Sunday 16 June 2024

Susan Twist


            On Saturday morning I worked out the chords to the second verse and the chorus of “Et quand bien même” (And Even If) by Serge Gainsbourg. From this point on the chords just repeat except for maybe the instrumental. 
            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice and had my amp back for the first time in over a month. It sounds much better now with no static and no major hum when I turn on the reverb but there still is a general light hum that might be normal. 
            I weighed 88.1 kilos before breakfast. 
            Around midday I put the market bags back on my bike trailer and rode to No Frills. On my way I stopped at a mail box to send my colon cancer FIT test to Life Labs. At the supermarket the red grapes were $8.80 a kilo but I’d just bought red grapes at Freshco on Thursday for $3.90 a kilo. I’ve never done a price match with my phone but I searched for the Freshco flyer to show it to the cashier when I checked out and got seven bags. I also bought two packs of raspberries, a pack of strawberries, mouth wash, dish detergent, six bars of Irish Spring soap, two T-bone steaks, a jug of low sugar lemon iced tea (with no artificial sweeteners), a jug of orange juice, two containers of Siggis skyr (because the preferable much thicker PC brand has been absent for over a month, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s sweet chili kettle chips. When I got to the cash the Freshco flyer kept disappearing from my phone and so the cashier asked me to step out of line to find it. I showed her the close up of the Freshco grapes from their flyer but the cashier wasn’t sure it was a flyer and so she called her supervisor who is always super nice. She looked at her phone and found an even cheaper flyer for the grapes at Walmart for $3.17 a kilo. She put in that code for me. She deserves a foot massage for that. 
            I weighed 88.75 before lunch. I had saltines with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of lemon iced tea. 
            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. On my way out, while riding to Brock on Maple Grove I saw some books that someone had thrown out. Most of them seemed like the kinds of books a twelve year old girl would read but there was also a novel by Austin Clarke and an empty hard cover writing book with the word “LOVE” on the cover but divided as
LO
VE. 
            I assume tweens nowadays don’t write on paper anymore. Maybe someone gave it to her as a gift that she never used. I can always use a hard cover writing book and so I took that, despite the cover.
            I weighed 87.8 kilos at 17:12, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since last Saturday. 
            I posted my blog as usual and seconds later it got tagged with a Content Warning. Obviously no person at Blogger read it that quickly and so AI must have misconstrued the content as being inappropriate for some reason. We live in strange times. 
            I was caught up on my journal at 18:37. 
            In the Movie Maker project for my acoustic performance of “Mamadou” I synchronized the video and audio and isolated the song. I added a fade to black effect at the end. Tomorrow I’ll decide what other effects I want to add and then publish it. I’ll see then if I have time to upload it to YouTube or if I need to wait until Monday. 
            In the Audacity project for synchronizing the copy of the studio recording of “The Next State of Grace” and drums with the master track that has no drums I got about halfway through the song. I didn’t listen to it but only tried to line up the wave forms for the two tracks based on recognizable visual patterns in each. It’s very time consuming and I may not even have it done tomorrow.
            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sourdough bread with Basilica sauce, a sliced beef burger and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 14, episode 7 of Doctor Who.
            SPOILER ALERT!!! 
