Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about our main man known as Buzz Lightyear. The 2022 film, known simply as ‘Lightyear’, seemingly throws everything else that we knew about BL out of the window… only it does not. In the cartoon series ‘Buzz Lightyear of the Star Command’ (or something along those lines), there were a couple of episodes with an evil, Zurg-like Buzz… who came from an alternate universe. He appeared on the show irregularly, but was still defeated, but he was still Buzz. Therefore, what is the point?
The point is that ‘Lightyear’ is set in an alternate
universe, that is what! Until now, the ‘Toy Story’ franchise’s installments, (a
heterogeneous bunch in their own right), were set in one universe – let us call
it ‘Universe A’. But ‘Lightyear’ and all of its’
associations, are taking place in a different universe – ‘Universe B’, one
where sexual minorities and important characters, played by POCs appeared in
the early 1990s, unlike, say, our universe, where they, (and especially the
former), didn’t. Therefore, all that we knew about BL from the previous ‘Toy
Story’ installments is not really relevant anymore – it is a different Buzz,
with a different crew, in a different world. ‘To infinity and beyond’, indeed –
to infinite multiverses! Anything else?
Aye, I met an opossum earlier this week. Real life
might suck, but sometimes it does deliver. Pause.
Let us try again. Until I met it, I thought that an
opossum was just a variant rat, especially since I have seen the latter, both in
pet shops and in the wild. Same for mice. However…
Let us start with mice. They are the smallest out of
this bunch – I could easily hold a mouse on one finger. The rats I saw were two
or three times bigger than a mouse – the size of my head, (the males were
usually bigger than the females), and I would need one, or both, of my hands,
to hold one, (we are talking about pet rats here – wild rats, especially Norway
rats, should be avoided). And the opossum was two or three times bigger than a
Norway rat – it was the size of an average house cat or a small dog, and the
one I met was distinctly unfriendly, so no physical contact with this one
either.
The second point are the teeth. Mice and rats are
rodents; you put a mouse and a rat alongside a squirrel, a chipmunk, a marmot,
and, say, a beaver, and they will all have baseline similarities to each other,
especially in the teeth: huge incisors, no canines, and some premolar and molar
teeth. The ‘professional’ carnivores and herbivores have different dental formulas,
but you still can, usually, figure out which tooth is which. The opossum
doesn’t really have this differentiation; from what I could see: all of the
teeth in its’ jaws looked mostly the same, not unlike the teeth on a saw,
(sorry for the lame pun). Obviously, an opossum is a competent biter and chewer
in its’ own right, and I had no intention of having it bite me – it looked
quite formidable for a creature the size of a small dog – but I’m guessing that
it was a very different biter and chewer from a rodent. Then again, the opossum
is no rodent, but a marsupial – it is proportionally closer to the kangaroo and
the koala than to rodents or to us. Though keep it mind that among the
marsupials, the opossum family – most of which live in the American tropics,
and only one species – the common opossum – lives in North America instead; the
point is that the American opossums are treated separately from the rest of the
(Australian) marsupials, but let us move on…
The final topic is the tail – in the earlier days
people assumed that the common opossum’s tail was prehensile, like a spider
monkey’s but to me, it certainly didn’t look like it; it did look a bit like a
rat’s, or a mouse’s, tail – long and hairless, but it also looked fairly thick:
maybe the opossum uses it to store fat for the winter or something, The point
is that the opossum has authentically surprised me, and I have certainly enjoyed
observing it. Real life does suck, but sometimes – not so much.
This is it for now, see you all soon!
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