On Sunday morning I memorized the fourth verse of “Aux enfants de la chance” (To the Children of Chance) by Serge Gainsbourg.
I played my Kramer electric guitar for the second of what would normally be four sessions but I’ll skip Christmas day and play the last session on Tuesday.
I weighed 86.1 kilos before breakfast.
Around midday I removed all the Frog Tape from the back row of squares I painted on the Masonite in front of the kitchen counter. Then I put down more tape to mark off where to paint the three black squares in the front row. This was much easier than the back row and when I was finished I unpeeled the tape. My checkerboard floor looks generally pretty good and one could almost be fooled that the black and white squares are tiles. I still have to do the area under and to the side of the stove but I think I only need to paint three black squares back there. I’ll do that sometime this week.
I weighed 86.3 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been at midday in 66 days. I had a toasted Montreal style bagel with tzatziki and five-year-old cheddar with a glass of part calamansi lemonade and part pomegranate juice.
In the afternoon I put fresh flashers on my bike and took a ride downtown and back.
I weighed 85.6 kilos at 17:30.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:20.
In Movie Maker I copied my synchronized September 11 song practice project into a new project called “The Accordion (acoustic)”. I deleted everything before and after that song, added a fade to black effect at the end as well as lowering the overall brightness. I kept about a quarter of the audio from the video camera to add some warmth and then published it. But then when I played it the voice sounded a little too low. So I went back in Movie Maker and set the audio to 100% of the Audacity recording and then published it again. But this time the voice was even lower. Then I realized the problem was my left speaker and so I nudged my amp and the voice came back on. Now I have two movies of the song but I’ll probably go with my original choice when I upload it to YouTube, which will likely be on Christmas day.
I continued to search for clips of Greta Garbo to correspond with my line, “it brushed against my soul”. I think the video I found yesterday fits better than anything I saw today and so that’s the one I’ll download.
I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce, two cut up strips of bacon, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer but because it was Christmas eve I had an extra beer. During dinner I watched Wakanda Forever the sequel to Black Panther.
The opening segment has the death of T’Challa the Black Panther but he’s not shown of course because Chadwick Boseman was already dead. If he had lived there would been a lot less extended sentiment with the grieving and the funeral. The grieving process takes up moments of the middle and the end as well and the movie would have been much better without it. The film was two hours and forty one minutes long and could have stood to lose an hour.
Up until this story it was believed that Wakanda was the only place in the world that had vibranium but it is discovered there is vibranium in the ocean. In the comics there is a place underneath Antarctica called the Savage Land where there is vibranium and also dinosaurs as well as the Tarzan-like hero Kazar and his pet sabre toothed tiger Zabu. Marvel is considering developing a movie based on Kazar or at least putting the character in another Marvel project.
A sub-ocean operation to extract vibranium is initiated by the CIA and the US navy but they are attacked by water breathing Smurfs led by Prince Namor also known as the Submariner in the comics. Namor first appeared in Marvel Comics #1 in 1939, two years before DC came up with Aquaman. Namor was always a more interesting character than Aquaman other than the ridiculous wings on his feet, which couldn’t possibly give him the ability to fly. It’s mentioned that he’s a mutant, which never came up in any of the comics I read but it would explain the wings and someone online says he has telekinetic powers, which would explain his ability to fly.
A teenage student at MIT has developed a vibranium detector. Namor easily infiltrates Wakandan defences and gives the queen an ultimatum. Either deliver the young scientist to him so he can kill her or his warriors will invade Wakanda. Wakanda’s top scientist Princess Shuri, the late Black Panther’s sister goes with General Okoye to Boston to meet the student, whose name is Riri Williams. While they are there Namor captures Shuri and Riri.
They are taken to Namor’s undersea empire known as Talokan. In the comics it’s Atlantis like it is in Aquaman but it makes sense to give it another name. There are theories anyway that Atlantis was Incan but in this case it’s Mayan. I’m okay with that but it would have made more sense to say that Mayan culture came from Atlantis rather than to say that the oppressed Mayans drank a special herb that transformed them into water breathers. That’s just dumb. In the comics “Namor” is just “Roman” spelled backwards but in this story it is explained that the Spaniards called him “N’amor” meaning “without love”.
Namor and Shuri have a connection. He takes her on a tour of his kingdom and she finds it beautiful. Queen Ramonda seeks out T’Challa’s former lover Nakia who is living in Haiti. Nakia goes to Takolan and rescues Shuri and Riri, taking them back to Wakanda. Namor retaliates by attacking Wakanda. They have water grenades that cause massive flooding and Ramonda drowns. Namor gives the Wakandans two weeks to join him in his plan to conquer the surface. If they don’t then he will destroy Wakanda.
Shuri synthesizes the Black Panther power herb that was destroyed in the first movie and becomes the new Black Panther. Apparently the planned script for the sequel before Boseman died would have included Shuri becoming a second Black Panther to fight against Namor. I think she is too small and skinny to be a convincing Black Panther. With a second vibranium detector as the bait Shuri lures Namor and his army away from Wakanda to a location on the Atlantic. Shuri sets a trap for Namor in a Wakandan ship with special heat lamps to dry him out. They crash into the desert. Namor impales Shuri with his spear and she is stuck to a rock but she breaks free in time to stop him from reaching the water. She forces him to yield by agreeing to a peaceful alliance and he accepts. Shuri meets Nakia’s young son who she reveals is the son of T’Challa.
This was not even close to as good as the original movie. It was extremely low on action but it did inexplicably well at the box office. It came out just at the end of the pandemic so maybe people were just glad to get out of the house. The movie would have been okay if they’d chopped an hour off.
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