Annabelle Wallis

            On Thursday morning I had all the chords worked out for “Ex-fan des sixties” by Serge Gainsbourg, except for the second part of the instrumental intro. 

            My second song practice with the new B string machine from Washburn didn’t go any better than the day before. The string continues to go out of tune but I don’t feel like taking the guitar back to Remenyi today. Since it will be shipped back to Washburn I’ll have to live without it for two weeks and so I'll keep it for at least another day. 

            In the late morning I decided to go to Freshco because I was totally out of fruit and yogourt, but when I took my bike down odd the hook I had a flat tire. I removed the back wheel and thought I’d take it to Metro Cycle a few doors away to get the right size tube, but it turned out they are closed on Thursdays. I tried to call Mojo on Queen near Roncesvalles but there was no answer. I didn’t want to walk all the way there if they weren't open so I called Brockton Cyclery. They didn’t answer either but there was a message saying they aren't answering their phone as often these days. Since I pass there on my bike and have recently seen them open I decided to walk up there. It’s only at Dundas and Brock and so it's not really that far but I’m not used to walking and it seemed to take a very long time. I got the tube and had to pay by debit and then walked home. 

            On the way I found a bag containing two cans of black beans, one can of lentils, one can of British style baked beans and a little bottle of Palinka fruit brandy. I had to look it up and found that in the European Union only Hungary and some regions of Austria have the right to produce Palinka. This was Meggy Palinka, which I think is cherry flavoured. I probably wouldn't have noticed it if I'd been on my bike. I walked down Brock to Queen and noticed there’s now a bakery and a cannabis store on Brock just north of Queen. 

            Once I was home it took me about half an hour to change my tube. I put the old tube under water and saw that there was a very tiny leak but I didn’t find anything in the tire that would have made the hole. By the time I was done it was too late to go to the supermarket before lunch and so I just took a quick ride around the block to make sure I’d done the job right. Everything seemed fine.

            I had one of the cans of black beans with salsa for lunch. 

            When I got up from my siesta in the afternoon I posted my blog and then headed to Freshco. The grapes were in bad shape and there were no cherries so I got two bags of clementines. I also bought a pint of blueberries, a half pint of raspberries, some pork ribs, two cans of peaches, three containers of Greek yogourt and a box of spoon size shredded wheat. 

            I looked at my notes on my performances of “A Ham and a Fiddle” from this summer’s recording session and found that there are only two good or complete renditions. I listened to them and decided that I can do better and besides I’ve changed a major line in the chorus since then. I’ll wait until the next recording session, hopefully this summer, to do a better version for uploading. So it looks like I’m done with YouTube uploads for a few months. Hopefully I’ll have a good sounding guitar to play in the summer, otherwise there will be no point recording. I deleted my entire June 18 session but I might keep a couple of songs from June 19 just to have a record of them. I’ll go through all the sessions over the next few days and probably delete most of the recordings. The ones I keep I’ll reformat to WMV to save space and move them to my external hard drive.

            I worked for half an hour on my poem series “My Blood in a Bug”. 

            I continued to partially colourize my skateboarder photo from the 80s. I spent about forty-five minutes trying to make some graffiti clearer on the wall behind the skateboarder. I had to call up another image of the wall that shows the letters better. I made some progress but some of it is still obscure. 

            I had a potato, two chicken drumsticks and gravy while watching Star Trek Discovery.

            SPOILER ALERT!!! 

            Osyraa has taken over Discovery and has forced Stamets with a mind controlling device to use the spore drive to jump to Federation space. As she approaches she is making it look like Discovery is being pursued by her own ships so that the admiral will open the shields and allow Discovery through. Meanwhile Michael is with Book and he is flying his ship through the subspace courier networks to catch up to Discovery and to crash inside the hold. The Emerald Chain Regulators have locked Tilly and the bridge crew in the ready room. Book gives Michael a device to keep her from being detected and stays with his ship to be captured and to buy time. Michael makes her way to find Stamets and while taking out a regulator she is badly stabbed in the leg. Osyraa engages her top scientist, a man in a wheelchair named Aurellio to figure out the spore drive. He has Stamets freed of the device so he can talk with him. The scientist turns out to be very naïve about Osyraa’s actions because she saved his life from a genetic disease when he was ten. Discovery gets through the shields and then Osyraa opens a channel to the admiral and tells him that she is there to negotiate a treaty with the Federation. He allows her to transport in to talk. He serves her snacks and after she’s eaten some he informs her that the base out of which their replicators make food is their shit. He has some and then says, “It’s not bad for shit.” He tells her that he is willing to have the Federation and the Emerald Chain merge. She says she would make her chief scientist the face of Emerald Chain diplomacy. The admiral says that he must not be a puppet and he must be willing to try her for her war crimes and other atrocities such as slave trading. That’s a line Osyraa won’t cross and so she leaves. Back on Discovery Book has been captured and put in the same room as the crew. Michael is traveling through a Jeffries tube when Osyraa’s security chief Zareh detects her badge. He sends regulators after her but she opens up an air lock and they are sucked out into space. She reaches Stamets and frees him but he wants to jump back to save Hugh and Adira. Michael won’t allow it because the fate of the Federation is at stake where they are. She knocks him out with a Vulcan nerve pinch, puts him in a protective pod and jettisons him into space. Just after that she is captured by Zareh. The bridge crew have overwhelmed their guards and escaped. Book and Ryn stay behind to fight until they are captured. Ryn has scrambled the sensors and refuses to fix them when Osyraa demands it. She disintegrates him. I thought his character was going to last longer than that. As Tilly and the crew are fighting their way through the ship they encounter three robots. One of them projects an old silent film from the early 20th Century and Tilly knows that the three robots have been taken over by the Sphere Data. They offer their services to help take back the ship. 

             Zora, the Discovery computer that has merged with the Sphere data is voiced by Annabelle Wallis, who played Jane Seymour in The Tudors series.