Thursday, 2 July 2020

Quarantine entry #103 - July 2


Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks… not that AoS is doing that much better. Clark Gregg’s character has died… again. This is the fourth character of his to be killed-off, (or get rid otherwise), after the actual Phil Coulson, the first LMD, and the Sarge – and this is not even a real Coulson, only another LMD version of him. For all we know, there are still a dozen or more of them stuck in the Time Bus’s stockpile, eh? Ergo, why should we care about the second LMD Coulson?

…We do not. For a while now, AoS played cute by using the same actors to act-out different characters (more or less), killing them off regularly. Consequently, audiences no longer care whether or not the actors remain on the show anymore, and by now this probably goes for the cast and crew too – AoS is in the finish line here, and its’ cast are probably jumping ship: they got recast all too often to form permanent bonds, especially real ones, and not publicity stunts. Remember when Jeff Ward (Deke) admitted that he could not stand Iain, (Fitz)? Well, right now, we got plenty of Deke, but little of Fitz on AoS’ S7 – gee, I wonder why. I also wonder just what is Deke’s role on AoS now, now that agent Sousa seems to be more of Daisy’s love interest than of May’s, but since the final AoS season is about halfway done, no one on AoS cares about this anymore either, I bet.

Getting back to real life, let us talk osprey. More precisely, we are talking about the real life bird here, since it is too a bird of prey, but a very unusual one. For one thing, it is almost completely piscivorous – the sea eagles may also eat fish, but they also attack other animals; some, like the white-tailed eagle actually prefers to hunt waterfowl to fish, but the osprey does not. It feeds almost exclusively on various fish, and is the most aquatically adapted modern bird of prey out of them all.

…There are also the so-called fishing owls, but as owls, they are grouped separately from the birds of prey that we’ve discussed earlier, and so we’ll be talking about the owls in general separately too. Right now, though, it must be pointed out that no one knows where to put the osprey within the bird of prey group either. It is called the fish hawk, even nowadays, sometimes, but the truth is that scientists agree that it is no more related to the hawks, eagles and vultures than it is to the falcons; the fact that it is grouped with the former rather than the latter is just whimsy, really, nothing scientific at all. Sigh.

To further deepen the unnecessary conclusion, the osprey is sometimes lumped in discussions alongside the secretarybird. The two avians have little in common – i.e., both are birds of prey without any obvious living relatives and their fossil history is not very good either. That is it. Otherwise, while the osprey is the most aquatic of the diurnal birds of prey, the secretarybird is the most terrestrial – it even looks like an ostrich wannabe, with its long and powerful legs. The two of them have nothing in common with each other or the other raptors, and so they are often discussed side by side. Sometimes human logic is something else, you know?

In addition, some people believe that there are two species of osprey – the common or the western osprey, (the one usually seen in the various videos, TV specials and what else have you), and the so-called eastern osprey, which lives around Australia and Oceania, (the island complex that is closer to Australia than to any place else). Whether that is justified, or is the local osprey one of the subspecies, (and right now, the osprey lives all over the world, save for the poles), so far has not been decided…

Well, this is it for now. See you all soon!

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