Maurice Noble

            On Thursday morning I searched for the lyrics for "J'en ai autant pour toi" (I Have the Same for You) by Serge Gainsbourg. I found them on gainsbourg.net but that site doesn't allow copying and so I had to transcribe all the words. Then I translated the first two verses. It's a complaint to a partner who always complains. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I finished sorting through all the official papers and receipts in the bottom drawer of my plastic cabinet. I washed the drawer and put everything back in place. Now I'm ready to start cleaning the area over the southern window in my kitchen. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on the way back where the red grapes were on sale, so I bought seven bags. I also got a bunch of bananas, a pack of nectarines, Bavarian sandwich bread, five-year-old cheddar, a whole chicken, three bags of skim milk, a small container of skyr, a jug of orange juice, and a jar of mild salsa. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:09. I reviewed four more videos of me playing my song "Sixteen Tons of Dogma". On June 13 I fumbled some of the chords; on June 14 the take that starts at 11:45 was probably the best up to that date but it's still sometimes a bit off on the high D sharp chord and I think I hit one wrong chord during the epilogue; June 15 would have been the best to that date if I hadn't flubbed one chord; June 16 is the best so far but I was still a little off on the D sharp and some of the chords in the epilogue. 

            In the Movie Maker project for my song "Instructions for Electroshock Therapy" I almost got the concert video synchronized with the studio audio for the line, "Is all of this making sense?" It should only take one more adjustment. After that I have to shoot a video of me answering that question with "No!" while lip-synching Brian Haddon's vocal from the studio audio. I'd better charge the camera battery. I just checked and it's fully charged and ready to shoot. I have an idea of just shooting myself poking my head through the bedroom curtain looking into the living room in the indirect light of sunset, with and without dark glasses on to see which works best. 

            I finished sorting through the eighth folder of my writing. Next I have to see which is the fattest of the seven folders and divide that into two parts preferably chronologically. 

            I made a new batch of gravy and had some on a potato with a chicken leg while watching two Bugs Bunny cartoons from 1967 and two from 1958.
            In the first story Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are performing together at a theatre but Daffy is upset that he hasn't gotten top billing. They do a synchronized tap dance together and the audience is applauding enthusiastically. Daffy goes out to take a bow but the crowd goes silent. Then Bugs pokes his head out and the audience begins to applaud again. Daffy challenges Bugs to do a solo dance. Bugs does a seven-beat dance to the melody of "Shave and a Haircut" and the audience responds enthusiastically again. Daffy does an elaborate tap dance and finishes in a split but there is silence from the crowd. Daffy sets up his trained pigeon act with props such as a bicycle on a tightrope but when he opens the cage all the birds fly away and he gets a tomato in the face. Bugs then does the act of sawing a volunteer in half and so Daffy volunteers because he knows it's fake, but he really gets sawed in half. Daffy decides to sabotage Bugs's xylophone playing act with explosives wired to a certain note. Bugs plays "If Ever Those Endearing Young Charms" but keeps missing that note and so Daffy comes out and shows him how to play it, thus taking the blast. Then Daffy performs an act that no other performer has ever dared. He comes out in a devil suit, drinks a generous portion of gasoline, then nitro glycerine, then gunpowder, uranium 238, then lights a match and explodes. The audience goes wild with appreciation and Bugs tells him they want more. But as Daffy's ghost floats up to the ceiling he says he can only do it once. 

            The second story is considered to be the greatest cartoon that Warner Brothers ever made. It's called, "What's Opera Doc?" and in it the usual chasing of Bugs Bunny by Elmer Fudd is threaded together with four of Richard Wagner's operas. Elmer plays the role of Siegfried while singing, "Be very quiet, I'm hunting rabbits." He follows rabbit tracks to Bugs's home and begins stabbing his spear into the hole while repeatedly singing "Kill the rabbit" to the tune of "Ride of the Valkyries." Bugs comes out of the other hole and sings, "What's up doc?" Elmer answers in song that he is going to kill the rabbit. Bugs sings the question of "how?" Elmer sings he'll do it with his spear and magic helmet and he gives enough of a convincing demonstration of controlling the weather that Bugs runs, with Elmer in pursuit. But then Bugs returns in drag and on horseback as Brünnhilde. They do their courtship song and dance until Bugs's wig falls off. Bugs runs, but now Elmer uses the full force of his magic and strikes him dead with lightning. Elmer is overcome with remorse and tenderly carries Bugs's corpse away until the end when Bugs lifts his head and says to the fourth wall, "Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?" 

