Aliza Gur

            On Friday morning I worked out the chords for the chorus and the first verse of “Made in China” by Serge Gainsbourg. I don’t think the rest of the song deviates from that pattern and so it shouldn’t take long to finish it. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second session of four. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before breakfast. 

            I continued to re-read Pearl by Siân Hughes, making notes as I went along on references to paganism. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been at midday in fifteen days. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. There were a few places closed for Good Friday but a lot of stores were open and traffic didn’t seem that light. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:24. 

            I continued to research the pagan references in the novel Pearl and found a couple of interesting things: 

            The word bogeyman comes from the Middle English bugge or bogge, which means “frightening spectre” “terror” or “scarecrow” “bogart” “bugbear” “bug” a goblin. Hobgoblins or elf goblins were considered helpful, doing small chores around the house for scraps of food before Christianity made them mischievous and evil. 

            Medieval folk said the smell of hawthorn blossom was just like the smell of the Great Plague in London. Botanists later discovered the reason for this. The chemical trimethylamine present in hawthorn blossom is also formed in decaying animal tissue. In the past, when corpses were in the house for several days before burial, people would have been very familiar with the smell of death. So it is hardly surprising that hawthorn blossoms were so unwelcome in the house. 

            I made oven wedge fries topped with chick peas, garlic and salsa. I ate dinner while watching episode 10 of Amos Burke: Secret Agent. 

            General Cabral is a former South American dictator in exile in Spain with his wife Carla and her sister Florita. Cabral and Carla plan to return to their country where they can rule like king and queen with financial backing from the red Chinese. But a doctor reveals to Carla that the general is terminally ill. Fearing that Cabral will hesitate in their plans if he finds out, she keeps the diagnosis from him and has the doctor murdered. Later an MX3 agent named Jeff Smith who was investigating the case is also killed after the brake line of his car was cut with a hacksaw. Burke is given the mission to find out what happened. Burke is searching for evidence in Smith’s apartment when a young woman named Carmen comes in and tries to burn his clothes. Burke stops her but she says that Jeff told her to burn everything if anything happens to him. She says she thinks Django the chef at The Foundry, the club where she dances is the killer. At the Foundry Carmen taps out a messages with her feet to tell Burke that Django is in the kitchen. Burke confronts Django and is attacked. After a long fight around kitchen things Django dies. Before he dies he tells Burke that Captain Luzardo paid him to kill Smith. Luzardo is Carla’s lover and part of the plot to return to Latin America. Carmen gives Burke the key to a locker at the airport. Inside he finds General Cabal’s x-ray. Carmen says she saw Florita give the envelope to Smith last week. Florita just happens to be there at the club and Burke talks with her. She doesn’t know that Smith is dead. He takes her to Smith’s apartment where he shows her the x-ray and tells her about Smith’s murder. Florita knows now that Carla’s plan is to return with the general long enough to reestablish power and then when Cabral dies she will take over. Carla learns that Burke has seen the x-ray and she is worried that he will ruin their plans. But Luzardo has captured Burke. They take him to the dungeon and tie him to the rack (That particular dungeon with the steep curved stone stairway and the torches on the walls has shown up in several episodes and I’ve seen it on other shows as well. Sometimes it is modernized but the shape of the set is unmistakeable). They stretch Burke on the rack for a couple of turns but they are called away for a meeting. While they are gone Burke cuts through the rope with his cufflink and frees himself. He climbs into a secret corridor in the castle where he observes the meeting take place. Then he goes back to the dungeon and finds a passage to the caverns below through which he escapes. Back in his apartment Burke finds Willowby the weapons expert who has brought him some tools. A telescopic ladder, miniature grenades and gas bombs, a gas mask, and a gun that switches from blanks to real bullets. Burke returns to the castle where from the secret corridor he observes the meeting with the Chinese. Burke interrupts and shoots one of the Chinese agents. But Luzardo comes up behind Burke and disarms him. Carla takes Burke’s gun and shoots him. But he has it set for blanks and only pretends to be dead. Minutes later the general dies before it is time to leave Spain. Burke catches Luzardo trying to escape with the money. They fight and Luzardo runs but Florita shoots him. Carla has lost her mind and just sits watching old film footage of her glory days as a dictator’s wife. 

            Carmen was played by Aliza Gur, who was Miss Israel of 1960. She co-starred in the cult vampire film The Hand of Night. In the James Bond film From Russia With Love she played one of the two Romani women fighting over a man in perhaps the last of the great cinematic cat fights. In my experience women fight with their fists like everybody else. She co-starred in Night Train to Paris and Tarzan the Jungle Boy.