Quarantine entry #66 - May 26

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, though it is weird sometimes – for example, there is a granny of a singer, who is both over 90, and owns over a dozen of mature and fully-grown lions and tigers, (though not bears, apparently – somehow, she had missed them). The good singer is actually half-boasting about that – I am guessing she is waiting for the mammals to eat the granny and then be acquitted, because they are, well, animals, and are not really subjected to the American law…and if they are euthanized or whatever when the granny gets eaten, it’s no skin off the singer’s nose either – win-win. What next?

The province of Ontario – during the long weekend – broke all of the rules of social distancing, yet they still want the borders with U.S. closed. Imbeciles. This is why I hate other people too, and not just myself. Ergo, let us talk about the other animals instead – and how about the walrus?

…Yes, we’ve talked about the walrus a long time ago, when we’ve discussed the AFO episode ‘Polar bear vs. Walrus’ – remember it?.. but first, here is a shout-out to NatGeo’s latest mini TV-series, ‘Barkskins’, which we’ve mentioned earlier as well. This is a fairly decent and enjoyable drama, and a pleasant change from ‘The Wrong Missy’ and ‘The Lovebirds’ that we’ve discussed earlier.

As for the walrus itself…where to start? The walrus is the biggest pinniped of the Northern Hemisphere – males can reach up to 4 m in length and weigh up to 2 metric tons. Despite its physical similarity with the eared seals, (aka fur seals & sea lions) rather than the true seals, the walrus is in its own group, not exactly too close to either of the seal groups, and it is a single species, with two or three subspecies, (scientists are not sure about the number).

The walruses prefer to live in the shallows of the northern seas, where they feed on bottom-dwelling sea animals – molluscs, worms, crustaceans, etc. There are stories about walrus orphans that became full carnivores, but that evidence is anecdotal, and in the last few decades there wasn’t any new ones, so that is probably a salty sea tale or whatever.

Once, the walruses lived all over the Arctic waters, living in herds of hundreds, if not thousands of animals. Now, however, their numbers have fallen – even with the conservation efforts, the global warming is affecting them as well as the polar bears, and the walrus females are not that much more fertile than their polar bear counterparts are – they become sexually mature only at four to five years of age, and give birth to new pups only every three to four years. The pups in question grow slowly – for the first two years they feed only on milk, but during that time, they grow up to 2 m in length and over 300 kg in weight.

…The walruses supposedly grow until they reach about 20 years of age, and they live for a very long time, if they survived their initial childhood. Humans aside, the only animals that mess with fully grown walruses are killer whales and polar bears – and it’s a mixed bag with polar bears, (they prefer to go after walrus pups and females, not the mature males, and if they can afford it, they go for seals instead), and as for killer whales… I have not seen much evidence of killer whale on walrus attacks, so I am guessing that they would rather eat anything else than a walrus first, especially a mature male one.

Finally, here is a piece of the original fiction about it instead:

A walrus is a big and heavy beast. It looks like a bag of blubber, but got plenty of brawn too.

A walrus has two ivory tusks jutting from beneath the bristly moustache. It got flippers instead of feet, too. A walrus is an aquatic beast.

A walrus will dive deep and graze on the sea floor like a cow on a meadow. It eats seaweed and mollusks, and once it is done, the walrus will emerge, grab an ice floe or the shoreline with its tusks and get out of the water completely. It will lie down and sleep.

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

C&D cancelled - Oct 25

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. This week – on Monday – us Canadians put its’ own spin on this thesis, by creating a minority government. It became obvious almost immediately, that Singh, and Scheer, and Trudeau, do not get along and probably will not, and so it is anyone’s guess where this arrangement, the minority government, will get. Probably nowhere fast, that is where.

…Ivan Andreevich Krylov, the man who had adapted the fables of Aesop and Lafontaine for the Russians during their imperial period, had one among their number titled ‘The Swan, the Pike, and the Crayfish’, in which the titular characters were hired to deliver a some sort of a load, (it is never defined just what it is), somewhere. The load is not heavy, but the swan went for the sky, the crayfish began to move backwards, (in Russia, it is a common folk myth that the crayfish walk only backwards, because reasons), and the pike went into the water. Whose fault it was, the fable rhetorically proclaimed, is not for us to judge, but the load never went anywhere. The Russians consider this fable to be one of Krylov’s best ever. For Canadians, the Trudeau Swan, the Singh Crayfish and the Scheer Pike can be much harder to endure, especially since they are not the only characters on Canada’s political Olympus, and our country’s political landscape has acquired other features by now. In Western Canada – there is a lot of resentment brewing towards Trudeau and his government because of oil, and ecology, and native rights, and what else have you. Miss Greta Thunberg left her mark there too, but now her ‘phenomenon’ is dying down: if Al Gore, in the years past, as America’s VP, could change the tide, then neither can Ms. Thunberg, no matter how much she was tried to be puffed up in the past weeks and months.

…And in the East we got the good old Quebecois separatism, which, apparently, also gotten re-started these days. Fun! I remember that, however, vaguely, back in the 90s, when my family just came to Canada, it was all the talk, especially among the Anglo-Canadians, but nothing came out of it back then; what will come out of it now is for anyone to guess.

