Elisha Cook Jr.

            On Thursday morning I finished revising my translation of “Le temps passe” (Time Goes By) by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll run through singing and playing it in English and then I’ll upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog. 

            In my Christian’s Translations blog I finished preparing “Tandem” by Serge Gainsbourg for publication. I only need to add a video and then I’ll post it tomorrow. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the last of two sessions. Tomorrow I’ll begin a two session stretch of playing my Martin acoustic guitar. 

            I weighed 86.3 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since January 20. 

            I wrote an email to Indigo to encourage them to sell my book in their store. I figured it was worth a try. As far as I know Ekstasis has done nothing to promote my book Paranoiac Utopia to Toronto book stores. 

            I weighed 86.3 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I didn’t even consider taking my bike out in the aftermath of the storm. It would have been hell to ride. But I needed grapes and some raspberries and so I walked down the street to Queen Fresh where I got three bags of red grapes and a heart shaped pack of raspberries. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos at 17:25 but that was after getting everything from 85.85 to 87.6. I picked the weight that came up twice and it made more sense than the high one anyway. 

            I posted my blog but didn’t notice until I posted the link on Facebook that the front image had a water mark. But even though I deleted the image on my blog and posted another photo the old image kept showing up on Facebook and so I had to delete the entire blog and start again. 

            I finished watching the BBC documentary “When Hippies Ruled the World” and it has lots of clips I can use for my Seven Shades of Blues video. I downloaded the documentary about the Rainbow Family Gathering. Tomorrow I’ll convert it to WMV AVI and then edit it in Movie Maker. All I want is the clip of the people walking with rainbow umbrellas. That’s also all I want from the Woodstock doc. 

            I compared the song practice videos of my electric performances of “Annie C’s Aniseed Suckers” on September 14 and 18. September 14 looks a lot better and sounds better. I compared September 20 to September 14 and September 14 looks better. I make similar mistakes both times but the Gibson sounds better in September 14. I compared September 24 to September 14 and September 24 was the day the guy was cleaning the building across the street with a power sprayer so it was pretty noisy. I compared September 30 to September 14 and I made fewer wrong chords on September 14. I compared October 6 to September 14 and I make fewer wrong chords on October 6. I compared October 10 to October 6 and heard that I made fewer errors on October 6. So if I upload an electric version of this song to YouTube it will be the one from October 6. 

            I compared the videos of my electric performances of “Les Sucettes” on September 23 and October 5. September 23 had fewer wrong chords. I compared October 9 to September 23 and I made fewer mistakes on October 9 even though the Kramer was out of tune. I don’t think any of the electric takes from last year were good enough to upload. The acoustic takes are a little better but I think that I can improve my playing on these songs and so I’ll try it again in the spring.

            I reviewed the video of my song practice performance of “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” on September 1. Only the top half of the Gibson could be seen and I fumbled through without trying to do a smooth take. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a chicken leg while watching the second season finale of the 60s Batman TV series. 

            This story begins with the cliffhanger that ended the previous one. Mr. Freeze has placed Batman and Robin in a chamber that will freeze and then vapourize them. As the transparent chamber frosts over, Freeze pulls the switch to vapourize and then Batman and Robin are gone. Professor Isaacson is removed from the deep freeze where Freeze placed him after injecting him with dry ice to torture the formula for frozen ice out of him. Isaacson is extremely shaken and thinks his memory has been frozen as well. Freeze threatens him with another injection and so Isaacson says he’ll try. Freeze moves his operation back to the inside of the glacier in Gotham Harbour. After they leave, Batman and Robin emerge from the seal cage, having discovered an emergency exit from the vapourizing chamber. Because she has chosen to be the accomplice of a criminal, Batman refuses to refer to Freeze’s girlfriend as Glacia Glaze because he thinks it’s too elegant a name and so he calls her by her birth name of Emma Strunk. Holy identity disrespect! The next day there are a sea of icebergs off Gotham Harbour. Freeze hasn’t made the ice-bergs but rather used an ice magnet to attract them from the north and south. Professor Isaacson finishes writing down his formula but doesn’t know how it works. Glacia charms him into figuring it out and the thermodynamic ice ray gun is built. Freeze gives the world an ultimatum and threatens to return it to the ice age unless his demands are met. Freeze shoots the weapon at Gotham and freezes several things, including the Bat Computer. It isn’t explained how that could be frozen while other things near it like the Batmobile aren’t. Mr. Freeze’s homing seal is still in a bathtub at police headquarters. Batman has a seal Bat Tracker attached to it and arranges for the seal to be released in Gotham Harbour. Batman and Robin follow the seal’s signal from above in the Bat Copter as it swims to Freeze’s hideout. Commissioner Gordon tells his secretary to call his daughter Barbara at college to tell her to take a later plane because he wants to meet her at the airport. This is the second reference to Barbara in the second season, apparently to prepare the audience for her to appear as Batgirl in the very next episode, which will be the premier of the third season. Batman and Robin surprise Freeze by being still alive and by finding his hideout. His ice gun doesn’t work on them because of their super thermal long under-wear. The final fight takes place. Freeze tries to escape but commissioner Gordon, Chief O’Hara and the cops arrive and arrest him and Glacia. Batman rewards Freeze’s homing seal with a live fish that he just happens to have because a true crimefighter always carries everything he needs in his utility belt. 

            Professor Isaacson was played by Elisha Cook Jr., who debuted on stage at 14 to work in vaudeville, stock companies and on Broadway. His film debut was in Her Child in 1930. He moved to Hollywood in 1936. He co-starred in The Killing, House On Haunted Hill, ans Born to Kill. He played the lawyer Samuel T. Cogley on the Star Trek episode Court Martial. He played the crime lord Ice Pick on Magnum PI. He was married to his wife Peggy for 25 years then they divorced but three years later they remarried and stayed together again for another 19 years. He lived in a cabin in the mountains where he fished between films.