Ken Southworth

            On Thursday morning I uploaded to my Christian’s Translations blog “Our Pretty Gestapo”, my translation of “Le petit Lauriston” by Boris Vian. I started preparing it for publication. 

            For my translation of “Sacha Distel et Jean-Pierre Cassel’s Song and Dance” by Serge Gainsbourg, I named the characters Mr. Warble (representing the singer) for M. Distel and Mr. Gambol (representing the dancer) for M. Cassel. I uploaded it to Christian’s Translations and began preparing it for publication. I’ll probably have it posted tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. Hopefully next week the humidifiers won’t be necessary and I can take the Martin to be repaired. 

            I weighed 86.05 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I was looking for my WinX video converter but couldn’t find it anywhere. I used to find it in my start menu. I started reinstalling it when I saw in the Destination that the first word in its name is Digiarty and so I cancelled the installation since I knew I already had it under that name. I converted Season 3, episode 4 of Batman to WMV. 

            I weighed 86.05 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. I passed a guy on an electric bike and later he came up beside me at a light to tell me he liked my bike. He said it looks like a fast model. I told him I’m not a fast model anymore. I stopped at Freshco on the way home where the red grapes were super cheap and so I picked through them all until I got seven bags of relatively firm ones. I also bought a pack of raspberries, three individual avocadoes, two bags of avocadoes, a bunch of leaf lettuce, and a bunch of scallions. I wanted to find a Canadian alternative to Motts Garden Cocktail so I thought I’d try Matt and Steve’s Caesar. 

            I weighed 85.45 kilos at 18:26, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since February 9.

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:24. 

            I tried to use WinX to download from YouTube the video “The Story Behind Flower Power” but it turns out I would have to pay for the upgrade to do that. So I downloaded it with 4K Downloader and then used WinX to convert the MP4 file to WMV. I imported that into Movie Maker and copied it to the end of the timeline of my Seven Shades of Blues project. I edited it down to two segments and then inserted the clip of the riot police beating peaceful anti-war protestors to correspond with “Rebellion drags us to the grave”; followed by the clip of the young protestor putting flowers in the barrels of the guns of the military police, to fit with “resistance leads to growth”. Next I have to find videos to correspond with the last two lines of the song, “So wrestle with that angel but never let it lose / The rainbow road to Asgard’s paved with seven shades of blues”. I’ll start looking tomorrow. 

            I compared the electric song practice video of my October 3 performance of “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” to that of September 20. I found that I play the E flat about the same in both takes but the October 3 video looks a lot better. There are five more to compare. 

            I had a grape tomato, avocado, cucumber, and scallion salad with lemon juice for dressing and a glass of Matt and Steve’s Caesar (The foretaste isn’t great but the aftertaste ain’t bad). It was the last meal of my 14 day fast and I ate while watching episodes 31 and 32 of The Adventures of Batman and Robin. 

