Russ Mayberry

            On Sunday morning my left arm was slightly better than the day before. 

            I finished working out the proper text for “L'araignée du soir” (The Spider of Night) by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I can return to memorizing it. 

            I memorized the fourth verse of “Une Fille à la mer” (A Girl Out to Sea) by Serge Gainsbourg and translated it. 

            I played my Kramer electric for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune a lot for a Kramer. Tomorrow I’ll begin a two session stretch of playing my Martin acoustic. 

            I weighed 86.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I started applying the second coat of primer to my bathroom. I got a little over a quarter of the ceiling and upper walls done. I did the northeast corner and about half of the southeast corner before the paint in the tray was used up. Judging from what I got done I’m definitely going to need a third coat of primer before I colour the ceiling and walls. 

            I weighed 87.3 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the early afternoon since last Sunday. I had whole wheat saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of iced tea. 

            Before preparing to leave for my bike ride I tried to carry my lazy Susan with the toiletries still on it to put them back on the top bathroom shelf but the mouthwash fell off and the cap broke, spilling about 10% of the liquid on the floor. I sponge toweled it up and tried to find an alternative cap for the mouthwash bottle so the alcohol wouldn’t evaporate. The cap of a stainless steel water bottle almost fit but I needed to fold up a sheet of paper towel and wrap it around the cap so it would somewhat fit. Because of that delay I ended up leaving for my bike ride about fifteen minutes later than usual. I rode downtown and back. 

            I weighed 86.65 kilos at 18:08. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:03. 

            I imported the video I shot on Friday into Movie Maker and copied it to the end of the timeline of my Paranoiac Utopia project. I edited it as I watched it and cut out about 13 minutes of the 63 minute video. So far the later parts when I’m shooting while riding on the sidewalk are better than the earlier parts when I’m shooting from the street. 

            In my “2024-10-07 Song Practice” Movie Maker project I synchronized the audio with the video before supper. Next I need to cut out all the songs before “Elisa”. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, tomato pesto, pepperoni, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 19 of The Brady Bunch. 

            Carol is away then Alice sprains her ankle, leaving Mike the task of getting the six children to do all the cooking and cleaning. The girls make a mess of breakfast and the boys are supposed to do the dishes but they refuse to clean up more than a normal mess and so they walk away. They try to do the laundry and soap suds floods all the way to the dining room. At dinner everything burns except for Mike’s lambchops and the salad ends up on the floor. Alice is upset about her situation because she can’t go to the meatcutters ball with her boyfriend Sam. On top of that Sam feels he has to go and take someone else because he’s on the entertainment committee. Marcia appeals to Greg about the boys doing their part and at first he repeats that the boys shouldn’t have to clean up the girls’ mess but she reminds him that dad told mom they were doing a great job when they’re not. Way too easily Greg changes his mind and they all start working together to turn things around. Somehow they suddenly all become good cooks. Mike orders some steaks from Sam and we see him handling the meat with his bare hands, which no butcher would do nowadays. The night of the Meat Cutters Ball Sam comes to see Alice instead of going to the ball and they spend a romantic evening alone together. 

            This episode was directed by Russ Mayberry who directed a few other Brady Bunch stories. He directed 7 episodes of McCloud. He directed the Disney film Unidentified Flying Oddball. He directed “Code of Honour”, which is considered to be the worst episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and was in fact fired because of it. The alien race the crew encounters was originally written to be reptilian in nature with a kind of Samurai culture. But Mayberry instead cast the aliens all from African Americans and made the alien culture one similar to 1940s Africa. The episode made the cast uncomfortable because it felt racist. Jonathan Frakes thinks it should not be in circulation.