Kings of Pain 2 - Dec 11

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks and your family does its’ best to make you feel worse. You cannot escape them, not really, and certainly not legally, and if you aren’t ready to cross the legal lines, you are in trouble, and if you are-? Then you are ready to spread your trouble to your immediate vicinity and beyond because you are that badass, (but in a bad way, so do not get too cocky). …And so I tried to escape into the realm of TV for some sweet release, and what do I find there? ‘Kings of Pain’.

Now, I have been talking about them in passing in our last few entries, but I tried to avoid talking about them directly, because there were, and are, better topics to talk about; this time though there aren’t any. Oh, sure, there are also the news that the Marvel TV as such is being assimilated into the greater MCU, but this was in the cards all along: FOX mutant TV shows and FOX itself – cancelled/concluded/assimilated. Netflix TV series – cancelled or finished. AoS – finished in summer 2020. C&D – cancelled. Runaways – finished this winter, (2019/2020). And then there were none, and Disney+ is coming out soon, so any outsiders shall be dealt with accordingly. Yes, Sony showed that Disney/Marvel juggernaut is not so tough. Yes, until Netflix’s rights expire properly and for real, (we’re talking about the Defenders here), Disney/Marvel isn’t about to use any of them in its’ movies, TV shows, and so on, lest there be a copyright conflict issue. Quite a while back, Lionsgate made an animated ‘Planet Hulk’ film, and so we got ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ film the way we got. Disney/Marvel isn’t quite as badass as it appears to be, but it’s close enough, the end.

…Not that DC is much better – remember the Maxwell Lord situation that we have mentioned earlier? That is typical for DC, however – the ‘Arrow-verse’ is tight, and nothing else in DC-verse is. What does it have to do with ‘Kings of Pain’?

Here’s what: just as Disney has clamped down tight on its’ YouTube aspects – ‘Mulan’ barely got any discussion, and what did occur was carefully controlled and positive – so has ‘Kings of Pain’ stopped appearing on YouTube at all, even on the official YouTube channel of History TV. Why?

…Before we get into it, let us give a dishonorable mention to NatGeo, and not just because its’ website is now a paysite. Aside from the online paysite, NatGeo has two other main sources of sharing its’ info: the magazine, (which is always available on the site, of course), which is available as a corporeal, paper magazine, (duh!), and also on the YouTube channel – as videos. Actually, there are several connected YouTube channels that are property of the NatGeo brand, but…

…But now that the mothersite of NatGeo is a paysite, NatGeo releases its’ videos on its’ YouTube channel very rarely and very sparingly and they are only clips from its’ various shows now – no news. You get only what you pay – how commercial. They are not about to share much freely, but neither are they about to abandon this venture either.

Why is NatGeo’s YouTube info free? Hard to say. Various movies, TV series, etc., are for cash only on YouTube, but not short episode clips – just look at BBC Earth YouTube channel, for example. Video clips that are under 5-10 minutes are free, and apparently, NatGeo has to follow this rule slash guideline as well. Therefore, it does, and it does so by releasing only a couple of clips per week at most – yay. No.

How does the History channel compare to this sort of thing? Just like the BBC TV family on YouTube, it reveals plenty of episode clips from its’ shows on its channel – the full episodes are available on the History website where you need to sign-in, join-in, etc. Fair enough, but lately there are no episode clips of ‘Kings of Pain’ on YouTube, only full episodes on the History website proper. Why? Does the team of the History channel consider this show so good? Let me give you a hint: they are not.

…On this week’s episode, ‘Kings of Pain’ dealt, first, with the toe biter, aka a giant water bug. Note the ‘bug’ in its’ name – this is important, because the leads of ‘Kings’ called it a ‘beetle’ repeatedly on the show instead. ‘Bugs’ aren’t ‘beetles’: the two groups of insects are separate and distinct as much as – cats and squirrels, for example.

How you differentiate beetles from bugs? Beetles have two pairs of wings. The hind pair of wings is membranous and transparent and is used by beetles for flight. There are flightless beetles, of course, but they still have front pair of wings that are more properly called the elytra and aren’t wings at all, but hard covers that protect the vulnerable hind pair of wings and the soft abdomen of the beetles.

