X-Men/Mufasa - May 1

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Now onto the home stretch of the X-Men ’97 season?

…Well, rather not, because by now we got the gist of the conflict in this season: it is the X-Men and most other mutants against yet another sentinel version – the Prime Sentinels. As far as Sentinels go, they are the X-Men version of the Mindless Ones, complete with glowing eyes. They can hardly be stopped, they can barely be reasoned with, they are yet another incarnation of the ‘evil mob’ kind of foe, and as such they cannot be sympathized, not really – and (the now dead) Gyrich is behind them. Of course he is. He is the mastermind behind the mob, (not to be confused with the actual X-Men character named the Mastermind). It was said before and it is said now, the X-Men ’97 franchise is going around in a circle like a snake in a wheel and going nowhere.

…Ok, this was uncalled for – with Magneto’s help the Prime Sentinels are defeated, but since the season’s finale is a 3-parter, and this was only the first part, so more excitement is ahead, really. Hell, even Jubilee and Roberto will be given something to do! Back in the 90s, Jubilee was all but written out of the main narrative, because it was no longer obvious what she was needed for in a show with a big cast, and the same is happening now, her and Roberto’s adventure in Mojo-land notwithstanding. This time she and Roberto are being dragged along for the ride like a couple of accessories to the main suit, and-

-and yes, Jubilee may grow up into a formidable warrior if she doesn’t die, and Morph is used as a prop to showcase various other Marvel mutant characters without them being actually around, and professor X is back, and everyone is excited, and the audiences are eating the show up, and there’s no specific background, unlike what is shaping up in the ‘Deadpool 3’ movie, and we’ve been here before, remember? Therefore, instead of beating up a (existential status undetermined) Deadpool, let us briefly talk about the upcoming ‘Mufasa’ film.

This is a spin-off of the ‘Lion King’ films, focusing on the childhood of Simba’s father instead. In this trailer, we see that 1) the (spotted) hyenas might be present, but they are playing a smaller role than they did in the original movie (both incarnations), which is good, because they need more good PR (the hyenas do). 2) Is that Mufasa’s brother Scar is not very prominent in the trailer either, but there are scenes of two lions of different ages fighting each other. In one scene, the background is on fire, and we get a glimpse of a small creature attacking the (enemy?) lion – perhaps it is Timon, who, alongside Pumba, is also supposed to be appear in the film. In the second fight, the background is icy, so either we are going to have a flashback into the past, into lives of cave lions instead, or Mufasa is going to get onto the Mt. Kilimanjaro or somewhere similar.

…The geography in the ‘Lion King’ franchise is just as bad as zoology is – in RL Africa has deserts at the ends, the jungle in the middle, and the savanna in-between, broadly speaking. In the world of Mufasa, Scar and Simba, we get the desert between the savanna and the jungle instead, therefore, an ice and snow covered mountain could fit quite well into this ensemble.

3) – in another scene, we have a lion cub, or cubs, having a misadventure with at least one Nile crocodile. In RL, this reptile is the only challenger to the saltwater crocodile in size and strength; the royal lion can defeat it, however – on land, and preferably in a pride. One on one, and especially in the water, the Nile crocodile has the upper hand, however. Since Mufasa (and his companions) are just cubs, they are in big trouble.

Finally, 4) – Rafiki. He is a mandrill, and this monkey, as well as its’ only true relative the drill, are not baboons, nor are particularly close cousins to them; rather, their closest relatives are the crested mangabeys, a group of guenon-like monkeys that don’t look anything like the drill/mandrill duo, as the latter look much more like the baboons and the geladas instead. Moreover, unlike the latter, the drill and the mandrill live in the African jungle, and as such, they appeared in Disney’s animated Tarzan-verse, and avoid the savannahs instead. Disney is certainly playing fast and loose with Africa in the ‘Lion King’ franchise; it will certainly be interesting to see how the movie will come out in winter of 2024.

For now, however, this is it. See you all soon!

