Paloma Nuñez

            On Saturday morning I posted the lyrics for “The Yellow Spiders”, my translation of “Les Araignées” by Boris Vian on my Boris Vian Facebook page and my own page. 

            I continued collecting images for a photo montage video of the song “Flashback” by Serge Gainsbourg. I think I might have all I need by Sunday. 

            I weighed 86.9 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since September 26. 

            I played my Martin acoustic during song practice for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune during almost every song. Tomorrow I’ll begin a four session stretch of playing my electrics.

            Around midday I rode down to No Frills were I bought five bags of black grapes, two packs of raspberries, some bananas, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a pack of chicken drumsticks, a sirloin tip roast, mouthwash, a jug of orange juice, two containers of 4% skyr, and a bag of barbecue flavour Miss Vicki’s chips. 

            I weighed 87.8 kilos at 14:10. 

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

            I weighed 87.45 kilos at 18:15. 

            At 18:30 I remembered to buy beer and so I went over to the liquor store and bought a six pack of Creemore. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:04. 

            I returned to digitizing my old cassette tapes. The one I left off with months ago has some non-verbal vocalizations by my daughter and a couple of takes of rehearsals of “Seven Shades of Blues” with just me singing and Yehudah Cullman playing the cello. Then there’s dead air and a recording of CBC’s Brave New Waves profiling Chumbawamba followed by dead air. I digitized it. The file could use some editing but I can always do that later and just work on the digitization for now. 

            In my “2024-10-07 Song Practice” Movie Maker project I continued searching for the final take of “Je t’aime. Moi non plus”. It wasn’t in part A so I deleted part A and imported part B. The audio had been synchronized with the video of part A but it was out of line with Part B. I had them in sync just before dinner but still hadn’t found the final take. I should have it tomorrow. 

            I made pizza on a slice of multigrain sandwich bread with marinara sauce, pesto, a cubed slice of ham, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore while watching season 3, episode 6 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

            James Kirk is the First Officer of the Ferragut but he finds it boring to work under Captain V’Rel because she doesn’t take risks. They are surveying the planet Helicon Gamma but the way she approaches the task could have been done with automated probes. He thinks they should beam down to the planet. Suddenly a focused gravitational beam from a gigantic starship hits the planet and the debris severely damages the Ferragut and injures much of the crew, including V’Rel. Kirk is now temporary captain of the ship. He sends out a distress call and the Enterprise arrives. Spock, Chapel, and Scotty beam onto the Ferragut. The monster ship grapples the Enterprise, pulls it inside and then goes to warp. Una and La’an remember stories about such a scavenger ship that had various names such as “Destroyer of Worlds”, Asaasllich, The Annihilator and Astrovore. Kirk orders Scotty to try to repair the engines so they can go after the Enterprise. On the Enterprise they learn they could power the thrusters manually but can’t coordinate them with the comms down. Pelia, who is so old that she used to live on Earth in the 20th century has a solution. She takes them to her quarters, which is like a historical rummage sale. She digs out some land line phones and some game controllers from the 1980s. The scavengers have been jamming their coms but they won’t be able to jam cables. Pelia says she hasn’t run cables like this since she was a roadie for the Grateful Dead. Spock doesn’t understand the reference and thinks she was doing something with corpses. Pike and La’an work on severing the cord that holds the Enterprise but two scavengers arrive in large armoured suits that are resistant to phaser fire because of some shielding device they wear. The Ferragut goes into warp and overtakes the scavenger ship but the warp engines blow out and they are now dead in space in the path of the scavenger ship. The crew discuss removing Kirk from command but Uhura argues that he has it in him to lead. Kirk has doubts because if V’Rel had listened to him and took the risk of beaming down to the planet they would all be dead. Spock tells him to trust himself and a little too suddenly he does. he proposes to set a trap for the scavengers by flooding the intermix chamber with antiprotons to make them think they have Aldentium in the plasma manifold. Even though the scavengers can resist phasers, their own weapons are like bullets. The scavengers attack Pike and La’an in the galley. She rolls a bottle of booze towards them and ignites it with a phaser. The scavengers take the bait and try to scavenge the Ferragut but Kirk is able to temporarily disable their ship. Pike pumps baryon particles into the scavenger ships umbilical cord, forcing them to retract it and free the Enterprise. Kirk fires photon torpedoes into the collecting mouth of the scavenger ship and the ship is destroyed. Then a scan reveals that there were 7000 lifeforms on board and they were all human. On a piece of debris they see what used to be the flag of the United States. Because of debris they can’t beam anyone on board. They were the descendants of a group of Earthlings who ventured into space in the mid 21st Century after WWIII. They accumulated technology over the years and became brutal world destroying scavengers. It reminds me of Voyager from the first Star Trek film starting out as a harmless satellite but becoming a powerful entity. 

            Alvarez, a bridge officer on the Ferragut was played by Canadian actor Paloma Nuñez, who graduated from the University of Guelph, majoring in drama and math. She studied improv at Second City. She won a Screen Actors Guild award for her performance in Spotlight. She was nominated for a Dora for Wonder Pageant. She became a director and a teacher at Second City.