Bugs also have the membranous hind pair of wings and they too can fly, and they also have the elytra, but their elytra is only partial, it only covers part of the hind wings and of the abdomen, giving bugs a very different appearance from the beetles.

The second main difference of true bugs from true beetles is that all of bugs have a proboscis – a sharp syringe with which they stab their food, liquefy from the inside and sap it up. Beetles, conversely, usually have jaws called mandibles and they chew their food up – but they are a very varied group, and some beetles have adapted to eat liquid food also – we are talking about the stag beetles and their kin, so this method of separating true beetles from true bugs is not as reliable as the first one.

…And then we have the Wikipedia that already has done the hard stuff and you can always look it up to see just what you are dealing with, broadly speaking. Team ‘Kings of Pain’ did it – in this episode, they also list a number of lay names for the giant water bugs aside from the primary toe biter moniker that they clearly got from the Wiki – so why did they insist on calling this insect a ‘beetle’? Giant water bugs are no more beetles than cats are squirrels, you know!

…My money is on the show itself – it has its’ good aspects still, but so did AoS, and on ‘Kings of Pain’ we may be dealing with an AoS level of bad. The main leads seem to be decisively unenthusiastic when working with each other, they have no chemistry, and sometimes they appear to honestly hate each other sometimes, or at least – not like each other very much. Sometimes their banter does seem natural, but this isn’t enough to save the show entirely, so why the apparent VIP treatment by team History? Because they consider the new show to be that good, (it isn’t), or that bad, (it just may be)? Everyone can draw his or her own conclusion.

…The other animal featured on this week’s episode was the scorpionfish and that came with its’ own problem. You see, the term ‘scorpionfish’ applies to a very large family of fishes, scientifically known as Scorpaenidae. The lionfish, which appeared in an earlier episode and was referenced here, is actually a lay name for a fish genus named Pterois: it includes several fish species and is a part of the Scorpaenidae family, aka the scorpionfish. This particular ‘scorpionfish’ featured on ‘Kings of Pain’ didn’t look anything like a lionfish, but there are several genera of ‘scorpionfish’ that resemble each other very closely, (which is why the scientific names of their genera sound similarly), so it’s hard to figure out just what species of ‘scorpionfish’ ‘Kings of Pain’ used in their show. Of course, in the wild the scorpionfish live mostly in Indo-Pacific, which is nowhere near Baja California where this episode supposedly took place at, but not exclusively so, as the wild lionfish do, so let’s give ‘Kings’ the benefit of doubt on this one and call it a day.

Anything else? Well, Boris Johnson, who is the U.K.’s PM (for now, but still), had hid in his fridge to avoid an interview on live TV – nice. It is because of actions such as this one Ms. Greta Thunberg became TIME magazine’s person of the year… but we have already mentioned that real life sucks, so let us call this an end for this rant.

…Ergo, this is it for now, so see you all soon!

Black Widow trailer 1 - Dec 4

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. So we look onto the TV and what do we see there? The ‘Vikings’ season premiere! And-?

And I was wrong – it will not be the Turco-Mongols that the titular characters will be fighting, but the Russians. Oh, for fuck’s sake!

Let me elaborate. These days, the Russia that the West knows is associated with Moscow, or as the Slavic people acknowledge it, (sometimes) – the Moscow Rus. Reasonable enough, right? The problem – the first one – that during the Viking era – the Rus that existed in the world was the so-called Kiev Rus, it existed primarily on the territory of modern Ukraine and the Balkans, Eastern Europe, really – and Moscow was only its’ north-east periphery at best.

…Real life carefully point-out to me that the Donald decided to replace the Democrats fictional Russian interference – the Russian threat to the U.S. regime is quite real, but meddle in the election-2016 it did not – but equally fictional Ukrainian one. Democrats firmly rejected it, Republicans are just as firmly pro-Donald, so now what?

Nobody knows. At least since the year 2016 the West figured out by now that using fictional Russian threats to distract from real-life problems – the Epstein fallout, for example, or the Brexit – just makes it works and have stopped using them. Substituting them with just as fictional Ukrainian threats is worse, since Ukraine is trying to be the part of the Western culture for real, for what reasons, is another thing, but for real. They do not deserve this sort of a backstab… but they are getting it anyways.