Quarantine entry #78 - May 7

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. I mean, here you go, reading about how a lobster fisherman caught an albino lobster, one in a 100 million or something, and then you learn that a 10-ft. great white shark, (that’s 3 m long, longer than an average man is tall and much stronger, too), unintentionally killed a surfer. That is life, but it still sucks, even if it is not COVID-19 bad.

…And then you read how some pilot drew a fish – I mean, a fist - for George Floyd in the air over Nova Scotia, and this is when I knew that the American society is in trouble…and also nuts. Why? Because it is bored. Everyone in the West – but especially in the U.S. – was bored because of the lockdown, and when the George Floyd protests came along, they piled onto it with no intention of stopping it.

Oh, sure, people like the Donald try to stop it…which they do…in a manner that is certain to make everything worse and to ensure that the ‘U.S. civil unrest’ beats-out ‘Coronavirus-19’ for top spot on news sites, (such as the MSN, but still). The fact is that people are sick and tired of COVID-19 and will do anything to forget about it; but…

…But what people are not talking about is how the ‘civil unrest’ issue will exacerbate the COVID-19 issue. Forget ‘Barkskins’, forget ‘Gordon Ramsey Uncharted’, they are out in the real world, where blood is being spilled, and COVID-19 is beginning to become ignored, sickness or not. Pause.

Here is the thing. Canada itself is doing just that, demanding justice for its’ own deceased POC, deceased under suspicious circumstances, I point out, but somehow it falls far from the scope of the U.S. – and they still have not opened the borders.

That is to say, the U.S.-Canadian border is permeable, but because my family does not want to take risks – and they are not entirely wrong there by now – it might as well not be. Pause.

Here is another thing. I doubt that this border is going to be officially open anytime soon, as neither D.C. nor Ottawa want to force the issue, and actually, they probably do not want to open the border at all. The U.S. – because its’ people have been moving as in ‘immigrating’ to Canada since 2016, (and whose fault is that? Not the Canadians) – and Ottawa because right now the U.S. is a burning pile of tires that is full of crap that stinks. The Donald and Trudeau are two very different people that did not get along too often in the past, and now it shows.

…The people…under other circumstances, the people would, and could, tell Ottawa and D.C. something about that, and so they do…about people of color, and about defunding the police. The latter part is U.S.-only, somehow it didn’t get caught in Canada, (cough), and so I feel comfortable enough to say that whatever is going on in Canada is only an imitation of the ‘U.S. civil unrest’ and the ‘George Floyd fallout’, and it helps Trudeau and his peers to feel important, while keeping them out of the U.S. level of danger. Anything else?

Speaking of danger, the first episode of S2 of ‘Gordon Ramsay Uncharted’ has reminded me quite a lot of ‘River Monsters’, especially the African episodes, for the obvious reason – hippos. We have talked about them repeatedly on this blog, but they are amazing animals, especially the common hippo. The pygmy hippo is remarkable in its own right, but people do not encounter it in the wild as often as they do its’ larger cousin, with ‘encounter’ being the key word here. You see, unlike the wildlife in Asia or South America, the African animals are kind of used to people, they know that if they charge first and think about the fallout later, they can survive their human encounters, while humans don’t. Sadly, humans are even smarter and are even better at killing than the African mammals are, and the latter do include hippos; hippo attacks are one of the main causes of death in Africa, whereas shark attacks…

Whereas shark attacks in Africa are something else, and we have talked about the AFO episode ‘Hippo vs. bull shark’ in the past. The hippo won, but that is not very surprising; I have seen some live-action footage, (not CGI) of hippos encountering bull sharks, and the latter give hippos a wide berth. They may be as formidable as the great white sharks are, in proportion, but otherwise? Nile crocodiles feed on them, and hippos can handle Nile crocodiles, no problem! Kudos to GR for channelling his inner JW, I say!..

For now though, this is it. See you all soon!

