Saturday, 28 March 2020

The Case of the Disappearing Document



            On Thursday morning I started tracking down the chords for "On n'est pas là pour se faire engueuler" (Trans: We Didn't Come Here to be Shouted at) by Boris Vian. I found a few versions and copied and pasted them into a file. I only spend ten minutes every morning on this project and so it will take a while for me to find the chords that fit for me.
            I started memorizing “Le Bras Mechanique” (The Mechanical Arm) by Serge Gainsbourg. It’s basically a list of all of the body parts and accessories that this woman with the mechanical arm has and most lines rhyme with “eek”.
            I managed to not spend the whole morning on Twitter, but just barely.
            In the early afternoon I went to Freshco. In addition to the usual tomatoes and avocadoes to have today I bought salad ingredients and some dressing for Friday when I would break my fast. I bought cucumber, lettuce, green onions, broccoli and a raspberry vinaigrette. I also bought grapes, a half pint of gooseberries and some petroleum jelly. I looked for sea salt but the salt shelf had been pretty well stripped by hoarders.
            At Freshco, instead of the cashiers wearing masks, there have now been installed plexiglass cough shields between the cashier and the customer, about a metre high and a metre and a half wide.
            In the afternoon I did my exercises while listening to Amos and Andy. The story begins with Sapphire modelling a one-piece bathing suit in front of her mother and Kingfish. Kingfish begins making fun of Sapphire's body but her mother says that Sapphire once had the figure of Miss America. Kingfish says, “It looks like she lost most of Canada and gained all of Mexico.” The mother in law tells Kingfish that he's so bow legged that if he ever went to Scotland he could take the high road and the low road at the same time.
            Kingfish learns that Sapphire and her mother are going to Florida for Sapphire’s sister’s wedding and they have made a deal to drive a man’s car down there. Kingfish is supposed to pick up the car from the garage for them, but when he goes there the clerk thinks he’s somebody else and gives him another person’s car. The result is that halfway to Florida Sapphire and her mother are arrested. They finally get off and get back to New York very angry at Kingfish. He feels bad and sells all his clothes to a guy in an alley and makes $300 to buy them train fare to Florida but they get arrested again because the $300 was counterfeit.
            I was typing my “Thirty Years Ago Today" journal when the document disappeared and it became “closed for editing”. When this happens, any Word document I have open also goes away and I have to close Word in the Task Manager. It does this fairly often with this particular file but today it happened about seven times. It was extremely frustrating. To finish it I had to type a few words and save over and over again until finally it was done. It only happens when I’m typing but if not, nothing happens. I don't know why this occurs with mostly this file. I think I will start to just use Open Office for that journal and see what happens. 
            I started re-downloading six more of the torrents I’d lost in the power outage, plus I added a few more.
Thirty years ago today I weighed 75 kilos and today I’m at 88.5 kilos.
I downloaded a couple more the sets of pdfs from the Indigenous Studies course site but when I tried downloading one 15 megabyte document it failed and my second try stayed stuck at 7.1 megs.
I had my last meal of just tomatoes and avocadoes with no dressing and watched the ninth episode of Star Trek Picard.
Spoiler alert!
The La Sirena arrives and comes out of the wormhole above Soji’s home planet of Coppelius. They are immediately attacked by Narek. They damage his ship. Suddenly also through the wormhole comes the Borg cube that Seven of Nine had put back on line. Giant orchids come up from the planet and engulf them. Their power goes out and they crash on the planet but the orchids soften their landing. When they leave the ship they walk and find the crashed cube. Inside they discover Seven and Elnor still alive, along with some of the former Borg. They are all working to repair the cube. Picard and his crew go to the city of Soji’s people. They know her immediately and she knows them. They meet Altan Ineego Soong, the son of Data’s creator Noonian Soong, after whose image Data was created. Altan looks like an elderly human version of Data. They also meet a golden skinned version of Soji named Sutra.
Picard warns them that over two hundred Romulan warbirds are on their way to kill all of them. Picard offers to take them to safety in the La Sirena.
Sutra mind melds with Agnes and sees the vision that Oh planted which had horrified her. But Sutra sees it as a message for her people from the more advanced synthetic beings that are watching over them. It is telling them that they will come to help them eliminate the threat of organic life.
Narek is captured but Sutra allows him to escape if he would do something for her. The synth who had been watching Narek and caring for his needs is found murdered. This seems to be part of a plan by Sutra to turn her people against the humans. Picard is arrested but not Agnes because she now wants to stay with the synths and complete Bruce Maddox’s work to develop a synth into which human consciousness can be transferred.
Altan Ineego Soong is played by Brent Spiner, who of course also plays Data.



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