And now we return to the ‘Vikings’, where the Vikings will be fighting the Russo-Ukrainians, even though…

…Even though in reality they were the ones to establish the state slash kingdom of Rus – the Russians themselves accept it. The first Russian dynasty were the Ruriks, whose founder, Rurik, alongside with his brother, Sinehus and Truvore, was a Variag/Varangian – a Viking. The Russian name ‘Oleg’, and its’ female counterpart, ‘Olga’, are Russified versions of the Norse ‘Helgi’ (male) and ‘Helga’ (female). Far from fighting with the Rus, the real-life Vikings colonized and began to civilize them. …Yes, they were still Vikings. …Yes, in real life their version of colonizing meant that for about half a year they would plunder – but increasingly systematically – their Slavic subjects – and the rest of the year was spent by their journeys back and forth, as well as by other interactions, with the Byzantine Empire. These days, the geographic West took the place of the Byzantines, but otherwise? The ethnically Russian spiritual heirs of Russia, Ukraine and probably Belarus too follow the same model: they plunder, however systematically, their subjects and live-off on their spoils in the West, literally a distance away from their subjects – and the West largely has no problem with that. The 90s could have been a literal new leaf in the Russian history as the pro-Western faction of its’ society assumed that it would – instead this period became known as ‘The Big Grab’ and ‘The Cut-Throat Nineties’: neither name is particularly positive either in English or in Russian… where were we?

Ah yes, for a show that is a part of a History channel, the ‘Vikings’ are a great big pile of pseudo-history crap, as it was pointed out in the past seasons. They also discard a potentially very positive propaganda piece by having them arrive on the Rus territory and bringing to the latter the light of the true Western civilization – instead, we got some sort of a ‘cold war’ that we know that they are going to win; in reality, of course, the Kiev Rus actually became superior to the Viking Scandinavia by the XI century and it was only after the Scandinavian Vikings converted to Christianity and became a part of the European culture properly did they begin to catch up. But until the Kiev Rus succumbed to the Turco-Mongol yoke, it and Scandinavia were very close to each other – politically, socially, dynastically and so on. To see the ‘Vikings’ go the way it went is just sad. What next?

Next is the new ‘Black Widow’ trailer that came out recently, (Dec 3, 2019). Supposedly, it will take place in Budapest, Hungary, because in the very first ‘Avengers’ film, (the one where Loki’s loaned alien army invaded NYC, remember it?), Nat and Clint mentioned some sort of a Budapest incident in their past. Maybe we will see it; yes, Jeremy Renner, who plays Hawkeye in MCU, has had his own #MeToo moment, but maybe we will still see him and Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury star against ScarJo’s Black Widow in her 2020 film. What next?

I cannot shake the feeling that this movie include plenty of time jumps, simply because it will take place in the past, as in the ‘present’, aka the ‘Endgame’ film, the Black Widow is dead and probably won’t be coming back. Since even the trailer already introduces us to Yelena Belova, who is one of the ‘other’ Black Widows of Marvel comics, the odds of her becoming the next Black Widow of MCU is quite high.

Next, the trailer introduces us to the Red Guardian, in his Alexi Shostakov avatar, (because there was many Red Guardian characters in the Marvel comics). In the Marvel comics, Shostakov is Ronin these days, but in MCU, it was Renner’s Hawkeye who got to be Ronin, while a much older Shostakov version is the Red Guardian. ‘Much older’ because in the comics he is actually Natasha’s ex-husband; here, he seems to be more of a funny crazy old drunken uncle figure to Nat and the girls. ‘The girls’, because it brings us to the final new character introduced in this trailer – Melina Vostokoff. In the comics, she became the Iron Maiden… who is a Black Widow villain, not an Iron Man one, connotations be damned. In Marvel’s Mangaverse, (Earth-2301, I have no life, sue me), this is the superhero name of Tony Stark’s twin sister, but so far there is no evidence of such character in MCU, so let’s assume that the Iron Maiden will be the superhero or supervillain alias of Vostokoff…or she can become the new Task Master. In Marvel comics, the Task Master is an ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. agent named Tony Masters – aka a man. This is also how the Task Master has appeared in Marvel cartoons, but as people pointed out, it is always possible that MCU will do a gender bender on this character instead. What next?

