Hilly Hicks

            On Monday morning I woke up to find someone (probably Shawn from upstairs) had switched the heat back on. The temperature in the hall when I went to bed was 21 and when I got up it was 21 again. I assume it got colder than that overnight and so it’s understandable that he would want it on. I guess he and I can be the thermostat team. He can turn it on when it gets too cold and I’ll turn it off when it gets too hot and together we’ll make the building comfortable. The humidity didn’t drop very much and so I didn’t need to turn the humidifiers back on. 

            The ibuprofen that I took at midnight was still working during yoga and so I was comfortable with no toothache. 

            I published on my Christian’s Translations blog “At the Risk You’ll Get the Blues”, my translation of “Au risque de te déplaire” by Serge Gainsbourg. I also posted the lyrics on Facebook. I went back through my files to look for Serge Gainsbourg songs I couldn’t translate because I only had the audio and no French text. I returned to “Al Cassel’s Air”, which was a TV skit that Gainsbourg wrote in 1964. I found the YouTube video and copied the URL, then pasted it into Vizard, which generated a transcript. I didn’t have time to transcribe it and so I took a screenshot so I can transcribe it tomorrow. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. The painkiller slows down my reaction time and I feel stoned so I don’t really like it. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            I tried to see if any dentists were open today. The emergency place at Yonge and St. Clair said I could get my tooth pulled today but I didn’t want to ride all the way up there. The internet listed each place nearby as “open” but I don’t think they were. I walked over to Family Dentistry at Lansdowne and Queen and it was all caged up. I’ll call Dentistry On Queen West tomorrow and if they don’t have a quick and close referral I’ll try someplace local. 

            I weighed 87.45 kilos before lunch, which is the most I’ve weighed in the early afternoon since March 19. 

            I took a siesta and slept an extra 45 minutes, probably because of the ibuprofen. It was too late to take a bike ride downtown and so I just rode to Ossington and Bloor. 

            I weighed 86.6 kilos at 18:08, the same as on the evening of May 11. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:15. 

            I worked on adding shades of blue to the sepia copy of frame 24 of my rainbow wave animation. There’ll be four frames left to do after this one. 

            I had a potato with gravy and my last two chicken drumsticks while watching season 1, episode 6 of The Bill Cosby Show. 

            In the teachers lounge the other teachers are offering advice to Chet on how to coach the school basketball team, which always seems to lose. Chet makes a deal with them that he will never try to tell them how to teach if they don’t tell him how to coach. Then Chet learns that Mr. Roman, the regular Algebra teacher is sick and he will have to teach his class. Chet thinks it’s going to be easy because there is an answer book and he will get the smartest student in class to demonstrate. In the class, a student tells him they are supposed to have Algebra word problems today. Chet picks three from the book. He has three students do the problems on the board and checks the answers in the book. The second one is wrong and so he gets Eddy Tucker to come up and finish it. But the third problem is one that none of the students can figure out: “How many pounds of $0.75 cent candy and how many pounds of $1.25 candy must be mixed to make a mixture of 9 pounds to sell at $0.96 a pound? Chet’s problem is that the answer to that problem has been torn from the book. Janet had written, “Let x = $0.75 of candy and let y = $1.25 of candy”. The bell rings and Chet tells them to all work on the problem over the weekend and if they don’t get it he will help them. He says that, thinking he won’t be back but then he learns he has to substitute for Roman again on Monday. He asks Mr. Madeo the Math teacher for help but he reminds Chet they made a deal. Madeo says he’s going to let the other Math teachers know that Chet thinks the job is easy. Chet spends the weekend trying to figure out the problem. He even goes to a candy store and asks the owner to sell him the exact amounts and prices of candy as in the problem. Since none of the candy is for that price he asks the owner to charge him more so the prices match the problem. He says he needs an even mixture so it all comes out as 9 pounds at $0.96 a pound. The owner says one needs to know Algebra to do that. He says he can do it by adding little bits of each price of candy until it comes out to 9 pounds on the scale. Finally Chet just tells him to give him 9 pounds of each. Chet tries to do it on his scale at home but it doesn’t work. He calls up Mr. Roman to ask him about the problem but Madeo has already been in touch and Roman is not going to help him. Chet comes in to Roman’s class on Monday hoping someone has solved the problem but no one has. He fumbles at the blackboard trying to look like he knows something until finally Eddy has a eureka moment and he’s figured it out. He does it on the board and saves Chet’s ass. This was the funniest episode so far. 

            Eddy was played by Hilly Hicks, who co-starred in the short-lived sitcom “Roll Out”, which was set during WWII and about a company of supply truck drivers who were mostly black. He played Lewis Harvey in the mini series Roots. He played Robbie Robertson in the 1977 TV movie pilot of The Amazing Spiderman. He became a United Methodist Church pastor.