Jeff Burton

            On Thursday morning I uploaded “Slavic Soul”, my translation of “L'âme slave” by Boris Vian to my Christian’s Translations blog and started preparing it for publication. 

            I revised my translation of “La plus jolie fille du monde” (The Prettiest Girl in the World) by Serge Gainsbourg and ran through singing and playing it in English. Tomorrow I’ll upload it to Christian’s Translations, prepare it for publication, and may even have it published. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of four sessions. It went out of tune a couple of times at the beginning but settled in for rest of the ninety minute rehearsal. 

            I weighed 86.85 kilos before breakfast. 

            At 11:45 I rode down the street to Parkdale Community Legal Services for my appointment. I had a good long talk with a student lawyer named Joseph. He said my landlord definitely needs to give me written notice if he plans to come in and tear up my walls. It’s not certain if he has the right to simply do that while I’m living here. The landlord has offered me a choice to either stay at a motel during renovations or stay in my place but Joseph says if Raja thinks I could stay there even though my peaceful enjoyment of my home is disturbed then he’s probably in the wrong. If the work he plans to do would require me to leave then Raja needs to fill out a special form that requires a hearing before he does anything. Joseph will get back to me on this once he’s consulted with his supervisor. He says I can maybe block the renovations on the grounds that they aren’t necessary, in which case Raja would have to try to prove to the Landlord-Tenant Board that they are required. 

            I weighed 86.95 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back I stopped at Freshco. The cherries are cheap but they are still from the US. The raspberries are usually from Mexico but this time they were from California and so I got a pack Mexican blueberries instead. I bought two bags of green grapes, some bananas, a pack of chicken legs, two packs of Full City Dark coffee, dish detergent, and a tube of Sensodyne tooth paste. I did a price match on the grapes with the Food Basics price of $8.77 a kilo. 

            I weighed 86.5 kilos at 18:22. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:39. 

            I converted the “Lungs and Breathing” and the “Diaphragm” videos that I downloaded yesterday to AVI and imported them into Movie Maker. In the “Ballad of My Chest Cavity” project I decided to use the “Lungs and Breathing” video and inserted it into the main timeline just before the second verse, which features the lungs. The speed of the lungs expanding and contracting in the video was too slow for the beat of the song and so I used the effect of doubling the speed. But that was still too slow and so I doubled it again and then again. That made the lungs move to the rhythm of the song. The lungs in the video were brown against a blue human outline and I didn’t really like the look and so I added the Edge Detection effect, which made the lungs an outline as well. But that took all of the colour out of them and the whole video looked a little pale and so I added the effect of moving through the colour spectrum. The “Lungs and Breathing” video put the concert video slightly behind and so I shaved a bit of the “Lungs and Breathing” video off until the concert video was synchronized with the studio audio for the lines, “At night my lungs they take the air along the promenade and stroll the boardwalk hand in hand down to the balustrade”. After that the synchronization goes a little off again but I’ll figure out how to fix that tomorrow. 

            I compared the song practice videos of my electric performances of “Laisse tomber les filles” on September 17 and 19. I think September 19 looks and sounds better except for the traffic noise. I compared September 29 to September 19 and find that September 19 is the best so far. There are four left to compare. 

            I had a potato with gravy and my last slice of roast beef while watching season 2, episode 11 of The Bill Cosby Show. 

            This is part two of the story of Chet helping Dolores Winters have her baby. She’s going into the second stage of labour but is not as confident as she was before. Chet reassures her and she’s okay again. He helps her through the contractions by describing her climbing a mountain and each time it’s a slightly higher mountain. Chet says he needs to boil some water but Dolores says that’s just in the movies. Mr. Tyler comes and says he found a cop who says he’ll come after he evacuates some old people from a flooded building. Tyler occupies Dolores’s kids with cacao and games. Dolores starts yelling. The cop arrives and when Tyler tells him Dolores is mountain climbing he recognizes natural childbirth. He says he had one who was fantasizing about the heavy weight championship while giving birth. The cop heads for the bedroom to help but Chet is standing in the doorway looking pleased with himself and announces, “We had a baby!” and then we hear the baby crying. Later Chet and Tyler go to see the baby with presents. They’ve both bought baby mobiles to hang over the crib. The father says they’ll put one at each end. Dolores says they have narrowed the baby’s name down to three: “Philip”, “Vernan”, or “Chester”. Chet thinks “Chester” would be best but that it should be shortened to “Chet”. The father says he likes it but his son Harold tells him, “That’s what you’ve been calling him all morning!” 

            The father was played by Jeff Burton, who spent the 1950s in the US Army and retired with the rank of captain. He started acting in summer stock theatre. Between 1964 and 1974 he played supporting guest appearances on TV series and in Blacksploitation films. His TV debut was on an episode of Hazel. He played Lieutenant Thomas Dodge, who was one of the three astronauts that landed on The Planet of the Apes but his character was killed, stuffed and displayed in a museum. He co-starred in Street Sisters (aka Black Hooker). In later life he became a parole officer.