            The Tardis arrives at UNIT headquarters and the Doctor and Rose emerge. There are heartfelt greetings with old friends and warm regards for new ones such as Morris Gibbons, a thirteen year old genius who is also a UNIT agent. It seems UNIT is not subject to child labour laws. Then the Doctor gets serious. He needs help because everywhere he lands a woman appears. He projects an image of her from each of his recent adventures on the screen. But the crew at UNIT are all fully aware of the woman because she is famous on Earth in the present. Her name is Susan Triad and she is an IT genius. Today she’s releasing her software free of charge worldwide. Rose and the Doctor begin to wonder if Susan is the Doctor’s granddaughter. Rose asks why he wouldn’t recognize his own granddaughter and so he has to explain Time Lord regeneration. Then the Doctor informs UNIT about another mystery, that of Ruby Sunday’s mother. There is CCTV footage of Rose’s mother leaving her in front of the church on Ruby Road on Christmas eve, 2004 and Ruby has it on a VHS tape. But she says the images are unclear. Morris says UNIT tech can sharpen the image. Ruby goes home to get the tape and her mother Carla insists on going back to UNIT with her. She gets the neighbour Mrs. Flood to come over and look after Ruby’s grandmother, Cherry. When Mrs. Flood and Cherry are alone Cherry tells Mrs. Flood she would love a cup of tea. Mrs. Flood responds, “We’d all love a lot of things that aren’t going to happen”. Then she says, “I’ve been very careful … There’s a storm coming in. He waits no more.” Back at UNIT Kate Lethbridge Stewart the head of the organization is having a conversation with the Doctor. She says her father never mentioned the Doctor having a granddaughter. The Doctor’s travels with Susan ended before UNIT was formed. She says that if he has a granddaughter he must have children, but he says, “Not yet”. She asks, “You can have a granddaughter before you have children?” He responds, “If you’re a Time Lord”. The Doctor’s former companion Mel works for UNIT but she has been working undercover to spy on Susan Triad. She comes with a DNA sample that shows that Susan Triad is human. Ruby returns with the tape and the Doctor asks Kate if UNIT has a Time Window. They take him to the sealed chamber where they can get glimpses of the past such as of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. They feed the VHS into the system to recreate the event of Ruby’s abandonment. The Doctor, Ruby and Colonel Chidozie are sealed into the chamber. It begins to snow before the program is started. They are on Ruby Road in front of the church, from inside of which can be heard a choir singing “The Carol of the Bells”. They see the hooded figure of Rose’s mother walking towards them but she is more obscured than everything else. As she passes they try to see her face but the tape fast forwards at that point. Then the Tardis arrives and the Doctor exits to save Ruby from the Goblins in that earlier episode. The hooded figure stops as she walks away and Carla observes that she’s crying. Then when the Doctor returns to the Tardis he stops to watch the woman and then she turns and points at him. Chidozie steps in the direction she is pointing to see if there is anything. He goes behind the Tardis. The woman walks away and then disappears. Then what looks like a controlled sandstorm with a red light inside of it appears and swirls around the Tardis. Chidozie is nowhere to be seen. He doesn’t respond until Rose asks for him. He says he’s lost and tells them it’s been waiting for so long. The Time Window shuts down and all that is left of Chidozie is a mound of sand in his shape. The Doctor asks Mel to take him to Susan Triad. Whatever was swirling around the Tardis in 2004 has now been detected around the Tardis in the present. The Doctor meets Susan just before her big broadcast. She mentions that she dreams a lot and he asks what about. She is led away to go on international television but as she is leaving the Doctor asks if she dreams of being an ambulance. Her expression shows that this jarred her memory. On live TV she begins her speech but then gets confused and begins talking to herself and wondering who the Doctor is. Back at UNIT a new member of the crew named Harriet Arbinger begins speaking for the lifeform that surrounds the Tardis. She says it seduced the Tardis. The Doctor is listening from the studio and deduces Harriet Arbinger is another Harbinger of the Gods. She lists the Gods: The Toymaker, The Trickster, Maestro, and several others. She says the God of all Gods has returned. He has been called Set, Seth and many other titles but his true name is Sutekh. The storm around the Tardis forms into a giant doglike beast with Egyptian style decorations. Then Susan’s face becomes takes on some skull-like features as she becomes possessed by Suteckh the god of death and grabs one of her aids, turning him to dust. She reaches out for the Doctor as we read “To be continued”. 
            Susan was played by Susan Twist, who first appeared on television in the teen drama The Squad in 1980. From 1985 to 1996 she played Rosie Banks on the British soap opera Brookside.



No comments:

Post a Comment