Quarantine entry #77 - May 6

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Why? Because it changes, and usually it bad ways. Just look at how the Donald had handled his latest interview questions done by an Afro-American female journalist. Yowch! Now his life will turn to worse yet again – why does he still want to remain the POTUS, again? If he had left the office, especially before the COVID-19 start, he would have been forgotten by now, and the others would have let him go!..

…Or not, as Kendall Jenner’s case shows. Way back in 2017 she participated in an especially tone-deaf, (politically), Pepsi ad that included confronting a riot and resolving it with a Pepsi. Both she and the Pepsi Company ate crow over it and everyone forgot about it…or not, as now, given the real-life events, at least some people dragged the ad in question back into spotlight. Only… this particular Jenner had learned something from this mess of hers, and since then did her (relative) best to do damage control regarding this sort of thing – probably in case of an emergency. Well, there is an emergency now, but since KJ had did some damage control – more or less – people are not giving her as much flak about the ad-2017 as they could have done otherwise. Why couldn’t the Donald do something similar?.. Oh, wait, he is the Donald, never mind.

On the other hand, we have ‘Batwoman’ the DC TV series that recently has officially proclaimed that it will not recast the titular character, (who was played by Ruby Rose, remember?). Frankly, this makes ‘Batwoman’ a tie with ‘Swamp Thing’ and ‘Powerless’, and if the latter was something of an outlier in the world of DC TV series, then the former was certainly a good and an interesting show to watch. Ah well, everyone fails, especially if they do not have Disney to support them, as AoS depicts.

Yes, by now, not just AoS is finally ending, but the rest of the ‘old guard’ has ended as well. Yes, initially they were supposed to be replaced by ‘The Winter Soldier and the Falcon’, ‘WandaVision’ and the show about Loki, but then COVID-19 happened and everything just died instead. Pause.

Now, today I wanted to talk about stars, because yesterday we had a partial lunar eclipse, aka the strawberry moon, but regrettably, our part of the world – a suburb in the New York state – didn’t have too much in terms of the moon: the sky was partially cloudy last evening and night, yes, but nothing more, and the moon…before we went to sleep, admittedly, but still… didn’t look any different from how it usually looks… where were we?

Stars are huge giant balls of gas, as Pumba from ‘The Lion King’ used to say. Or was he Pumbaa? Frankly, I do not care, the rebooted ‘Mulan’ was supposed to come out in April-2020, but now there’s no sign or indication of it, or that it would ever come back to the big screen. Pity, the people are starved for shows… and then along came George Floyd and the idiot, who had killed him, and now people are out in the streets, and a similar situation is developing in Canada. What else?

…Sadly, it is very unlikely that the US-Canada border will be opened any time soon, simply because the Donald is himself, whereas in the North we got Trudeau, Scheer and Singh getting along only not. After the Donald’s latest messes, no one there wants to be associated with him, and, moreover? Canada still has not gotten its’ act together either, though, at least, in its’ case there’s no case of civil unrest actually beating COVID-19 as top news.

…Ok, this was a depressing thought, so I am ending my blog entry for today on this note. See you all soon instead!

Quarantine entry #61 - May 21

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about something else, anything else, really.

There’s the final season of AoS…which I’ll miss, because I’m stuck in a place that has no TV, and I’m not so certain that I’ll be able to access them via my computer, because no matter how much I love AoS, I’m not sure that it’ll be worth the money. As it is, odds are that in their final season, AoS will turn into DC’s LoT, (remember those guys?), complete with time travel and all. S.H.I.E.L.D. must save Hydra because otherwise there will be no S.H.I.E.L.D. – sigh. In the CA: CW film, Zemo made a point in telling some Hydra/ex-Hydra colonel or another that Hydra is done, gone, lost in the junkyard of history.

…Zemo was contained at the end of that movie. He’s supposed to return on ‘The Winter Soldier and the Falcon’ Disney+ series, but that series was one of the first to go down once COVID-19 was here to stay, and so that is the end of that, for the moment.

…Speaking of team DC, Ruby Rose is leaving the DC-verse. Since she was the titular character in the new ‘Batwoman’ TV series, this raises a question – just who will take over from her, and how will ‘Batwoman’ be able to spin it? The reasons here actually aren’t COVID-19-related, but RR is gone from DC-verse all the same, so what next?

…’The Lovebirds’ movie is coming to the Netflix soon, (as in tomorrow – May 22, 2020), so we will talk about it then. The ‘SCOOB!’ film did come to the screens before today, and it is yet another reboot of ‘Scooby-Doo’ in particular and of ‘Hanna-Barbara’ in general, so what is left?

Well, I wanted to talk about snakes today. They may be the youngest modern group of reptiles, and probably the most infamous, thanks to the Biblical serpent. In reality, snakes are not any more – or any less – dangerous than their closest cousins the lizards are, and as for the crocodilians… do not go there.

We have talked about various snakes on and off in the past, especially regarding the AFO episode ‘Jaguar vs. Anaconda’, where the latter had won. Why this was the wrong decision was also discussed at length, so what is left behind?