Well, let us give a shout-out to the new ‘James Bond’ movie trailer that came out today, (Dec 4, 2019), and move onto ‘Kings of Pain’. Why? Because the double-oh trailer reveals that the titular character of this film will just be running around, hitting and gunning down people, while saving either the world or his own skin in the process. Fun! – but nothing to discuss, however; even ‘Kings of Pain’ have more context, so let’s talk about them instead. Seriously, double-oh movies are pure suspense/action/adventure flicks with some romance and porn thrown in, so let’s give credit to ‘Kings’ – whatever they are, this isn’t them.

…No, actually, let us talk about the ‘Kings’ credit in this week’s episode – how does it fall?

In the neutral field, we got the velvet ant portion of the episode: this week, the not so dynamic duo went to Africa because of the Nile monitor. (Think a much smaller version of the better-known Komodo dragon). Why Nile monitor? Because ‘Brave Wilderness’ had a Nile monitor episode, as well as a velvet ant episode and a hippopotamus one.

…Getting back to the velvet ant, listen: there are 400 species of these insects living in the U.S., so there was no need for the ‘Kings’ cast and crew go to Africa to catch a couple of them. However, the velvet ants, (who really are wasps, whose females are wingless), probably live in Africa, so it evens out.

Next – the bad: the hippopotamus encounter. It was completely unconvincing: the duo’s boat was shaken around in the dark supposedly by a hippo…that is it. The camera stayed mostly on the show’s leads, we never got a glimpse of the hippo, and everyone made it to shore safely.

Listen: the hippopotamus is one of Africa’s Big Five, i.e. it is one of Africa’s biggest animals. It is also one of Africa’s most dangerous and ornery animals. Why? Because the first modern humans appeared in Africa, and they stayed in Africa, and the modern African animals evolved in co-existence with humans and human civilizations, and they know that humans aren’t their friends, but are dangerous, and tend to attack them – to attack us – with the slightest provocation because this knowledge is almost instinctual by now. The hippos’ twist – we are talking about the common hippopotamus here, not its’ pygmy sibling – is that it is an amphibious animal: like its’ cousins whales, dolphins and porpoises its’ skin does not endure well the sun, but unlike whales, dolphins and porpoises hippos can move on land just fine. Indeed, they do not really swim – more like walk along the bottoms of rivers and lakes, surfacing for air. Did not prevent them from colonizing Madagascar in the past, yes, (they are extinct there now, though)… where were we?

Ah, yes – hippos have explosive tempers and know how to use it. They are not as fast on land as rhinos and elephants are, but they still can run, and they can trample, and their jaws with tusk-like teeth are huge and strong enough to tear apart canoes and smaller rowboats, as well as lions and Nile crocodiles, so if the cast and crew of ‘Kings’ have encountered a genuinely upset hippo, odds would be that this ‘river horse’ would not only took bites out of some boats and what else have you, it could’ve also followed them to dry land, (actually, at night hippos prefer dry land to water – they forage there) and had a rematch. Nothing of this sort happened, so excuse me for being sceptical.

However, what has happened in real life was the Nile monitor biting the show’s main leads. That certainly was not fake, so kudos to them for this. While nowhere as large enough as the Komodo dragon, let alone the probably extinct Australian Megalania, the Nile monitor is still a very large lizard, with powerful jaws, claws and slapping tail; I don’t know if the duo’s interactions with the lizard took place in Africa or on a set, the monitor did bite them, and for the record? The teeth of the monitor lizards are serrated and sharp, they rip their prey, not crush it as the crocodiles do. Pieces of meat often get caught in their teeth, where they rot, giving the monitors – even the Komodo dragon – a very potent and atypical venom: Komodo dragons kill water buffalos with it, and let us be fair: a water buffalo’s immune system is much more robust than a human’s. True, a Nile monitor is also much smaller than a Komodo dragon is, but it still got powerful jaws and a toxic bite, and it showed. Coyote Petersen on ‘Brave Wilderness’ didn’t even try to have the Nile monitor bite him. So yes, here ‘Kings of Pain’ certainly broke the mould and showed that they are capable of something real and not staged. This certainly puts them ahead of the ‘Vikings’ and their messed-up world history.

