful over the last month, I haven't found any with fresh blood inside since June 25.
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