Maura McGiveney

            On Sunday morning it was very hot because the heat was on all night. I switched the humidifiers on. 

            I worked out the chords for the third and fourth verses of “À poil ou à plumes” (Naked or in Feathers) by Serge Gainsbourg. There’s a good chance I’ll have the song finished tomorrow. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice for the first of two sessions and it went out of tune a lot. 

            Around midday I applied more primer to the bathroom door and the white squares of the checkerboard pattern on the floor in front of my kitchen counter and stove. I finally finished the last of the primer. Next I need to buy a step ladder before painting colour in the bathroom. 

            I weighed 88.6 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. My Range Rider leather gloves were almost not warm enough. 

            I weighed 88.2 kilos at 18:10. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 18:45. 

            I listened to the Willie P. Bennett cassette that my late friend Mike Copping gave me years ago. Mike’s wife Cathy was Bennett’s ex-girlfriend. 

            In my “2024-10-09 Song Practice” Movie Maker project I deleted everything before “Je t’aime. Moi non plus” and then copied the project as “Je t’aime. Moi non plus (electric)”. I isolated the song and separated the voices of the two speakers with the effects of spanning the colour spectrum and grey scale. Then I published it just to archive it because I won’t be uploading that song to YouTube until I record a better version. 

            I started a “2024-09-20 Song Practice” Movie Maker project. The video begins in part B but the audio starts from the beginning so I had to delete a lot of the audio to synchronize them. The audio was still at least a song behind at supper time. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with marinara sauce, tomato pesto, a cut up ground pork burger, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 11 of Cain’s Hundred. 

            Karl Bigger is co-owner of a barely successful cheap costume jewellery company. His partner has disappeared. His accountant Hal Saltzman has a genius for numbers and is also a compulsive thief but the company would be lost without him. The company though has now become a front for a gold smuggling racket run by James Condon and so real gold is being used to make what used to be fashioned from cheap materials. It’s being smuggled by women who wear it while crossing the Mexican border. Nicholas Cain is investigating a gold smuggling racket in a district on the Mexican border. He goes to get help from DA Maggie Summers, who has a cheeky secretary. Cain doesn’t yet know how the gold is being smuggled. Harry White works for Bigger and he’s recruiting women like Carol Tredman to smuggle the gold. Cain is checking the jewellery shops, including Bigger’s. He recognizes Saltzman as being wanted for a parole violation but doesn’t pick him up. Instead he goes to see him at his home. Saltzy picks Cain’s pocket out of habit but gives him back his pen. Cain tells him that the gold makes its way to the far east where it is used to buy heroin that is smuggled back into the US. Saltzy brings Cain a parcel of jewels as samples of how the gold is being smuggled. Cain photographs the items and then gives them back to Saltzy who gives Cain back his watch. Now that they know what to look for, customs officers are looking for women wearing the jewellery. Carol is photographed crossing to Mexico with the jewellery and stopped because she doesn’t have it on the way back. However it can’t be proven she has done anything wrong so she gets off. Carol gets the idea for them to give her the gold jewellery to wear to Mexico but a cheap copy to wear on the way back. Saltzman tells Cain about it. But now someone has been giving junk to the carriers and Condon is threatening to kill Bigger. Carol decides it’s getting too nasty and she goes to tell Cain and Maggie about the operation. Condon is arrested and Cain talks Maggie into hiring both Carol and Saltzman. 

            Maggie’s secretary was played by Maura McGiveney, who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. She moved to Hollywood and made her film debut with an uncredited role in North By Northwest. She was nominated for a Golden Globe in 1966 as Most Promising Newcomer in Do Not Disturb. She played the character called “The Body Politic” as a cast member of an ensemble comedy show called Turn On that was trying to be something like Rowen and Martin’s Laugh-In but a little more risqué. The sponsors found it too offensive and canceled it after one episode. She was very disappointed because she was so sure it was going to be a hit.