Obligatory disclaimer: happy Mother’s day! May it be
fruitful and satisfactory for all the mothers involved, for better or for
worse, COVID-19 or not! …That said, real life sucks, and I am no prize either,
I do not deny it. The lockdown has made it all worse, more acute, as everyone
is cramped together and everyone is making an effort to get along, and as time
goes along, the effort becomes more extreme. Our family actually has it easy,
as we have time away from each other, and so the effects of the lockdown are
not as extreme, but they are still felt, and we fight, but we usually have
space to get away from each other, and that is important, because otherwise we would
have killed each other instead. What next?
The head of the Russian space program is dead from COVID-19,
which is kind of bad news for team Putin and the latter’s plans for the Russian
domination. Pre-COVID-19, he was supposed to annul his old presidential
experience and start everything anew, but now everything is falling apart
instead; his new PM got COVID-19 already, (but he is not dead), and now this.
…Plus the windmills of God mill slowly, but exceedingly
small; the patience of the Russian proletariat may be long, but it isn’t
infinite, and when it ends, it’s explosive – just look at 1917, for example. In
addition, Lenin is not gone either – he is right there, in the Mausoleum, next
to the Kremlin. Yeltsin, the person (putting it mildly) that made it possible
for Putin to become a president at the end, made plans to inter the first
Soviet general-secretary ever in a proper grave, but somehow it never amounted
to anything and in the end, Yeltsin was the one buried, because he died first. Well,
when you were as bad an alcoholic as he had been, it was only a matter of time
until he was dead for real – and so he is. The rest of his family and entourage
lived on, and Putin was a part of it, at least until 2014-5, when the entire
mess with the Crimean peninsula began, as Putin began to push his new,
independent politics, and you can see as to where it had led the Russian
Federation – in the past. In the present, with COVID-19 running rampant in the
RF, Putin’s plans became derailed, and it is anyone’s guess as to where RF will
go from there; Putin’s regime will endure for a while, because his opposition
is hardly any better than he and his supporters are, but it will end. What will
happen next is anyone’s guess, so what else?
A brief return to the jaguar – we have talked about the
biggest cat of New World repeatedly in the past, so I decided to talk about it
again, because why not? Let us begin.
…Neither lions nor tigers live in the Americas, but it has
big cats of its own – the jaguar and the puma. Not everyone can distinguish a
jaguar from a leopard, for the two cats are similar, and so are their spots,
but the jaguar’s spots are bigger than a leopard’s are, and they are different – not plain spots, but
rosettes with a smaller spot in the middle. In addition, a jaguar’s head is
proportionally bigger, and this feline itself is taller but shorter than a
leopard is. Pause.
…The jaguar is a natural climber, swimmer, and runner; it
loves the water almost as much as a tiger does. Of all the big cats, only the
tiger and the jaguar willingly go into water – even into such great rivers as
the Ganges and the Amazon – on a regular basis. Sometimes a jaguar will feel so
comfortable sleeping in the water that the current, supposedly, carries the cat
out into the ocean… but I am not so sure about that.
In addition, a jaguar is an avid fisher, stalking fish from
the shoreline for hours. As footage has proved, the jaguar also attacks
caimans, (distant relatives of the crocodiles, close kin to the alligators),
and turtles, including sea turtles, which it encounters on the seashore. It
ambushes the reptiles as they come ashore to lay eggs and it flips them upside
down to make a food cache. The turtles do not die, and their meat is not
spoiled, but neither can they right themselves and escape back to the water…
Finally, the jaguar can be found almost anywhere, from the
wet jungles, (where it is always possible to catch something nasty, like
rickets), to the prairies and open ground in the rest of South America; they
used to come into North America as well, but by now, most people admit that
they are gone from it in the wild state; they may return, but the Donald’s wall
might ruin that – but the Donald’s wall is another story…
…Well, this is it for now – see you all soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment