Tawny Newsome

            On Sunday morning I finished memorizing "Au bon vieux temps" (In the Good Old Days) by Boris Vian. On Monday I'll start looking for the chords. 

            I ran through singing and playing "To Be or Not to Be", my translation of "Être ou ne pas naître" (To Be or Not to Be) by Serge Gainsbourg. I uploaded it to Christian's Translations where I started the editing process to prepare it for publication on the blog. 

            I audio and video recorded song practice while playing my Kramer electric guitar. As usual it took a few tries to get through "Megaphor" and "Sixteen Tons of Dogma". I don't think my singing was that great today. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I went over to the hardware store to buy a stronger drain cleaner. The guy told me the strongest stuff they have is Professional but if one doesn't know what one is doing it can damage one's pipes. I asked what more one would need to know besides following the instructions and he said if I follow the instructions I should be okay. I took it home and followed the instructions to use half a cup of it, wait five minutes and then flush for three minutes with cold water. I did that and the cold water immediately backed up like nothing had been poured down. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 84.7 kilos at 17:00. 

            I chiseled some more quartz crystals free of the rock, mostly black but some of the amethyst. 

            I put a whole cup of the strong drain cleaner in the sink and flushed it after about ten minutes. The only result seems to be that the P-pipe under the sink has started to leak again. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:34. 

            I reviewed this morning's song practice video. I think I hit a wrong chord or two on Megaphor and Sixteen Tons of Dogma. I also don't think I was singing very well. 

            In the Movie Maker project for creating a music video of my song "Sleep in the Snow" I got the concert video synchronized with the studio audio up to the instrumental. But the studio instrumental is about twice as long and so now I need to find some video to fill up the extra time. 

            I scanned the rest of the colour negatives from March of 1987 and then a black and white set from probably the mid 80s with mostly shots of people on the street and in art studios. I started a very large set of black and whites that are also probably from the mid 80s. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce Genoa salami and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 2, episode 7 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

            This story is a crossover with the animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks. Four of the characters from that show, Ensigns Brad Boimler, Bekett Mariner, Sam Rutherford and Noel Wells are investigating an ancient portal. Rutherford takes a picture of Boimler in front of the portal and the flash activates the portal. Boimler is being sucked in and Mariner runs to save him. Boimler goes back in time to when Una, Spock and La'an are investigating the same portal. 

            Boimler is taken aboard the Enterprise where he is excited to see his heroes, Pike and Spock in real life. He keeps dropping tidbits he shouldn't about their fates. 

            An Orion ship approaches the Enterprise and Starfleet in this time knows Orions as pirates, so they prepare to fight. Boimler tells them it's a science vessel and it is. But later the Orion ship beams the portal aboard their ship. Boimler knows a way to track the Orions but he has to do it without giving the Enterprise crew the knowledge of how. The Orion Captain Karas wants Pike to persuade him to return the portal. Boimler says Karas wants to trade. Karas says he would like the grain in their cargo hold and so Pike agrees. 

            There is enough Horonium in the portal to send Boimler back to his time, but before he can step in, Mariner comes out looking to save him. Now they are both stuck in the past and there is no more Horonium. What they just used up was the last known Horonium in 100 years. 

            Every time Boimler sees Una he freaks out and moves away. Una asks Mariner what is wrong and she explains that Boimler has a picture of Una inside his locker. 

            Since they are stuck, Boimler wants to make things right. The grain that Pike traded was going to needy people and so he and Mariner plot to steal a shuttle and trade the portal back to the Orions in exchange for the grain. They send them a message but they are caught by La'an before they can make the trade. 

            Pike says he understands because he would be in awe if he were to go back in time to visit Archer's Enterprise. Suddenly Boimler knows how to find Horonium because ships of Archer's time used Horonium in their hulls. Also when a new ship is built bearing the name of a previous ship, a piece of the old ship is buried inside of the new ship. They find that piece under the floor in engineering and extract the horonium. 

            Boimler and Mariner are taken to the portal but Karas is there because he got Boimler's message. They have to explain that they come from a time when Orions are part of Starfleet and their friend Wells's great grandmother is a crewmember on Karas's ship. Pike offers to let Karas claim discovery of the portal and he agrees to that. 

            Back on the Enterprise the bridge crew are drinking the Orion Hurricanes that Mariner introduced and it causes everything to feel two dimensional. 

            This was a very entertaining episode and the two voice actors showed themselves to be very good live action comedy actors but still didn't make me want to watch Lower Decks. 

            Mariner is played by Tawny Newsome, who grew up riding amateur rodeo. She played Angela Ali on Space Force, Gabby in Brockmire, and Chelsea Leight-Leigh in Bajillion Dollar Properties. She's the co-host of the official Star Trek podcast. She writes and performs with Chicago's Second City. She sings with two country bands: Four Lost Souls and Jon Langford. She put out a desert punk album of original songs called Material Flats with Bethany Thomas.