Quarantine entry #42 - May 2

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Sometimes it sucks so bad, that it burns. The good news that things change, they transform, and so life becomes something new. Only death is eternal, and no, I’m not talking about G.W. and his shooting rampage – yesterday or so, (May 1, 2020), Mr. Trudeau the PM banned 1500 types of assault rifles, or 1500 assault rifles period, or whatever. That is understandable – he had a rough time lately, first his wife got sick, then his mother, and now G.W.’s rampage… and on top of it, during NATO’s practice in the Mediterranean, a Canadian helicopter crashed, everyone on board of it is dead, and some of the people are from Nova Scotia again… yeah. April was not a good month for this Canadian province. What else?

I have watched the ‘Gorilla vs. Leopard’ episode of AFO, and I have watched the chimpanzee episode of David Attenborough’s ‘Dynasties’. I am struck how Africa’s great apes are very much like us, if we were polygamous, that is. Pause.

Here is the thing. When it comes to sex and families, the animal kingdom is varied and various and deserves a separate discussion of its own, but among the mammals? You usually have the females raising the young alone, or you got a main mated couple and their offspring, (and sometimes younger siblings), instead. There are various versions of those scenarios, but the basic designs are those two – the lemurs have a female in charge, (usually the main mother), while the monkeys like the marmosets and the night monkeys are monogamous – and then we come to primates such as the howler monkeys, that actually have harems led by males. Pause.

Let us get down to terms: ‘matriarchy’ – females are in charge. ‘Patriarchy’ – the males are. ‘Matrilineage’ – families are designed following the maternal bloodlines. ‘Patrilineage’ – same as before, but following the paternal. Among many mammals, males tend to come and go, (whether we’re talking about deer, lions, or even baboons), while the females stay, raise the young, and shape the family’s culture, (in a manner of speaking).

…And then we got the gorillas and the chimpanzees, where the males are very much in charge, especially among the more peaceful gorillas, and act not unlike the more polygamous human cultures. Yes, female chimpanzees can stand up for themselves, and among the ‘other’ chimpanzee species, the bonobo, the society is largely matriarchal…and much more peaceful than the society of the common chimpanzee, more like the gorillas’… pause.

A semi-popular theory states that the chimpanzee and bonobo lineages split when the gorillas, (there are several species of them, actually), appeared on the scene. They are more herbivorous than the common chimpanzees were, and scientists believe that when the ancestral gorillas encountered the ancestral chimpanzees, they forced the latter to become the more omnivorous common chimpanzees, and in places where they were absent, the ancestral apes become bonobos instead. The latter are more closely related to the common chimpanzees than to the gorillas, but they behave more as the gorillas do instead. Evolution sometimes acts in strange ways.

…The orangutans, it can be noted, have evolved in apparent isolation from the other types of great apes; the gibbons, or the lesser apes, also live in the jungles of Southeast Asia, but the two groups of primates tend to avoid each other period. Orangutans live where the gibbons typically do not, and vice versa. In Africa, the gorillas and chimpanzees avoid each other, but because they live on the ground rather than on trees, they aren’t as shy as the orangutans and the gibbons are, (proportionally speaking); the common chimpanzee, in particular, may be the most violent of the all great apes, as well as the second smallest, after its’ bonobo cousin. The bonobo, it should be noted, is a very peaceful mammal, and nowhere as violent as the common chimpanzee is…

…Well, this is all that I wanted to say for now. See you all soon!

S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Window of Opportunity' - May 17

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and then there is Ali Smith. Her novel ‘Autumn’ was kind of pessimistic but still well-written and normal; ‘Winter’ was more, um, derived, (and no, this isn’t a compliment), and her latest novel, ‘Spring’ feels like a flow of consciousness, reminiscent of James Joyce at his most…semiotic. It is anyone’s opinion if this approach works; personally, it feels more like a breakdown of the author (Ali Smith) as a person due to personal issues with it reflecting in her works, not unlike as to what is going on with J.-Ro, whose professional life post the HP books isn’t going so smoothly either.

On the other hand, there is also ‘Dynasties’, both the book and a TV series. It works in both incarnations in an intriguing and thought-provoking manner. There are flaws – we have discussed ‘Dynasties’ last year – but it still works, regardless of the flaws. Go team Attenborough and co.! Raise the natural awareness! Fight the good fight! Yeah! …Real life sucks, but not always, and now let us try to talk about AoS S6.