Quarantine entry #19 - April 9

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Not only COVID-19 is still going on strongly, this morning we had a very nasty snowstorm. Fortuitously, we stayed inside, and now the storm is over, (it is the beginning of April, after all), and nature is coming back out – the birds are flying, singing, fighting over their nesting territories en masse, showing just how resilient life on Earth. The storm passed and is over; COVID-19 too will pass and be over and life will return to normal. …Well, relatively so, seeing how the politicians, businessmen, and who else have you, are trying to take advantage of the lockdown and all, are trying to take advantage of the lockdown, and it is all coming down like a great big mess; people are fleeing into the literal woods to escape both COVID-19 and everything else. What next?

Let us talk about the giraffe. Why the giraffe? Because it is unique. There is no other mammal on the modern planet like it. If the modern elephants represent the last scions of an ancient dynasty of herbivorous mammals that fell due to the competition with the artiodactyl mammals, then the modern giraffe is one of those evolutionary cousins of the main dynasty – aka the antelopes, gazelles, wild cattle, sheep and goats – that had its’ heyday in the past, (the Miocene & the Pliocene epochs), but is largely gone, these days.

Pause. The entire taxonomic-biological family of the giraffe consists of the giraffe, and the okapi, aka the forest giraffe. Frankly, the latter name is not used very often, because the okapi is only like the giraffe in the most generic ways; you can see the family similarity, but nothing more. With an effort, you can confuse an Asian elephant with an African one, or an Asian rhinoceros with an African one, but an okapi with a giraffe? Just no. …The families of the okapi and the giraffe have diverged during the Miocene slash the Pliocene, around 11.5 MYA, and the two have never been in contact since.

The okapi family is represented by a single species – the okapi itself. The giraffe, on the other hand, is murkier, as people in charge of biological classification still have not made their mind as to if there is just a single giraffe species, or four of them, or what. Even if there is just a single giraffe species, it may have up to nine subspecies, which is a lot. …Of course, with humans hunting them for all sorts of reasons, or even without any reasons at all, because we humans can be assholes, they may not be around for much longer, but that is not a good thing.

…Yes, COVID-19 has hit humans, even in Africa, hard, so they may not be up for the giraffes, but no one knows exactly how it affects other animals; for example, a tiger in Bronx zoo was discovered to have it; and with giraffes slash okapis, it is anyone’s guess.

So, why is the giraffe so unique? Because it is a very specialized animal – it is not big: it is tall. A good portion of the giraffe is its’ disproportionally long neck and legs; the neck, I think, amounts for about half of the giraffe’s body length, (while in case of the okapi it is about 30%, on average). Just like a human’s, the okapi’s and the giraffe’s neck consist of only 7 vertebra, but the giraffe’s are the most massive one out of the three by far, both in size and in weight. Isn’t trivia fun?

What next? …Um, aside from the humans, the main enemies of the giraffe are the African lion and the Nile crocodile; no one else really wants to tackle and fully-grown giraffe – compared to an elephant or a rhinoceros they may look like great big fragile land kites or something, but their head-butts are painful, and their kicks can be deadly. African lions, however, are known to tackle African bush elephants, (not fully grown, but not just calves either), who are even stronger than the giraffes are, and so they do overpower giraffes by working as a team, on occasion.

The Nile crocodile, on the other hand, is more of a case by case situation – it is a solitary hunter; crocodiles of these species may gather together to feed, (their anatomy of jaws and teeth makes it easier for them to feed together, rather than separately, on something bigger than what they can just swallow whole)… where were we?

Ah yes, unlike the African lion, the Nile crocodile is a solitary hunter, but a social feeder, especially if the prey is big – say, a dead African hippo. Then the not-quite-social crocodiles gather and tolerate each other, more or less, as they feed – with ‘tolerate’ being the key word here. The African lions hunt together, (though there is plenty of case-by-case variation there), and their society is quite complex, (cough, TLK is full of baloney, cough), but they and the Nile crocodiles do not have anything in common aside from both of them living in Africa.

