Did you know?

Did you know...?

1) ‘Bella’ is an anagram for ‘label’. Seriously. ‘Label Swann’ – that just sounds really wrong. ‘Mrs. Label Lestrange’ – that is even more wrong.

2) Ditto for ‘Kratos’: it is an anagram of ‘Sokrat’ – Socrates, who was one of the greatest Greek philosophers and a founding father of Western modern philosophy as well. Kratos is a great guy, but a philosopher? I think that he would be first to admit that philosophy is one thing that he isn’t strong at – now if it was head-bashing, then he would be on top of things...

3) If you read the Old Testament part of the Bible, you can see the growth of patriarchy. Abraham might have been a God-fearing man, but he was also totally dominated by his wife, Sarah. The incidents with Hagar and Israel (Genesis 16; 21) are rather unseemly by modern standards, but they also indicate the importance of Sarah in the relationship of Abraham and God: Sarah is not afraid of speak up even to Almighty; the latter has to talk to Abraham in private regarding the sacrifice of Isaac; and Abraham has to trick Isaac (and his mother?) to get Isaac out of the camp and onto the sacrificial mountain – maybe because if Sarah knew about this, she would’ve put her foot down very firmly and the entire Biblical history would need to be re-written from Genesis onwards.

By contrast, in Quran the sacrifice of Israel was done voluntarily – this version of Abraham had no need to trick Hagar and Israel regarding the sacrifice. This was done because the authors of Quran (unlike Genesis) were fully patriarchal and did not need to trick their wives to do what has to be done (at least in theory).

Back to Genesis. There, Abraham sold Sarah several times to various pharaohs and kings, and each time God intervened to ensure that Sarah would return to Abraham via various pestilences and plagues. Clearly, not unlike the pagan deities, God of Abraham (Genesis 11-25) had his favorites among the Jewish women, like Sarah.

It is different with Isaac and Rebekah. It is anyone’s guess what their family life was like, but at the end Rebekah had to trick Isaac into blessing Jacob rather than asking for Divine intervention: the Almighty has already turned away from women and towards men at this point in Biblical history. Rebekah could not apparently directly impose her own will onto Jacob as Sarah did upon Abraham either – either Isaac was made of sterner staff than his father was, or Rebekah lacked some tribal rights or customs that her mother-in-law had, I do not know.

Finally, Jacob has 12 sons, but only one of them from Rachel, the woman he really loved. I am reasonably certain that Rachel also had feelings for Jacob, and also, as the mother of the second-youngest son she cared little for her and Joseph’s rivals, but again, unlike Sarah, she did not do anything – maybe because she could not do anything? In any case, whereas Sarah played a large, active, and directly connected to, role in Abraham’s career, Rachel’s role was much more passive, and she was much more submissive, both to her father and her husband; in fact, she is almost completely defined by her relationship to these men; even her theft of her father’s idols was done only to promote the success of her husband, nothing more – Sarah, for all of her flaws, was a character and a person in her own right, moreso than her daughter- and granddaughter-in-law, it seems.

And as for Joseph’s wife? His wife, Asenath, does not even feature in the Biblical canon; texts such as ‘Joseph and Asenath’ are technically more like first fanfics (Bible-themed) than Biblical canon, so they do not quite count among the religious people.

4) A new season of ‘River Monsters’ in on the way; pity that it does not air in Canada just yet: I cannot wait and see for myself what JW has been up to!

5) Spike site has invented a new trick – episode highlights. Basically, they had full footage of some of the episodes and assembled video clips of the others. So, they took those video clips, and assembled them into single features. Good idea?

Maybe, but the execution of this idea is not that good. You click, for example, onto the highlights of DW episode ‘Aztec Jaguar vs. Zande Warrior’: what you get is a brief promo of the episode in general and a longer clip of the Aztec maquahuitl saw through a gel head of a horse. That is it, seriously. People, come on, I’m sure that there are many DW audience members that would argue that that decapitation isn’t the only video highlight of that episode, now is it?

Or you click for the highlights of a SFD episode ‘Dr. Quarantine’. Here, you get three combined clips of varied length – in reverse. The first clip should have been the last and vice versa, but the video editor of Spike’s site has not done a good job, and so the video highlights were combined in reverse. That is just dumb.

6) Speaking of SFD, (‘Savage Family Diggers’/’American Digger’), what can be said about it? It is just lackluster, though Ric Savage does do his best to liven it up. It is also not staged as some of Spike’s other series (‘World’s Worst Tenants’, ‘Urban Tarzan’), something that I can clearly respect. Of course, I am not sure how the Savage family can make a real living from what they dig-up (a typical payload appears to be somewhere between 1500 to 3500 dollars, it seems – a sum that people can live off, but not particularly well or long), but meh, the head of the family used to be a professional wrestler, he probably got enough money saved up to run this hobby, so kudos to him for that.