…Modern snakes are characterized by the lack of limbs, though the oldest of them all, pythons and boas, have spurs as remnants of them. Snakes’ eyelids have also ‘fused’ into goggles, making them different from the various legless lizards, such as the slowworm and the glass lizard. Many snakes are venomous, meaning that it is dangerous for them to bite you, but not vice versa, because otherwise they would be poisonous instead. The venomous snakes of North America are mostly the various pit vipers; they tend to be much more aggressive than their non-venomous counterparts are and do not hesitate to warn others of their defences – i.e., the rattlesnakes rattle, their cousins the cottonmouths (and maybe the copperheads as well) show the insides of their mouths, and so on.

…The odd ones here are the coral snakes of the southern, especially south-west USA, which are more closely related to cobras and kraits of the Old World than to the pit vipers, (which are also found in Asia, though the American species outnumber them). They are shier than the pit vipers are, but are also much more colorful, in bands of black, red and yellow that warns other animals to back away, and rightfully so, because the coral snakes are quite venomous.

There are other snakes, all over the New World, really, that imitate the coral snakes’ coloration with various degrees of authenticity – this is called mimicry, and it is a really quite amazing evolutionary devices that allows the non-venomous, very venomous, and slightly venomous snakes to co-exist with each other, while protecting each other as well, (in a manner) of speaking – but that is another story.

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

Quarantine entry #25 - April 15

Obligatory disclaimer: real life still sucks. Snow still comes, even though it’s mid-April, and the lockdown continues until the middle of May at least. My computer is not doing so well either, so let us talk about something else – mice.

No, not computer mice, but the real life mice in whose honor the computer devices are named. Ergo, what about them?

The term ‘mouse’ is not very scientific; neither is ‘rat’, though technically speaking, a ‘rat’ is bigger than a ‘mouse’ is. As for mice themselves, they are a mixed bag, which consists of…

…'True mice', aka rodents from the Muridae family – the so-called ‘true mice’. Most of those rodents live in the Old World rather than the New, and by the rodent standard they consist of those that humans call ‘mice’, ‘rats’ and ‘gerbils’ to begin with. They feature the house mouse, the Eurasian field mice, and also – the Eurasian harvester mouse, one of the smallest rodents ever.

Closely related to the ‘true mice’ are several species of ‘mice’-named rodents, (such as the American harvester mouse), which, however, belong to the Cricetidae family instead. Most of the Cricetid rodents are identified as hamsters, lemmings, voles… the ‘mice’ from this family live primarily in New World instead. Murids and Cricetids are close relatives, both belong to the Myomorpha suborder of rodents, but they belong to two different families all the same.

The rest of ‘mice’ look much more exotic than the rodents that we usually associated the name of ‘mouse’ with – mice do make popular pets, and even more popular lab animals slash subjects – real life sucks not just for people, but for animals as well. Firstly, there are the ‘mice’ from the Heteromyidae family – these rodents are known as kangaroo mice and rats, and also pocket and spiny pocket mice, and they all look to be slightly more…derived than the ‘ordinary mice & rats’ do. Instead, physically, they appear to be more like miniature kangaroos of Australia instead, although, yes, pocket and spiny pocket mice do look mouse-like, but they all live in the wild, often away from humans, so people aren’t aware of them as much as they are of the kangaroo mice and rats, (and yes, we’ll get to the kangaroos soon as well).

Secondly, there are the flying mice. Now, in such languages, such as Russian, the term ‘flying mouse’ is the local analogue to the English ‘bat’, (remember, we've talked about them earlier as well?), which does look like a mouse with wings, but the ‘true flying mouse’ are more like flying squirrels; if the aforementioned pocket mice and co. belong to the Castriomorpha subfamily, which also features the beavers, (while the muskrat is just an oversized aquatic vole, but that is a different story), then the flying mice are actually ‘scaly-tailed squirrels’ or ‘scaly-tailed flying squirrels’. They, too, belong to a separate suborder – the Anomaluramorpha, and their closest relative is the African springhare, which looks like a kangaroo rat…or just a kangaroo.

This, in turn, brings us to Australia proper – this small continent features not only true rodents, both native and introduced, (which includes the house mouse from the aforementioned ‘true mice’ group), but also the so-called marsupial mice, which aren’t rodents at all, but are marsupials, just as the kangaroos are. Only, while the kangaroos feature the biggest modern marsupials – the red kangaroo, the two greys and the antilopine kangaroo, the marsupial mice are some of the smallest marsupials, and they belong to the Dasyuridae family, which features not only them, but also the infamous Tasmanian devil, and the quolls, which are marsupial ‘cats’, or rather ‘martens’, (real martens are cousins of weasels, FYI). The marsupial mice themselves are carnivores, (while their rodent counterparts are more herbivorous; the flying mice, which are one of the genera of the scaly-tailed squirrels are supposedly food specialists, even), and behave more like shrews rather than true mice, (let us keep the rats out of this equation, shall we?). Consequently, these days, the terms ‘marsupial shrew’ and ‘marsupial mouse’ isn’t used much anymore; the terms ‘antechinus’, ‘dunnart’, and the like instead…

…Well, I must admit – this was informative. I never knew that there were so many different mice, marsupial and otherwise, and that they had even more relatives among both placental mammals and marsupials. They had certainly distracted me from the realization that real life still sucks and that COVID-19 is still going strong through the planet. How about you? Any comments? All criticisms are welcome, and this is for now, see you all soon!

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!