…Yes, we have discussed the ‘African lion vs. Nile crocodile’ AFO episode a while back, and spoiler alert – the lion lost, (and the giraffe was not involved at all), which is fair: a male African lion is a fighter, but it is a team fighter, and on its own, it rather has a disadvantage against the crocodile. Plus, on that episode team AFO really did its’ homework, and their deduction that the Nile crocodile was a better fighter than the African lion was justified, so there!

Back to the giraffe? Er, did it leave while we were dealing with the lion and the crocodile? Why, we have not even mentioned the non-avian theropod dinosaurs, aka the meat-eaters, are the goal of a real discussion of whether they did hunt together as the African lions do, or just fed together, as the Nile crocodiles? And what did they feed upon? Sauropods, among other things, just look at the second episode of WWD, or the fifth episode of ‘Planet Dinosaur’ (2013), for example! Are sauropods like the giraffe?

No, not exactly. Some are – that is the Brachiosaurus and its’ relatives. Others are not – rather, they are big, (aka the elephant) – that is Argentinosaurus and the rest of the titanosaurs; or they are just long – aka Diplodocus and its’ relatives, (including the Apatasaurus). Yes, we are generalizing here so hard, but the thing is that many of the sauropods were built different from the giraffe, and many of them were not built like it.

Moreover, neither was the extinct Indricotherium, or whatever it is named now, (see the third episode of ‘Walking with Beasts’). Just like the extinct titanosaurs, or the existing elephants, it was big rather than tall, and quite proportionate. Why did it die out? Because not unlike the giraffe it was a specialized mammal, designed to eating foliage, and as the savannas, prairies, steppes, etc. spread, the Indricotherium could no longer survive. With the modern giraffe – it is pretty much the same thing: the giraffe survives alongside all of those antelopes and gazelles by being the best foliage eater in the African grasslands – a very specialized niche, to be sure, but it does allow the giraffe to survive over more of Africa as opposed to the more generalized okapi, which exists only in parts of the African rainforest, and whose overall population is worse off than that of the giraffe. Evolution and ecology sometimes play strange tricks upon animals!..

…Well, this is it for now; see you all soon!

Quarantine entry #13 - April 3

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. It goes on, but it still sucks. I am tired of reiterating it, but there is only so much fresh material that I can use, and what is left, anyhow?

…Well, not DW – I am putting it on hold again, maybe AFO? Therefore, I watched its’ penultimate episode – ‘American Alligator vs. Black Bear’, and again, I was hit that the Black Bear won where the lion had failed – in luck: the Nile Crocodile was able to get a good grip, and the American Alligator was not. That all it took.

…Now, when we have discussed this episode for the first time, I made something of a comment that it was important that both of those animals were American, because otherwise? There’s a Chinese alligator that lives in China, (i.e. only in the Yangtze River) and there’s an Asian black bear, also known as the moon bear, which is roughly the same size as the American black bear, save that it has a white spot on its’ chest. Now, the American black bear is usually monochrome in color – the basic color is black, but there is also cinnamon, brown, even white – the spirit bear of the West Coast. However, it is all solid color, no spots or anything else. As a matter of fact, only the American black bear, the brown bear, and the polar bear are all-monochrome: the giant panda, (which is lately been identified as a true bear once more), is decisively chiaroscuro, while the other bears, while usually black, also usually have a splash of white on their chests or muzzles.

The main coloring exception is the Malaysian bear, probably the smallest (physically) bear of them all: its’ spot on the chest is not white, as in case of the Himalayan bear, but yellow. Hence, the whole sun/moon bear dichotomy, I suppose…

Back to the alligators? Of the alligators and caimans, the American alligator is the biggest, while the Chinese alligator is slightly over two m in length and weighs about 45-50 kg – that is compatible with a grown-up human man. Considering that without firearms bears kill humans easily enough – well, the brown and the American black bears do – I doubt that the moon bear is any different, as it is the Old World counterpart to the American black bear. Plus, the Chinese alligator is less confrontational than its’ American relative, so, again, I doubt that it would’ve went after any bear the same way that the American alligator went after the American black bear on AFO. Anything else?

