Leslie Nielsen

            On Tuesday morning my left arm was less sore than the day before until I was lying on my back. I lifted my leg, reached up to grab my foot and wrenched my arm again. 

            I searched for the chords for “L'année à lenvers” (The Year in Reverse) by Boris Vian but no one had posted them. Stupid AI tried to tell me it’s not a song but a novel. I worked them out for the intro and the beginning of the first line. 

            I finished my direct translation of “Notre Derniere Chance” (Our Final Chance) by Serge Gainsbourg using the names of the French newspapers he lists. I started an alternative version using the more familiar names of mostly English language newspapers. I’ll continue with that tomorrow.

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice for the first of two sessions. It went out of tune a few times but not to an annoying degree. 

            I weighed 87.65 kilos before breakfast. 

            A little after 11:00 I took my Surly down to Metro Cycles. I bought it there six months ago and I get a free partial tune-up half a year after purchase. I told Alex that the key issues are the gears are delaying, the brakes are squeaking, and the seat tends to drop. He said it should be ready tomorrow or Thursday. 

            I weighed 87.3 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 87 kilos at 17:40. 

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

            I worked on the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Paranoiac Utopia”. The concert video continues to drag behind the studio audio and so every few words I have to delete some of it to bring it forward. In the second chorus I managed to synchronize the concert video with the studio audio for “our”, “hell must be”, “the”, “devil they believe each”, and “greeting”. 

            I started a Movie Maker project for my September 26 song practice and it didn’t take long to synchronize the audio with the video. I deleted everything that preceded my final acoustic performance of “How to Say Goodbye to You”. Then I saved the project as “How to Say Goodbye to You (acoustic). I isolated the song, added a fade to black effect and then published it. I made a thumbnail from a screenshot of the end and then uploaded the video to YouTube. 

            Then I opened my Movie Maker project for October 9 and started deleting everything that comes before my electric version of “Comment te dire adieu”. 

            I grilled three chicken legs and had one with a potato and gravy while watching the series finale of The Bold Ones: The Protectors. 

            A zookeeper named Morgan whose nickname is Tiger is smuggling drugs inside of animal feed. He sells a lot of pot and acid to the students of a local high school. The mother of Clancy Austin finds drugs in her son’s room and calls the cops. Clancy is a school leader and is about to give a graduation speech when the cops come to arrest him. He comments that he was just accepted at Princeton but now that’s all over. As a protest several students step forward and confess to the arresting officers that they too have drugs and so several arrests are made. Deputy Chief of Police Sam Danforth is mad because all these little arrests just make it more difficult to find the main dealer. The lab analyzes the LSD and discovers that it’s laced with poison and could be deadly. Morgan’s girlfriend Miriam has taken some of the bad acid and has wandered off. She has various encounters with strangers and almost gets raped by some homeless winos. Then she sees a cat and it reminds her of Tiger and she runs to the zoo. Morgan gives her something to counteract the acid and wants to take her to the hospital but then the cops arrive to arrest him. He runs but they corner him with their guns drawn. He surrenders but it’s bizarre that they would threaten to shoot an unarmed person. Meanwhile Miriam wanders into the tiger cage. I doubt if they would make the cage so easy to open. She is walking towards the tiger when District Attorney Bill Washburn walks in, gently picks her up in his arms, and then backs out of the cage. This happens in California in 1969 but now cannabis is legal there. This series was not well written and the characters were clichéd and inconsistent. Sometimes the cop would take a conservative stance but sometimes the DA would and the cop would be liberal. The dialogue was not natural. It was not as good as The Bold Ones: the Lawyers or The Bold Ones: The New Doctors. 

            Sam was played by Leslie Nielsen, whose father was a Mountie who beat him and his mother. Leslie was born in Regina and raised in the Northwest Territories. He escaped as soon as he could and lied his age at 17to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. He worked as a DJ for a Calgary station after leaving the RCAF. He was legally deaf and wore a hearing aid. He studied at the Academy of Radio Arts in Toronto and then earned a scholarship to the Neighbourhood Playhouse in New York. His TV debut was in an episode of Studio One in 1950. He appeared in 46 live TV shows in 1950 alone. He made his Broadway debut in Seagulls Over Sorrento in 1952. He made his film debut in The Vagabond King in 1956. He was a Star Trek fan from the very first show, perhaps because he saw that it was inspired by his 1956 movie The Forbidden Planet. He co-starred in The Opposite Sex, Tammy and the Bachelor, The Poseidon Adventure, City On Fire, Airplane, Prom Night, Wrongfully Accused, All I Want for Christmas, Stan Helsing, Men With Brooms, and Day of the Animals. He starred in Hot Summer Night, Repossessed, 2001 a Space Travesty, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and Mr. Magoo. He starred in the TV series The Swamp Fox and Doctorology. He played identical twins with opposite personalities in 19 episodes of Peyton Place. He starred in the sitcom Police Squad, which led to his many Naked Gun movies. In 2002 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. His brother Erik Nielsen was the Conservative Deputy Prime Minister of Canada from 1984 to 1986.