I worked out the chords for the intro and the first line of “Paris d’papa” (Papa’s Paris) by Serge Gainsbourg.
I played my Kramer electric during song practice and it went out of tune quite a bit but not as much as the Martin and the Gibson. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing the Martin.
I weighed 87 kilos before breakfast.
Around midday I rode down to No Frills where they still had some Canadian cherries but they were all too soft. They had grapes but they were all from the US, so I got a basket of Canadian peaches, another of Canadian nectarines and a Canadian watermelon. I also bought a pack of raspberries, some bananas, a pack of three chicken legs, sandwich bags, olive oil, saltines, maple mustard, guacamole salsa, two containers of plain skyr, a container of berry skyr, a jug of iced tea, two bags of Miss Vickie’s chips, and two 1.5 liter jugs of orange juice for $4 each because the less than 3 liter jugs were over $8.
I weighed 87.75 at 14:13. 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.
I weighed 87.3 kilos at 17:40.
I was caught up in my journal at 18:23.
In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Paranoiac Utopia” I continued replacing the partitioned sections of the concert video with parts of the exact same duration from my August 22 video and made it to the end of the song. But I’m not fully happy with the clips I used from my ride through the Milky Way graffiti alley at the end, so I think I’ll change some of them tomorrow.
I opened my “2024-10-10 Song Practice” Movie Maker project and deleted the song that came before “Coiffure by Eliza”. Then I saved the project as “Coiffure by Eliza (Kramer)”. I deleted all the songs that followed, then added a fade to black effect; plus the Posterize and the Brighten effects. It actually makes the video look a lot like I remember acid trips to have appeared 50 years ago. I published the movie and took eleven screen shots. Tomorrow I’ll upload the video to YouTube.
I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, basil pesto, oven fries, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 14 of Checkmate.
A priest named Reverend Wister arrives in San Francisco from China and is approached by a Chinese man who immediately shoots him, but he is only wounded in his left arm. Another Chinese man named Han stops to help him. Don and Dr. Hyatt go to a Chinese theatre where Wei-Ling is performing one of Hyatt’s favourite operas. There they meet Reverend Wister, who has hired Checkmate. He says that someone is trying to stop him from warning Tom Lo that he may be assassinated. Lo heads an organization that helps people get out of Red China. The opera is also the favourite of Wister. The royal palace has been invaded by barbarians and Wei-Ling plays a handmaiden imitating the princess. She is shown poisoning the barbarian leader and then stabbing herself to death with a ceremonial knife. Wister says he was a missionary for 40 years and his wife was killed while evacuating the children from their mission. We learn that Hyatt is also a widower. The next day Wister is taken to the police station to identify his attacker. A man named Chang, who is the assassin we saw, is brought in but Wister says he doesn’t remember. Han is brought in and he immediately identifies Chang as the shooter. Wister only has a three day Visa to be in the US and after that has to return home to England. A day of those three has passed but Checkmate still hasn’t found Lo. That night they learn that Chang was released from jail and found dead an hour later. Jed drives the understandably distraught Mrs. Chang home and she mentions that her husband was afraid of the retired warlord General Wu, who heads the Benevolent Society, an outgrowth of the old Tongs. Don goes to see Wu but he says he does not know Lo. Wister goes to see General Wu and meets his daughter who turns out to be the opera star Wei-Ling. Han is also there. She asks Wister to bring someone to vouch for him and he calls for Don and Hyatt. But then Wei-Ling says they can’t share Lo’s secret with westerners. If that was her answer all along then why bother to bring Don and Hyatt in? That night Han comes through Wister’s window and draws a gun. We don’t see what happens but the next day Wister, Don and Hyatt are in the police station after Wister has killed Han in self defense. Hyatt wonders if Wei-Ling is actually Tom Lo. Wister quotes “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”. Hyatt asks if that’s Proverbs and Wister confirms it is chapter 7, verse 3. But Hyatt looks it up and it’s John 15:13. Don learns that Wister is an imposter. Hyatt follows Wister to the opera where he has switched Wei-Ling’s collapsing theatrical knife for a real one so she will really kill herself in the suicide scene. But Hyatt stops the knife from being brought to her and switches the knives back again. Don takes the fake Wister to the police.
Wei-Ling was played by Lisa Lu, who started as a teenager performing in Kunqu theatrical productions in China. In the late 1950s the communist government stopped subsidizing the theatre and so Lu moved to the US. In 1956 she joined the Pasadena Playhouse and made her professional western stage debut in Teahouse of the August Moon in 1958. She made her TV debut on Have Gun, Will Travel in 1958. She co-starred in The Mountain Road, Womanhunt, The Last Tempest, Saint Jack, and The 14 Amazons. She starred in Qing guo qing cheng, Sewing Woman, The Empress Dowager, and Apart Together. At 98 she became the oldest person to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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