Well, the Chinese alligator is the only member of the alligator and caiman branch that lives in the Old World, while the New World has several species of true crocodiles living alongside alligators and caimans in the American tropics. However, aside from the American crocodile per se, they are fairly shy and retiring creatures, and they are much harder to see than the crocodiles of Africa and Australasia, especially the Nile and the saltwater crocodiles.

…The Old World also has the gharials, the final members of the crocodilian family. Previously, they were thought to consist only of the ‘true’ gharial, as opposed to the ‘false’ gharial, which was supposed to be one of the ‘true’ crocodiles’, but now it is also part of the gharial group. Sometimes animal classification can have some real twists and turns – just look at the pandas, (getting back to the bears). I.e., these days the aforementioned giant panda is a true bear once more, while the red or lesser panda belongs to its own family, and apparently consists of two species, rather than just one. And yes, the two species of red panda are very similar to each other, only a specialist can distinguish between them, but, nevertheless, there is two of them. Hah.

…Well, this is it for now. The lockdown still sucks. Life still sucks. Anything else is up for discussion. See you all soon!

Animal Face-off: shark vs. hippo - July 17

To finish the matter of sharks and AFO, let us look at the second (and the last, for now), episode of AFO that dealt with a shark – the bull shark. It went against the hippopotamus, and-

Well, yes, lost. It lost for a very simple, AFO, reason: a hippopotamus, (we are talking a common hippopotamus here, not the pygmy one), weighs about 2800 kg. The bull shark weighs only 280. The hippopotamus fight the Nile crocodiles on a regular basis. The bull shark often ends up eaten by the crocodiles on the same regular basis instead. Yes, these are usually saltwater crocodiles, rather than the Nile crocodiles, but the two species are similar to each other in most aspects, and while the Nile crocodile is smaller than the saltwater one, it isn’t that much smaller, and may even compete with the saltwater crocodile in terms of size and strength…which is nowhere near to successfully fight and defeat a hippopotamus in water or on land.

True, the hippopotamus is not all that – the African elephant can defeat it quite handily, (or is it ‘trunkily’?), but the African elephant was not in this episode (‘bull shark vs. hippopotamus’), it was fighting the African white rhinoceros in its own episode. In this episode, the hippopotamus owned the bull shark and killed it with a single bite, because this is what it does to the Nile crocodiles: once it gets one good grip and bite with its jaws, it usually can kill the reptile, (in no small part because it has an unarmored belly). Where does the bull shark fit in?

A shark and a crocodile fit into two similar econiches, if not one and the same, save that the sharks live (mostly) in seawater, and the crocodiles live (mostly) in the fresh. Given a chance, one would handily kill the other, not just literally by eating it, but by out-competing it in the econiche in question. To a hippopotamus, (and crocodiles will readily eat the hippopotami, if given a chance), a bull shark is not very different from a Nile crocodile, especially if it starts to harass the hippopotamus first. …Why a bull shark?

Because AFO did its’ best have the element of authenticity/realism in its episodes. This is one of the reasons why it was a good show, actually. Until Escobar brought hippos to South America, where the bull shark also lives, BTW, the former lived only in African rivers, on one hand, and on the other, the bull shark is the biggest shark that can live in fresh water. Most cartilaginous fish – sharks, rays and their relatives – cannot. Moreover, because AFO went for realism, it could not just throw any shark at the hippopotamus, (unlike the saltwater crocodiles, hippos usually do not go out into the sea), it had to be a bull shark, period.

The result? One of the most predictable and straightforward fights in the AFO, period. Usually, whether it was ‘the African elephant vs. the white rhinoceros’ or ‘the saltwater crocodile vs. the great white shark’, let alone ‘the lion vs. the tiger’ episode, of course, (but we’ve discussed that piece separately in the past), the audience is left wondering until the CGI fight itself, as to who will win. In this case? The hippopotamus overwhelmed the bull shark so much that no fan was probably surprised when it won – as it was fair.

