I worked out the chords to all the verses of “Mickey maousse” by Serge Gainsbourg. All that’s left are some of the instrumentals and I should have that done tomorrow.
I did my first audio recording on the new computer with a functioning Scarlett interface now that I’d solved the clipping problem. I wanted to try recording with Audacity but it wouldn’t let me record. I’d been able to use it several times before but this time it wouldn’t work. I tried Ableton and it didn’t refuse me but I couldn’t get it to record although I’d been able to do it a couple of days ago. I settled on Windows Voice Recorder for this session. When I tried Audacity a little later it worked but I can’t figure out what I did differently. My tests came out at really low, almost inaudible volume. I tried changing settings but nothing worked. Then my Scarlett interface stopped working, and a minute later it worked. Finally, I turned up the gain a little more on both the interface and Audacity and was able to record at a decent level. I’ll try it again tomorrow. I’ll test Ableton again later and see if I can get that working for a future song practice.
After shaving and showering and then doing the dishes, I found a YouTube tutorial for beginners that helped me record a test on Ableton. I think the problem this morning was that it was set on “No Input”. This time I clicked on my interface and it worked. I’ll try recording with Audacity tomorrow because it’s simpler and work my way up to Ableton.
I weighed 84.4 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. I stopped at Long and McQuade to buy a pop filter and settled on the Shure Popper Stopper for $61.59. The box claims it’s the original popper stopper but I couldn’t find any evidence of that online.
The people who work at Long and McQuade seem to all follow a dress code since they all wear shirts and ties. It’s such a striking contrast to Steve’s where all the employees look like they are ready to jump on stage for a night of rock and roll. I find the people at Steve’s much more comfortable to deal with.
As I was riding down Yonge Street just south of Bloor someone called out my name and it was Tom Smarda, who I haven’t seen in three years. I’ve known Tom since the streets of Vancouver in 1978. In Toronto, in the 1990s Tom played guitar and sang in my band, Christian and the Lions. The next day I’d be meeting Brian Haddon, who played recorder and keyboards and sang in my band in the late 90s and early 2000s. Meeting two Lions in two days is an interesting coincidence. We chatted for a while. I had been wondering about his reaction to the pandemic over the last three years. He said he thinks it’s all bullshit and refuses to wear a mask on the TTC. He boycotted any stores that enforced the mask mandate. It’s interesting because I’d associated those kinds of reactions to the mask mandate with the extreme right, but Tom is on the extreme left. I told him masks definitely work because they stop the water droplets that the virus rides on. Unless he thinks that there was no covid virus at all, masks can’t be bullshit. Anyway, it was great to see Tom again.
On the way home I stopped at Freshco where all the grapes were soft and so I bought seven very expensive bags of cherries. I also got a pint of strawberries, a pint of blueberries, a half-pint of raspberries, a can of peaches, a container of skyr, and two bags of kettle chips.
When I got home I put the pop filter on my microphone stand so it’d be ready for recording tomorrow.
I weighed 84 kilos at 18:15.
I got caught up on my journal just before dinner.
I had a potato with gravy and the last two chicken drumsticks while watching season 2, episode 9 of Star Trek Picard.
Picard, Seven, Raffi, and Tallinn rush to get to the La Sirena before the Borg Queen who is still controlling Agnes’s body. But she gets there first with her assimilated special ops squad. Rios rushes to get Teresa and her son Ricardo off the ship and he is wounded. They beam out to the vineyard where Picard, Seven, Raffi, and Tallinn are. Picard has Tallinn use her Watcher technology to teleport Rios, Teresa, and Ricardo back to Teresa’s clinic, and then he has her shut the device down so Rios can’t get back.
But on the La Sirena the queen meets resistance from Agnes, who has not fully allowed her consciousness to be buried by the Borg. Agnes has locked the ship so the queen can’t take control of it and she has created a battle hologram in the form of Elnor to fight the queen’s soldiers on the ship.
The soldiers are hunting Picard and his friends, so in order to regain the ship, they split into two teams. Each team makes its way through different parts of Chateau Picard while the soldiers pursue them. Picard leads Tallinn down into the tunnels and while they run, Picard relives childhood memories of what happened to his mother down there. His father had locked her in her room to protect her from her self-destructive urges but the young Picard had released her, which led to her going to the tunnels. The young Picard had opened a door to find that his mother had hung herself. This is a memory that he had repressed his whole life until now.
It’s strange and unrealistic to have these kinds of flashbacks occur while Picard is in a life-threatening situation. People don’t reflect on their past while soldiers are trying to kill them. It also doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the main story. If it did somehow tie in maybe there would be an excuse.
Picard and Tallinn emerge from the tunnels only to be confronted by Adam Soong and the remaining soldiers. Adam orders the soldiers to kill Picard but Rios has finally overridden the teleportation lock. He appears and takes out the soldiers, but drops his phaser. Soong picks it up and is about to fire but Rios tells him the weapon is geared to his DNA and will explode if anyone else uses it. Soong tosses the weapon just before it blows up and he escapes.
Seven and Raffi make it onto the La Sirena to find that the Elnor hologram has eliminated all but the Borg Queen. She fights with Elnor and it seems he defeats her. She is down, with Elnor behind her and Seven and Raffi in front with phasers aimed at her. But she sends three metal tentacles out of her body to each of them. She dissipates the Elnor hologram, knocks Raffi away, and mortally wounds Seven. She is about to finish Seven off but the knife stops before it reaches her. A tear falls on her hand from Agnes’s eyes and Agnes confronts her. Somehow and way too easily Agnes convinces the Borg queen that she and her should remain together in one body but change their mission. They should start a new species of benign Human-Borg hybrids and actually help people rather than destroy them. The bargain is that they keep the La Sirena for their new mission and leave Picard and the crew in the past. Half Borg Agnes saves Seven’s life with Borg implants exactly like the ones she lost in this timeline. Borg Agnes’s final message before heading to space is to tell Picard that for the Europa mission to succeed there must be two Renée Picards: one who lives and one who dies.
Adam Soong is played by Brent Spiner, who is most famous for his role as the android Data in Star Trek the Next Generation and other Star Trek shows and films. In high school in Texas, he won the national championship for dramatic interpretation for the speech team. At 19 he worked as a performer at Six Flags Astroworld. There was also a TV special at the time called The Pied Piper of Astroworld. In the 70s he moved to New York where he worked in theatre and on Broadway. He moved to LA and started getting supporting roles n TV series. In 1984 he starred in the movie Rent Control. In 1987 he began his popular role of Data in Star Trek and later played the part of Data’s creator, Noonien Soong, as well as Soong’s descendants and ancestors. He starred as Dr. Nigel Fenway on Threshold; he starred as a fictional version of himself on Fresh Hell; he played Brother Adrian in Warehouse 13; he played Sidney in Outcast.
I finally made it to a week without seeing any bedbugs. The last one I saw was seven days ago and before that, it was six days. Maybe the anti-bedbug fungus that pest control sprayed has gotten rid of them throughout the building. I’m going to have to not see any for a month before I start relaxing about it though.
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