Phil Leeds

            On Sunday morning just after midnight I turned on my new computer to see if my wifi adaptor would help it go online. But though it acknowledged the adaptor was there I couldn’t activate it. Then I tried to tether my phone to the new computer but that didn’t work either. I shut it down and turned mine back on then I looked for help. I found a tutorial that helped me override my computer’s insistence that I go online before anything else. When I turned the new desktop back on I held the shift key and pressed F10. That opened Command Prompt. I clicked the middle of the black box and it allowed me to type: “start ms-cxh:localonly” then I pressed Enter and everything opened up. I was able to connect my wifi adaptor to my Bell wifi network but there was still no internet. I turned off the new computer and turned my old one back on. I don’t normally use my Bell wifi on my old computer and just use the wifi from the Tibetan restaurant downstairs, but I don’t remember the password. I switched my computer to my Bell wifi and it connected but there was no internet. I think it’s been that way for a couple of months and I just didn’t notice it. The “OK” on my router has been red when I think it should have been green. I’ll have to call Bell because that might be the reason my new computer is having these problems. 

            After yoga I uploaded “Tout l’monde est musician” (Everyone’s a Musician) by Serge Gainsbourg. to my Christian’s Translations blog and began to prepare it for publication. I might have it done and posted tomorrow. 

            I called Bell tech support to get my wifi fixed. The guy on the phone guided me through several resets and tried also to reset from his end but there’s still an error message. He said a technician would come to my place tomorrow morning. 

            I weighed 88.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            During song practice I played my Martin acoustic for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune more than usual since Alex Wood set it up. 

            Around midday I was about to clean the humidifier that I’ve been using for the last week but then realized that I’d forgotten to buy vinegar at No Frills yesterday. I was about to ride to Freshco to buy a jug of pickling vinegar when I had the idea that maybe they sell vinegar at the hardware store. I walked over there and found that they do have very high acid vinegar at 10% for cleaning purposes and so I got two jugs. I didn’t know they made 10% vinegar. The cashier told me that she uses a Brita filter for the water she puts in her humidifier and so she doesn’t get all that crusty residue. I think the 10% vinegar worked a lot better than the 7% pickling vinegar. 

            I recharged my old phone because it is already set to connect with the Shambhala restaurant’s wifi and I thought that maybe later I could try tethering it to my new computer. I can’t do it with my new phone because it was connected to my Bell network and I don’t know the password for the Shambhala. 

            I weighed 88.75 kilos before lunch. I had Sky Flakes crackers with peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar and a glass of iced tea. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. It was minus ten and on the way downtown I wore my balaclava as a toque but on the home stretch I wore it over my face. 

            I weighed 88.4 kilos at 18:05. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:00. 

            I finished cleaning the inside of my Sony Dolby double cassette player and connected the cables to my amplifier but it wouldn’t play a cassette. The machinery won’t move at all. It’s a nice, high quality system so it would be a shame to throw it away so I’m going to see if someone can repair it. 

            I reviewed the song practice video of my September 10, 2024 acoustic performance of “Please Don’t Quit Me Now”. The take at 1:13:45 wasn’t bad. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with marinara sauce, tomato pesto, oven fries, and five-year-old cheddar. I was about to have it with a glass of Creemore while watching the first season finale of Car 54 Where Are You? when I could hear that the sound was only coming from one speaker. I pulled the amp off the shelf and saw that one of the speaker wires was only half connected and so I started fixing it when suddenly the sound from both speakers went dead. I couldn’t figure out what happened. Did a fuse blow in the amp? Did the amp suddenly die? I reconnected all the speaker wires and checked one of the speakers but everything seemed to be connected. I felt frustrated and useless as I repeatedly reconnected the wires for about half an hour. I switched to the radio and turned up the volume and there was sound. I switched back to the channel for the computer sound and realized that somehow I’d simply turned the volume way down. By that time my pizza was overdone and cold and I was mad at myself for being stupid. 

            I watched the show while eating. 

            Toody and Lucille have just gotten home from the policeman’s ball and she is very angry because he danced all night but not once with her. He remembers in great detail the colour of the eyes of a certain blonde he danced with but when Lucille challenges him to remember the colour of her eyes even though they’ve been married for 15 years he doesn’t remember. She is determined to get him to notice her and so the next day she goes to Julius the Beautician and has her hair bleached blonde. She’s really vamped up in a sparkly black cocktail dress when he comes home from work but he doesn’t notice. Then he leaves to go bowling with Muldoon and a couple of his other colleagues. Suddenly a hot and shapely blonde wiggles in front of them and everyone but Toody goes wow. Toody says she’s not as hot as the blonde he saw earlier. They want to know when that was and he says it was after Muldoon dropped him off at his place. Now he remembers she was in his building and then he says she was in his apartment and suddenly he realizes who it was and rushes home. He tells Lucille she’s a goddess and he can’t take his eyes off her. She wakes up in the middle of the night to find he’s been staring at her for three hours. He says he’s taking her dancing the next night at the most exclusive club in the Bronx. But he goes to sleep and dreams that Lucille becomes a big star and he ends up a hobo. When he wakes up he’s determined to not let any other man near his blonde so he’s not going to take her dancing after all. When Muldoon and the others hear him talking about his blonde they think he’s cheating on Lucille. Muldoon goes to tell Lucille and then realizes she is his blonde. He tells Lucille that she needs to change her hair back or Toody will be impossible to live with or work with and she agrees. Everything goes back to normal as Toody returns to not noticing her. 

            Julius the Beautician was played by Phil Leeds, who started as a peanut vendor at Yankee Stadium. He became a Borscht Belt comedian. He was blacklisted for pleading the Fifth Amendment during the investigations into communism during the 1950s. In 1960 he starred in the pilot for a sitcom called Rosie that never got picked up. He played Dr. Shand in Rosemary’s Baby. He co-starred in the sitcom Double Rush.