Shawn Doyle

            On Saturday morning I memorized the first verse of “Valse Dingue” (Mad Waltz) by Boris Vian.

            I finished posting my translation of “Alice hélas” (Alice Alas) by Serge Gainsbourg. I looked for the lyrics for his song “Parisiana” but they aren’t posted anywhere that I could tell. There is a YouTube file of Zizi Jeanmaire singing the song and I started trying to write down the lyrics by listening, but that has never worked out. I just don’t have the ear for understanding sung French unless I have the words in front of me. Gainsbourg.net lists the song and they have the lyrics to almost everything, but no one has posted them there either. 

            I decided to move on to Gainsbourg’s song “Overseas Telegram” and I memorized the first verse. 

            I weighed 85.8 kilos before breakfast. 

            In the late morning I went down to No Frills where the grapes were too soft, so I bought a watermelon instead. I also got a 5.5 kilo bag of potatoes, a bottle of Sunlight dish detergent, a box of Ziploc freezer bags, three bags of skim milk, a large container of skyr, and a bottle of pomegranate lemonade. 

             When I got back from the supermarket I had time to clean out the drawer beneath my cutlery drawer. Most of what is in there are tools and rechargeable batteries, so after washing the drawer I decided to make it my tool drawer and put all the other stuff in a separate pile. I didn't have time that day to put the tools back in though and so I left them on the floor to put away on Sunday. 

            I weighed 85.7 kilos before lunch. I had a Popeyes biscuit with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemon iced tea. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I wore shorts for the first time in a week. Yonge Street was partially closed off from Gerrard to Queen. It took a while to find out why after I got home. Apparently, it’s the annual Gumball 3000 Car Rally. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos at 17:10. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:00. 

            I looked for some kind of pillow-related video that I could insert into my Movie Maker project to correspond with the line, “Slip a pillow underneath the back to reduce the spinal motion.” I would have just settled for old footage of someone holding a pillow and moving it towards the camera. I searched for almost two hours but I couldn’t find anything no matter how I worded it. Finally, I decided on a clip that doesn’t have a pillow in it at all but shows silent movie footage of a magic show in which the illusion is created of levitating a woman. I think that the sense that she is floating in the air on her back with nothing under her will work in the video. I only need about twelve seconds of the woman floating. I bookmarked it and I’ll download it tomorrow. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with fire-roasted tomato pasta sauce and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching episode 10 of the most recent episode of Star Trek Discovery. 

            In the previous episode, Tarka had unilaterally destroyed the Dark Matter Anomaly to stop it from indifferently killing billions, but mostly so he could go to a special dimension where he thinks his friend has already gone. But the DMA he destroyed was replaced shortly after by a more powerful mining machine. 

            The energy source for the DMA is on the other side of the galactic barrier, so that’s where Book and Tarka need to go to destroy it and that’s also where Discovery needs to go to make first contact with Species 10-C. Because of this, delegates from various Federation member worlds as well as the president of the Federation herself are coming along for the mission. 

            The Enterprise’s and Book’s shields need to be fortified with programmable anti-matter in order to survive the passage through the galactic barrier. The Enterprise already has access to anti-matter but Tarka needs to take Book to the abandoned site of an Emerald Chain base where he and a fellow scientist named Oros were slaves for a few years. Oros had theoretically developed a means of transporting out of the prison and into another dimension. He and Tarka had hidden extra anti-matter in their cell, so Tarka retrieves and uses it to fortify Book’s shields. 

            Meanwhile Enterprise is approaching the barrier beyond which communication with their galaxy will be impossible. In the last transmission from Earth, they learn that the DMA has moved into the Alpha Quadrant and in a matter of days will destroy Earth and Navarre. 

            For some reason the space between galaxies would destroy Discovery in minutes and so Stametz has a plan to hitch a ride inside one of the cells that travel across the barrier. Apparently, the grey cells are inert but if they get inside a coloured one they will travel. They make it inside one just before their shields give out. But then the cell joins a cluster and so they have to leave and pass through some other cells to protect themselves before they reach another one that will take them across. Of course, they make it with even less time to spare this time. 

            This was kind of a nothing episode with a lot of therapy style communication between Michael and the president. 

            Tarka is played by Canadian actor Shawn Doyle who is from Newfoundland and studied acting in Toronto at York University. He won three awards for his performance as Dennis Langley on “The Eleventh Hour”; he co-starred as Ronnie Lobell on “24”, and Mr. Hartley on “Desperate Housewives”. He played Arkady Balagan on “Endgame”. He won a Canadian Screen Award for his performance as John A Macdonald in the CBC drama “John A: Birth of a Nation”. He won an ACTRA award for his performance in “The Disappeared” and a Gemini for his role in “The Robber Bride”. I did my usual search for bedbugs before bed, and for the second night in a row I didn’t find any. If the sad pattern holds though I will find one tomorrow night.