The adventures of the titular AoS characters continue to delight; this week’s episode – ‘Window of Opportunity’ – stared the new, (and further?), adventures of Fitz and Enoch. Enoch was the non-human alien, whom is not quite android and not quite alive…interesting. The point being, however, is that the team FE killed off ‘the Controller’, who was really a minor villain and a jerk, and are off to the planet of Kitson for further adventures, with team Jemma being close behind them. The odds of them constantly missing each other until the S6 end are astronomical, AoS almost constantly kept the FitzSimmons apart ever since the second half of S1, so they probably are not going to change this dynamic in S6. Anything else is up in the air, free for grabs.

Trivia time: not only this week’s episode took place on a backdrop of a planet that looks suspiciously like real-life planet of Jupiter, but also AoS had no idea as to what to do with languages: the Controller spoke perfect English, while at least some of his crew – the engineers – talked some sort of an authentic alien language, cough. Seriously, who do the script writers think they are? Tolkien? Then let us have Fitz drop into, or onto, Middle-Earth and help Aragorn, Gandalf, and the hobbits fight Sauron and his orc hordes, shall we? The S6 of AoS – the space part of it – has some clear and obvious influences of SW, so why not LotR as well?

…Yeah, that annoying copyright issue and everything, but regardless, an AoS/LotR crossover could be cool. Does anyone want to write it? Really, I will read it and all! Back to trivia?

…Baron Samedi’s wife in real-life voodoo mythology is called Mama Brigid. Cough, but doesn’t our detective O’Reilly have something atypical in her ancestry? Just asking… oh wait, we are discussing AoS now.

Coulson/Sarge and his people continue to be a motley crew of chaotic, unpredictable, and possibly amoral antiheroes…but there does not appear to be an outright evil vibe coming from them. Maybe there is more to them than just destroyers of worlds, as they appear to be set-up in the eyes of S.H.I.E.L.D., (Mack’s version). Moreover, the scriptwriters did their best to make Yo-Yo be, well, important in this episode, NCB got to show-off her character’s new prosthetic arms, (from the second half of S5, when Ruby Hale had cut them off with her chakram – hello Xena, agent Heartly and Lucy Lawless) and ran around a bank. Yay Yo-Yo! …Of course, the fates of Bobbi and Lance come to mind: they were made regular characters on AoS in the first half of S3, and in the second half, they got dropped completely, and now their actors are done with MCU, at least for now. (Cough, the Orville, cough). Yo-Yo and her actress have lasted proportionally much longer than they have, but still…

Speaking of new agents? The one shot by Sarge last week was an agent Fox. (Really?) And now we got agent Keller and it does not look as if he is going away in a hurry, so apparently this side of the AoS script equation got a lot of its own drama now too. Yay! Not, but AoS is doing its best to be exciting – Melinda’s fight with Sarge’s crew was certainly interesting and well-choreographed – so let’s throw them a bone and worry about anything else later.

…This is it for now. See you all soon!

Dynasties - Dec 11

Obligatory disclaimer: sometimes life sucks, but right now? It is more tolerable. Let us move on?

‘The Gifted’ are on a hiatus until January 1, 2019. This is a doubtful move by the TV show in question; they tried this strategy back with their S1, and it wasn’t really successful, in regards to the numbers; right now, S2 is longer – 16 episodes vs. 13, but they already played about 55% of them, 9 out of 16, so it’s anyone’s guess as to how they will arrange the last 7. What is next?

DC’s ‘Elseworlds’ ‘Arrowverse’ special was aired this and last week, and it works. It introduced a new villain – the Monitor – and eventually Super-Girl, the Martian Manhunter, and the rest of their people will need to battle an evil Super-Man. Very exciting! However, there are plenty of people discussing this story arc, no doubt, so let us talk about something else.

…No, it is not the excitement of breeding the various breeds of goldfish, or domestic turkeys, or whatever. I am sure that it is very exciting from the inside, but again, not the topic I want to discuss now – rather, it is yet another TV show that went down lately: BBC’s ‘Dynasties’.

No, it is not a yet another GoT rip-off, well, not really. Rather, it was yet another David Attenborough’s special – a five-part series about various animals around the world.

Well, not really – the lion and the wild dog came from the African savanna, and the chimpanzee – the common chimpanzee, not the bonobo – is living right next door to them in the African jungle, so it’s not much of a stretch, (some chimpanzee populations actually venture into the savanna, but unlike the human ancestors they still give its’ predators – lions, wild dogs, leopards, hyenas, etc. – a wide berth. They have not mastered fire either, though they still have tools. Technically, that is not a big issue: humanity had mastered fire only at the Homo Erectus/Homo Ergaster level, so chimpanzees have some time yet… unless humanity drives them to extinction first.

