The Primer Directive

            On Monday morning I worked out the chords for the seventh verse of "C'était une pauv' gosse des rues" (She Was a Poor Child of the Street) by Boris Vian and for the first verse, the chorus, and half of the second verse of “Your Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the second session of four. 

            I weighed 85.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I put a third coat of primer onto the front of the doors and drawers of my kitchen counter. The dark brown fake wood veneer that I painted over is still showing through in some areas as faint streaks of grey. I was expecting it to be thoroughly white by now but I’ve still got about a quarter of a can of primer so I might as well just keep painting until it’s done. I want the purple to look even when I put it on top and so I might as well do it right. 

            I weighed 85.4 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon when I got up from my siesta it was raining but I decided to get ready for a bike ride anyway. It actually had pretty much stopped when I ventured out but started coming down in big drops by the time I rode up Brock Avenue to Dundas, so I turned around and headed home. On the way I found a Frisbee and a softball in a box, so I took them. I was wet when I got home but not soaked. 

            I weighed 85.6 kilos at 16:25, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening in a week. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:20. 

            In the Movie Maker project for my September 3 song practice session I managed to get the audio and video almost synchronized to the point of a slight echo. I just need to find out whether it’s a small slice of the audio timeline or of the video timeline that I need to remove to get them lined up. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Megaphor” I continued to remove small bits of the clip from the movie “Ziegfeld Girl”. I got it down from 47 seconds to 42 seconds but I only need 4 seconds to insert into the main video. 

            I scanned about six uncut strips of colour negatives. Five of them had some shots of my ex-girlfriend Brenda in each, so they were probably from 1987. One set had some shots of my daughter’s mother Nancy and so I probably took them in 1990. There are 36 uncut strips, seven individual negatives, and eight boxes of slides left to scan. I’ll probably have them all done by Christmas so I’d better buy myself an external hard drive for a present. When I’ve finished the scanning I’ll focus on digitizing all the cassette tapes that have my performances on them. 

            I had a potato with gravy and two slices of roast beef while watching season 3, episodes 2 and 3 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story the Douglases are out of jam but Sam’s store doesn’t sell it because everybody in the valley makes their own. Oliver encourages Lisa to try that but she is reluctant. Finally she tells him she will do it because in 1924 the Hungarian parliament passed a law saying that all women had to do whatever their husbands wanted them to do no matter how dumb it was. It was called “The Big Dumb Law of 1924”. Eb picks three bushels of peaches for Lisa to use for jam and Hank Kimball gives her a pamphlet on jam making. It says to add one quarter of a cup of water for each peach and so Lisa starts breaking cups to get a quarter of one. Lisa has so much trouble following the instructions that Oliver suggests that she get some help from Doris Ziffel who is known to make the best jam in the valley. She does so and Doris gives her the secret recipe. The next day the cupboard is filled with jars of peach jam and Oliver says it’s the best he’s ever tasted. But then he notices that the three baskets of peaches are still in the kitchen. Lisa confesses that Doris’s secret is that she goes to Pixley and buys jam at the supermarket, then transfers it to empty jam jars with home made labels. 

            In the second story Arnold Ziffel the pig is in love with Cynthia the basset hound. Fred Ziffel forbids the relationship because Cynthia is Mr. Haney’s dog. Fred has Arnold stay with Oliver and Lisa so Cynthia can’t find him but she does. Oliver is so annoyed by the howling and squealing that he lets Arnold out to go to Cynthia. Cynthia is scheduled to defend her champion status in a hunting dog contest the next day but comes in last. Haney wants to sue Oliver for $1 million.

November 7, 1993: My daughter was saying "Yup" and "Me" a lot

Thirty years ago today 

            On Sunday evening I took my daughter back to her mother’s place in Scarborough. She was saying “Yup” and “Me” a lot.

Tommy Tedesco

            On Sunday morning I worked out the chords for the sixth verse of "C'était une pauv' gosse des rues" (She Was a Poor Child of the Street) by Boris Vian and for the intro and part of the first verse of “Your Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first session of four. 

            I weighed 85.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I finished painting the second coat of primer onto the edges and the hard-to-get-at spaces between my kitchen counter doors and drawers. I think I have just enough primer left for a third coat. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 85.5 kilos at 17:00.

            I tried to chisel some black quartz from a piece of the rock that I found six years ago. But now that the clocks have been turned back it’s too dark at around 17:00 to accurately work the hammer and chisel, at least when it’s cloudy. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 17:55. 