            In the first story, a South American luxury liner in Gotham harbour has in its safe a map to the lost treasure of the Incas. The Joker cracks the safe only to find inside of it Batman’s head because it’s a fake safe on a fake wall that Batman is standing behind in front of the real safe. Joker escapes. A week later the same map is travelling in an armoured car to a bank vault when the vehicle is bombed by Penguin. But as he descends upon it in his upside down umbrella the Batmobile arrives and so he flies away. Days later the Riddler is approaching the bank vault but is confronted by Batgirl. He tosses a grenade that is caught by Robin, then thrown to Batman and then back to Riddler, who throws it away just before it explodes. It blows a hole in the wall through which he escapes. Later Joker, Penguin, and Riddler meet to pool their minds on how to defeat Batman so they can get the Peruvian treasure map. They decide to try to split the team up by making Robin jealous of Batgirl. They fake a robbery of a jewellery store by Joker’s men and pull the alarm themselves to attract Batman and Robin. They wait until the Batmobile and then Batgirl arrives and make sure Batgirl sees it when one of them sneaks up on Batman. Batgirl snags the thug with her Batrope. Then three of them attack Batgirl while another three attack Robin, but Batgirl’s assailants pretend that she is too much for them while with Robin they don’t hold back. Then when Batgirl comes to rescue Robin, his attackers say, “Look out! Here comes Batgirl!” and they run away. Inside the store a trap is set for Batman and both Batgirl and Robin run inside. But a hidden thug trips Robin while Batgirl is unimpeded to save Batman from being hit from behind. The press arrive and take pictures of Batgirl with Batman while ignoring Robin. Later Dick Grayson goes for a bike ride to clear his head when he sees a billboard that reads “Welcome to Gotham City Home of Batman and Batgirl”. Dick is moping at home and listening to the radio when the DJ announces a new song about Batman and Batgirl, although Dick can’t see that Joker, Riddler, and Penguin are forcing the DJ to play it. That night on the Ed Sullivan Show, Batgirl is introduced as Batman’s number one partner. Dick answers the Batphone to hear that Joker, Riddler and Penguin have just been seen exiting the Broadcast Building and that Riddler left a riddle behind: “What’s worth two in the bush?”. Everybody knows that it’s a bird in hand that’s worth two in the bush but Dick misinterprets that the bird is the Penguin. Dick decides to change to Robin and to prove himself by capturing all three villains by himself. Robin heads out in the Batmobile but suddenly a giant hand blocks the road. When he leaves the car to approach it a cage drops over him. Robin is taken to an abandoned factory where he finds himself on a precariously narrow island of concrete surrounded by hungry alligators. Meanwhile both Batman and Batgirl separately conclude that the bird that’s worth two in the bush is Robin and they head out to save him. Robin activates the homing transmitter on his utility belt and both Batman and Batgirl are tracking it. Just as Robin is about to fall into the water, Batman swings in to save him and then Batgirl arrives. They all realize this has been a plot to break them up. The three villains approach the mansion of the Peruvian ambassador and break in, crack the safe, and steal the map. They each take a piece of the map but Batman sneaks up and grabs Riddler’s piece. But the ambassador drops a net on Batman, not realizing he’s not a burglar and the real crooks get away. The heroes now scheme to turn the tables and to break up the team of villains. Batman, Robin and Batgirl are being interviewed on television and Batman says that he feels sorry for Penguin because the other two will no doubt try to cut him out. Batgirl says she thinks the Riddler will double cross the Joker. At the bad guys’ hideout the Penguin confronts to other two and demands their thirds of the map. But he gets a dose of knockout gas from Riddler and then Joker gasses Riddler. Joker heads with the map for a yacht and tells the captain to make way for Peru. But the captain turns out to be Batman. Joker escapes in a speed boat but is pursued by Robin in a chair copter. Joker jumps in the water and swims to a dock where Batgirl is waiting for him. The moral is that you can’t beat teamwork. 

            In the second story, Batman and Robin attend the unveiling of a sculpture of themselves carved in the side of a mountain. But when the tarpaulin is pulled off there is also a statue of the Joker. Then the Joker appears atop the Batman statue. Batman and Robin try to reach Joker via the Batcopter. They lower themselves onto the Joker sculpture only to find that it’s not made of stone but of a sticky type of plastic into which they are sinking like in quicksand. Joker leaves to commit a crime “where the matador gets the girl”. The Batcopter is hovering above and Batman uses his remote control to have the ladder lowered and they pull themselves up. Back home Bruce and Dick are trying to figure out the meaning of “Where the matador gets the girl” when Alfred asks for the night off so he can go see Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen. Suddenly Batman remembers that it is in Carmen where the matador gets the girl. Robin says he read in the paper that the star soprano would be wearing the Tetrazzini Tiara tomorrow night and it is under guard back stage right now at the Opera House. That night Joker and his men are in the opera house when they see the floating and glowing heads of Batman and Robin up on the balcony. Joker sends two of his men to investigate and they see two glowing forms of Batman and Robin in the corridor. The men run because they think they are ghosts. The Joker sees the heroes swinging and cut their ropes so they fall but disappear before hitting the floor. Batman and Robin are using mirrors for their vanishing act. Joker swings and grabs the tiara from the guards. Joker escapes in the Jokermobile but has to make sure the heroes are really dead and so he goes back to the sculpture in the mountain. He’s poking the plastic sculpture when he is startled by Batman and falls in to begin sinking. They save Joker and arrest him. 

            Some of the animation for these episodes was done by Ken Southworth, who was born in England and won a scholarship to the Chicago Art Institute when he was ten. He got hired as an assistant animator by Disney in 1944. He completed the rough animation of Alice in Wonderland. He worked on animating the wicked stepmother in Cinderella. He worked on the film Song of the South and on several cartoon shorts. He worked at a number of animation studios after Disney. He is said to be the creator of the Woody Woodpecker show intro. At Hanna Barbera he worked on Scooby Doo, Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, and the Smurfs. He directed all 100 episodes of Q.T. Hush. He did the Looney Tunes animation that appears in Gremlins 2. He taught animation seminars at several institutions and also created a video home instruction animation course.