Warren Scherer

            On Tuesday morning I memorized the second verse of “Au revoir mon enfance” (Goodbye My Childhood) by Boris Vian. There are seven verses left to learn. 

            I finished editing the duration of the images in my “Flashback” Movie Maker project. I published it and uploaded it to YouTube. Tomorrow I’ll upload the text for “Flashback” by Serge Gainsbourg to my Christian’s Translations blog to begin preparing it for publication. 

            I weighed 88.9 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since last Tuesday. 

            Around midday I applied a little more primer to the bathroom door and then took the paint into the bedroom where I covered all the baseboards that are near the bed. There is still some primer left and so I’ll have to figure out tomorrow where I’ll put it. Maybe on the kitchen side of the bathroom door. 

            I weighed 88.55 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 88.1 kilos at 18:45. 

            I was caught up in my journal at 19:45. 

            I reviewed the next cassette tape ahead of digitizing it. It’s from Christmas of 1994. My daughter and I are playing with the tape recorder and she and I are singing. I digitized it and hopefully it worked.

            I roasted the Australian eye of round and had one end of it with a potato and gravy while watching season 3, episode 9 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

            The Enterprise is investigating an unexplored region of space and there is gravimetric volatility that Spock would like to study. Ortegas volunteers to go out in a shuttle to collect data but while she is out there a wormhole suddenly appears and sucks her in. On the other side of the wormhole she crash lands on a desolate moon. From the wreckage she scavenges parts to make a water condenser. On the Enterprise they don’t know if Erica is still alive but they send probes through to boost communication signals. The probes however fail. The Enterprise is limited in the amount of time they have to search for Ortegas because they are delivering a life saving vaccine that will save hundreds of thousands of lives. Ortegas sees a flickering light in the far distance but nearby finds a thrown together structure that is occupied by a Gorn. It catches her but releases her when another creature emerges from a hole. It kills the creature and tears it apart for meat. Erica thinks she’s next but the Gorn throws her a piece. When the Gorn goes to sleep Erica heads back for her shuttle but it is swallowed by the ground in a quake. She is surrounded by the creatures but the Gorn saves her, sustaining a leg injury in the process. The wormhole is closing and Uhura proposes flying the Enterprise just inside to keep it from closing. Pike agrees to try. The Gorn and Erica return to the structure where the Gorn has rigged a forcefield from parts of its ship. From her tricorder Erica rigs a rudimentary universal translator that allows her to understand “yes” or “no” answers from the Gorn. Erica learns that the Gorn already understood English without being able to speak it. She also learns that the Gorn is a pilot and a female like her. Ortegas makes a chess board and teaches the Gorn to play. It beats her four games in a row. It teaches her a Gorn board game and Erica wins that. The Gorn does not want to be rescued because she would be killed in that society because of her injuries. The moon’s orbit will soon temporarily take it close to the gas giant and at that point the atmosphere will be flammable. Ortegas proposes to set the atmosphere on fire to create a massive flare for the Enterprise to see. The gas giant has 396 moons and so it is a slow process for the Enterprise to scan them for Erica, plus they are still on a deadline and will have to give up the search for her soon. The crew of the Enterprise sees the flare and La’an beams down to find Erica. But she misunderstands when she sees the Gorn and kills it, much to Erica’s devastation. As they are about to beam back to the Enterprise, time freezes for Erica and the blinking light from the distance draws close to reveal a being that looks a lot like a version of the Watcher from Marvel comics. It is a Metron who reveals that this was an experimental study of the interactions of human and Gorn. The Metron says Erica will forget this encounter but will remember the Gorn. This encounter seems pointless. Why would the Metron bother to talk with her if it was going to erase her memory of the conversation anyway? I guess maybe her reactions to learning about the study are part of the study. 

            The Gorn was played by Canadian actor and stunt person Warren Scherer, who has played four Gorn on Star Trek shows plus four other creatures. He said the rubber suits weighed 50 kilos and were hot like saunas. He played Pestilence, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in X-Men: Apocalypse. He has acted in prosthetics in several other movies and shows.