            In the Audacity project for my September 3, 2023 song practice I amplified the volume of my voice and added reverb to the guitar for the song “Time of the Yo-Yo”. Every time I added reverb it decreases the volume so I had to amplify the guitar again. I increased the reverb three times and amplified the guitar three times. Then I exported that session and replaced the other one I’d exported because it had been distorted and crackling. But this new one was distorted on that song in the same way. I went back into Audacity and exported the file as MP3 instead of WAV. This time it wasn’t distorted. In Movie Maker I started a project for my September 3 song practice. I imported the videos for that session and the audio that I’d just edited. I started cutting the beginning of the audio timeline. Tomorrow I might have the audio and video synchronized. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Megaphor” I finished reversing part of the clip of the film Ziegfeld Girl. I moved a section to earlier in the timeline and then I started removing small sections of the video that I don’t need. Right now the clip is over 47 seconds long but I only need about 4 seconds. 

            I scanned two sets of uncut colour negatives. The first has a lot of shots of flowers and also pictures of my late friend Mike Copping’s children Rachel and Noah. The second has photos of Rachel and her mother, so both must be from the fall of 1987 when I was sharing a house with them. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching the second season finale and the third season premiere of Green Acres. In the first story it’s Eb’s birthday and he has woken up Sam at 4:00 to tell him to push the sale of a $14 transistor radio when Oliver comes in. Oliver wakes up with a message balloon tied to his finger, a message mouse trap snapping his toe and bumps into a big sign in the closet reminding him of a birthday. Oliver thinks it’s Lisa’s birthday and he rushes to Sam’s to buy a present for her. Sam pushes the radio and so Oliver buys it. When he gives it to Lisa she says her birthday is in two months. Eb eventually gets it and then becomes obsessed with winning a song identification contest. Whoever first guesses correctly all twelve songs that are played wins the prize of an all expenses paid trip to Las Vegas, Illinois. Every song sounds exactly the same as the previous one but Eb seems to be able to tell them apart. Oliver makes him leave the radio in the barn while they go to work in the fields but the radio gets knocked into Eleonor the cow’s hay and she eats it. They can still hear the radio from inside Eleonor’s stomach. Eb gets the first eleven songs right but just before the twelfth song is played Eleonor’s stomach changes the channel and so Eb loses. 

            In the second story the state senator is retiring at the age of 92 to settle down and raise a family. Sam goes to the state capital to discuss who to nominate for the new senator, and he suggests Oliver. Watkins and Simpson from the state senator nominating committee come to interview Oliver and then his neighbours. This whole story is a setup for flashbacks from previous episodes. But the senator decides not to retire because his 96 year old fiancé dumps him for being too young. 

            One of the prominent instruments in the Green Acres theme song was the lead electric guitar played by Tommy Tedesco. Between 1960 and 1980 he was one of the most in demand studio musicians on the west coast of the US. He is said to be the most recorded guitarist in history, having played on thousands of records and many hits. He played on Richard Harris’s “McCarthur Park”, Jack Nietzsche’s “The Lonely Surfer”, Wayne Newton’s “Danke Schoen”, The Ronette’s “Be My Baby”, Sam Cooke’s “Twistin the Night Away”, all of the 5th Dimension’s hits, and Nino Tempo and April Stevens’s version of “Deep Purple”. He wrote a regular column for Guitar Player called “Studio Log”. He wrote an autobiography called Confessions of a Guitar Player. He played on the soundtracks of The French Connection, Jaws, The Godfather, and The Deer Hunter. He also recorded a number of jazz records under his own name. He was a member of the band of studio musicians known as The Wrecking Crew.

November 6, 1993: My daughter and I walked through the leaves in the nature trail

Thirty years ago today

            On Saturday I took the bus, the Main bus to the subway, the train to Warden station and the Warden bus to Bamburgh to pick up my daughter. We walked through the fall colours of the nature trail on the way to my place.

Walter Woolf King

            On Saturday morning I finished memorizing “You’re Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg. I searched for the chords but no one had posted them and so tomorrow I’ll start working them out. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second session of two. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my Kramer electric. 

            I listened to the recording from the cassette through the new device and it seems to be of more than one night at Fat Alberts because there are a couple of performances of “Angeline”. There’s also a pretty good performance by Tom Smarda of a couple of his songs. I’d like to figure out if it’s possible to just play the device directly through my computer and record in Audacity. I might already have a cord and an adaptor so I can just plug it directly into the Scarlett, so I’ll look into it later. 

            I couldn’t wait so I looked and found that I do have a cord with plugs at each end that fit the headphone jack and the adaptor jack to the interface. I moved the wire that connects the audio from my computer to my amp, plugged that into the headphone jack of my Scarlett and was able to play the cassette and hear it through my speakers. That means that I should be able to use this device as a player instead of a recorder and then record what’s played directly into Audacity, thereby making my own recordings in whatever audio format I want. Maybe I should have just looked for a usb cassette player instead of a converter but what the hell. 

            I weighed 85.4 kilos before breakfast.