…Yes, it’s kind of dramatic and strange that the official History channel in Canada airs mostly reality shows that don’t really have anything to do with History; the ‘Vikings’ are historical fiction, but at least they’re historical. That is real life for you, though. It sucks. I hope that when the ‘Black Widow’ movie comes out in May 2020 it will be good and a welcome distraction from real life instead.

This is it for now though – see you all soon!

Crown-of-thorns starfish - Nov 27

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Just ask Toronto’s police force, which was currently on the manhunt for a man who was walking around throwing feces, (hopefully, not his own), at other people. Considering that he is an Afro-Canadian, this is really a PR disaster for everyone involved. What is next?

Nothing much, just a brief admittance that ‘Kings of Pain’ are beginning to grow on me. In this week’s episode, the not-so-dynamic duo continue to follow in the footsteps of ‘Brave Wilderness’… sort of. Coyote Petersen got stung and bitten by harvester ants, (Pogonomyrmex species, but there are several ant genera which are called ‘harvester ants’ by lay people), and so did the ‘Kings of Pain’. Coyote Petersen got stung by a tarantula hawk, (a common name for two genera of so-called solitary spider wasps, family Pompilidae), and so did the ‘Kings of Pain’. Coyote Petersen encountered a crown-of-thorns starfish, and- wait. Here is where the two shows diverge: Coyote Petersen, in fact, was not stung or stabbed by the venomous starfish, while the ‘Kings of Pain’ did. And-?

…Well, geography has gotten the best of the ‘Kings of Pain’ again. See, the crown-of-thorns starfish lives in the Indo-Pacific biogeographic region. ‘Brave Wilderness’ had their venomous starfish encounter off the coast of Hawaii, which is within the eastern end of Indo-Pacific, but ‘Kings of Pain’ caught their specimen, supposedly, off the western coast of Mexico, which… isn’t a part of the Indo-Pacific biogeographic region – in the east it ends around the central Pacific Ocean region, which does include Hawaii, but not Mexican western coast. Put otherwise, ‘Kings of Pain’ have staged their starfish hunt in a way that ‘Brave Wilderness’ didn’t, but-

-But on the other hand, the crew of ‘Brave Wilderness’ didn’t get stung by the crown-of-thorn starfish. The leads of ‘King of Pain’ did, and the look on Alleva’s face after Thorn got stung first – it did not look staged. Last week’s episode, one that featured two scorpion species, (we have discussed them earlier this month, remember?), and a lionfish, (species not established), felt staged, especially at the end, when the not-so-dynamic duo had their banter at the end of the episode. This time, after the starfish encounter, felt more genuine. Maybe the show’s cast is warming up to each other and making it more authentic, simply by default? If so, good for them, because as I said, I am beginning to warm-up to this show and am actually rooting for it to finish its’ first season at least, before it gets cancelled, because so far? Given the lack of authenticity that stuck to ‘Kings of Pain’ as a bad smell, it might well happen.

Speaking of bad smells… yeah, the impeachment keeps on going, the American government remains divided, and the American enemies keep on winning, even though they have their own problems, but they also got stability and endurance, something that the current version of USA seems to lack – but that is another story.

…This is it for now – see you all soon!

Call of the Wild 2020 - Nov 20

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and sometimes you have no idea as to how to fix it. On the other hand, maybe you do, but not entirely sure if it will be worth it, especially in the long run. Sometimes things are just stacked in your favor, though you do not know it, and your actions, possibly, are making it worse. Now onto the movies!

…No, we are not talking about the ‘Frozen 2’ film; it has not come out yet, so we will talk about it later. What we are talking about here is the trailer for 2020’s version of ‘Call of the Wild’ film, made by Fox, (cough Disney cough). Based on Jack London’s novel of the same name, the movie again features real life dogs (and wolves?), albeit augmented by CGI.

…Yes, it clearly seems to be influenced by 2019’s version of ‘Lady and the Tramp’, but even from this initial trailer it can be seen that this movie will be much more original content than the adaption of L&T has been. How so and why?