But enough of the depressing reality, let us talk about… television. Pause. No, let us not talk about the new ‘Watchmen’ TV series, which is already a shit-storm of alt-left, alt-right, fanboys, SJWs, and what else have you, and so far the series have only aired its’ very first episode. What will happen as more of its’ episodes is aired? More hubbub and controversy, and that is all that I care about. Why? Because I do not like ‘Watchmen’, I did not like the original comic series, I was not a fan of the film, and I am staying away from the TV series too. I had had this sort of bad excitement back with the SW7 & 8 films, and do not need its’ TV analogue too.

This brings us to Marvel, and – more bad news: C&D are cancelled. Why? Good question, and so far this is no concrete answer. The easy way would be to blame the latest Marvel shake-up, as Kevin Feigle begins to manage the Marvel TV, as well as the Marvel movies. But the more subtle signs that something wasn’t right there could be seen in S2, which was more jumbled and less tight than S1 had been, it felt almost like two seasons smashed together, just like how the ‘Fallen Kingdom’ movie felt like two movies smashed together, and SW8 – as a film that had fragments and elements of another film, especially in the end. Just like AC of MCU, or ‘Swamp Thing’ of DCEU, C&D may be just another TV series that got canned…just because. Maybe the numbers weren’t high enough… since the end of S1, as the S2/the series proper ended on Ty & Dy leaving New Orleans for pastures new. There are rumors of them appearing on ‘Runaways’ S3, but now it’s anyone’s guess if this’ll come to pass.

…Yes, in the comics C&D did come to NYC, but MCU is different from Marvel comics, and Ty & Dy’s departure from New Orleans felt like an end of something – in this case, it was of the C&D show proper. Ouch.

…Speaking of comics? The 2017 ‘Runaways’ comic reboot has amounted already to 24+ issues, while C&D – to 50% of that number, at best. Clearly, something was going on with C&D in the entire Marvel multiverse, not just to MCU, and now it has manifested itself: C&D is cancelled for good for now. That is real life for you. It sucks.

…You can argue that not all of real life is bad: the NatGeo site nowadays permits about 4 or 5 free articles a month, (the benefactors), plus there are some YouTube videos from that franchise that are appearing on YouTube on a more regular basis than once every week or so, (the generosity), so really, turn that smile upside down! Or not, because in Canada the political landscape has become an unpredictable and volatile cul-de-sac, (by Canadian standards, but still), and elsewhere it is worse. In the U.S., we got the brouhaha with the impeachment, now it seems to be going forwards, but it will make much fewer people happy than initially; and across the pond we got the Brexit, which is still going forwards…somehow, and increasingly more and more people are getting fed-up with it, especially in Great Britain proper. In under a week now there will be a lot of people unhappy with Boris Johnson and the rest of his crew, one way or another. Of course, the latter will have their own axes to grind and to bear once everything explodes, and that will just make everything worse, again, but hey! That is real life for you. It sucks. Just look at C&D – it did not suck, so it got cancelled, and we just have to grin and bear it. End of the story.

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

NaGeo - Sep 4

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. In this particular instance, it is because the NatGeo news website is now a paysite. The fuck?

Now, this development is not exactly a surprise: for the last few years the NatGeo magazine online was almost exclusively for money only, aka The Same Deal You Got for the Paper Copy. No biggie. The fact that the general news articles on the website are for money only starting this September (2019) is still annoying. A while back – when the ‘Pathfinder’ franchise was only beginning to prepare to put itself into its’ second edition incarnation – we discussed how ‘Wizards of the Coast’ site for D&D and co. has become a paysite whereas the ‘Pathfinder/Starfinder’ site is an online/Internet store for the different ‘Pathfinder/Starfinder’ merchandise, with a forum where ‘Pathfinder/Starfinder’ fans can discuss the pros and cons of the various ‘Pathfinder/Starfinder’ goods as well as talk about any other topics regarding this franchise. It’s not a bad idea, for a while the franchise also included various novels and comics, but these days the novels are gone, finished, they aren’t made and published any longer, whereas comics seem to be going this way too with barely any presence in the real world. You can, probably, buy them online and all, but how many people do that? – And where does it leave NatGeo?

Now that is an interesting question. This website was never very popular among the Internet users to begin with, and now that it costs separate money from your usual Internet bills and taxes… yeah. Plus, what is its’ point? You can watch NatGeo videos freely on YouTube and similar sites, and the news themselves are often reposts from other sites, sites that are not necessarily paysites and you can read the news there for free again. What is the reasoning behind this tactical move of NatGeos, again?

...Hard to say. For a while, NatGeo tried to be more interactive, literally, we are talking an interactive Internet site here, but sometimes it does not always work. It certainly does not work for the NatGeo magazine, which has grown increasingly clustered over the years, as the magazine’s crew tried to cram more and more info into the same amount of space within the magazine’s physical parameters and the result is largely a glorified photo album with minimum of printed information. Does Disney owe the NatGeo or the Discovery franchise? If it is, the former then they probably are not getting their money’s worth, is what I am saying, and if it is the latter, then this NatGeo strategy is even dumber. Sad face emoji here. End rant.

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