Quarantine entry #14 - April 4

…It came to pass to my knowledge that I’ve talked about the alligators – especially the American alligator – a lot in the past entries; much more so than about the bears, so yeah, my apology, if yesterday’s material was something of a re-use, but while we’re down in the lockdown, we don’t have too much of the new material to go on about. What next?

Firstly, real life sucks. (Cough obligatory disclaimer cough). Second, what should we talk about? Should we talk about them bears some more? In AFO, the three best-known species have some –up – the brown bear, the American black bear, and the polar bear. The other bears species are quite famous themselves, (cough giant panda cough), but the aforementioned trio is the big three. Did you know that the polar bear is also known as the ice bear? I did not know, not until recently, anyhow. And-?

And if we are going to talk about trivia, let us talk about bats instead. Those small mammals are the only mammals that truly fly; everyone else is a glider instead. They do not even look anything like bats – seriously, compare a bat and a flying squirrel. The duo do not even have superficial similarities! Rather, a bat’s superficial similarities is with the bird and the extinct pterosaur; the three vertebrate groups are not really related to each other, but physically they seem to have more in common than with anyone else. Next?

The bats’ classification is a mess. Initially, they were thought to be more closely related to primates, but now they are considered to be a sister group to true carnivores, true ungulates and cetaceans. Sometimes scientific logic is hard to discern, and the fact that bat evolution isn’t much clearer than the modern bird one, isn’t helping – bats: appeared in the Eocene already…as did bears, for comparison, but whereas bears took some time acquiring their modern shape, the bats already sprung up largely primed and ready, save for the echolocation, of course.

Pause. There are eight species of existing bears (yet), and several extinct ones. All of them – the extinct cave bear and short-faced bear, the ancient giant panda and spectacled bear, (the only surviving relative of the short-faced bear family), the modern polar bear – they all are built around the same lines; the polar bear actually has viable hybrids with its’ closest relative, the brown bear, and that isn’t something that happens in nature very often. But what about bats?

So far, there is no case of bat hybrids – not in the wild and not in captivity. On their own, bats divide into megabats and microbats. The former are better known as fruit bats or flying foxes. Their echolocation is less derived, and their eyesight and sense of smell are better. That is because they eat mostly tropical fruits (and sometimes pollinate flowers), and you do not need echolocation to find them.

Some of the microbats also pollinate flowers, but most of them are carnivores and insectivores of one type or another. That said, they also differentiate into horseshoe bats and their relatives, who have elaborate nose leaves on their noses, and such bats as the free-tailed bats that have plain noses instead. (This division is not so clear-cut, but you get the gist). Otherwise, ecologically, the two bat groups are similar; there are bat species that are outright carnivores rather than insectivores, and the three true vampire bat species feed on blood, but in general? The majority of microbats eats insects and other invertebrates, just as most of megabats eat fruits. Is that it?

Yes, pretty much. People are pointing out that if I talked about Batman, my blog would be more popular, but I do not like DC, I do not like DCEU, and I do not really feel like talking about it. Maybe some other time instead. (Cough WW1984 movie cough).

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

Race to the Sun - Jan 17

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. It is tedious. So’s family. So are you, and it is up to you, and you alone, to do something about it. Sometimes you even succeed, and that makes all the difference. 

Now let us escape into the world of books – in this particular instance, it is Ms. Rebecca Roanhorse’s YA novel, ‘Race to the Sun’. Once more it is a YA novel associated with Rick Riordan of Percy Jackson fame, but this time it has something different, and no, it isn’t the fact that it is a self-contained, one-shot novel, but its’ intro – it is more open and expanded than before. This is important, because ‘Race to Sun’ is a much slimmer novel than, say, the previous installment – i.e. ‘Tristan Strong’, (remember him?), meaning… what?

First, what kind of a novel ‘Race to the Sun’ is? It is a straightforward imitation of Riordan’s own novels with none of the development or the effort that Mr. Riordan had put into his own novels. Ms. Roanhorse did an admirable attempt at this YA novel, yet somehow it feels perfunctory, empty, and pointless – kind of like popcorn for brain, put otherwise. When you are reading ‘Tristan Strong’, you really resonate with the novel’s titular character/narrator and the rest of the characters on their quest/journey; in ‘Race to the Sun’ – not so much.

…As a matter of fact, the issue of scope is another difference between the two novels: in ‘Tristan Strong’, the stakes are saving an entire world; in ‘Race to the Sun’ – not so much. Oh, sure, stakes are high and personal for ‘NIZHONI BEGAY’, her family and friends, but somehow, ‘Tristan Strong’ manages to do the same thing better, and it is a much thicker book too – 482 pages vs 298 for ‘Race’. Okay, and-?

