Rupert Crosse

            On Saturday morning I worked out the chords for the third verse of “L'âme slave” (Slavic Soul) by Boris Vian. 

            I could have memorized the third verse of “La plus jolie fille du monde” (The Prettiest Girl in the World) by Serge Gainsbourg but I made a push to try to nail down the entire song and didn’t quite get it. I should have it all in my head tomorrow. 

            I weighed 87.05 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since last Saturday. 

            Around midday I rode to No Frills where I bought three bags of green grapes, two bags of red grapes, two packs of organic raspberries (that were the same price as and in better condition than the non-organic raspberries), a watermelon, some bananas, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a pack of cheddar sausages, kitchen garbage bags, spoon sized shredded wheat, a container of skyr, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips.

            I weighed 87.1 kilos at 14:00. I had saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemon iced tea. 

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

            I weighed 86.8 kilos at 17:30. 

            At around 18:30 the landlord came by with a contractor and walked him through my place telling him to rip out all my beautiful antique walls and put drywall everywhere. He even wants to cover my wood floors with vinyl. He also said he’d remove the big mirror in the kitchen that adds so much light and a sense of space to my home. Those changes would break my heart. He told me if I were to get liability insurance for $1 million he wouldn’t do anything. At first I said that was absurd but when I looked into it I saw that it might not be that expensive: between $450 and $2000 a year. If I can get that and he agrees to keep his grubby hands off my place it would be worth it. It would still be less than paying rent on a place this size somewhere else. I’ll look into it on Monday. 

            Later I called Raja and told him I was going to try to get the liability insurance. He said he was okay with it but he’s going to try to prove I’m a liability and if the insurance company is still okay with it he doesn’t mind not spending the money on the renovations. Anyway I figured I’d call him so he doesn’t go ahead with the contract. He said he’d give me five days. If it doesn’t work out at least I tried.

            I was caught up with my journal at 19:30. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the Christian and the Lions studio recording of Brian Haddon’s song “The Ballad of My Chest Cavity” I started editing the video montage of musical Tom and Jerry cartoons. I had almost half of it done when Movie Maker crashed but only for that section. I decided to copy all of the Tom and Jerry bits and to paste them into another Movie Maker project. I’ll publish that Tom and Jerry project, then import it back into “Ballad of My Chest Cavity”. I’m pretty sure that’ll work. 

            But it didn’t work. It froze in the exact same places. I tried rendering the whole converted WMV file into a video in Movie Maker but that froze in the same place as well. Finally I used Winx to convert the original downloaded MP4 file to AVI and that worked. I finished editing all of the clips I wanted. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, pesto, Genoa salami and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 2, episode 6 of The Bill Cosby Show. 

            Chet, his mother, his brother, his Aunt Bertha and several others attend the reading of the will of Chet’s Great Aunt Harriet. The others each receive an item of value but Chet inherits all the rest of her possessions including a prized Abraham Lincoln letter that was handed down to her from her mother. The letter’s value is estimated to be $15,000 and that was in 1970, which would be $124,000 now. Harriet’s lawyer who read the will is Felix E. LeBlanc and he immediately injects himself into Chet’s life with investment plans for the money for the sale of the letter. Chet however just wants to spend the money on a high end car. Felix says that’s sudden death and that putting the money in the bank is like striking a match to it. He suggests buying a Mexican racehorse, investing in raw alcohol which increases in value ten times after seven years, or a pistachio nut farm. Meanwhile the letter is somewhere in one of several crates and boxes that are delivered to Chet’s place. They go through them over a few days until finally in a Bible they find a letter. But the letter is actually addressed to Lincoln and not from him and it is worthless. They accept that it was a wild goose chase but then they read the letter and it refers to having received a letter from Lincoln and so the show ends as they start looking for the letter again. 

            Felix was played by Rupert Crosse, who studied acting under John Cassavetes. He made his film debut in Shadows in 1958. His TV debut was on Johnny Staccato. For his performance in The Reivers in 1969 he was the first black actor to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. He co-starred with Don Adams in the short lived sitcom The Partners. He was one of the actors to whom Jack Nicholson dedicated his As Good As It Gets Academy Award. He was a lifetime member of The Actors Studio. He married the daughter of Cab Calloway.