I finished working out the chords for “Sacha Distel et Jean-Pierre Cassel’s Song and Dance” by Serge Gainsbourg. On Tuesday I’ll run through singing and playing it in French and English and then I’ll upload it to Christian’s Translations to prepare it for publication.
I played my Gibson electric guitar during song practice for the last of two sessions. Tomorrow I’ll do a two session stretch of playing my Kramer electric.
I weighed 86.15 kilos before breakfast.
Around midday I worked a little more in editing a video of the third appearance of Batgirl on the live action Batman TV series.
I weighed 87.1 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the early afternoon since March 21.
I took a siesta at the usual time of 14:30 but woke up twenty minutes later than usual. I took a bike ride but only went as far as Bathurst and Bloor. I stopped at Freshco on the way home to buy a jug of high acid vinegar and also picked up three packs of grape tomatoes.
Just after I got home I was about to hang my bike up when I saw my upstairs neighbour Shawn. He bought a copy of my book and I signed it but I spelled his name “Sean” and crossed it out, then when I wrote it again I didn’t put the “w” in, so I added it later and it was a pretty messy book signing. He told me that the landlord tried to charge him extra for his brother living in his place but that’s illegal. It turns out that when Raja changed the front door lock it wasn’t for the reasons he stated in the notice he’d slipped under everybody’s doors. No one had lost their key. It was just Raja being a dick about Shawn and his brother. Shawn is still studying to be a social worker but he’s at the apprenticeship phase now and working at a drop-in centre. He still has to turn in assignments but that will be finished soon.
I weighed 86.7 kilos at 18:30.
I was caught up on my journal at 19:36.
I took another crack at converting the one clip of Lime Kilm Club Field Day that wouldn’t open in Movie Maker. I had converted it to WMV but it froze in Movie Maker. I tried reconverting it to WMV with both Total Video Converter and WinX video converter but that didn’t work. Finally I used WinX to convert it to AVI and that worked. I imported it to Movie Maker, then in the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Seven Shades of Blues” I worked on organizing all my clips of Lime Kilm Club Field Day in some sort of logical order.
I had the usual tomato, cucumber, scallion and avocado salad with lime juice dressing and a glass of Garden Cocktail while watching episodes 25 and 26 of The Adventures of Batman.
In the first story it’s Valentines Day and Catwoman sends Batman a cat with a valentine on its collar and a note offering a truce for the day. Robin likes the cat and names her Valentina. It rides with them in the Batmobile but the heroes don’t realize that Valentina is being tracked so that Catwoman can commit crimes when Batman and Robin are far away. Catwoman robs a mail truck but by the time Batman and Robin get there she is already performing another theft at the airport. They see her on the cloverleaf but she is able to evade their every attempt to catch her. Batman concludes that she is tracking them through Valentina. Suddenly Valentina sees a mouse and jumps out of the Catmobile. Robin follows her when she goes into a hollow log where it is dark and he sees she is glowing. He brings her back to Batman and they take her to police headquarters. There Batman determines that Valentina’s fur is covered with a chemical that gives off radio waves. They leave the cat with Commissioner Gordon to go to Spiffany’s to catch Catwoman. Gordon decides to go there too and asks his daughter Barbara to watch after Valentina. But Barbara wants to help catch Catwoman so she changes to Batgirl and takes Valentina with her on her Batgirl Cycle, not realizing she is tipping Catwoman off by doing so. When Batgirl gets there, Valentina leaves her to go into the Batmobile. Catwoman escapes and Batgirl follows her but Catwoman releases “cat claws”, which are claw shaped sharp objects she scatters on the road behind her that cause Batgirl to crash. Later the Batmobile starts to follow Catwoman and she releases more cat claws, which blow out all of the Batmobile’s tires. But Batman activates the Batmobile’s hover jets and they continue their pursuit. She puts a fence across the road but Batman activates the Bat Cutter to slice through. She tries to ram the Batmobile with her Catmobile but Batman increases the jets and rises above her. She climbs to the top of a building and Batman and Robin use their batapaults to shoot themselves to catch her but only manage to grab tentatively hold of the ledge while Catwoman whips their hands to try to cause them to loosen their grips and fall. Valentina sees Catwoman attacking her friends and climbs the building to attack Catwoman. It’s chasing her on the roof when Batgirl arrives and throws a bola that ties Catwoman’s legs. Batman and Robin take out the rest of Catwoman’s tomcats.
In the second story, Catwoman creates a fake Bat Signal and somehow knows where the exit tunnel of the Batcave is to trap the Batmobile in a net when it comes through. If she knew where the exit is wouldn’t she know how to get to the Batcave? She and her tomcats roll the Batmobile with Batman and Robin into the back of a van. But the Batmobile has a laser that breaks through the net and then they just reverse hard through the doors of the van. The Batmobile takes a shortcut and cuts the van off on the road. They take out her Tomcats but she stuns the heroes with her catnap gas bubbles and then steals the Batmobile. Later Batman deduces that Gotham Film Studios is Catwoman’s hideout. They take the Bat Copter after her. They climb to an upper window and come inside on the catwalk but Catwoman pushes a button that causes the catwalk to flip them down into a cage. She suspends Batman by his wrists from the ceiling while she traps Robin inside of a giant pinball in an enormous pinball machine. The red, coil-shaped bumper at the bottom will explode on contact, so he has to use body English to avoid it. Meanwhile a giant toy propellor with sharp blades is launched and so Batman must swing to avoid it. When he does, it cuts the rope he’s hanging by and he lands on the other end of a seesaw that Catwoman is absent mindedly standing on, causing her to fly and have to be caught by her tomcats. Batman frees Robin and they fight the tomcats with the usual giant objects being used as weapons. At one point Batman references Superman for the first time in this series, when he puts one of the tomcats on the propellor and launches it while saying “As Superman would say, up up and away!” Batman picks up a basketball and tells Robin he used to be a star player. He throws the ball up onto the pinball machine and sets off the explosive bumper. After that we just see Catwoman and her tomcats captured.
Some of the animation for these episodes was done by Norm McCabe, who in the 1930s became an animator for Leon Schlesinger, whose company produced Warner Brothers cartoons. He animated and co-directed several black and white Looney Tunes. His first was Goin to Heaven on a Mule. His last cartoon before he joined WWII was Tokio Jokio, which, like a lot of cartoons he did during the war would be considered racist today such as The Ducktators, and Confusions of a Nutzy Spy. After the war he illustrated Bozo the Clown books and records. In the early 60s he animated the cartoon parts of the Pink Panther movies as well the Pink Panther cartoons. In the late 60s he moved to Filmation where he animated shows like The Adventures of Batman. He worked on Fritz the Cat in 1972. He worked on several shows for different studios, such as Bobby’s World, Muppet Babies, The Transformers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In the 80s he trained young animators at Warner Brothers.
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