What else can be said? The ‘bull shark vs. the hippopotamus’ episode showed some of the limitations of AFO’s sort of show layout: dealing with any animal combatants from a purely technical P.O.V. can be simply limiting and basic and not necessarily exciting to watch…yet it is still better, from a scientific P.O.V, than such mockumentaries as ‘Megalodon: the monster shark lives’, which was featured in a ‘Shark Week’ of 2014 or 2015 as a real documentary instead.

AFO may be limited in scope, but it still did its’ best to be scientific, and not just entertaining. (Yes, it did have its various amusing bloopers, but it also had some scientific revelations too.) Nowadays, the shows shown on the Discovery channel, as well as on Animal Planet, do not even do this – a sad deterioration of TV standards…and probably a discussion for another time.

River Monsters - Invisible Executioner

As far as I am concerned, the success of each individual episode of RM depends on several factors, but the most important, or basic, or central one is the fish. In this episode, the "Invisible Episode", the fish that JW is after is yet another catfish - the vundu catfish, one of the biggest catfishes in southern Africa. JW loves catching catfishes, and overall RM is a good show, but this episode was not. What went wrong?

The catfish. I am not against JW catching catfishes - after all, with him it's not just the fish, but it's also the fishing technique and the promise, and here the promise failed. Unlike the "Asian Slayer" episode, where he failed to catch the mahseer (even though he had caught it once, when he was fishing for the goonch in "Killer Catfish"), here JW did catch the Vundu, but it was far smaller than what the audience may've expected it to look like.

Is that important? Tricky to say. Unlike the "Asian Slayer" episode JW did not go overboard with the local culture, and of course the native wildlife - Nile crocodile, hippopotamus, tigerfish, etc. - were present as well: both factors that make "Invisible Executioner" different from the other episode. But because the final catfish - the Vundu catfish - was far less impressive than how JW made it sound, this episode isn't as good as it might've been. The Vundu simply doesn't look like any executioner - just like a regular catfish that may be able to swallow a child - but it also may not; in fact it looks like it does not. Any arguments? I would be happy to argue!

River Monsters - Pack of Teeth

Honestly, I confess: this is my favorite episode of RM S4 up to date, for several reasons.

First of all, this is an episode set in Africa. I like Africa; make no mistake, I like nature in general, but Africa so far is the best for some reason I cannot put my finger on. Maybe it's because JW in his show depicts it so colorfully: the animals, the native people and their culture, and, of course, the fish. The witch doctor's performance in this episode was amazing and certainly interesting - I have enjoyed watching it a lot.

I also felt great regret to the victims of the Nile crocodile's attack: the second-biggest crocodile in the modern world, the armored king of Africa's swamps and rivers isn't very impressed by the latest alpha species on land and feeds on humans as if they were any other sort of prey - a far call from the highly urbanized city life of Canada and States...

Of course, the Nile crocodile was just one of the species featured in this RW episode - from the small tilapia to the elegant egret to the massive hippopotamus were shown very vividly and vivaciously - very much alive. This is a clear contrast to Russian landscape that appears to be devoid of any life other than people - and people are dying out as well...

The fish themselves number two, not counting the incidental tilapia: the catfish and the African tigerfish. The catfish... is the catfish: there are more RM episodes that do feature a catfish of some species than vice versa. You just go to accept it.

The tigerfish, however, were something else: powerful and wicked-looking they're worthy cousins to the goliath tigerfish that appeared in the previous seasons. Unlike the goliath, this species hunts in packs, apparently, and it is just as deadly as the South American piranhas, only more so, since even this species of tigerfish is larger than the piranhas are.

In any case, I certainly enjoyed viewing this episode, and I hope that the following episodes of RM will be just as good as this one.