            At around 12:45 I went to No Frills where I bought five bags of black grapes, a whole chicken, three bags of 1% milk (I wanted skim but all the 0% milk was close to its best before date), a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips, and two containers of skyr. The middle aged guy behind me with the neck tattoo told me he’d considered just walking out with his items without paying but changed his mind. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I spent about 25 minutes chiseling black quartz from a piece of the rock that I found six years ago. There were quite a few sizable bits of quartz this time. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos at 17:30, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening in a week. 

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

            I uploaded the video of my acoustic performance of “Time of the Yo-Yo” to YouTube and posted the link on Facebook and Twitter. 

            I opened the audio recording of my September 3 song practice and the part where I play “Time of the Yo-Yo” was distorted and crackling. I opened the Audacity project for that date and it sounded fine. I worked on removing the recording of the hum that happens when I turn on the reverb on my amp. That lowered the volume of the guitar and so I amplified the guitar but that brought the hum back and so I removed the hum again. I also want to experiment with adding more reverb to the guitar inside Audacity. I’ll work on it again tomorrow. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song Megaphor I continued to edit my clip of the movie Ziegfeld Girl so part of it goes in reverse. 

            I cleaned a set of uncut colour negatives but didn’t have time to scan them before dinner. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 2, episodes 28 and 29 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story we hear yet another origin story of Lisa. She says that her great great grandmother was queen of the Romani people. She married someone from the US and so that’s why Lisa married Oliver. The law of the tribe states that every fourth generation must marry someone from the US or else they lose custody of the ring. As she relates the story of how her great great grandmother Lastvogel met her great great grandfather Cornelias the parts are played by Lisa and Oliver. She finds him painting in the woods and they chat. She tells him she has to steal something because today she is taking her Gypsy test. If she steals something good she can become a boy. If not she has to stay a girl and do all the work. All the boys have to do is lie around and steal. While they are talking she steals his watch, his passport, his wallet and his money. He gets them back but after she leaves he discovers she stole the workings of his watch. Cornelias goes to the Romani camps and meets Lastvogel’s father. Cornelias wants to paint Lastvogel’s picture and everyone gathers round to watch. But every time he turns to paint something has been stolen. First his paints, then his canvas, then his chair and so on until Lastvogel gets stolen. Later he agrees to marry her but the tribe says he must first steal a white chicken. Cornelias asks why they steal. Her father says it’s not their idea to steal but everybody says they do so they want to make people happy. Cornelias tries to steal the chicken and winds up in jail. His parents come to bail him out and they later meet Lastvogel. They have a Romani wedding. In the end the whole town of Hooterville is sitting in the Douglas house listening to the story. Later Oliver and Lisa keep stealing from each other. 

            Cornelias’s father was played by Walter Woolf King, who started singing professionally at an early age and after high school joined a vaudeville musical act. At 19 he made his Broadway debut in the lead role of Floradora. His first movie was a starring role in Golden Dawn. He co-starred in Embarrassing Moments, One More Spring, Spring Tonic, Today I Hang, and A Yank in Libya. He played a sadistic opera singer in The Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera. When his career slowed down he became an actors agent. 

            In the second story Oliver is fixing a hole in the roof when he accidentally drops his hammer on Lisa’s head. She gets a strange type of amnesia in which she remembers a different life. She is also suddenly a good cook. She thinks Oliver is her butler Claude. When he tries to get ready for bed in her bedroom she begins screaming. Doc Stewart tells him he should court her all over again. She doesn’t respond well to flowers. She says Fredericks, who doesn’t exist, is taking her to the opera. Stewart says Oliver should take her. While they are there she falls over the railing of their box, hits her head. and gets her memory back. At the doctor’s office Oliver hits his head and thinks he is Fredericks.

November 5, 1993: Mary Milne and I were excited about having control over our own open stage

Thirty years ago today 

            On Friday Mary Milne was at my place until 4:00 as we talked and made plans for our open stage. We were pretty excited about having some control. I didn’t get much sleep and woke up an hour late to get ready for work. I tried to call in at West Toronto Secondary School but I couldn’t get through and so I just headed down there. When I arrived I found the school empty because it was a PE day. I went home and later called Danya who apologized for not paying attention to the school schedule when she booked me. I didn’t tell her that I’d been late anyway. I asked her for two days of work in a row to compensate. I got paid for the day anyway.

Know Which Side Your Car is Battered On

            On Friday morning I worked out the chords for the fifth verse of "C'était une pauv' gosse des rues" (She Was a Poor Child of the Street) by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized the second and third verses of “Your Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg. There’s just one verse left to learn and I should have it nailed down tomorrow. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. The B and E strings went slightly out of tune a couple of times. That doesn’t happen very often but it probably will every now and then throughout the winter as it gets dryer in my place. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning in thirty seven days. 

            I painted another coat of primer on the front of the doors and drawers of my kitchen counter. It looks like it might need a third coat.

