Dick Crockett

            On Thursday morning I went to bed with my undershirt, sweatpants and socks on under the comforter because it was so cold. 

            I edited and published on my Christian’s Translations blog “Dance and Swing to the White and Black Blues”. Tomorrow I’ll post the lyrics on Facebook and then move on to learning the antepenultimate Gainsbourg song in my project. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. The B string continues to go out of tune. 

            During song practice I saw the phone ringing and noticed it was Bell’s number so I answered it. It was a technician here to install the cable for my modem. There were two techs: a guy named Robert with a slight Jamaican accent and a guy named Igor with a strong Slavic accent. They made an interesting team. At first they said they’d have to run the cable from the back door of the building and down the hallway to drill a hole from the hallway to my bedroom. I had thought they could run a cable along the side of the building to the east side of my kitchen but Robbie said they couldn’t do it because the building is covered with stucco and they didn’t have attachments that would hold a cable to stucco. After a while they realized there were attachments already there and they just drilled a hole in the east wall and ran the cable through. Someone else is going to come soon I guess with the modem. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos before breakfast at 11:00, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since January 9. 

            I weighed 86.35 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on the way back. I knew that No Frills had a better deal on grapes but when I tried to access the flyer for the price match my phone shut down. It was almost at 70% when I left but this has happened a few times recently. My old phone battery is reacting to the extreme cold and can’t handle being asked to do anything when I’ve been out riding. Later I checked my records and saw that I bought the phone seven years and two months ago. Nobody keeps their phones as long as I keep mine but I see no reason to change until a phone stops functioning properly and it looks like that time is now. I’ll look into getting a new one at Freedom Mobile when I pay for my February phone service next week. 

            I picked through their grapes, putting the soft ones into bags of other soft ones and ended up with five small bags of relatively firm grapes. I also got a pack of raspberries, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a pack of Full City Dark coffee, a jar of Bolognese pasta sauce (because it looks like Classico has discontinued the Basilica sauce and their Italian sausage sauce isn’t as good), and some two-in-one dandruff shampoo. Priscilla was kind enough to find the price match for me because I always buy so many grapes. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos at 19:18. That’s the least I’ve tipped the scales in the evening since January 8. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 20:31. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of roast beef while watching season 2, episode 39 of Batman. 

            This story was part 3 of a three parter. At the end of the last episode the Joker has captured Batman, Robin and his former moll Venus. They are chained in the artificial lagoon where Joker keeps his giant clam. The clam has just swallowed Robin. At the beginning of this story Batman makes one of his weakest escapes. He does nothing clever to get free of his chains. He simply finds the strength to break them and then pries open the clam to save Robin before he is digested. Batman puts Venus up in the midtown apartment of Bruce Wayne that he hardly ever uses. Meanwhile Joker’s men Uranus and Mars break Penguin out of prison in a laundry bag. Back at the Batcave, Batman and Robin try to figure out Joker’s next crime. All of his capers have been zodiac themed throughout this storyline and he has been moving in sequence around the astrological wheel. The next on his list is Aquarius the water bearer and Batman thinks he plans to sabotage the city’s reservoir. Batman’s suspicion is correct as we see that the Joker has developed a concentrated gelatin that can turn the entire water system into strawberry jelly. Joker tells Penguin he needs him for the Capricorn phase of his plan to make Batman the goat by seducing Venus, who he knows is staying in Bruce Wayne’s apartment because he placed a homing device in her shoe. The Joker is successful in jellifying the water system. Batman and Robin head for the reservoir in the Bat Copter. With a portable Bat Lab contained in a briefcase Batman begins analyzing the jelly to find the antidote. Meanwhile several boxes of roses are delivered (by Rob Reiner in his screen debut) to Venus. She thinks they are from Batman but then the Penguin arrives to tell her they are from him. Then he has Rob give her a large bottle of Surplus 6, the most expensive perfume in the world. She thinks the strawberry jelly coming from the faucets is just how rich millionaires like Bruce Wayne live. Penguin then has rob serve them champagne and Penguin gets Venus to drink glass after glass by warning her that otherwise she could die of dehydrophalia. Meanwhile Batman has developed the counter chemical to Joker Jelly and attaches it to an explosive batarang which he throws out into the middle of the reservoir. After the explosion the water is instantaneously returned to normal. Back in Wayne’s apartment Penguin tells Venus that she has inspired him to reform but one stumbling block to that is that Batman has his criminal record locked in the Batcave. He requests that she ask Batman to take her to the Batcave so she can slip his card from the Bat Computer and Penguin will be able to start with a clean slate. Later Venus asks Batman and he seems quite taken with Venus because he says he trusts her and will let her see the Batcave. However he can’t let her know its location and so she must be given Batgas first so she will be asleep on the way there. Once they arrive, Batman sprays her with a waking gas. But then out of the trunk of the Batmobile emerges The Joker, the Penguin, plus Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. That’s one big Bat Trunk! But suddenly Batman pulls a switch and Joker and Penguin are caught in a flash that makes them look for a moment like photo negatives. Batman says it’s his Bat Spectrograph criminal analyzer, which he’s just recently developed. It has recorded Joker and Penguin’s bone structure, metabolism rate, molecular blood structure, and retina patterns. That sounds like a major invasion of privacy. He says it only works at close range and so he needed them both in the Batcave so he could do a successful scan and that’s why he lured them both there. Penguin tries to incinerate Batman and Robin with his umbrella but it doesn’t work because the negative ion attractor that Batman placed in the trunk depleted its power source. Now the big sound effects battle takes place until Joker, Penguin, and Joker’s gang are subdued. Batman gasses them for transport back to prison. 

            One of Joker’s henchmen was played by Dick Crockett, whose film debut was in the 1938 Marx Brothers movie Room Service. In 1939 he began working as both an actor and a stuntman in films such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He was associate producer of The Pink Panther, The Great Race, What Did You Do During the War Daddy?, and Gunn. He was second unit director of Darling Lili, and Wild Rovers. He played President Gerald Ford in The Pink Panther Strikes Again. The film “10” was dedicated to Dick Crockett. Julie Andrews claimed in her autobiography that Crockett committed suicide.