Celeste Yarnall

            On Saturday morning I worked out the chords to the third and fourth verses of “Notre Derniere Chance” (Our Final Chance) by Serge Gainsbourg. I’m pretty sure at least the fifth verse will have the same chords as the first and there are just two verses after that. 

            I played my Kramer electric during song practice and it went out of tune more than usual. Tomorrow I’ll begin a two session stretch of playing my Martin acoustic. 

            I weighed 86.85 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went over to Freedom Mobile to pay for my August phone service. Then I went into Vina Pharmacy to see if they had razors. All the local supermarkets put their razors behind a locked glass case and so it’s a hassle to ask for them. Vina had them free of encasement and so I got the Gillette Mach 3 with 1 extra blade. I also got some shaving gel because I forgot to get some at Freshco and at No Frills they also keep their shaving cream and gel locked up. 

            I rode down to No Frills where I bought five bags of Canadian cherries, a pack of Ontario raspberries, a pack of organic Mexican raspberries, a Canadian watermelon, some bananas, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a pack of chicken legs, a box of whole wheat saltines, a jug of iced tea, a jug of orange juice, two containers of 0% skyr, two containers of 4% skyr, and two bags of Miss Vickie’s chips. 

            I brought my groceries home and thumped my trailer upstairs. Then I went back down to get my bike and ran into my next building neighbour Taro. He’s been working as a bike courier for many years but is now trying to find something else. He says he used to be able to make $20 an hour but now he’s lucky to get $20 a day because the electric bike couriers have taken over. 99% of the electric bike food couriers are South Asian and Taro says he’s never felt so racist in his life because he resents them violently. He confessed that he once took his knife and slashed the tires on one of their E-bikes. He says that priority is given to the South Asians for deliveries and the best he can get is when a job is so far away that they turn it down. I guess it’s possible that South Asians have taken over the dispatching of these companies but I wonder if they are just beating Taro to the jobs not because they are South Asian but because he only rides a pedal bike. If dispatchers know which couriers are riding E-bikes that can get there faster, wouldn’t they favour the E-bike couriers? He says most of them commute into town on the GO Train from Brampton. While we were talking Taro pointed out several of them as they passed and even shouted to one of them, “Go back to Brampton!” The ironic thing is that Taro is of Asian descent himself. I think he’s Vietnamese. He says he used to be a landscaper but nowadays one needs a horticultural certificate to mow a lawn. He says that one needs a food handling certificate to wash dishes but I don’t think that’s generally true. He’s two months behind on his rent and his landlady is threatening to evict him. He says he’s been investing in Bit Coin and is expecting $80,000. I asked if he’s sure it’s not a scam. He said he did get scammed but this is legit. I have my doubts. 

            I weighed 86.95 kilos at 14:17. I had saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of iced tea.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. On the way back a cyclist was giving an electric bike riding food courier hell for cutting people off. 

            I weighed 87 kilos at 17:45. 

            I was caught up with my journal at 18:50. 

            I worked on the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Paranoiac Utopia”. I edited Buster Keaton’s “Cops” down to four 8/10 of a second clips. I copied one of the clips of Keaton on a plank that is teetering on a fence while cops on either side are trying to reach him and pasted it into the main timeline to replace the concert video that doesn’t exactly correspond to the studio audio when I sing the phrase “uptight cops”. But the concert video was still ahead of the studio audio for “and frazzled addicts” and so I added another half second clip of the same scene. The video was still ahead and so I added another 8/10s and that synchronized the concert video and the studio audio for “each”. For the next word “thinks” the audio was ahead again and so I just deleted a small part of the video to line them up. 

            In my “2024-09-27 Song Practice” Movie Maker project I synchronized the audio with the video and then began isolating the song “Comment te dire adieu”. I still hadn’t reached the final clip when it was time for supper. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, tomato pesto, a cut up New Zealand grass fed beef burger, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 3 of The Bold Ones; The Protectors. 

            Some guys are stealing crates of booze from a warehouse when a police car rolls up. But the car blinks its headlights as a signal and one of the thieves blinks his flashlight in response. The cop goes to a phonebooth and makes a call but all he says is “The laundry has been delivered” and then hangs up. But unknown to the thieves and the cops a night watchman named Earl Howell is observing all this from an upper window. The next day Deputy Chief of police Sam Danforth is on a lunch date with his girlfriend Allison when he gets a call from District Attorney Bill Washburn who tells him to come to his office right away. Howell is there and when Sam hears about a bad cop from his department he immediately challenges the old man’s eyesight and judgement. Sam begins to look through the profiles of his officers with his fellow deputy chief Jack Miller. They note the ones who’ve slipped up in their duties with infractions like sleeping on the job, drinking, and undue force. There have been a lot of thefts of high end items in the warehouse district and the thieves keep getting away. Sam orders the sector staked out continuously. Next there’s a successful jewel theft with no clues. Jack and his wife Ethel meet with Sam and his girlfriend Allison at a police event in a nightclub. Ethel complains about Jack’s drinking. Bill calls Sam to tell him that they have a line on Tony Stovall having some of the stolen booze at his nightclub and so Sam and Jack head there. They find one crate under the bar but Stovall was tipped off before the cops go there. Bill secretly has one cop spying on the other cops and sending him reports. They catch Jack as the one whose been involved with the crime ring. He says he did it to keep his wife. Sam is upset but Allison tells him that in her neighbourhood it was the most crooked cop that was the bravest and who saved everybody from a gunman. I don’t know what the moral of that is supposed to be, especially in relation to the main story. 

            Ethel Miller was played by Celeste Yarnall, who started as a model. Her TV debut was on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Her film debut was in The Nutty Professor. In 1964 she was the last Miss Rheingold. She played Yeoman Martha Landon in the Star Trek episode The Apple. She was in Live A Little Love A Little with Elvis. She said she watched Martin Luther King’s funeral with Elvis in his trailer and he cried. She co-starred in Eve and Beast of Blood. She starred in The Velvet Vampire. After acting she managed screenwriters, got rich with her own real estate business, became a successful breeder of Tonkinese cats, and hosted a radio show. She earned a PhD in nutrition and lectured on the subject at Pacific Western University. She wrote Natural Dog Care and Natural Cat Care. She attended Star Trek conventions to sign autographs.