Let us start with the obvious: ‘For Honor’ got
released earlier this week. So far, the reviews are unanimous – the story mode
of the game is the weakest link, but everything else is very good. ‘For Honor’
has figured out how to play up to its’ strengths – the players’ interactions, the
fancy armors, the combat maneuvers, etc. – and there are not too many
weaknesses left; mostly some bugs that shall be fixed in the future releases of
the game. Also, even the Lawbringer and the Valkyrie are playable characters,
bringing the roster to the full dozen, (four for each fraction). All right!
Secondly, this week’s episode of ‘Powerless’ is the
best one so far – the show seems to have found its’ footing at last, and it is
mostly corporate humor with some DC trappings, especially in the main plotline,
where Van and Emily have to convince the Atlanteans to sign up with Van’s
company as clients. The humor is still very low-brow, (to put it mildly), but
there is less of it, and when it does occur, it is presented in a very absurd
manner, so it is impossible to take it seriously, or be offended by it –
mostly. Plus, ‘Powerless’ is a sitcom
after all, it isn’t even trying to pretend to be anything like ‘AoS’ or ‘Blindspot’
or ‘Arrow’, so one shouldn’t dig too deeply either. ‘Powerless’ is here to
entertain, it entertains (the audience), end of story. How exactly ‘Powerless’ does it, is another story, but occasional profanity
aside, ‘Powerless’ works.
…Unlike AoS, BTW. The next episode will come only next
week, of course, but judging by the clips by now the show is robbing its’
villains off their dignity as human beings; this is why these days all of AoS’
villains are unsympathetic, period – Grant, and Kara, and even Malick and his
crew were somewhat sympathetic, so when ‘the good guys’ began to kill them, the
ratings began to slip even lower, and right now AoS is still at its’ lowest;
the ratings are going up and down, but they are still currently lower than the
ratings of ‘Powerless’, and the latter has only aired 3 episodes so far. We
will just have to wait until the next week to see what AoS does next.
Finally, next week is ‘Big Cat Week’ on Nat Geo Wild,
meaning plenty of nature documentaries about the big cats of the wild, (duh!).
That is very good, but, FYI, most of them appear to be filmed in Africa instead
– I have already touched this issue when I discussed AFO’s ‘Gorilla vs. Leopard’
episode, and here it is more of the same: lions and leopards of Africa, plus
several other African wild animals, (spotted hyenas, wild dogs, cheetahs,
etc.). Again, I’ve no idea why the Asian big cats – tigers and leopards,
(different subspecies than the African leopard), snow and clouded leopards (completely
different animals from the ‘ordinary’ leopard) aren’t appearing; maybe it all
comes down to the differences between Africa and Asia in general and how the
West perceives them in particular?.. I have talked about this before, if anyone
else has any other ideas, I am listening…
However, there also going to be some sort of a special
about the jaguar, the biggest cat of
the Americas of the modern time. Incidentally, its’ closest living relative is
the African and Asian lion, not the leopard.
Let us pause and talk about taxonomy of the
pantherine, or ‘roaring’ cats. The already-mentioned clouded leopard belongs in
a sister group or genus to the rest of them: Neofelis. It consists of two species of clouded leopard, so let us
put them aside, (they are very different from the rest of the pantherine cats).
The jaguar is most closely related to the lion, the tiger – to the snow
leopard, and the leopard itself is more closely related to the lion and the
jaguar, but it is not as derived as either of them. In this case, the
scientists mean that the leopard retains most of the basic feline features; it is
not as specialized as the lion and the jaguar are.
The numbers, (let us take the AFO approach for a
while) seem to support this theory. The jaguar and the leopard look
superficially similar, but the jaguar is twice as long and twice as heavy as
the leopard. A male jaguar can be the same size as a male lion, king of the
beasts, but the lion is twice as heavy as the jaguar is, so the leopard is not
even in the same league as the lion – and it shows. In their respective
behaviors, that is.
This technically brings us to the puma, (or the
mountain lion) and the second point I want to make about ‘Big Cat Week’, which
is also about the cheetah: the cheetah and the puma aren’t ‘big’ or ‘roaring’
cats, they actually belong to the so-called small cat family – basically every
other cat, wild or domestic, that isn’t a lion, a tiger, a leopard, a jaguar,
etc. According to the latest data, the lion and the rest of the ‘big’ cats
parted ways with the rest of the felines about 11.5 MYA – way before there were
humans on the planet.
Then, 8.2 MYA, the feline evolution produced the
so-called puma lineage, and by 5 MYA that lineage has split into branches that
produced the cheetah of Africa and Asia on one hand, and the puma itself, as
well as the jaguarundi, on the other.
BTW, the jaguarundi is nothing like the jaguar: it is a small wild cat, less than a meter
in length, less than 10 kg in weight, and is built a bit like an otter, with
short legs, an elongated body, long tail and short, rounded ears. They still
hunt mostly on the ground and behave as the rest of wildcats do, too, but then
again, most of the cats, not only look similar, they behave similar: a feral
cat, a bobcat and a puma behave similarly, their main differences are their
respective sizes and the prey that they can take down, (according their size
and strength). With the ‘big’ cats, such as lions, the comparison gets vaguer,
but as the Asian lions show that this
difference is largely secondary, caused by the life in savanna: in Asia, the
lion lives a more solitary life, not unlike that of the tiger or the leopard;
there are small family groups, but that is it…
(BTW, the now-extinct American cheetah was a closer
relative to the puma than to the modern cheetah).
Getting back to ‘Big Cat Week’, let us be precise.
Aside from the old reruns, (whatever they will be), it will show more footage
of African wildlife, (‘big’ cats, ‘small’ cats, other animals), and a Sir David
Attenborough’s special on the jaguar, (possibly with other American wildcats
guest starring as well). This is not a bad layout, just…weird, in regards to
Asia and its wildlife.
So, this is it for this installment; see you in the
future!
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