Well, that is it for now. See you in May, hopefully.

MLP:FIM & "Lost Girl" - the issue of changing, part 2

And so the 3^rd season of “Lost Girl” came to a close. What can I say about it? It was rushed.

The first two thirds of the 3^rd season (pardon the alliteration) were about Bo digivolving into the next stage of the succubus-hood. Regrettably, all came down to Bo reviving Dyson from the dead, and while I have nothing against the good ship Bo/Dyson, I have to point out that the powers of life and death are not associated with the succubae as a rule. Yes, obviously, Bo was initially made a succubus because her being would be simply cliché, but she could have at least grown wings or a tail or something along those lines.

The make-up budget for the show didn’t allow an extensive amount of prosthetics in the BtVS fashion?  

 Perhaps, but they did not have to be worn for a long amount of time – just long enough to make an impression. Instead, we had Bo appear (in flashes) looking crazy with some sort of a savage hairstyle, clearly implying horns...so there were horns, just really cheap knock-offs.

That said, my main problem is the last third of the plot in the season: out of nowhere the issue of human-Fae interaction finally came ‘online’... and Vex has basically wasted the Morrighan. What a waste. She survived Aoife and the Naga-Garuda feud only to fall to one of her ex-minions. Oh well.

Still, the Morrighan’s fate is just one of the casualties that befell the 3^rd season of “Lost Girl”. The previous seasons were generally wholesome and coherent, while this one appears to be more of two seasons, two plotlines, smashed into one, with only some moderate connections between the two of them – namely, Bo’s father, the Wanderer.

What sort of a Fae is the Wanderer? The Wandering Jew, maybe? Because I seriously doubt that Aoife slept with Carl Wanderer, an infamous American murderer. I mean sure, Aoife can probably sleep with a murderer if she wants to get ahead, she does not shy from killing people herself, but Carl Wanderer was a real-life person, and “Lost Girl” doesn’t mess with the real world all that well.

That said, I am nowhere near certainty regarding the identity (or the species?) of Bo’s dad. At the end of one of the episodes, Mr. Trick (who at the end of S3 went off to Scotland with the blonde Stella-star), looked at a rather Jersey Devil-like image: this was the episode’s heavy hint that Bo was going to meet him in the future – i.e., her dad might be the Jersey Devil or a similar creature...

Yet all of this is besides my point, which is as following: two thirds of the S3 were spent on Bo being forced by an internal reason to evolve, and once she did (and proved it by bringing Dyson back to life), this whole plot just vanished into thin air, leaving Bo in a messed-up relationship with Lauren, and nothing else. That is just wrong and unfair both to Bo and to the audience: if both have spent so much time with Bo’s evolution, then either this sort of an abrupt dismissal does not make sense, or Bo’s evolution was unnecessary, because it can be dismissed so abruptly. Pick your choice, or make your own theory, I am listening.

If Bo’s metamorphoses have amounted to nothing, then so have Twilight Sparkle’s, actually. Firstly, the comics (which take place after MLP: FIM S3) show her as a unicorn, rather than an alicorn. Why? Twilight’s ascension was a big deal, to ignore it in the comics seems wrong, again (as is the case with Bo).

Let me elaborate (hopefully). In MLP, an alicorn is a superior being (towards other ponies), to become an alicorn is essentially is to stop being a pony (regardless of the sub/species) and to become a demigod of some sort. In the show, TS became an alicorn, in the comics she did not. And again, WTF? If her becoming an alicorn is a big deal, then the comics should not ignore this; if it is so easily ignored, then it is not a big deal and should not have been made in the first place: the alicorn princess Trollestia is not canon, TS and her friends did not have to be pranked so nastily.

Unlike “Lost Girl”, though, I have a theory: when TS became an alicorn at the end of S3, this caused a backlash of criticism from the show’s fans, so now, if not Lauren Faust herself, then the other members of the Hasbro team scurry to undo the damage caused by this ep. In particular, they have released information that TS shall not outlive her friends, she is not immortal, she is not really an alicorn – just the same old TS, just with a pair of wings stuck to her sides. Someone, call Celestia – Trollestia has really messed this one up, a millennium up on the moon (or the sun, or a planet) is required to cool her off while the rest of the alicorn family and the Mane 6 undo her damage.

Seriously though: just like Bo, TS has been transformed by external forces outside her (their) control, and after the transformations were complete, neither of them received any benefits from this – on the country, Bo’s transformation has now become obsolete and/or ignored, while TS’s transformation has not done only that, it is in the process of becoming nullified. Why? Why have them go through it if those transformations are not going to stick? I have no idea, but both Hasbro and Showcase™ have let their heroines down, period.