Now, this brings us back to the ‘Dynasties’ proper – they, this TV series, was about conservation of wildlife, especially the last episode, about the Bengal tigers. …Yes, according to some data, there are only two species/subspecies of tigers – the island tiger, (the Sumatran tiger), and the mainland tiger, a single species/subspecies, from India to Siberia, but I am not so sure that that P.O.V. is correct; and I reckon that this last, tiger episode was the weakest among the entire series. That is not surprising, many of American, (Western, actually), books, TV series, etc., the conclusion is often the weakest chain in the link. However…

There are rumors that clouds are gathering over Sir David himself. If that is so, then it sucks, because Sir David had been one of the best people that had ever come from the British soil, and his TV series, specials, nature documentaries, etc., were some of the best that had ever come to TV and the Internet. However, it is always possible that times are moving on, and Sir David is being left behind. This sucks, a whole lot, but real life sucks as a rule. Period.

Back with the ‘Dynasties’ proper, one of the weaker aspects it was the composition. As it was said before, the lion and the wild dog are almost two sides of the same coin, the chimpanzee is their neighbour, (a stretch, but not so much), but then we have the tiger, and the penguin.

The emperor penguin is the odd beast out. It is an Antarctic fowl among tropical beasts, but hey – everyone loves penguins, and the ‘Dynasties’ TV crew did their best to sell those flightless birds – and they did. However, the tigers? They were the weakest, and the most intense. ‘Dynasties’ did their best at selling the tigers at their most vulnerable, that it worked…and it was too much. Somehow, if the penguin episode felt like the odd one out, then the tiger episode felt like the weakest. Sorry, but them’s the breaks.

…Yes, the public perception mattered – the tiger and the lion have two very different reputations in the eyes of the public, especially Western public. Why this is, so is a difficult question, so we will not talk about right now. Moreover, it is not the point – the point is that ‘Dynasties’ have fumbled the ball at their last tiger episode, and that’s that. The series is over, (there is no signs of a sequel), so we have to live with that, and we can. Whether Sir David, (who may have his own real life problems), can, is another story.

Speaking of the other stories, there is the remark of ‘The Lion King’ looming in the future. Influenced by the remake of the ‘Jungle Book’, TLK is coming on strong, but-

But while TJB was written by Rudyard Kipling, who didn’t care for political correctness (especially by the contemporary standards) and who tried to include some real life wildlife facts in his books, (initially, TJB was a duology), TLK was, or is, ‘Hamlet’.

No, seriously, by now it is openly admitted that TLK was a remake of ‘Hamlet’, which was never big on real life wildlife, but on many other things. If you google it, you can find plenty of essays and discussions on it, in particular whether ‘Hamlet’ was a Catholic or a Protestant play, in regards to the ghost, because Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity have two different opinions of ghosts in relation to, well, Christianity and the Bible, and that is important, because it leads to the question as to whether or not the Ghost was a genuine ghost, or an evil spirit who sold Hamlet a load of baloney, and that leads to the question as to whether or not Hamlet was honestly righting a wrong, or just killing many people for the sake of revenge. The truth being is that regardless of the veracity of the Ghost’s info, Hamlet overreached himself; if he had killed Claudius in private, while the other man was praying (and failing) in private, then the play would’ve taken a very different turn; instead, in reality, we had Hamlet killed Claudius as he wanted to – in front of many people, with a large proportion of them also dying. Hamlet did not care about Denmark or its’ people – he just wanted revenge for his father, which, for him, was the righting of the wrong. Bully for him, really.

TLK, on the other hand, tried to be more derived, and as a result on one hand, it isn’t realistic from wildlife’s point of view – since the 1990s, plenty of wildlife scientists pointed out that real life lions and hyenas don’t behave as they do in the initial TLK movie, and on the other? There is at least one theory that equates Zazu with Polonius, the crooked counsellor from ‘Hamlet’, suggesting that he had been conspiring with Scar to get rid of Mufasa and Simba from the start. It is an interesting theory, especially since the original Polonius is not so straightforward a character himself, so it will be interesting to see as to how Disney’s remake of the TLK will come out.

Finally, in summer 2019 the second ‘Godzilla’ movie is coming out. Here, he is facing off with King Ghidorah, and as someone said, ‘what is a king against a god’? King Ghidorah is taller than Godzilla is in this incarnation, but a good amount of his size are his wings, and tails, and necks with heads – he’s tall, not big, so Godzilla has a good chance in a straightforward face-off that we were shown in this trailer.

In other news, in one of the original ‘Godzilla’ movies, the titular character teams up with Rodan and Mothra to defeat King Ghidorah, and this trailer shows precisely those other two kaiju – or titans, in this particular incarnation. Maybe they will work together in the summer 2019 movie too, we will have to see. Of course, the big question is where’s King Kong in all of this, for so far, we have seen no sign of him, but again, we will may learn more about all of this in the future.

Well, this is it for now – see you all in the future!