Carl Reiner

            On Thursday morning I finished revising my translation of “C’est le Bebop” by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll run through singing and playing it before uploading it to my Christian’s Translations blog. 

            I worked out the chords for most of the first verse of “Mon Légionnaire” by Raymond Asso. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. 

            I weighed 87.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I finished transcribing my hand written notes for my Critical Summary but it took me a long time because I kept dozing off. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been at midday in ten days. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and even though it was only minus four the cold was clawing through my gloves with its gloves off on the way back. I stopped at Freshco where I bought seven bags of green grapes, a pack of blackberries, a pack of blueberries, some bananas, seven loose avocadoes, three bags of small avocadoes, a bag of lemons, fifteen vine ripened tomatoes, and two jugs of garden Cocktail. The grapes were so expensive that Priscilla the cashier looked on her phone for a price match for me and saved me $20. That was very nice of her. 

            I weighed 87 kilos at 18:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:30. 

            I worked on my Critical Summary but only completed a paragraph before dinner: 

            In Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger’s essay “Mysticism and Materiality: Pearl and the Theology of Metaphor” she argues that it is through metaphor that “mysticism” manifests itself in language. The Medieval poem “Pearl” is then a mystical work of art because of its heavy use of metaphor. She goes on to say that dreams are also a form of metaphor. That would imply that dreaming itself is a mystical experience. As “Pearl” takes place almost entirely in a dream it suggests that this would render it as an even more deeply mystical poem, but also accessibly so because anyone could potentially dream such an experience as the poet describes. 

            I had the rest of my potato soup with the rest of my plantain chips and the remainder of my soymilk while watching season 2, episode 13 of Burke’s Law. 

            This was a silly story full of a lot of stereotypical characters deliberately played in an over the top manner. At a convention of the world’s greatest detectives, Chief Gaynor, the keynote speaker is in another room finishing his speech. Meanwhile in the conference room Commissar Ilyna Buda of the Hungarian Peoples Police drinks to the other attendees. They are Chief Inspector House of Scotland Yard, Bascule Doirot from the French Sûreté, Toto from the Metropolitan Police of Tokyo, the famous US private eye Caligula Fox, and their absent comrade Captain Amos Burke. Suddenly the lights go out. While Tim and Les are struggling to light a candelabra Toto comes out and says somebody stole his Star of Fujiyama. They open the door to Gaynor’s office to find he’s been shot dead. They call Burke and when he arrives Tim and Les are in trouble for allowing this to happen under their watch. Les says the only suspects are the detectives because no one else could have gotten in. The lights weren’t out in the hall and so if anyone had come in from there they would have seen them. While Tim was watching the door and Les was calling Burke they couldn’t stop the world’s greatest detectives from tramping all over the murder scene. Burke enters the conference room where Fox is having his dinner. Burke tells Fox he hopes he is the murderer since he’s the only non police detective there. If he didn’t do it then that means a cop has become a cop killer. Burke says one of them might be an impostor. Burke observes that there was a mechanism in the table setting that allowed the killer to cause the lights to go off. Burke realizes that all the detectives left the room without being checked to see if they are carrying the Star of Fujiyama. Tim, Les and Ames do an experiment to see if the suspect could have gotten past them in the dark. Ames is blindfolded and tries to make it across the room but after several tries they find it would have been impossible. Burke goes to see House who is an over the top parody of Sherlock Holmes. House makes wild deductions based on faulty observations and he is always wrong. He concludes that Burke is a former sailor because he sees from his thumbs that he’s tied many nautical knots. He can tell from the hereditary slope of Burke’s shoulders that his father was a hog carrier. Burke says a House is not a Holmes. House plays the violin badly to help himself think. House plays the Hungarian Suicide Song. House says that he observed during dinner that Gaynor was on dope. Burke gets the lab report that Gaynor was on dope. Burke goes to see Toto who is played horribly by a white actor. Burke thinks someone slipped Gaynor a mickey. Burke goes to see Ilyna and finds her preaching against capitalism in a working class bar. Tim finds Doirot on the beach where he hides the star of Fujiyama. Tim pretends that he’s an aspiring detective novelist and outlines the plot of the real crime that has taken place. Doirot reveals that he has the star and that he knows Tim is a cop. He says the star was slipped into his pocket by Fox. Now Burke has the star and he interviews Fox who says it was slipped in his pocket by House. House says it was dropped into his pocket by Ilyna. She says it was passed to her by Doirot. Burke says he knows who the murderer is but needs to prove it. He invites all the suspects to dinner in his home. He invites Toto there an hour early and says he needs his help to capture the killer. He says he wants him to hide with Henry and he calls for Henry but there’s no answer. Toto says he saw Henry go into the study. Burke finds Henry leaned over a table, investigates and says he’s dead. He tells Toto to call the police and he leaves the room. Then Burke fires a gun. Burke steps out and tells Toto that’s the way he did it. He killed Gaynor while Tim and Les were reporting the murder that hadn’t happened yet. Toto pulls a gun on Burke but Tim and Les enter the room suddenly and distract him long enough for Burke to disarm him. 

            House was played by Carl Reiner, who at the age of 16 attended a dramatic workshop and it set the direction of his life. His first screen appearance was in the 1948 TV sitcom Fashion Story. The next year he was a regular on the 54th Street Revue. He made his Broadway debut that year in the hit musical Inside USA. In 1950 he joined the cast of Your Show of Shows and became a crucial part of the sketch show, winning an Emmy for his work. When Your Show of Shows ended he continued working with Sid Caesar on Caesar’s Hour. He was nominated for three more Emmys for the show and won two. On Caesar’s Hour he was also a writer. Around that time he wrote his novel Enter Laughing. It became a play and then a movie. In 1959 he wrote the pilot for a show called Man of the House but it wasn’t picked up because the lead character was too Jewish. He developed a routine with Mel Brooks called “The 2000 Year Old Man” which they performed on the Steve Allen Show. It became a hit album that won a Grammy. They did five more albums together and an animated version of the original skit. Reiner’s Man of the House pilot was picked up as The Dick Van Dyke Show with Reiner playing the dictatorial Alan Brady based on Sid Caesar. For it Reiner won five more Emmys, three for writing and two as the producer. Years later he played Alan Brady on Mad About You and won another Emmy. His directorial debut was the film adaptation of his play Enter Laughing. He directed The Comic, Where’s Poppa, Oh God, The Jerk, The Man With Two Brains, All of Me, and That Old Feeling. He co-starred in The Russians Are Coming. He was a regular on Hot in Cleveland and was the voice of Carl Reineroceros in Toy Story 4. He worked right up until his death at 98.