Dick Curtis

            On Thursday I thought for sure I would be able to finally memorize the nineteenth verse of “Ballade de la chnoufe” (Ballad of the Snuff) by Boris Vian but I was plagued by memory lapses. I would forgot a line from the middle of the song that I usually breeze through. I would repeat it to get it back in my head and then I’d start the song again and get that line right but forget another one. I finally made it all the way through and even got verse nineteen right but then I saw that I’d forgotten one line from verse fifteen. Some days are just bad memory days and then everything comes back the next day so hopefully I’ll be able to nail the nineteenth verse down tomorrow. I spent over an hour on this and so I didn’t have time today to gather images for my photo-video of “Les millionaires” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice and it stayed in tune most of the time.

            I renamed some images of the same people so they would move together in my Photos folder. 

            I weighed 89.05 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown but should have worn long underwear. I stopped to pee at the Yonge and College McDonald’s. On the way home I stopped at Freshco where the grapes were super cheap and firm and so I got seven bags, I also bought a pack of blueberries, some bananas, several avocadoes, three mangoes, and a bottle of cranberry-raspberry juice. 

            I weighed 88.5 kilos at 19:10. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 20:07. 

            I tried to record from the same cassette to Audacity again that I’ve been attempting to digitize for the last few days. The clip of Leonard Cohen before my band starts playing still has no waveform but when my band is playing there is a waveform. It was like that before and the recording sounded distorted. I tried a restart but it didn’t help. I didn’t have time to fiddle with it tonight because I got home too late so I’ll try again tomorrow. 

            I ate some grapes while watching episode 12 of Captain Nice on archive.org because that episode didn’t come with my download. 

            Carter Nash is helping his mother Esther shop when she notices the well known gangster Harry Houseman entering the post office. She wonders how he got out of prison and Carter explains that he was paroled because two politicians gave him excellent references. He knew them because they had been cellmates. They look in the window of Houseman’s car and see it’s full of guns. So Carter drinks his last bottle of formula to turn into Captain Nice. He confronts Houseman and looks into the box he is about to mail to find more guns. But it turns out that the guns are all toys. One of them is a cap gun and Sergeant Candy Cane asks if there’s a law against carrying one. Chief Segal says he’s been carrying one for years. 

            Now Carter is out of his formula and he can’t make a new batch without sodiumphenocarbolate. There’s only one place in the country that has it and he sent for it a month ago through the mayor’s office. He leaves his mother in the lab and goes to the mayor’s office to find what happened. He is told to go look in storage for his requisition form. When he returns to the lab and finds his mother has washed the evidence from all his microscope slides because she thought they were dirty. 

            Carter tries to add to the formula the closest thing to sodiumphenocarbolate, which is salt. He drinks it and transforms but not to a hero. Now dogs are chasing him because he smells like hamburger. He makes more of the hamburger odour and throws it out the window to draw the dogs away and it works. 

            On their way home they pass the post office where they see Houseman and his henchman Bostic getting let into the locked post office by an inside man. Carter and Esther are going to go call the police when they are stopped by Bostic, who pulls a gun and forces them inside. They are tied up in the mail room. Houseman goes to look through the mail to see if there is anything of value to steal. Esther tries to appeal to him and asks, “What do you suppose your mother is doing right now?” He says, “Ten to twenty for kidnapping”. 

            Houseman finds a package addressed to Carter and tosses it to him. He thinks it’s amusing because he won’t live to open it. He leaves and Carter’s hands are just free enough to open it. It’s the sodiumphenocarbolate he ordered. The incomplete bottle of formula is in his briefcase and they are able to complete it but Carter’s hands aren’t free enough to drink it. However one of the toy squirt guns is nearby and Esther is able to load some of the formula into it and aim it at Carter’s mouth. He transforms into Captain Nice, breaks free and captures Houseman and his gang in mailbags. 

            Chief Segal arrives to arrest them. He asks Esther why he always sees her around crime and violence. She says she guesses it’s because she doesn’t get enough of it at home. 

            Bostic was played by Dick Curtis, who started in Hollywood at the age of 8, running errands for actors. He became a singer, dancer, and nightclub performer and cut two record albums. He joined the Marines during WWII and afterward returned to entertaining, starting with The Jack Benny Show. He was a regular castmember of the Jonathan Winters Show. He was the voice of Motormouse. He did commercials for Blitz-Weinhard beer. He wrote for Revue 61 and The Spade Cooley Show.