Penelope Mitchell

            On Sunday morning I finished working out the chords for “Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man) by Serge Gainsbourg. I ran through the song in French and also my translation and then I uploaded it to Christian’s Translations. I should have it published on the blog tomorrow. 

            I weighed 85.3 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday, I cleaned the doors below my kitchen counter. Now I can get back to cleaning my kitchen floor but first I have to mop the apartment several times. Some parts have gotten stained and maybe I need to re-scrub some areas that I’ve already gone over in the living room and kitchen. 

            I supposedly weighed 86.2 kilos before lunch, but it’s hard to believe I ate a kilogram for breakfast. 

            For lunch, I had a toasted Montreal-style bagel with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I now have strong working brakes again but the wobble that the guy at Metro Cycle tried to fix yesterday is still there. When I got home their sign was still out on the sidewalk but as I approached the shop the guy turned the “open” sign around on the door to read “closed.” I’ll see if they’re open on Monday. 

            I weighed 85 kilos at 17:00. 

            I have an appointment tomorrow to drop off some shoes to be repaired at Sole Survivor. There was an email when I got home giving me weird instructions to use a certain code number to put the shoes in a box in the entryway and take my ticket. It doesn’t look like I will be able to talk to the cobbler at all. They don’t even know what’s wrong with my shoes. I don’t know if this is a covid precaution or if these people are just obsessively anti-social. It’s definitely the weirdest business interaction I have ever encountered. 

            I got caught up on my journal at 18:40. I figured out how to record with Ableton but got the same clipping as I did with Audacity, and Windows Voice Recorder. I switched the mic to the microphone jack at the back of my computer and I got the same clipping. I tried two other microphones and I got the same clipping. By process of elimination, the clipping problem has got to be either with my computer itself or with how the levels are set. The microphone setting on this computer is pretty low at 20. I don’t think this amount of clipping occurred when I recorded on the old computer. I’m going to have to wake it up tomorrow and try it out to compare. 

            I’ve also noticed that my computer has an internal microphone that I didn’t know about. When I was looking at the settings the horizontal bar jumped when I spoke, even though there is no external mic plugged in. 

            I made pizza on two halves of a Montreal-style bagel with roasted garlic sauce, and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 2, episode 5 of Star Trek Picard. 

            The Watcher takes Picard to her apartment and confirms she is not Laris, and that her name is Tallinn. As a Watcher, her job is to secretly supervise and protect the life of one crucial individual. Picard makes a reference to Gary Seven, who appeared in one of the original Star Trek stories as a supervisor similar to Tallinn. 

            When Picard tells Tallinn his name she reveals that the person she is watching is his own ancestor, Renée Picard. Renée is an astronaut about to launch into a special space program called Europa, which will send a crew to Jupiter’s moon, but she has doubts. Picard now believes that if Renee does not go, that will be the alteration of the timeline that changes his present into a nightmare. He says she is destined to discover a sentient microorganism on Io. 

            They listen in on and watch a therapy session in which Renée is expressing her doubts and the therapist seems to be feeding her discouragement. Picard asks to see the face of the therapist and it is Q. Tallinn says that Renée is scheduled to go into pre-launch quarantine in 15 hours. Once she is in quarantine she won’t be able to back out, so they need to make sure she goes into quarantine. 

            Next, we meet Adam Soong, the ancestor of the man who created Data. He is a geneticist whose daughter has a rare genetic disease that prevents her from going outside. He is trying and failing to find a cure but suddenly he receives a message on his computer that simply says, “I can help” and then “Check your 3-D printer”. The printer has made the letter “Q”. Soong meets Q who gives him a sample of a serum and tells him that if it works, he wants something from him. It does work, and his daughter is able to step into the sunlight, but only for a few hours. After this tease, Q says he can permanently cure his daughter and Soong says he will do anything. 

            Meanwhile the Borg queen is alone on Rios’s ship and disconnected from it. She tries to get the ship’s computer to give her access to local cellular tower frequencies but the computer says her voice. Pattern is not authorized. She imitates Agnes’s voice, but that doesn’t work; then Picard’s but that is not authorized either; but when she uses Rios’s voice the channel is opened. She calls the police and tells them in French that a woman is being attacked at the Picard vineyard. When the cop arrives she uncloaks the ship and he enters. When he discovers the Borg queen suspended as just a torso with a head and two arms he is shocked. She grabs him by the throat with a cable from her body and calls for Agnes. Agnes comes with a shotgun. The queen says she will kill the cop if Agnes does not give herself to her. Agnes fires the gun. 

            Seven and Raffi are on the highway waiting for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bus that is transporting Rios and several other men without documentation to Mexico. Seven uses the tricorder to disrupt and stall the bus. Rios knows what’s happening and tells his fellow prisoners in Spanish to be prepared. One of the ICE guards comes back to shut him up and Rios knocks him out. Raffi boards the bus and stuns the driver and then Seven frees Rios and the other prisoners. Raffi sees that one of them looks just like Elnor. When I studied the Knowledge and Reality Philosophy course there was one philosopher who wrote that a world where time travel is occurring would be full of such coincidences. 

            With Rios free, they beam back to the ship where Agnes tells them she had to kill the Borg queen to save the man she was threatening to murder. Shortly after this Picard and Tallinn arrive on the ship. They all discuss their mission to make sure Renée goes into space. There will be a gala that night that Renée must attend, so they have to get in, but security is high. They arrange for Agnes to infiltrate the party and hack the computer to allow everyone else to get security clearance. At the gala, Agnes is communicating by com with the others but security sees her talking with herself and takes her into custody. It turns out however that was the plan because she is now in the room from which she can hack the computer. 

            But now we see a flashback to Agnes shooting the queen. She comes close to the queen as she is dying and the queen reaches out and touches her neck, sending needles from her fingers and injecting Borg nanobytes into her body. It seems she has merged mentally with Agnes as her body dies. 

            Renée Picard is played by Australian actor Penelope Mitchell, who graduated from her high school in the top 1%. She entered Melbourne University with the intention of becoming a lawyer but switched to Arts and upon graduating moved to LA to pursue acting. She played Letha Godfrey on Hemlock Grove and Liv Parker in the Vampire Diaries. 

            For the third night in a row, I found no bedbugs before retiring.