Daws Butler

            On Sunday I worked out the chords for the intro and the first two verses of "Suicide" by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday, I finished washing and scrubbing the floor in the southeast corner of my kitchen. That ends the floor cleaning project that I started more than three years ago. When I first moved in here in 1997 the floors were covered with carpet and tiles and when I ripped all that up I found a hardwood floor underneath. Although I'd swept and mopped the floors, they had never been scrubbed of what was probably fifty years of dirt. So now that's done, and I can move on to cleaning my southern windows. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos before lunch. I had saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. Every Sunday there's a group of evangelists that sing gospel songs with microphones and an electric guitar at Spadina and Queen. The leader seems to be a middle-aged woman with bleached blond hair who looks like a recovering alcoholic. After every few songs she does a little preaching and today she was offering to baptize people with bottled water. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos at 17:00. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:54. I reviewed two videos of me playing "Time of the Yo-Yo" and two of "Le Temps des Yo-Yo". For "Time of the Yo-Yo", on June 22 the audio recording was the other one with the crackling, but it doesn't matter because I flubbed this one after several takes. June 24 at 5:25 was the best of these takes but I was short on the G. For "Le Temps des Yo-Yo", on June 23 I had the right camera position so the pop blocker was not in the way and I was centred properly from left to right. I played it okay but I was a little short on the G chord. On June 25 the camera was out of focus. The last take was at 7:50 but I was too short on the G. 

            In the Movie Maker project for my song "Instructions for Electroshock Therapy," I added clips of lightning flashes to various parts of the slow instrumental. But I got confused as to whether adding clips was putting the concert video ahead or behind the studio audio. The concert instrumental finished earlier than the studio instrumental and I started thinking I'd added too many clips and made it earlier. But after removing some I saw it was finishing even earlier and so I put them back in and added some more. I got the audio and the video synchronized at the point where I shout before singing the next verse. The next line is "Multiply the patient's current by the machine's resistance" and I think I sing it slower in concert and so it probably can't be synchronized with the studio audio. There's a video that I've bookmarked that shows a pointing stick being placed on various parts of a shock therapy machine, so I think I'll download that next. 

            I started dividing up the poetry that I wrote between 1993 and 2000 into work written before I got my computer in 1996 and after. Anything written with a typewriter is before and anything that came from a printer is after. There are some pages that overlap because they are handwritten, but certain references help. Any poetry written about my ex-girlfriend Dorita was definitely composed when I had a computer. Any reference to my place where I've lived since 1997 is also in the latter category. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with Basilica sauce and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching two Bugs Bunny cartoons from 1955 and two from 1956. 

            The first story is another one in which Bugs Bunny gets lost on his way to Miami Beach and winds up in some far-flung part of the world. This time he pops out of a tunnel he's dug to the Sahara Desert. He keeps walking to get to the ocean but winds up in an oasis where there is a small pool of water. Bugs concludes that people exaggerate the size of the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, Yosemite Sam (here calling himself Riff Raff Sam) is riding a camel and sees that someone has gotten footy prints all over his desert. Sam attacks Bugs, who takes shelter in a fortress. Sam says, "Open that door" and the drawbridge comes down on top of him. Sam tries to pole vault over the wall but hits it. He tries to chisel open one of the large bricks but when he removes it he gets a cannon in the face. He tries walking on stilts but when he fires his gun, he knocks himself over. He tries ramming the door with an elephant, but Bugs runs a wind-up mouse under the door that scares the elephant. He tries to slingshot himself to the fortress but hits a tree. He finds a secret entrance to the fortress and opens it, but behind every door there is another door because Bugs has added them. After a long row of doors, the last one is wired to detonate a pile of TNT that explodes as Bugs walks away. In the end, Daffy Duck pops out of a hole, also thinking this is Miami. Bugs decides to let him find out for himself. 

