Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. On the one hand, the
official U.S.-Canada border will remain closed until July 21st at
least, because reasons. On the other,… wait.
…Let’s talk media, for a second. These days, at least some
of mass media sites, such as Yahoo News, tend to illuminate such important
events as the border closure and the prolonging of CERB very sparingly – they just
tell us about the happening of one fact or another, and that is it. What and
how it all went down – we do not know.
Instead, we are given brief polls on that site, basically
the standard yes-or-no question with some minimal variations. Are those questions
supposed to matter? In the West, true, people do believe that their opinions
matter, but the fact is that if their opinions are handled in a sufficiently
detached manner, then it suddenly becomes much harder to understand as to how
precisely it does matter.
In the RF, the situation is different – people, the common
people, know that the higher-ups in the Kremlin and etc. don’t care about their
opinions, unless it is backed-up by force, so when they have enough, they go
into the streets… therefore, the aforementioned higher-ups in the Kremlin and
etc. do their best to appease their ‘electorate’ just enough to prevent the
aforementioned revolution… usually. Right now, with their own COVID-19 epidemic
on hands, this system is breaking down…sucks to be them…but real life sucks to
begin with.
Elsewhere in the world, it is different. In the U.K., (and
the rest of the EU), news about COVID-19 and the like are much more sparse than
they are in the U.S. In Canada…well, we have just talked about how the Canadian
government handles COVID-19 – apparently, they make all the decisions, but give
polls to their electorate to reassure them that their opinion still matters and
they can always vent, of course, online. Put otherwise, Canada may not be the
RF, (thank God), but neither is it the U.S., (captain Obvious says ‘No duh!’). What
next?
I admit that I wanted to talk to you about our old
favorites, the elephants, today, but then I caught a glimpse of a cartoon. It
was about bears, fair enough. The titular character is a grizzly bear, who used
to be a circus actor slash jack-of-all-trades in his youth, but then settled
down. He is also a bachelor, (because plot reasons), but has a girlfriend, also
a grizzly/brown bear, who comes and goes throughout the show’s episodes. He
also has a romantic rival, a male black bear, who is something of a jock, but
who appears very rarely in the show, because it is a children’s cartoon… so
what’s my point?
My point is that in this episode, the male grizzly’s old
flame from the circus came to visit him. She was a spectacled bear from South
America, a real party animal, (pun intended), and she is much smaller and more petite
than the other bears of the show, (mostly brown and black, though there is a
giant panda cub as a distant relative of the titular character too). And-?
And that is actually realistic – the spectacled bear is
smaller than the brown bear is: about 120-200 cm, with the males being larger
than the females are, (but that is a common trade of all the bears, especially
the modern ones), and much heavier – up to 115 kg on average, while the female
spectacled bears usually weigh – on average – only 65 kg. Apparently, this sort
of discrepancy puts the spectacled bear right alongside the polar bear for being
one of the most sexually dimorphic modern bear species, even though the latter
is only a very distant cousin to the spectacled bear; both are true bears, of
course, but the spectacled bear is much more closely related to the now-extinct
giant short-faced bears of the previous epochs. (In particular, the short-faced
bear Arctodus simus was featured in
one episode of ‘Prehistoric Predators’, and had cameo appearances in some
other, remember?) Ironically, however, diet-wise, the spectacled bear has only
5% of meat in his overall diet; it might be the next most herbivorous modern
bear after the giant panda! Maybe that is how it was able to survive the last
Ice Age when the short-faced bears died out, and keep in mind, that the
American tropics are also home to the jaguar, which might be less physically
formidable than the spectacled bear is, but much more formidable and
carnivorous – the spectacled bear manages to avoid it by living in places where
the jaguars are rare – mainly in the Andes mountains of north and west South
America. If given the chance, spectacled bears are just as ecologically
dexterous as the brown bears of the Northern hemisphere are, but these days, while
the brown bears are Least Concern, the spectacled bears are Vulnerable instead,
so there is that. Real life sucks for those fascinating creatures, it looks
like, but that is real life.
…For now, though, this is it. See you all soon!
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