On Monday morning I finished memorizing “Tombée des nues” (Falling from the Clouds) by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the chords but no one has posted them and so I worked them out for half of the first verse.
I weighed 87.45 kilos before breakfast.
Around midday I took an early bike ride downtown because I wanted to stop at 555 King West to get my electric guitar strap copied. I asked for a slight alteration. The neck end of the original strap has a strip of leather extending from the first button hole, but that’s fine for the Kramer because it has a big space between the button and the neck. But on the Gibson the button is much closer and the strip curls up against the neck, so I asked for the hole to be closer to the end and to skew the other holes accordingly. They said it would cost $150. I was surprised because the strap they made last year cost $75. They then changed their minds and said they would charge me $120 and after tax $135 and that it would be $120 if I paid cash because I’m a regular customer. They said I could pick it up on Thursday. I later checked my diary from last year and it was actually $175 in cash that I paid for the other strap.
I weighed 86.55 kilos at 14:49, which is the lightest I’ve been in the early afternoon since July 8.
I weighed 87.95 kilos at 17:45.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:42.
It was too cloudy to go out and shoot videos so I just worked on the Movie Maker project for my electric performance of “The Wooden Leg”. I established the beginning and end and added a fade to black effect. Then I added a sharpen effect in conjunction with a grainy film effect. “Sharpen” or “Film Grain” by themselves are not that outstanding but combined they are quite striking. But when I published the movie the video was slightly slower and skewed with the audio even though in Movie Maker the video played normally. I tried it again and the same thing happened. I tried restarting Movie maker and rendering the movie again but that didn’t help. I restarted my computer but that didn’t change how Movie Maker behaved. I tried shutting down Chrome because it was using a lot of memory but it still didn’t help. I removed the “film grain” effect and published the movie. This time it came out normal. Something about sharpening the film grain seems to screw up how Movie Maker renders the movie. Sometimes Movie Maker behaves differently at different times so I’ll try it again tomorrow. If it doesn’t work I’ll try some different effects or just upload the version already rendered without the film grain effect.
I grilled two T-bone steaks and had one with a potato and gravy while watching season 5, episodes 17 and 18 of Bewitched.
Samantha is making a dress for Tabitha. As a witch who could conjure a dress instantly, Endora doesn’t understand the satisfaction of making things by hand. She thinks her daughter is living in poverty. Later a dishevelled man named Professor McCallister in a bad grey wig and who is obviously younger than he is trying to look comes to see Darrin. He shows Darrin’s secretary Betty a doll called The Fuzz, which he wants to market. We hear chimes to indicate something magical is happening. Betty falls in love with the doll because it immediately gives her a feeling of well being. It has the same effect on Darrin. He decides to back the professor who offers him 50%. Darrin persuades a client who owns a department store to put a few hundred of the dolls on display and they sell out. Soon Darrin is rolling in dough. The doll has no effect on Samantha but she suspects that a spell has been cast. She summons her mother but she swears with a witch’s honour that she didn’t cast a spell. Darrin is getting more and more rich and spending extravagantly. Samantha calls Endora again and this time asks her if she got someone else to cast a spell and so now she has to admit it. The spell is reversed and Darrin has to return everything he acquired.
In the second story Samantha wakes up to find that everything she says rhymes. She summons Dr. Bombay but he doesn’t appear. She calls for her mother who says Bombay is on vacation but she’ll try to find him. She comes back with a potion for the Venetian verbal virus but it has no effect. Endora goes back to fetch Bombay and this time he comes. He listens to Samantha’s elbow and then looks at her through what looks like a giant magnifying glass but he calls it an ambocrepuscular evaluator. Through the lens we see that Samantha is covered in spots. Bombay says she has secondary vocabularyitis. He gives her a sound wave injection through her elbow with a giant tuning fork. That seems to do the trick. But that night Samantha, Darrin and Larry have dinner with a very important client and his wife. After a while Samantha starts rhyming again to everyone’s annoyance. Samantha excuses herself and pops home to her mother who is babysitting. Endora tells her that Bombay is climbing Mount Everest. Samantha meets him at the top but he tells her she’s just made a mockery of his accomplishment. She tells him her problem and he says she must have primary vocabularyitis and he gives her a higher sound wave dose. That cures her. She returns to the restaurant and tells Mr. Durfy that her rhyming was just a way to illustrate Darrin’s point that jingles are annoying that he should update his campaign according to Darrin’s suggestions. Later Endora has the same virus.
Both episodes were directed by Richard Michaels, who moved to Hollywood in 1955 at the age of 19 where he became a script supervisor for Allied Artists. He directed several episodes of Bewitched, The Brady Bunch and Love American Style. He directed a number of made for TV movies and also the mini-series I’ll Take Manhattan. He had an affair with Elizabeth Montgomery that started during the eighth season of Bewitched and broke up her marriage to the show’s producer William Asher as well as ending the show. They lived together for two years.
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