Phumzile Sitole

            On Sunday morning I finished memorizing “Overseas Telegram” by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the chords and found one set so far that a few sites have copied. I transcribed those and I’ll look some more tomorrow. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I finished sorting out my tools and batteries to store in the drawer beneath my cutlery drawer. I put all the batteries, the Allen keys, and the ratchet attachments into separate baggies so they wouldn’t scatter all over the drawer. Next I took out the drawer beneath that one and began to remove the contents into separate piles on the floor. I decided that this will be my nail, nut, washer, screw, bolt, and bracket drawer. Everything else will go into the bigger bottom drawer. I didn’t have time before lunch to take everything out so I could wash the drawer. I’ll do that tomorrow and then start on the last drawer. It looks like I’ll be able to get back to my kitchen floor project before the beginning of June. 

            I weighed 85.8 kilos before lunch. I had my last Popeyes biscuit with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            I took a siesta and slept twenty minutes longer than planned. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 85 kilos at 17:20. 

            I was caught up on my journal by 18:20. 

            I downloaded the YouTube video of the 1932 silent movie of Howard Thurston’s magic show. I imported it into my Movie Maker project of making a video for my song “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy.” I placed a copy on the end of the timeline and edited out everything but the part of the show when he creates the illusion of levitating a woman. I inserted the clip into the main video to correspond with my line, “Slip a pillow underneath the back to reduce the spinal motion.” The clip is about ten seconds too long and so I’ll shave it down tomorrow. 

            I searched for torrents of TV shows from the 1960s to download, starting under the letter “A”. There’s a series called “Arrest and Trial” that seems to have only run for one season but it had a lot of stars such as William Shatner in guest roles. I initiated downloads of all the ones on the list and two of them have begun slowly. I also started downloading the complete series of Atom Ant, but so far it hasn’t moved past 0.2%. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with roasted garlic sauce, a few French fries, and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 11 of the latest season of Star Trek Discovery. 

            In this story Discovery has passed into the next galaxy and approaches the home of Unknown Species 10-C. But they are behind an impenetrable barrier and so Michael needs to find a diplomatic way in. There is a planet near the outside of the 10-C forcefield that Michael thinks may be the ancestral home of the 10-C. She, Saru, Culber, and Detmer take a shuttle to the planet where they explore some ruins and some enormous bones. The bones are more like cartilage and the away team suspect that 10-C lived in the gas layers above the planet. On the surface is a lot of hydrocarbon dust.

            While exploring outside the ruins Saru suddenly sees hallucinations and is stricken with the terror of impending death. When Culber tries to talk him down he has the same experience, and then later so does Michael. The only one unaffected is Ditmer. Inside the structure they figure out that the dust is different and that the different kinds of dust seems to have served for 10-C the function of pheromones. The emotions are very different inside the structure and there is a sense of love. They conclude that this was a nursery while outside they experienced the terror of death of some who were perhaps killed violently. They find sixteen different types of the hydrocarbon dust and conclude that this is the key for making first contact with 10-C. Saru observes that although the 10-C clearly experience deep connecting emotions, it does not explain how their DMA could so indifferently destroy the lives of billions in its mining operations. 

            Meanwhile, Book and Tarka still plan on destroying the DMA but need a way to get to it. Tarka has a plan to attach Book’s ship to a section of Discovery’s hull. But first they need to sneak onto Discovery in order to dull Zora’s sense of that section of the hull. While on the ship Book takes the chance of contacting General Ndoye of Earth, who voted to destroy the DMA. He gets her to agree to feed information to him. She agrees that if Earth enters into the red zone then the DMA must be destroyed but insists that if diplomacy begins before that he must stand down. But we know from past experience that Tarka is going to try to destroy the DMA anyway. 

            But if 10-C had the ability to replace the DMA effortlessly within hours of its destruction, why would destroying it do any good? I guess they plan on destroying it at its power source, but this is an astronomically more advanced species so I can’t imagine that they would be as vulnerable as Tarka seems to think they are. 

            Tarka is able to successfully dull Zora’s sense of that one section of the hull so Book’s ship can piggy back on Discovery. But one thing goes wrong, as Jett Reno catches Tarka on Discovery. In the final scene Book’s ship is attached to Discovery but Book beams on board only to discover that Tarka has taken Reno as a hostage. 

            General Nedoye was only a captain just a year or so ago. That’s quite a promotion. She is played by Phumzile Sitole, who is from South Africa. She played Akers on “Orange is the New Black”; she had a recurring part on “The Good Fight”. She starred in the South African film “Rights of Passage” and played a supporting lead role in the US movie “Lostfound.” 

            Before bed, I did my usual search for bedbugs and didn’t find any for the third night in a row. That broke the every-two-days pattern that has persisted for a few weeks, and hopefully it will be a trend.