Melanie Scrofano

            On Tuesday morning I worked out a few more chords for the intro of "Au bon vieux temps" (In the Good Old Days) by Boris Vian. 

            I blog-published "To Be or Not to Be", my translation of "Être ou ne pas naître by Serge Gainsbourg. I listened a couple of times to his "Le Couteau dans le play" (The Knife in the Play). I'll start memorizing it tomorrow. 

            I audio and video recorded song practice while playing my Martin acoustic guitar. I did "Megaphor" in one take but I think I hit some wrong chords. "Sixteen Tons of Dogma" came out okay. I made a few little pronunciation blunders on some songs that I always get right. The camera timed out while I was trying to get "Annie C's Aniseed Suckers" right. Every song up to and including "Baby Pop" and the English version "Dance and Sing to Baby Pop" are potentially songs that I could get right in a recording, upload them, and then move on to other songs. The songs after that starting with "Comme un Boomerang" and "Like a Boomerang" tend to need more work. 

            I weighed 84.9 kilos before breakfast. 

            I called my landlord about my plumbing and he said Yogi will come either this weekend or next to run a camera down my the pipe and see what's blocking the water flow. Meanwhile I have to wash all my dishes in the little bathroom sink. 

            I worked on my Statement of Purpose that is supposed to accompany my application for the MA program in Creative Writing at U of T. I made progress and might have it done on Wednesday. Then I have to start on my Curriculum Vitae. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. I stopped at the fruit market down the street where I bought two bags of black grapes and three bananas. 

            I chiseled more amethyst and black quartz crystals free of rocks for about twenty minutes. 

            I weighed 84.5 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:42. 

            I reviewed this morning's song practice video. The light was good and I looked and sounded good. My take of "Megaphor" was one of the best except for one chord being slightly off in one moment near the end. The same thing is true of "Sixteen Tons of Dogma". But I'm not quite halfway through this restarted recording project and so there's a good chance other takes of these songs will be better in the next twenty three days. My best takes of "Megaphor" between June 1 and July 15 were on July 5 and 6. 

            I downloaded the 1922 silent film Nanook of the North and also the scene from The Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy is in a drugged sleep caused by the Wicked Witch but awakened by the snow that the Good Witch causes to fall on her. I converted Nanook of the North to WMV and I'll convert The Wizard of Oz clip on Wednesday. Then I'll import them both into the Movie Maker project for creating a music video of my song "Sleep in the Snow". Nanook of the North is a two hour movie and so I'll need to spend some time breaking it down to just a few seconds of clips that fit my lyrics. 

            I scanned the rest of the negatives from the two sets shot before and after I went to Europe in 1987. There are lots of shots of my ex-girlfriend Brenda at both times, as well as portraits of people I'd randomly asked to pose, shots of my cat Siva and Toronto street shots. I started a set of colour negatives that were developed at the end of April 1992 but some of which are from Christmas of 1991 when Nancy and I took our daughter to New Brunswick for Christmas. There are quite a few shots of my daughter on my father's lap. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a slice of apple-maple pork loin while watching season 2, episode 9 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

            The Enterprise encounters a naturally occurring subspace fold. Spock thinks it could be channeled to triple the speed of subspace communication. But they have tried twelve times to send a message through the fold with no results. Pelia suggests that it's because the fold obeys different laws of physics that language is not compatible with and posits that fundamental harmonics might work. Uhura tries sending Cole Porter's "Anything Goes" but the result is the creation of an improbability field in which a new reality emerges causing the crew of the Enterprise to communicate their innermost feelings through song and dance. 

            One of the first instances is a singing argument in front of everyone between Pike and his lover Captain Marie Batel. La'an recognizes this as a security threat. James T. Kirk happens to be aboard the Enterprise because he has just been promoted to First Officer of the Farragut and he has been ordered to shadow Una so as to learn how First Officers behave. La'an knows that the improbability field will eventually cause her to sing to Kirk her true feelings and so she decides to carefully communicate to him how those feelings are for the other Kirk who died in a different timeline. He tells her that he felt like he knew her from the first time he saw her but he is in a sometimes relationship with Carol Marcus who is a scientist on Star Base One and is pregnant. 

            The improbability field is expanding and affecting hundreds of ships from both Starfleet and the Klingon Empire. The Klingons feel that in being compelled to sing they are being forced to behave in a shameful manner and plan to fire upon the fold. But they do not understand that doing so will destroy all of the ships that are affected by the field. 

            Uhura determines that the singing produces energy that if raised to a certain level will cause the field to close. So everyone must join in a grand finale, including the Klingons. I was disappointed with the Klingon song, as I had expected something deep, dark and resonant like Klingon opera but they sing the same kinds of songs as everyone else. Anyway the finale works and the fold is zipped up again. 

            The lyrics were okay but the melodies of the songs sounded like they were created by teams of people who technically know how to write songs and so there was an artificiality about them.

            Captain Batel is played by Canadian actor Melanie Scrofano, who started modeling at the age of thirteen. She played Mrs. MacMurray on the sitcom Letterkenny, Rebecca on the CBC's Being Erica, October on Pure Pwnage, and Tia on the CTV series The Listener. From 2016 to 2021 she starred in the series Wynona Earp. She played Emilie in the comedy horror film Ready Or Not. She is fluent in English, French and Italian.