Burt Styler

            On Wednesday morning my left arm was feeling a lot better and I had to reach further to feel pain. 

            On my Christian’s Translations blog I published both “The Year in Reverse”, my translation of “L'année à lenvers” by Boris Vian and “Hot Off the Press” my translation of “Notre Dernière Chance” by Serge Gainsbourg. I posted the lyrics for “Hot Off the Press” on Facebook. Tomorrow I’ll post “The Year in Reverse” on my Boris Vian and my personal Facebook pages. 

            I looked for the next Gainsbourg song on my list that didn’t get translated and in the 1971 file I found “Bathing Beauty and Sympathy” and “Une fille à la mer”. Both songs were sung only on television, the first by Jane Birkin and the second by Petula Clark. So far I can’t find a recording of either of them but I’ll look again tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice for the last of two sessions and it stayed in tune. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my electrics. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since July 30. 

            Around midday I finished applying the first coat of primer in the bathroom. The metal brackets for the shelves don’t hold latex very well and screwhead sized spots of rust have seeped out from some of the screws. The bathroom looks a lot better than before but I think it’s going to need more than a second coat of primer and more than half the 3.7 liter can has been used up. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before lunch. I had saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of iced tea. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back and wore long pants for the first time this summer. It was also the first time this season that I haven’t won sandals and the first time riding my bike with my new Blundstones.

            I weighed 87 kilos at 17:50.

            I remembered I was out of beer so I put my boots back on and went over to the liquor store for a six pack of Creemore. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:18. 

            I had hoped to start shooting my video of Parkdale from my bike this evening but it was too cloudy. So I started a Movie Maker project for the studio recording of my song “Divorce the Weather” because there is both a studio recording of the song and a concert video of me performing it. The only other studio recording I have that is yet to be made into a video is “Tropic of Ulcer’ and in the same concert video I also do that song. So I’ll create a Movie Maker project for that one when I’m finished with “Divorce the Weather”. I almost had the audio and the video synchronized when it was time to stop. 

            I started a 2024-10-07 Song Practice” Movie Maker project and almost had the audio and video lined up when it was time for supper. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, a chopped New Zealand grass-fed beef burger, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 15 of The Brady Bunch. 

            The boys and the girls have been collecting trading stamps since they were small in what used to be their separate families. Now that they are part of one clan they begin fighting over the stamps because each gender group has different goals. The boys want a rowboat and the girls want a sewing machine. Alice donates a drawer full of hundreds of trading stamps. The boys and girls argue over custody of those until Mike suggests they simply divide them up. When they have a hard time doing so in a simple fashion Carol suggests they just put all of the stamps together and buy one thing for the entire family. They agree but the girls can’t think of anything that the boys would approve of and vice versa. Finally they decide to let Carol choose. Carol chooses from the catalogue a grandfather clock but Mike tells her the boys would not like it. He suggests a pool table but gets the same reaction from Carol. The next morning the newspaper announces that the Checkered Trading Stamp Company will be going out of business in one month and so a decision has to be made quickly because the store might run out of merchandize as people rush to use their stamps. After negotiation the boys and girls decide to return to a choice between the rowboat or the sewing machine and to make the choice the prize in a contest between the two groups. Marcia suggests swimming but Greg reminds her she’s a swimming champion and it has to be a contest of equals. They finally decide to take turns adding to a house of cards and the first group whose member knocks the house down loses. The card structure gets very large until when Greg is adding a card, Tiger the dog jumps him and he knocks the tower over. The girls win the decision and go to the Checkered company to claim their prize. They come home with a package and the boys are not thrilled until the girls reveal that they bought a colour TV for everyone. 

            The writer for this episode was Burt Styler, who after WWII wrote for the Kate Smith radio show. He co-wrote the screenplays for Call Me Mister and Boy Did I Get the Wrong Number. He wrote 24 episodes of The Carol Burnett Show. He won an Emmy award for writing the All In the Family episode “Edith’s Problem”.