Firstly, what is the original novel about? Jack London wrote two great novels about people and dogs in the north: ‘Call of the Wild’ and ‘White Fang’. ‘White Fang’ tells the story of a dog, or a dog-wolf hybrid, which is born in a wild, gets captured (alongside his mother) and raised by Native Americans, has a lot of adventures of a savage kind, and eventually is brought to the mainland U.S. by his last and kindly Anglo-American owner, where he lives the rest of his life. ‘Call of the Wild’ goes precisely in the opposite direction: we have a Saint Bernard dog that gets kidnapped and brought to the Yukon, where he goes through a slew of owners, good and bad, until he gets adopted by a kindly old hermit, who likes dogs much more so than he does people, (and who apparently will be played by Harrison Ford in the 2020 film), and who… eventually gets murdered, alongside his dogs, (except for the Saint Bernard in question), by Native American savages, cough. And what does the Saint Bernard do? He takes over a local wolf pack and wages war against the Native Americans in question for the rest of his life.

…Now, a question about just how much Saint Bernard dogs are compatible with wolves, both in behavior, (that’s malleable, true), and in anatomy – humans have modified dogs from their initial wolf, jackal, coyote and wild dog stock a lot. That said, we must keep in mind that human knowledge and attitude regarding wolves, dogs, and wolf-dog hybrids has changed a lot between the times of Jack London (and his works) and the modern times on one hand, and on the other? In the upcoming 2020 film, the titular dog will actually not be a pureblood Saint Bernard, but rather a Saint-Bernard/Scotch Collie mixed breed instead. Is it because it will also be revealed to be a rescued (from a shelter) dog? It is anyone’s guess. Between this revelation and the glimpses of Buck the dog and Harrison Ford’s character rescuing a Native American woman, (something that didn’t happen in the novel), odds are that the 2020 film will be very different from the original novel, because reasons. Anything else?

On the plus side, I watched a NatGeo special, ‘America’s Greatest Animals’, where NatGeo and four of its hosts oversaw twelve of North America’s best-known iconic animals and selected the top five out of them – the gray wolf, the grizzly, the polar bear, the moose and the bison. It was nicely done, (though the hosts’ comments subtracted rather than added to the show’s enjoyment) and its’ script was smartly written, actually. Even the grading system was well designed…and this brings us back to ‘Kings of Pain’, even though we would rather not.

The show’s hosts, and actually the show itself keeps on imitating ‘Brave Wilderness’, and they are not succeeding even here: judge for yourself. On one episode, Coyote Petersen got stung by two North American scorpions, (this is important), and in another, he got stung (or spiked?) by a lionfish. And what do we see on this week’s episode of ‘Kings of Pain’? They travel to – South Africa, where they get stung by two scorpions and a lionfish. Cough.

Now, there is another episode, where Petersen actually gets himself treated for the lionfish stinger, for example; it is product placement, true, but it does balance-out nicely the process of him actually getting hurt. We are getting nothing like this in ‘Kings of Pain’… on top of the mess with the scorpions.

…Let’s talk about the scorpions. In this week’s episode, Mr. Rob Alleva and Mr. Adam Thorn got stung by two South African scorpions – one is a ‘bark scorpion’, and another one is an Uroplectes, aka a lesser thick-tailed scorpion. That is not the problem, the problem is that normally the moniker ‘bark scorpion’ applies to several North American species – the Arizona bark scorpion, the striped bark scorpion, and the Baja California bark scorpion. They all belong to the Centruroides genus, which is found only in the Americas… which hasn’t prevented an article – you can find it here, right now (https://meaww.com/kings-of-pain-rob-alleva-adam-thorn-stung-two-scorpions-lionfish-389378), from calling the ‘not-Uroplectes’ scorpion a ‘South African bark scorpion (Centruroides vittatus)’. End quote. There is such a scorpion indeed – it is the previously mentioned striped bark scorpion, which is found in the U.S. and northern Mexico. Supposedly, it is the most frequently encountered species of scorpion in the U.S., so some confusion can be accepted, especially since there is also a scorpion species known as Uroplectes vittatus instead, but still. The words Uroplectes and Centruroides are completely different – intentionally different, as to prevent confusion that can arise when only lay-names such as ‘bark scorpions’ are used instead. Someone is being unprofessional in the ‘Kings of Pain’ cast, crew and associates, and that really is not good. Seriously, we’re ripping-off ‘Brave Wilderness’, whose double-scorpion episode was set in the U.S., where the various bark scorpion species, (or rather, the scorpion species that are most commonly known as bark scorpions by the American populace), live. Can we at least put-in some extra effort to ensure that we got our scientific names and geography straight? The continents of North America and Africa are distinctly separate from each other, and so are their respective animals. Real life sucks already, but it does not mean that we should make it dumber as well.