And now we’re back to the prologue, where Riordan waxes much more poetically than how he normally does, talking about the Native American mythologies while being pointedly politically correct, and astute, and whatever else. For that matter, so’s the author, Ms. Roanhorse herself – in ‘Race’ she does her best for her novel and especially its’ main narrator to hit all the right notes while imitating Mr. Riordan’s novels to the best of her ability, with the supposedly added real life factor – ecology and pipelines. Pause.

…I know it’s weird, but Ms. Roanhorse, (and the rest of team Riordan), is beginning to remind me of another author – Ms. Ali Smith, and her latest novels: ‘Autumn’ (2016), ‘Winter’ (2017), ‘Spring’ (2019), and the upcoming ‘Summer’ (2020) are also fiction that is trying to facture in real life, including ‘the president of the United States’, who might be the Donald in Ms. Roanhorse’s ‘Race’ and who is the Donald in Ms. Smith’s series. Remember when we discussed the ‘Like a Boss’ movie earlier this January? How it tried to cruise easily by utilizing its’ politically progressive, (and also correct), race card? ‘Like a Boss’ ended-up failing as a movie; Ms. Smith’s novels moved from coherent and traditional in ‘Autumn’ to anything but in ‘Spring’, and while ‘Autumn’ was apparently ‘shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize’, she didn’t win – a George Saunders did, and neither ‘Winter’ nor ‘Spring’ came anywhere near the more traditional ‘Autumn’ too. Put otherwise, Ms. Smith’s latest novel series started strong but grew weak, and so are the novels that ‘RICK RIORDAN PRESENTS’ – they started strong with Ms. Chokshi’s and Ms. Cervantes’ novels, relatively speaking, and then there was Mr. Lee’s YA novel of space opera, ‘Dragon Pearl’, and then Riordan’s own YA novels of demigods and monsters began to flounder and are no longer as politically progressive and correct as they once were, and now we got ‘Race’, where on one hand we have Mr. Riordan’s own kiss-up of a foreword, and on the other – the novel itself, which feels like a pale version of ‘Percy Jackson’ and co., with the ecological angle tackled on it… not unlike how it went down in ‘Frozen 2’, remember?

In ‘Frozen 2’, team Disney tried to present an ecological as well as a socio-racial utopia, in the best dreams of Greta Thunberg, until she made a verbal slip, that all those politicians who disagree with climate change, should be ‘put to the wall’ (and given a final smoke before they’re shot), and then she went home on a train and nothing has been heard of her ever since – this sort of speech must’ve sounded too Russian revolutionary for Greta’s grown-up supporters, and that’s the end of her as climate & social media darling, eh?

…Essentially, this is the problem with the West’s attempts to ‘revolutionize’ its’ youth slash the next generation: they want change, but they want to play it safe while playing at radicals. You cannot. Either you have radical change, but it will not be safe, or you will have it safe, but the change will only be cosmetic at most, or even less than that. Disney, Paramount Pictures, and etc. can churn any sort of utopic/propaganda/etc. films, but unless they are ready to put up and suffer where it hurts – in the wallet – it will not work. Instead, in reality, as soon as Disney/SW began to suffer financially post the SW8 film, their SW9 film aimed to rewind and erase most of the SW8 film’s impact on the SW-verse. It did not really work, and people are just as unhappy with the SW9 film as they were with the SW8 film, albeit for different reasons – but we digress.

Now, ‘Like a Boss’ didn’t try to pull anything as ‘Frozen 2’ did – it just tried to coast on political correctness and that’s it. Ms. Smith’s novels tried to do the same thing – to utilize real world issues in lieu of the novels’ shortcomings, (whatever they are), including the world’s hatred of the Donald. Marvel comics tried to do something similar in their ‘Defenders’ mini-arc and it didn’t appear to have worked in regards to their sales either, and so that comic series ended with a panorama of all the ‘Defenders of NYC’ instead. Frankly, I sometimes wonder if there is any other city in the Marvel world that comes even close to NYC – at least in DC you got several cities, (Metropolis and Gotham at least), so it somehow balances out – in Marvel, not so much.