            I weighed 85.7 kilos before lunch. Amazon was supposed to deliver my cassette-to-mp3 converter from 13:00 to 16:00. I took a siesta at 14:00, thinking I’d hear the phone but I didn’t. When I got up to pee at 15:00 I saw that they’d called fifteen minutes before that. The message said they’d tried to deliver the package. I assumed they’d tried and failed but when I got up at 15:30 I checked the website and they said they’d left the package either inside the door or outside. I went downstairs and it was on top of the mailboxes. I didn’t try the converter yet. 

            I went for a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I spent about twenty minutes chiseling black quartz from a piece of the rock that I found six years ago. 

            I weighed 85.1 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:18. 

            In the Movie Maker project for my August 6 acoustic performance of “Time of the Yo-Yo” I isolated the song. I added a fade to black effect and tried out several other effects before settling on a sepia tone look for the video. There was some traffic noise picked up by the camera microphone so I switched the audio entirely to what was recorded through the audio interface. I published the movie but when I played it back it just showed the video for a few seconds before going black. I deleted the video and published it again and this time it was okay. Tomorrow I’ll upload it to YouTube. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song "Megaphor" I continued editing a section of the movie Ziegfeld Girl so it goes in reverse. 

            I reset my negative scanner to slide mode and re-scanned the strip that I scanned yesterday, thinking they were black and white negatives. It turns out they are very faint colour slides of my daughter when she was about one year old. 

            I wanted to try out the new cassette-to-mp3 converter and so I dug up a box of old cassettes. I’ve got way over fifty cassette tapes and so I did the right thing to buy a converter. If I’d paid for a service at $20 a tape it would have cost me well over $1000. I still didn’t get around to trying the converter. I went through the tapes to see if I could find the first Christian and the Lions concert but there’s nothing with that label. I know Tom Smarda’s friend Marcus recorded the event but I don’t know if we ever got a tape. I’ll listen to some of the unmarked tapes tomorrow. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of roast beef while watching season 2, episodes 26 and 27 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Haney sells a washing machine to the Ziffels that is essentially an outboard motor clamped onto a barrel with the propellor inside. When they turn it on it goes crazy and wrecks their house. Fred agrees to hire Oliver as a lawyer to get his money back from Haney. The judge says Haney has to pay $250. Haney at first tries to pay Ziffel in trade of more junk but Oliver won’t allow it. Finally he gets the money by selling a grandfather clock to Lisa for $300. 

            After the first story I went to make coffee and was washing some dishes when I heard behind me a loud thud. Outside a car was turned on its left side and had slid halfway onto the sidewalk almost right up to the Popeyes door, knocking over a parking info sign and once again destroying the bench on the corner. That bench can’t seem to catch a break. It was wrecked by a truck about a month ago and then replaced. The driver seems to have gotten out by her driver’s side window. She’d been obviously wearing a seatbelt otherwise she would have had more than a sore left shoulder. A lot of people were taking pictures. A drunk teenager driving by called out that the person must have been hungry to have tried to drive into Popeyes sideways. The car was on its side for a few hours until a tow truck came with equipment that dragged the car off the sidewalk. Then readjusted the cable and drove east of the car to pull it back onto its wheels. When it flipped upright several onlookers cheered. 

            In the second Green Acres story Hank Kimball gets fired by the new head of the department of agriculture Mr. Treffinger. Hank is actually happy about it and whistling a tune because he was making too much money and he had put off Ralph Monroe’s advances by saying that he’d marry her when he’d saved enough. Now Ralph is heart broken. A new county agent named Harvey Schmidlapp is hired but everybody hates him because he’s insulting, overbearing and undiplomatic. Oliver gets the people of the valley to sign a petition against Schmidlapp which he takes to Treffinger but Treffinger refuses to hire Hank back. Finally they turn Ralph loose on Schmedlapp with her romantic intentions and it causes him to have a nervous breakdown. He punches Treffinger in the nose and joins the roller derby. Oliver and Lisa find Hank working as a bartender and tell him he can have his old job back but he doesn’t want it because of Ralph. But when Oliver tells him there’s a new rule that county agents must remain single he is glad to return to the occupation. 

             The tune that Hank was whistling gets played by an orchestra on TV later and the conductor was played by Ted Stanhope. He appeared in a trio of Three Stooges movies. He started his career as Ted Strobach when he appeared in several Hal Roach comedies. His first movie as Stanhope was Between Midnight and Dawn. 

            Before bed I tried out the cassette-to-mp3 converter. It took a while to figure out the buttons but I was able to play an unmarked tape and hear it through the headphones. It was perhaps one of the times that I did a feature at Fat Alberts. It’s got Steve Lowe playing his amazing guitar arrangement for my song “Angeline” and singing backup. I found out that it will only start recording to mp3 when a usb flash drive is plugged in. I left it recording and went to bed.