Borg Queen

            On Wednesday during song practice I had all my chords and words back for the most part and it didn't hurt my barring finger as much to play. My voice was strong as well and I had a pretty good session.

I finally finished memorizing "On n'est pas là pour se faire engueuler" (Trans: We Didn't Come Here to be Shouted at) by Boris Vian. Next I will have to look for the chords.
I looked for the lyrics for “L’ile Enchantresse (The Island Enchantress) by Serge Gainsbourg but no one had posted them. There are videos of Jacques Dutronc singing the song and so I tried to transcribe the words by listening, but it’s still very difficult for me to fully understand spoken or sung French without the words in text. I would try again on Friday but if that didn't work I would move on to the next Gainsbourg song on my list, of which I already have the lyrics. 
I had a bad connection again in the morning and it caused my time on Twitter to drag past the morning. The wifi went down at lunchtime and so I ate my tomatoes and avocadoes while watching the first seven-minute episode of “Noggin the Nog.” It was a British cartoon show that started in the 1950s about a Viking King named Noggin. It was barely animated at all, with just a little bit of low budget motion and there were no character voices but rather just one narrator saying what everyone said. In the first part Noggin is only a prince and his father Knut is very old. Knut dies and the rule is that Noggin has to become married before he can be the king. All of the eligible maidens of the kingdom line up for Noggin to choose and he walks along inspecting them all, but doesn’t pick one. He goes to the end of the line where a very large bird just happens to be standing and he is looking at it curiously at the end of the episode.

            I worked on trying to get caught up on my journal.

            In the afternoon I did my exercises for the first time in a few weeks while watching Amos and Andy. This story continues from several episodes before when Sapphire left Kingfish and moved in with her mother. At the end of the last story Kingfish heard from somebody that they had seen Sapphire buying a baby bassinette and so now Kingfish thinks he is going to be a father. He does the unthinkable and gets a job so his child will be proud of him. He calls up Sapphire and hears a baby crying in the background and so he thinks his child has already been born. The reality is that Sapphire and her mother have gone into business running a baby nursery. Kingfish goes out to Brooklyn to get a look at his child and sees five babies. He begins to panic but nonetheless tells Sapphire to bring the babies home. Later he finds out that the babies are not his or Sapphire’s and he is greatly relieved but then Sapphire shows up at home with seven babies, saying that when he’d said he wanted the babies there she realized how much he loves children and so she decided to move the business there.

            Over the last few days I’ve been tracking down and restarting some of the torrents that I lost when the power went off on Sunday. I’ve recovered seven so far.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            I downloaded several sets of slides from the Indigenous Studies course site.

            I had the usual for dinner while watching the eighth episode of Star Trek Picard.

            Spoiler alert!

            The story begins with a flashback to probably fourteen years before. A Romulan secret society of female assassins called the Zhat Vash are performing a ceremony around an energy structure. The women in the circle must enter the structure and not go insane. Only Narissa survives. Commodore Oh tells her their next mission is on Mars. It was the Zhat Vash that instigated the slaughter of the Mars colonists. They did so in such a way to make it look like the synthetic people had been the killers.

            In the present Narissa and her centurions are hunting for Elnor. They find him and he takes out several but he is overwhelmed. Suddenly there is phaser fire and Seven of Nine arrives to save him. She kills all of his attackers.

            In order to save the Borg that are in stasis Seven has to become the Queen and awaken them. She hooks herself up to the Cube but Narissa has hundreds of Borg jettisoned into space. Nonetheless enough survive to kill the centurions and then overwhelm Narissa to assimilate her.

            Meanwhile, Picard and Soji have just arrived on the La Sirena. When Captain Rios sees Soji he is in shock like he recognizes her. He goes into retreat. Raffi points a gun at Soji but Picard steps in front of her. Raffi says that the last person Picard brought on board, Dr Jurati was carrying a tracker in her body.

            Picard goes to see Jurati and tells her that they are going to Deep Space 12 where she will be turned in to the authorities for the murder of Bruce Maddox. She tells Picard that Commodore Oh planted a psychic block to keep her from telling people about the tracking device.

            Raffi tries to figure out what is wrong with Rios and so he talks to all of the various holographic crewmembers on the ship that look like him but have different accents and slightly different personalities. He assembles them all in one room and puts together some of the pieces of the tragic moment that had caused him to be kicked out of Starfleet. Rios’s captain, Vandermeer had killed himself. Finally Raffi goes to talk with Rios. He has been drinking ever since he first saw Soji. He tells Raffi that Vandermeer had rescued a small ship containing two crewmembers, one of which looked exactly like Soji. The captain had reported the rescue to Starfleet and after talking with them he pulled out a phaser and killed both of them. Then he used the phaser to kill himself. When Soji learns of this she suddenly remembers everything about her history and the place of her birth. The people Vandermeer had killed were synths and Soji’s family. She also now knows the coordinates of her home planet. She takes over Rios’s ship and sets the coordinates. She also has acquired the knowledge of Borg warp passageways and can get them to her distant planet in hours. Rios appeals to her that it’s his ship and so she asks politely if he would take her home. At the end of the episode they open a wormhole and go through, but they are followed by Narek.