Higgins

            On Sunday morning I finished working out the chords for "Au bon vieux temps" (In the Good Old Days) by Boris Vian. On Monday I'll run through it in French and then I'll have to rework my translation before I can sing it in English. 

            I worked out the chords for the first verse of "Le Couteau dans le play" (The Knife in the Play) by Serge Gainsbourg. The second verse uses different chords. 

            I audio and video recorded song practice while playing my Kramer electric guitar for the second day of four. I did "Megaphor" in one take but a lot of the songs that followed like "Sixteen Tons of Dogma" had to be redone. It didn't come out horribly in the end. The rattling sound on the sixth fret wasn't solved by changing my A string so I'll have to take it back to L'il Demon even though I told myself I wasn't going to go there anymore. But he's in the neighbourhood and I need a quick fix. The problem however is that he's closed on Sunday and Labour Day, which are two electric guitar song practice days and so I won't be able to take it until Tuesday. If he fixes it on Tuesday I'll have two more chances each to record clean electric versions of "L'accordion" and "The Accordion". The camera timed out while I was finishing "Post Colonial Breakdown". 

            I weighed 85 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I've been in the morning in a week.

            Around midday I finished reading the information on the Canadian Graduate Scholarships website and then read most of the instructions for applying for the Ontario Graduate Scholarships application. I've decided that I'm only going to try for the MA in Creative Writing this once. On the slim chance that I'm one of the seven students selected I'll consider it an opportunity and do the work for three years to get my MA but if I don't get accepted I'm going to settle for the BA and move on with enjoying the rest of my life. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos before lunch. I had whole wheat crackers with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I chiseled some more black quartz from the pieces of the rock I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:20. 

            I reviewed this morning's song practice video. "Megaphor" was pretty good except that one chord seemed a bit off. I don't think that the ending of "Sixteen Tons of Dogma" was quite right. On "The Accordion" the rattling sound when the B flat chord is barred on the sixth fret wasn't as obvious as before. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for my song "Sleep in the Snow" I trimmed the end of the concert video so it ends on my last downstroke of the guitar and I let the audio of the reverberation continue in the dark for a second. I saved a copy of the project as "Sleep in the Snow without drums" then imported the master track of "Sleep in the Snow". I deleted the drum track and put in the drumless master track, then trimmed the end of that video in the same way. I published both movies. There's only one section of the second verse for which I couldn't get the concert video and the studio audio exactly in synch but I decided to live with it. In general the videos look and sound great. On Monday I'll upload them both to YouTube. 

            I finished scanning the single negatives that I found loose at the bottom of a file folder in my photo drawer. There was one cracked one of my ex-girlfriend Gloria doing yoga, a shot of my ex-girlfriend Brenda's beautiful derriere in checkered tights, and a street shot of a homeless person sitting in front of a mural of three acrobats. Then I scanned three strips of two negatives each. One had some shots of the bicycles inside the Architecture Building, another had a shot of an art student I used to hang out with and made a pass at, another was a colour strip that I don't think I or anyone I know shot. It looks like something I might have picked up off the street because one frame shows someone I don't know sleeping and another shows a lot of people on a beach. There was another strip of three. Next I have twelve strips of four to scan, which will be a lot easier because I won't have to remove the easel of the scanner to scan them. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 5, episodes 20 and 21 of Petticoat Junction. 

            In the first story Joe's barber shop quartet is rehearsing for a talent contest. It includes Sam Drucker, Floyd Smoot, and Newt Kylie. Joe hears that someone in the group is singing off key and eventually the process of elimination shows that it's him. He agrees to bow out but to stand by if they can't find a replacement. But it takes a few seconds to replace him with Grandpa Miller. Up until the last episode Grandpa Miller was almost deaf but suddenly he can hear. Anyway, Joe is now bitter about being edged out of the quartet. Then Salma Plout comes to see Joe. She is chairman of the judging committee for the festival and she wants Joe for a judge. She wants him because she knows he will vote against the quartet. She then tells him that she has a crop of land that she might hire Carson-Elliot Enterprises to crop dust and then adds that her daughter will be playing the theremin in the competition. At the festival Sam's quartet sing Bill Bailey quite beautifully and then when they are finished Sam adds that credit should go to Joe for founding the quartet and then nobly stepping aside. Salma cries bias but Joe reminds her that her own daughter is in the competition. Salma agrees to withdraw her vote as does Joe. The decision is on Mr. Quimby who votes for the quartet. Salma had instructed him to vote for someone other than Henrietta so things wouldn't look rigged. 

            In the second story the Bradley's nameless dog keeps running away from the hotel. But he goes to Betty Joe and Steve's place. For some odd reason Billie Joe and Bobbie Joe resent Betty Joe for this and accuse her of luring him away. But really he was Betty's dog from the start and he picked her by following her home more than once at the beginning of the second season. Steve gets Betty a female dog named Colette to keep so she won't be so encouraging of the dog being with her, but the dog likes Colette and she motivates him even more to come to Betty. When Billie and Bobbie see Colette they accuse Betty of using a female to lure the dog away. While they are arguing the dog runs away from all of them. Everyone including Sam, Floyd and Steve search the valley by air, rail and foot. Finally they find him in a cave. The sisters decide to share him from now on. 

            The Bradley dog was played by Higgins, a mix of cocker spaniel, poodle and schnauzer, who was found as a puppy in 1960 at an animal shelter by Frank Inn and subsequently trained by him. Inn had trained thousands of animals and declared Higgins to be the smartest of them all. He was a star of Petticoat Junction for six years, and also appeared on Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan's Island. He was retired when Petticoat Junction ended in 1970 but four years later at the age of fourteen he came out of retirement to star in the movie Benji, which was a big hit. He died the next year but his children Benjean and Mac starred in the Benji sequels. When Inn died he requested that Higgins's ashes be placed in his coffin.