Yoshiyuki Tomino

            On Sunday morning I noticed that the screen on my new computer doesn’t go off after ten minutes as it is set to. I think it’s because I downloaded BitTorrent yesterday. It always has a video going and so I guess it keeps the screen awake. But I tried minimizing Bit Torrent and it seemed to allow the screen to go black after a while. 

            I finished working out the chords for “Laide jolie laide” (Ugly Pretty Ugly) by Serge Gainsbourg and I ran through the song in French and English. I’ll upload it to Christian’s Translations tomorrow. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            I wrote down some initial thoughts for my essay proposal. I copied some related documents from the old computer to the new one, including my Indigenous Studies essay proposal to use as a template. 

            I weighed 87.9 kilos before lunch. I had five-year-old cheddar melted on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. It was thirteen above zero and so I eschewed the sweatshirt, one of my scarves, and my winter gloves. On Brock Avenue, most of the snow remaining was in Holstein patches on the tiny front lawns. On the curb, all that remained of the snow were dirty streams flowing from one pothole pond to another. On the Bloor bike lane, the eastbound lane on the south side was wet, with still some snow on either edge. But the sunny westbound lane was totally dry and there was no trace that winter had ever touched it. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos at 18:00. 

            I did some research for my essay proposal. I looked for comparisons between Mulk Raj Anand\s Untouchable and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I wanted to see if the image of the Dalit teenager Bakha promoted as many stereotypes and affected as much of a fictional understanding of Bakha as representing the reality of untouchables in the same way as Uncle Tom did. 

            I made pizza on naan with marinara sauce and extra-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of Astro Boy. 

            In this story, Astro Boy wakes up in the middle of the desert lying helpless, with no energy, with no way to get a recharge, and with no memory of how he got there. A man on horseback named Ali Baba comes along and agrees to help Astro Boy with a charge from his robot horse but only on the condition that he serve him in return. Astro Boy agrees and is renewed but not enough to be able to fly. While he is carrying Ali through the mountains back to his headquarters they are attacked by the robot Sphynx. Astro Boy battles and defeats the Sphynx, but it escapes. Astro Boy takes Ali to his headquarters where he meets Clyde Snidely, who leads Ali Baba and his gang. Unknown to Astro Boy, it was Ali, who under Snidely’s orders snuck into Astro Boy’s bedroom while he was sleeping and carried him to the desert. They drained his energy and then arranged to rescue him so he would do their bidding. Snidely tells Astro Boy that they need his help to find the treasure of the king’s tomb. He goes into a cave where he fights crab monsters and has another battle with the Sphynx, defeating her until she is almost dead. In the cave is a lot of advanced scientific equipment and a frozen man. Snidely explains that the man is Dr. I.C. Snow, who froze himself in the 1960s to prove people could be frozen and brought back to life as a way of dealing with long space flights to other planets. Snidely reveals that Astro Boy was tricked and that what they were really after was Snow’s scientific inventions which will make them rich when they sell them. Astro Boy finds a drum of atomic energy which he uses to fully recharge himself, then he defeats Snidely and his gang. He also revives the Sphynx, who was created by Snow to guard his frozen body. 

            Astro Boy was written by Yoshiyuki Tomino on his first job as an animator. He then directed Triton of the Sea. He went on to create in the 1970s the extremely successful Gundam animé series featuring the giant fighting robots controlled by human pilots in their heads. This led to several Gundam movies and TV series. 

            I kept the new computer on but turned the old computer off when I went to bed. I’d kept the old one on for the last couple of days but since there are still lots of files and documents to copy over to the new system and since I probably won’t start doing most of that until after school is finished at the end of April, I want to make sure it doesn’t crash before then.