…As for the lionfish…fair enough. There currently are 12 recognized species of those fish and they all resemble each other closely enough for lay-people (such as you and me) to honestly confuse them. No problem there, good luck to Mr. Alleva and Mr. Thorn as well as their entourage – they will need it.

…This is it for now; see you all soon!

Kings of Pain - Nov 13

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Yesterday, (Tuesday, Nov 12, 2019), I went across the entire Toronto for an afternoon doctor’s appointment… only it was not. Somehow, I became bumped to a late Friday morning (Nov 15, 2019), so I am going to do it all over again. I hate this shit. At least, family did not try to make it worse, one way or another. Hallelujah for small mercies is all I can say. Now onto the TV shows.

We are talking about the new live-action show, ‘Kings of Pain’, which has also premiered on Nov 12, 2019, on the History channel, (history-dot-ca on the Internet). We have already discussed a different show from this channel, ‘Forged in fire’, and that is really an AWE me/Man-at-Arms YouTube show meeting some sort of a cooking show, ‘Chopped’, maybe. People forge knives, hatchets, other weapons, using materials provided by the show hosts – some people like it, others don’t, but the show IS original in its’ approach, let’s be honest. ‘Kings of Pain’ – not so much.

Instead, ‘Kings of Pain’ are a clear rip-off of the ‘Brave Wilderness’ YouTube & TV show that stares Coyote Petersen and his cohorts. Just like the latter, the hosts of ‘Kings of Pain’ are getting stung and bitten by various creatures; in the series’ premiere, this went towards the executioner wasp and the warrior wasp. (Admittedly, I am not sure about the goliath birdeater tarantula, but)…

The main difference is that Coyote dedicated an entire episode to each creature – yes, it was only 15 to 20 minutes long on average, but the truth is, the plot of such an episode is actually quite limited: Coyote would capture the insect, it would bite or sting him, he would suffer, the end. Not a lot to proceed on here, and a lot of it was occupied by Coyote’s theatrics – the man is an actor, and the fact that he does gets stung for real does not change it.

By contrast, the hosts of ‘Kings of Pain’ do not do those theatrics as well at all – they get stung or bitten, they yell and flail, the end – and the next shot shows them calmly discussing it at a campfire. Plus, they constantly break the fourth wall by showing their camera crew, medical assistants, and so on – ‘Brave Wilderness’ didn’t do it on such a regular basis. Score another one for ‘Brave Wilderness’.

Am I biased? Well, yes, but the truth is that what ‘Kings of Pain’ are doing? ‘Brave Wilderness’ did it first. The latter show is not without its’ own flaws, and is aimed primarily at children as audience, but grownups can enjoy it too. ‘Kings of Pain’ are trying to aim at the grown-ups instead, but it still comes across as second best – in this week’s episode, (‘Nightmare in a Box’), the show’s hosts were shown to be stung and bitten by two different wasp species and the goliath bird-eating spider, yet somehow it was depicted as a less exciting and a more pompous, (in a pseudoscientific way), version of the ‘Brave Wilderness’ ‘Coyote getting stung’ story arc. That is life for you. Anything else?

In the promo for the upcoming ‘Vikings’ season, we get to see the titular characters face-off against… the Turco-Mongols, (or whatever they are called now). Sigh. In real life, the proper Scandinavian Viking culture vanished quite a while before the Turco-Mongols had reached the lands of Rus and Europe proper, so this ‘clash of East and West’ is historically anachronistic and is about as realistic as GoT’s Dothraki coming to Westeros as part of Dany’s forces – but the ‘Vikings’ historical inaccuracies were discussed at length in the past by much more knowledgeable people than me, so let us drop it. We know that the Vikings are going to win anyhow, simply because it is their show, and not the Turco-Mongols’. Ah well, this is TV for you – whether it sucks or not, it usually is not realistic.

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