Lorenzo Semple Jr.

            On Friday morning I technically had all the parts of “Le petit Lauriston” by Boris Vian memorized, but just not the order of the very long list of nasty gifts for the French Gestapo that are run through backwards after the final verse. There’s a good chance I’ll have it all done tomorrow. 

            I worked out the chords for the intro of “Sacha Distel et Jean-Pierre Cassel’s Song and Dance” by Serge Gainsbourg up until the horns come in to herald the first verse. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio electric guitar for the first of two sessions. It was very hot, even with the windows open. It’s that time of year when the heat will be on inappropriately. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since March 6. 

            Around midday I went over to the hardware store to buy a strike plate to fit the new doorknob set on the bathroom door. They didn’t have any as short as the original but I thought it being narrow was more important. I bought a plate and some duct tape. It turned out length was important because the too long plate exceeded the depression that had been carved in the wood. I used a razor cutter and a screwdriver to lengthen the depression. But then I found the screws wouldn’t catch. When I finally found longer screws the door still wouldn’t close. I worked on it in the evening too and finally gave up. The depression in the wood is enough for the door to be locked if it ever will be. Maybe I can make it look nicer with lacquer and paint later on. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 86.2 kilos at 19:00. 

            That’s the least I’ve tipped the scales in the evening since February 9. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 20:13. 

            In the Movie Maker project for my song “Seven Shades of Blues” I edited out a little more of Blackboard Jungle. My struggles earlier with the strike plate ate up a lot of my time for working on projects. There’s only one more piece from Blackboard Jungle I really need but I’m not exactly sure where it is. 

            I had another bowl of my lima bean and pea stew with a toasted slice of multigrain sandwich bread while watching the final half hour of Batman: the Movie from 1966. 

            Batman and Robin are in the Batcopter pursuing the Penguin, who has stolen the Batmobile. They’ve allowed him to steal it so they can trace him back to the hideout of the alliance he has formed with Catwoman, Joker and Riddler. They are all on Penguin’s submarine. Riddler fires a Polaris missile with the intention of it writing a riddle in the sky but it accidentally clips the Batcopter and causes it to crash. By a crazy stroke of luck however, the helicopter lands on top of a display of foam rubber products in front of a foam rubber company. They read the sky written riddles: “What comes down yellow and white?” Answer: An egg. “How do you divide seventeen apples sixteen ways?” Answer: Make apple sauce. They conclude that the villains are after the UN Security Council. Batman and Robin run across town to get to the UN building. The Penguin’s sub surfaces at the base of the back of the UN building. They blow the door. Meanwhile Penguin is already upstairs putting the guards to sleep with Penguin gas from his umbrella. He opens the door of the abandoned elevator and his criminal colleagues emerge. Meanwhile in the Security Council chamber the members are all shouting at each other at the same time. They don’t even notice the villains when they enter the room. The Joker fires the Total Dehydrator at each of them and one by one they turn into piles of dust on their chairs, each one a different colour. To the very last member they are still obliviously arguing as their colleagues disappear. Each one is then swept into a separate vile. Batman and Robin confront them as they head for the elevator. But Catwoman warns Batman that Miss Kitka dies if he takes one more step. Batman hesitates, not realizing that Catwoman is his beloved Kitka. The villains escape to Penguin’s submarine. They prepare the ransom notes demanding $1 billion cash from each of the nine countries that will be delivered to their secret island by Penguin’s carrier pigeons. Meanwhile Batman and Robin are speeding out to sea on the Batboat to intercept the sub. The villains fire a surface to surface homing missile. Batman has Robin send a jamming signal to the missile and it hits the water to explode short of the Batboat. The sub fires two torpedoes. Robin fires Bat Charges at the torpedoes and explodes them. Knowing that the heroes will soon be firing Bat Charges at the sub, Penguin orders it to dive and to run silent. There are several direct hits from Bat Charges until the sub is forced to surface. There is a final fight on the deck of the submarine with Penguin’s pirates as well as Penguin, Riddler and Joker against Batman and Robin. Catwoman sneaks up and pushes Robin into the water and soon does the same to Batman. As Batman is climbing back on she climbs down the hatch but trips and hits her head, knocking her mask off. She comes to as he lifts her up and he sees that Catwoman is Kitka, the woman he loves. We see tears running down from under his mask. He hears in his mind the chanteuse singing “Plaisir d’amour”. After a minute he regains his composure and tells Robin to cuff Catwoman. Batman gingerly grabs the vials of dust that are the dehydrated security council. But the unwitting Commadore Schmidlapp, who still thinks he is a passenger on a cruise ship emerges from his cabin because no one has yet brought his tea. He stumbles into Batman causing the vials of dust to shatter and mix on the floor. Later every speck of dust that was the security council has been gathered and is being processed in the Batcave by Batman’s Super Molecular Dust Separator. After tense moments separation is accomplished. The dust is returned to the security council chamber and placed on the member’s respective chairs. The dust is rehydrated and the members reassemble as if nothing had happened and continue arguing. But each member is speaking a language of another member. Batman thinks that this mixing of minds may be the greatest service ever performed for humanity. Batman and Robin leave through the window and climb down the building. That’s the end. It was entertaining. The best part was the romance between the disguised Catwoman and Bruce Wayne and it was interesting that she was untouched emotionally by his affections. Lee Merriweather doesn’t hold a candle to Julie Newmar in portraying Catwoman. They were both sinister and mean but Newmar’s Catwoman had humour to soften the blow. 

            The main writer for Batman: the Movie and for the Batman TV series was Lorenzo Semple Jr. I had thought that it was William Dozier but Dozier was more in control of the big picture and served as the announcer. It was Dozier’s vision that the Batman series needed to be pop art but Semple fleshed out all the details. It was his idea to have the written sound effects for the fight scenes and to put the word “Bat” in front of all of Batman’s tools. Robin’s “holy” this and that exclamations were inspired by the “bless my” expletives of the Tom Swift books. Even though he only scripted the first four episodes of the series he wrote a detailed instruction manual for the other writers that scripted Batman episodes. Batman must never be shown breaking the law, even if it’s parking in a no parking zone. Semple started as a short story writer for The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers. His play Tonight in Samarkand ran on Broadway in 1955. The movie The Honeymoon Machine was based on his Broadway play The Golden Fleecing. He co-wrote the movies Pretty Poison, Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, Flash Gordon, and Papillon. He scripted The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker. He wrote several episodes of Burke’s Law. He said that the Batman series was the best thing he ever wrote. In his senior years he was half of a YouTube show called The Reel Geezers on which he reviewed films.