Yetide Badaki

            On Tuesday morning I worked out the chords to most of the second verse of "Être ou ne pas naître" (To Be or Not to Be) by Serge Gainsbourg. The chords for the first and second verses are different but I assume that the rest of the song just repeats the chords of those two. 

            I audio and video recorded my song practice while playing my Martin acoustic guitar as I will on Wednesday as well. I did quite a few retakes of songs although a couple came through in one take. The camera cut off while I was trying to get through my third take of "Les Sucettes". 

            I weighed 85 kilos before breakfast. 

            I called my landlord about my kitchen sink leaking and of course he blamed me. What could I possibly have done to make his pipes malfunction? I suggested that it might be because he installed plastic instead of metal pipes and he started swearing at me. My bathroom sink has metal pipes and they have maybe leaked twice in the twenty six years I've lived here and the last time was about ten years ago. Apparently plastic pipes can't handle the pressure when a drain is being plunged and it causes them to leak. 

            I weighed 84.6 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I chiseled one of the leftover rocks containing clusters of amethyst and some other shiny silvery things. I knocked off a few small pieces to save. The rock was about the size of a baseball and I knocked it into five pieces, one is about half the size of the original and the other four are about equal with each other. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos at 17:30, which is the heaviest I've been in the evening in a week. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:40. 

            I reviewed this morning's song practice video. I think the final take of "Megaphor" wasn't bad. The ending for "Sixteen Tons of Dogma" is not uniform yet. I sometimes hit chords that are not quite right even though they aren't dissonant. Some of the other songs might be keepers. 

            I downloaded the clip of Marlene Dietrich singing "The Laziest Gal in Town" in Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright. I converted it to AVI and then to WMV, then imported the WMV file into my "Sleep in the Snow" Movie Maker project. I cut out everything but the parts with Dietrich, which shaved it down to two minutes. All I really need for my line "I guess I'm just too lazy" is the parts that show her lying on the elegant chaise lounge and looking languid in her feather and silk sleeping gown. I can cut out all the parts that show her singing. 

            I scanned two sets of black and white negatives from the 1980s of mostly street shots and started on another. 

            I had a potato with gravy and three pork ribs while watching season 4, episode 2 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

            In this story Pike has gone to the Voltaran Nebula to seek the Alerian lawyer Neera Ketoul to act as Una's counsel in her trial. The atmosphere of the planet is not breathable by humans and so he is using a breathing apparatus. He is told Ketoul is booked and can't see him but he says he'll wait even though his oxygen supply is almost depleted. His insistence is putting his life in danger and so Ketoul agrees to see him. He asks her to defend Una but she refuses because she and Una are old friends and she feels she was betrayed by her. Pike argues that this case could raise her profile so that her other cases against the Federation could get the attention they deserve. One of the prosecutors is Pike's girlfriend Captain Batel and the other is a Vulcan that Spock doesn't like. The prosecution is seeking that Una receive a dishonourable discharge and twenty years in a penal colony. Ketoul takes the case. During the trial she questions Admiral April under whom Una served. He said that if he'd known she was an Alerian he wouldn't have sponsored Una's application to Starfleet because it's against the law. Ketoul points out several incidents in which April broke the Prime Directive. La'an tells Ketoul that she thinks that someone accessed a personal log entry in which she stated that she'd found out Una was Alerian. Ketoul tells her it couldn't have been her because it takes six months to subpoena a personal log. While she is on the stand Una confesses that it was she who outed herself. Ketoul argues that by revealing herself to Pike as Alerian she was seeking asylum and accepting her was legal based on Federation rules. That argument wins and Una is fully exonerated. 

            Neera Ketoul was played by Yetide Badaki, who came to the US from Nigeria at the age of 12. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal with a BA in theatre. She was nominated for a Joseph Jefferson Award for her role in the play "I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document". She plays Bilquis on American Gods. She played Chi Chi on This is Us. She wrote and starred in the short film In Hollywoodland. She played the mother of Giannis in Rise. She is developing a Nigerian TV series called Najia Vamp.