And where does ‘Race’ fit in here? Why, right next to ‘Like a Boss’, and Ms. Smith’s novels and the like. Ms. Roanhorse tries to have it all while doing minimum, and as a result, her YA novel feels perfunctory and hollow: when you have read it, you do not want to re-read it, as you do with ‘Tristan Strong’ or even ‘Dragon Pearl’ for example. Those novels you want to re-read, YA audience or not. ‘Race to the Sun’ – not so much… but you still should try it, because real life sucks, and reading novels – YA, grown-up, etc. – helps you escape it, period. Anything else?

Well, yes, there’s a lot of other things to talk about, including the ‘Doolittle-2020’ movie that got released today too, but for now let’s just acknowledge that Mr. Riordan and his book franchise is suffering and degrading; from the truly memorable YA novels it had devolved into not-memorable instead; like so much of American youth culture lately, ‘Race’ wants to inspire, but it doesn’t want to offend, and you cannot have one without the other, as so ‘Race’ doesn’t offend anyone, but neither it will inspire anyone either. Ah well, I’m sure that Ms. Roanhorse got her commission or what else have you, Mr. Riordan got another (one shot) YA novel associated with him, and everyone is happy. Or not, but it is unknown what Mr. Riordan will do this time – the last time he was unhappy after the initial two Percy Jackson movies, and he spoke his mind, and that was the end of that. No more adaptations of his novels, (save for comics, but that is the same thing, really). No one wants to mess with the Riordan-man. No one wants to have anything with the Riordan-man. Take your pick, (and the fact that those movies were just plain bad does not the affairs help either). How will Mr. Riordan get out of this mess, will he be able to get out of this mess, we will not know, especially not immediately, but hopefully we will.

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

Like a Boss - Jan 11

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, for a variety of reasons – at least my illness is over. Yay! Therefore, to celebrate it, I went to see the premiere of ‘Like a Boss’ (2020), and here is my impression: it also sucks. Practically as bad as reality itself does, even though for a non-superhero, sci-fi, or fantasy movie it is not very realistic at all.

…Let’s start at the beginning: why did I watch it? Firstly, because of Salma Hayek – any film with her is fun; she is a good comedic actress. And secondly it was because the duo of Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne looked good, in trailers and all. Moreover, guess what – they do.

Pause. Remember that reality sucks? Tiffany (Sarac) Haddish voice might have something to do with it, (among other things). I have no idea as to what is its’ state of affairs, but as far as I am concerned, she sounds perfectly asexual, neither man nor woman, so all of you who give the transgender people a hard time? Shut up, because Ms. Haddish is completely ‘natural’ woman yet she sounds anything but, while being a successful American actress, comedian and author at the same time. Where we were?

‘Like a Boss’ tried to be woke, just as ‘Dark Phoenix-2019’ did: its’ main leads are an Anglo-American, an Afro-American and a Latin-American, with the supporting cast being both WASPs and POCs, and the premise itself – sisters are doing it for themselves – isn’t so bad, but the way it is delivered? Is. There are plenty of ‘risqué’ and ‘R-rated’ jokes and somehow they undercut the movie’s main message, it is very hard to talk about ‘girl power’ when you are talking about ‘chocolate pubes’ and what else have you got. These days, it isn’t 1990s or even the early 2000s – people aren’t going to give you a pass just because you’re a woman and/or a person of color, something that ‘Like a Boss’ failed to realize. You need both talk the talk and walk the walk, and this is something the cast of ‘Like a Boss’ fails to do. Yes, the cast, especially the supporting characters, are full of all colors and body shapes, but, again, none of this goes anywhere but some tasteless jokes. ‘Like a Boss’ might be safe, it might be playing it safe, but the result fluctuates from being insipid when Salma Hayek isn’t on screen, and to her stealing the film when she is. Considering that her character is the movie’s main villain, this probably was not what the team at Paramount Pictures expected to happen, but what can you do? Even the aforementioned jokes tend to fall flat thanks to Ms. Haddish’s peculiar voice. ‘Like a Boss’ comes across as both a proper paint-by-numbers picture and a yucky mess that is located in place of a proper paint-by-numbers picture at the same time. That is worth a Razzie, I would say. Anything else.

…People are upset that ‘Joker-2019’ won an Oscar and ‘Hustlers’ didn’t. Live with it. It is not just Marvel movies that are landing hard punches these days, you know! There are worse things in life – for example, Bianca Andreescu is withdrawing from Australian Open. Did I mention that real life sucks? Fans of ‘Hustlers’ should realize it and move on. ‘Like a Boss’, which features Salma Hayek in place of ‘Hustlers’ J-Lo, isn’t liable to win any Oscars or be even in a consideration for running, though.

This is it for now. See you all soon!