I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the final session of four.
I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast.
Around midday I went down to No Frills where I bought a bag of red grapes, four bags of cherries, some bananas, a pack of strawberries, a pack of naan rounds, a pack of two artisan naan, salsa, skyr, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips.
I weighed 86.8 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemonade with cranberry juice.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back.
I weighed 86.7 kilos at 17:30.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:08.
I read several more pages of The Buried Giant. Wistan and Edwin have been reunited. Edwin deceives Wistan that he is following the lure of the dragon but he’s following his mother’s voice in his mind and later confesses. Meanwhile Axl and Beatrice are still making their way towards their son’s village. A boatman lets them float down the river for free in two baskets but they are attacked by pixies. They want Beatrice and tell Axl that she will die a horrible death with him but a peaceful one with them. He fights them off and he and Beatrice make it to shore. They come across some children who give them shelter. They find the children have two goats to which they have fed poison. One of the goats has been eaten by an ogre that has died as a result. The children want Axl and Beatrice to take the other goat up the mountain to feed to the dragon. Axl refuses but Beatrice wants to do it because the dragon’s breath is causing everyone to forget. Axl gives in and they are making their way up the mountain with the goat. Earlier Sir Gawain remembers a genocide committed against the Saxons by Arthur’s knights. I’m 4/5 of the way through the novel.
I grilled two pork burgers and had one between two mini naan rounds with chili sauce, Dijon, horseradish, dill pickle, and Ted’s Tingly Sauce. I had dinner with a beer while watching season 1, episode 13 of Burke’s law.
Professor Kingston runs a roadside museum called Antique Americana. He has mannequins dressed in period costumes and arranged to commemorate moments in US history. One is the St. Valentines Day massacre. After a few other fake looking scenes he shows his customers an antique electric chair depicting the execution of Fannie May Flann (There is no such person among the list of female victims of the electric chair). Kingston pulls a switch and suddenly a real woman’s dead body instead of a dummy lurches forward. Burke is called and on the way in he pauses to look at a fake gravestone with the inscription, “He Called Bat Masterson a Liar”. Gene Barry played Bat Masterson before he played Burke. The woman looks like she was beaten to death. A ring of untanned skin around her finger shows a wedding ring has been removed. He interviews Kingston who says he works alone but his daughter Sarah works there sometimes. The rest of the time she’s a tennis bum and she’s going out with a married man. He says a married man should only go with a married woman because they have more in common. Among Kingston’s items they find an old swimsuit calendar and one of the models is the dead woman. The calendar was made by the Beacon Printing Company and they go there. The receptionist Mrs. Ormsby has a picture from long ago of herself and her son at Kingston’s museum. She thinks a son should always be with his mother. He asks about the model and she says to talk to Mr. Smith. Smith looks up the calendar month and year and finds the body is that of Eleonora Davis. He gives Burke her address. He says she was more interested in being behind the camera so they taught her about photography. He introduces Burke to Harold the photographer who thinks that it’s wrong for women to pose in bikinis. He prefers to take pictures of women wearing clothes. Burke calls Les and tells him and Tim to check out Eleonora’s address. Les tells him that Eleonora wasn’t beaten to death but with carbon monoxide. Les and Tim talk with Eleonora’s landlady Mrs. Mulligan. She wants to be paid for information and so Tim gives her some money. They ask about Rudolph Davis. She says Ellie Davis left him because he was broke. One of Burke’s girlfriends happens to have Eleonor’s most recent address. She got it from her friend Tootsie to whom she was recommending Canadian Air Force exercises. At Eleonor’s studio they find photo negatives of various people in compromising positions along with notes on how much they paid her to not publish the photos. At Burke’s office are two boy scouts and one little brother who found a mannequin in the lake behind Kingston’s museum. On the mannequin was a wedding ring that they give to Burke. Burke goes to talk with Rudy and with Kingston’s daughter at a tennis court. Rudy is surprised to know his wife is dead but he’s happy about it. So far on this show almost everybody that hears of a murder is glad. Sarah says Eleonor was refusing a divorce unless Rudy paid her $3000. Burke goes back to Smith because he figures out that the wedding ring was his late wife’s. He gave it to Eleonora. He provided the models for the compromising photos but he didn’t know it was for blackmail. He asked her for the ring back but she wanted $1000. He started beating her until she was unconscious. Mrs. Ormsby told him she was dead but she wasn’t so she took her to Kingston’s where she killed her with carbon monoxide from his antique car. She says she did it all by herself but Burke knows she needed help. He suddenly realizes that Harold is her son and he helped her. He’s the one who stupidly put the ring on the mannequin.
Mrs. Ormsby was played by Elsa Lanchester, whose parents were members of the Social Democratic Federation and didn’t believe in marriage or god. They were famous because of the Lanchester Kidnapping Case in which Elsa’s mother Edith was kidnapped by Elsa’s grandfather and placed in a mental hospital because he believed she could not be sane if she refused to get married. Edith later became the secretary of Karl Marx’s daughter. Elsa wanted to be a dancer and so Edith enrolled her in Isadora Duncan’s Paris school. In 1920 she started performing as an Egyptian dancer in English music halls. At the same time she founded the Children’s Theatre in Soho where she taught dance. Her theatrical debut was in a West End production in 1922 called Thirty Minutes in a Street. In 1924 she and her partner Harold Scott opened a nightclub called Cave of Harmony where they performed plays and cabarets. The club was a hangout for writers like Aldous Huxley and H. G. Wells. Her first movie was an amateur production in 1925 made by her friend Evelyn Waugh called The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama. Her first professional film appearance was in One of the Best in 1927. H.G. Wells wrote three screenplays for her and on those sets she became involved with Charles Laughton. They married in 1929 and two years later she discovered he was gay but they stayed married until he died in 1962. Her first Hollywood film was as one of the wives in The Private Life of Henry VIII. She played Mary Shelley and the Bride in The Bride of Frankenstein. She co-starred in Rembrandt. She was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role in Come to the Stable. Throughout the 50s she had a nightclub act and one woman theatrical-musical shows. She wrote two autobiographies: Charles Laughton and I and Elsa Lanchester Herself. She considered her acting style to be vaudeville because she was playing directly to the audience rather than the camera.
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