            The second story is a parody of the TV show "This Is Your Life" and it's called "This Is a Life?" The host is Elmer Fudd and in the audience are Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Daffy is sure that he will be picked to have his life story told on broadcast television, but it turns out it is Bugs. Elmer asks Bugs to start from the beginning and he relates the story of the Big Bang and then of amoebas forming in a pool of water on Earth. Elmer says not that far back. Then Bugs begins to recount the story of his childhood, which we saw in an earlier episode. Elmer reminds Bugs of one of their first encounters when he tricked Elmer into stepping off a high cliff. Then Yosemite Sam comes out and recounts the story of him being defeated by Bugs on a pirate ship. Elmer and Sam plot to give Bugs a lit bomb in a box as a present. But Bugs realizes what it is and tosses it back. As the three are throwing the box back and forth, Daffy comes on stage and grabs it, saying he deserves it more. It explodes.

            In the third story Bugs Bunny is a Hollywood star while Daffy Duck is pushing a broom on the lot. Daffy is fed up because he thinks he is far more deserving of success than Bugs Bunny. Daffy presents himself to a big producer and he is given work as Bugs Bunny's stand-in. When Yosemite Sam is about to blast Bugs, Daffy is brought in to be shot. In the next scene Elmer Fudd is supposed to pretend to saw off a limb that Bugs is sitting on. But Daffy knocks Elmer out and takes the saw. Disguised as Elmer he cuts the branch all the way, but the tree falls over instead. There are more scenes of Daffy getting shot. Then Bugs is piloting a crashing jet plane but just before it hits the ground the director yells "cut" and the plane freezes. Bugs is removed from the plane and Daffy is put inside, then the plane crashes. Daffy goes to the producer and demands his own picture. He is given a starring role in The Duck in which he is shot be several duck hunters. 

            In the fourth story, Bugs is tunneling to San Francisco to meet his cousin Herman when he hits a rock that just happens to be a solid gold boulder. A dishonest hustler by the name of Nasty Canasta chances to be observing Bugs's windfall. When Bugs is wondering how to protect his gold, Nasty sets up a fake bank for Bugs to make a deposit. When he sees Canasta tying the gold to his mule, Bugs tells him he wants his gold back. But Nasty folds up the false front of the bank with Bugs inside of it and rides away. Later Canasta owns a frontier casino and Bugs shows up in disguise pretending to be naive. He acts as if he thinks the slot machine is a telephone but while calling his mother, he wins the jackpot. Canasta asks Bugs to join him in a game of marbles, Frisco style, which is roulette. Bugs always bets on 23 and although the wheel is fixed, Canasta can't stop it from landing on 23. Then Canasta gets Bugs to play poker with him. Canasta gets a full house, but Bugs has four aces. Then Canasta pulls a revolver on Bugs and says, "Now we're gonna play another little game." Bugs says, "What do you do, spin this little gadget?" and he spins the cylinder, and gold coins come out. Canasta tries it and shoots himself in the face. 

            Nasty Canasta was voiced by Daws Butler, who at the age of 19 started entering and winning impressionist contests. Then he became a performer on the Vaudeville circuit. His first work doing voices for animated characters was in 1948 for the Screen Gems feature "Short Snorts on Sports." Then he was hired at MGM by Tex Avery to do the voice of a British wolf in Little Rural Riding Hood. From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s he did voices in several Avery-directed cartoons. On the hit puppet show TV series "Time for Beany", Butler did the voices of Beany Boy and Captain Huffenpuff. He worked with Stan Freberg on "St George and the Dragonet" and was also featured on the Stan Freberg radio show. He voiced Mr. Magoo's nephew Waldo. He did the voices of Chilly Willy, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, and Yogi Bear. 

            I didn't find any bedbugs when I was poking around the cracks with a toothpick, but it smelled like I did. Experts have told me that they only give off an odour when they are dying, so maybe I killed one that didn't surface or maybe that was the smell of the a bug dying from the fungus that's supposed to kill them.