Kay E. Kuter

            On Saturday morning I finished working out the chords to "Charlotte Forever" by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through singing and playing it. I started running through my translation but didn't have time to finish. I'll do that and upload it to my Christian's Translations blog tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar for song practice and it was the last session of this year's recording project. I made a few mistakes but made a few nice takes. I think I might have gone sharp on "Megaphor" a couple of times but I might have come up with a fairly clean take of "Sixteen Tons of Dogma". I made it to the end of "Like a Boomerang" just before the camera timed out. Saturdays are quieter than weekdays but at one point the big delivery truck comes to bring stuff to Popeyes downstairs and it stops in front of my window before making a lot of noise as it struggles to back up onto O'Hara. There are also lots of buses, which apparently will be gone this fall when the streetcars return to going all the way to Longbranch. Next summer's recording project might be a little quieter because of that. 

            On Sunday I'll return to my full song practice without worrying about how I look or getting flawless takes. I'll be starting my new practice of doing the session with the electric guitar every few days and using my Jazz Chorus amp instead of the Scarlett interface. I think that will give me the practice to make it easier to record while playing the electric next year. 

            I weighed 84.5 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I've been in the morning in eight days. 

            Around midday I went to No Frills where the cherries were on sale and so I got seven bags. I also bought a pack of honey-garlic sausages, Basilica tomato sauce, Dijon, spoon size shredded wheat, a jug of orange juice, and two large containers of skyr. 

            When I got home I went back out to the liquor store to buy a six-pack of Creemore. 

            I haven't listened much yet to the audio of my song practices that I recorded this year but while putting my groceries away I listened to some of June 1. Even though I was only playing song fragments and badly it sounded pretty good and put me in a positive mood. 

            I weighed 85.1 kilos before lunch. I had Breton crackers with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. On Bloor near Bay Street two guys were walking on the bike lane and a cyclist ahead of me almost hit one of them. The pedestrian called out, "Fuck you asshole!" Then I came up and he was directly in my way without looking and I said for him to watch out. This time he said, "Fuck you man" but under his breath. He might have been drunk.

            I weighed 84.4 kilos at 17:00. 

            I chiseled some more fossils out of the slate. I knocked away the rock around two million year old green roots that formed an interesting triangle.

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:23. 

            I reviewed the video of this morning's song practice. I did pretty good takes of "Sixteen Tons of Dogma", "The Accordion", "Joanna Dancing Lightly", "Kenya", "The Post Colonial Breakdown", "The Wooden Leg", and "Dancing to Baby Pop". "Like a Boomerang" needs work. Tomorrow I'll start reviewing the forty-some takes of "Megaphor" to hear if one of the acoustic and one of the electric takes are worth uploading so I can put the song away and start practicing another song of mine. 

            I got my amplifier ready to use for song practice with an extension cord running to the kitchen ready to plug in. 

            In Audacity I imported two files of Sleep in the Snow with drum tracks. One is the one with the snare and a basic beat on the skins and the other has fancy stuff like rolls. The first thing I wanted to do was to synchronize the two tracks. After a few tries I got them close enough that there was a slight echo on the vocal tracks. I tried again highlighting a small white space in the area where the second track was behind the first and deleting it. This time it came through without an echo. The next step of eliminating parts of the second track without throwing it out of sync will be more difficult. There should be a way to mute parts without deleting them. Looking that up now, unless I've got a limited version of the app, there is a "mute" button I can reach through the "edit" button. As far as I know the two tracks I synchronized should sound the same as the second track but I need them synchronized to edit the second one properly so as to make something new. I both exported the file and saved it as a project in Audacity. I think I made progress albeit a small amount. The "zoom" feature should be helpful when I want to start muting. I couldn't find an end to the zoom. It gets to a point where the wave form is just a bunch of dots getting further and further apart. 

            I had planned on grilling the sausages tonight but suppertime snuck up on me while I was working in Audacity and it was too late. So I just made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 3, episodes 6 and 7 of Petticoat Junction. 

            In the first story Bobbie Joe has been nominated for a very exclusive high school sorority. But there is an initiation task before a nominee is accepted, and that task varies according to the whims of the members. One highly influential member is Henrietta Plout, who is a mean girl long before Mean Girls. Every girl in school has tried to land a date with Stonewall Jackson. They call him "Stonewall" because no one can capture his interest as he only has eyes for sports. Henrietta has just tried and failed to get his attention and so she decides that Bobbie's initiation will be to land a date with Stonewall, which she knows is impossible. As Billie Joe is the most skillful boy catcher in Hooterville she says she'll get Stonewall to ask her for a date but then she will tell him that he can't get a date with her unless he dates Bobbie first. But Billie strikes out and the only Bradley sister who interests him is Betty Joe because she is a shortstop for the Hooterville Hawks. Kate sees Betty as the key and then Betty and Joe give Bobby a crash course in sports trivia. Charlie and Floyd arrange it so Bobbie is the only other passenger when Stonewall is on his way home from work. Floyd makes Bobbie sit beside Stonewall on the Cannonball and then has Charlie go around Dead Man's Curve without slowing down, which causes Bobbie to be thrown on top of Stonewall. At first Bobbie tries to impress him with sports statistics but that goes nowhere. Betty holds up a sign from several meters away telling her to talk about him. She rattles off some of Stonewall's own sports stats and suddenly she has his attention. At the station he asks Bobbie for a date right in front of Henrietta. Bobbie borrows a fancy dress from Lisa Douglas but her date with Stonewall involves him taking her to play sports and she comes home exhausted. She is awarded the sorority membership and then out of revenge arranges for Henrietta to have a date with Henry. The next time we see Henrietta she's on crutches because Stonewall tried to teach her how to pole vault. 

            In the second story a young doctor answers an ad posted by Joe asking for a doctor to serve as the hotel physician. Joe thinks it will bring in hotel guests. Dr. Bailey is very good looking, well read and likes sports and so he meets all of the criteria for Kate's daughters to keep him there. Kate eventually gives in but Dr. Bailey is getting no patients because everyone is used to seeing Dr. Stuart. Kate asks Stuart for advice on the matter and he says he had the same problem when he was a young doctor. His breakthrough happened when old Dr. Hamlin was out of town and Granny Campbell got pneumonia. He pulled her through and then he was in with the community. Kate decides to get sick and even her family believes it's real. Soon the Hooterville rumour mill has Kate on death's door. But the doctor who arrives is Stuart. Kate explains to him that she's faking and so he goes along with it and brings Bailey up to see her. Bailey figures out fairly quickly that there's nothing wrong with her. Stuart tells everybody that Bailey has pulled Kate through and suddenly he's turning patients away. 

             A semi regular on the series and on Green Acres was local farmer Newt Kylie, who was played by Kay E. Kuter. His father was a renowned art director for films and his mother had been a silent film actor. He was also a stage actor and a director of more than fifty plays. He co-starred in The Last Starfighter. For the final fourteen years of his life he was a the voice of Hershey's Kisses ads.