Know Which Side Your Car is Battered On

            On Friday morning I worked out the chords for the fifth verse of "C'était une pauv' gosse des rues" (She Was a Poor Child of the Street) by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized the second and third verses of “Your Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg. There’s just one verse left to learn and I should have it nailed down tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. The B and E strings went slightly out of tune a couple of times. That doesn’t happen very often but it probably will every now and then throughout the winter as it gets dryer in my place. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning in thirty seven days. 

            I painted another coat of primer on the front of the doors and drawers of my kitchen counter. It looks like it might need a third coat.

            I weighed 85.7 kilos before lunch. Amazon was supposed to deliver my cassette-to-mp3 converter from 13:00 to 16:00. I took a siesta at 14:00, thinking I’d hear the phone but I didn’t. When I got up to pee at 15:00 I saw that they’d called fifteen minutes before that. The message said they’d tried to deliver the package. I assumed they’d tried and failed but when I got up at 15:30 I checked the website and they said they’d left the package either inside the door or outside. I went downstairs and it was on top of the mailboxes. I didn’t try the converter yet. 

            I went for a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I spent about twenty minutes chiseling black quartz from a piece of the rock that I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 85.1 kilos at 17:30. 

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

            In the Movie Maker project for my August 6 acoustic performance of “Time of the Yo-Yo” I isolated the song. I added a fade to black effect and tried out several other effects before settling on a sepia tone look for the video. There was some traffic noise picked up by the camera microphone so I switched the audio entirely to what was recorded through the audio interface. I published the movie but when I played it back it just showed the video for a few seconds before going black. I deleted the video and published it again and this time it was okay. Tomorrow I’ll upload it to YouTube. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song "Megaphor" I continued editing a section of the movie Ziegfeld Girl so it goes in reverse. 

            I reset my negative scanner to slide mode and re-scanned the strip that I scanned yesterday, thinking they were black and white negatives. It turns out they are very faint colour slides of my daughter when she was about one year old. 

            I wanted to try out the new cassette-to-mp3 converter and so I dug up a box of old cassettes. I’ve got way over fifty cassette tapes and so I did the right thing to buy a converter. If I’d paid for a service at $20 a tape it would have cost me well over $1000. I still didn’t get around to trying the converter. I went through the tapes to see if I could find the first Christian and the Lions concert but there’s nothing with that label. I know Tom Smarda’s friend Marcus recorded the event but I don’t know if we ever got a tape. I’ll listen to some of the unmarked tapes tomorrow. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of roast beef while watching season 2, episodes 26 and 27 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Haney sells a washing machine to the Ziffels that is essentially an outboard motor clamped onto a barrel with the propellor inside. When they turn it on it goes crazy and wrecks their house. Fred agrees to hire Oliver as a lawyer to get his money back from Haney. The judge says Haney has to pay $250. Haney at first tries to pay Ziffel in trade of more junk but Oliver won’t allow it. Finally he gets the money by selling a grandfather clock to Lisa for $300. 

            After the first story I went to make coffee and was washing some dishes when I heard behind me a loud thud. Outside a car was turned on its left side and had slid halfway onto the sidewalk almost right up to the Popeyes door, knocking over a parking info sign and once again destroying the bench on the corner. That bench can’t seem to catch a break. It was wrecked by a truck about a month ago and then replaced. The driver seems to have gotten out by her driver’s side window. She’d been obviously wearing a seatbelt otherwise she would have had more than a sore left shoulder. A lot of people were taking pictures. A drunk teenager driving by called out that the person must have been hungry to have tried to drive into Popeyes sideways. The car was on its side for a few hours until a tow truck came with equipment that dragged the car off the sidewalk. Then readjusted the cable and drove east of the car to pull it back onto its wheels. When it flipped upright several onlookers cheered. 

            In the second Green Acres story Hank Kimball gets fired by the new head of the department of agriculture Mr. Treffinger. Hank is actually happy about it and whistling a tune because he was making too much money and he had put off Ralph Monroe’s advances by saying that he’d marry her when he’d saved enough. Now Ralph is heart broken. A new county agent named Harvey Schmidlapp is hired but everybody hates him because he’s insulting, overbearing and undiplomatic. Oliver gets the people of the valley to sign a petition against Schmidlapp which he takes to Treffinger but Treffinger refuses to hire Hank back. Finally they turn Ralph loose on Schmedlapp with her romantic intentions and it causes him to have a nervous breakdown. He punches Treffinger in the nose and joins the roller derby. Oliver and Lisa find Hank working as a bartender and tell him he can have his old job back but he doesn’t want it because of Ralph. But when Oliver tells him there’s a new rule that county agents must remain single he is glad to return to the occupation. 

             The tune that Hank was whistling gets played by an orchestra on TV later and the conductor was played by Ted Stanhope. He appeared in a trio of Three Stooges movies. He started his career as Ted Strobach when he appeared in several Hal Roach comedies. His first movie as Stanhope was Between Midnight and Dawn. 

            Before bed I tried out the cassette-to-mp3 converter. It took a while to figure out the buttons but I was able to play an unmarked tape and hear it through the headphones. It was perhaps one of the times that I did a feature at Fat Alberts. It’s got Steve Lowe playing his amazing guitar arrangement for my song “Angeline” and singing backup. I found out that it will only start recording to mp3 when a usb flash drive is plugged in. I left it recording and went to bed.