            In the third story an extremely unintelligent wolf named Charles is watching what sounds like a real baseball game when he is confronted by his nagging wife who hands him his gun and demands that he go out and shoot a rabbit for dinner. Once out of the cave he says, "I hate her!" and then gets hit by a thrown cooking pot. Bugs Bunny sees Charles running with his gun and runs beside him to ask what's up. Charles has to stop and think about it because he's forgotten what he's hunting. Bugs has to suggest that he's after rabbits. Charles begins shooting at Bugs but misses. Bugs takes the gun and tests it to see what's wrong. After shooting Charles in the face he concludes that Charles is a bad shot. Charles chases Bugs around a tree but when Bugs stops, Charles keeps circling. Bugs asks him why and Charles again has to stop and try to remember, but doesn't, until Bugs reminds him again. Bugs runs and escapes down his hole but puts out a box for Charles with a hand grenade inside. Charles follows the accompanying instructions for using the grenade but while he's still reading after pulling the pin, the grenade explodes. Charles chases Bugs into a railway tunnel but runs when he thinks a train is coming, but it's Bugs with a a flashlight and a train whistle. He chases Bugs back into the tunnel and hears the train sound again. Thinking it's Bugs he doesn't budge and gets run over by a train. Bugs lights a long fuse and while Charles is running he sees the fire traveling along it. Stupidly he follows it to a pile of TNT that explodes. Bugs is erecting a door to a platform over a cliff. Charles breaks it down to fall a long distance to the ground below. Charles comes running angrily back up the mountain and confronts Bugs, who asks him what he wants. Charles has forgotten again and this time Bugs just walks away while Charles sits and goes through a long list of possible animals he might have been hunting for. 

            In the fourth story, Bugs Bunny has a hole in the ground at a rocket launch site and the rocket is pulled directly above him. He gets up to climb out of the hole and bathe in the lake but climbs up inside the space ship and it takes off. By the time he reaches the nose cone he is far above the Earth. He unscrews the nose cone and somehow can still breath and exist without a space suit. He is caught by a satellite and carried to a surreal looking space station. He sees Marvin the Martian who has just finished building his Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator. Bugs tries to get help from Marvin but he ignores him and so Bugs follows him to ask to borrow a saucer to get back to Earth. Marvin tells him the Earth will be gone in a few seconds because he's going to blow it up. Bugs steals the device and Marvin plants instant Martian seeds which, after adding water, grow into large bird creatures that look like human sized flightless buzzards. They chase Bugs until he tricks them into jumping off into the void of space. Bugs escapes on a flying saucer but leaves Marvin the Space Modulator to explode in his face. Bugs crashes in a sewer with 10,000 instant Martians aboard. 

            The layouts for both "What's Opera Doc?" and "Hare-way to the Stars" were done by Maurice Noble. He was struggling as an artist when he was recruited by a Disney scout in 1934. He worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and did the background for the Rite of Spring sequence in Fantasia. At Warner Brothers he established the wide desert spaces that were characteristic of the Coyote-Roadrunner cartoons. He also did the layouts for several Dr. Seuss features. 

            I searched for bedbugs and found two sick ones. One that was in the upper left corner of the frame of the old exit door at the head of my bed looked almost glasslike but was black inside. The other one was at the foot of my bed, and it was also without my blood inside of it. I'm glad the ones I'm finding are dying or dead but I'm still impatient to not find any.