Babs Olusanmokun

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

            I memorized the second verse of “Juif et Dieu” (Jews and God) by Serge Gainsbourg, and adjusted my translation. 

            I video-recorded my song practice until the camera shut off and then I recorded some more until the camera said the battery was exhausted. I recorded the whole rehearsal on Audacity. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos before breakfast. Those bagel pizzas I made last night were heavy I guess.

            Around midday I mopped the floors two more times and then I returned to scrubbing the east side of the kitchen floor. Years ago there were two rows of tiles in front of the kitchen counter. I pulled up the outer row to cut out some of the floorboards for a ramp between the living room and the kitchen. So for years, there has been a 7 mm-deep depression in front of the counter that is a 26.5 cm by 153 cm rectangle. It’s a dirty area and it tends to catch more dirt all the time. I scrubbed it a bit today. My ultimate goal is to buy a sheet of plywood that would fill the space and then I’ll put new tiles down on top.

            I weighed 85.5 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 85.5 kilos at 17:00. I was caught up on my journal at 18:15. 

            I searched for videos of brains being fried, and there are quite a few, but none in which the brains are fried without being coated in something. I settled for a video that shows a brain being sliced in half before being cut into smaller pieces and breaded. I downloaded it from YouTube with the 4K Downloader. Tomorrow I’ll try to import it to my Movie Maker project. 

            I worked on my poem “The Odour” about the smell of bedbugs. 

            I worked on partially colourizing my photo “Anti Gravity’s Rainbow”. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of roast pork while watching the third episode of Star Trek Strange New Worlds. 

            This story begins with two away teams from the Enterprise doing research on an abandoned Illyrian colony on Hetemit IX. One team is led by Number One and the other consists of Captain Pike and science officer Spock. Number One’s team returns to the ship but shortly after that, they begin to show symptoms of chronic light addiction. Number One briefly experiences the same symptoms but shortly after that returns to normal. 

            Meanwhile an ion storm on the planet prevents Pike and Spock from beaming up to the Enterprise. 

            The light addiction infects almost everyone and causes some to go to dangerous lengths to acquire light. Chief engineer Hemmer transports part of the radiant core of the planet below onto the Enterprise and is about to walk into it when Number One stuns him. She then shows she is more than she seems when she picks him up and easily carries him to sick bay. Uhuru was able to avoid the affliction because she sleeps entirely in the dark and it is discovered that the disease is carried by light. Number One tells Dr. M’Benga that she is Illyrian, which is a group banned from Starfleet because they have genetically altered themselves. 

            On the planet, Pike and Spock take shelter from the storm in the library, and while there Spock reads historical data about the Illyrian colony. The Illyrians wanted to join Starfleet and tried to reverse their bio-engineering, but that is what caused the illness. Pike and Spock encounter energy beings who break into the library. At first, Pike and Spock see them as a threat but it turns out they have come to protect them from the storm. Spock concludes that the energy beings are Illyrians that were infected with the light illness and then struck by lightning. 

            Number One saves the crew with the help of Nurse Chapel as Una’s antibodies are given to the crew. Una confesses to Pike that she is Illyrian and offers her resignation but Pike refuses to accept it because she is the best first officer in the fleet. 

            Una confronts M’Benga because the transporters should have filtered out the disease and his medical transporter had not been upgraded. It is revealed that he refused to upgrade his transporters because he has his daughter in the pattern buffer. She has an ailment that is incurable in known Starfleet science but he means to keep her alive until he finds a cure. Number One says they will create an isolated pattern buffer for M’Benga’s daughter that will not endanger the crew. 

            Dr. M’Benga is played by Nigerian actor Babs Olusanmokun. He is fluent in English, French, Portuguese, and Yoruba. He has a triple black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and has won several championships. He played Jamis in Dune. 

            It’s been three days since I’ve seen a bedbug.