Quarantine entry #50 - May 10

Obligatory disclaimer: happy Mother’s day! May it be fruitful and satisfactory for all the mothers involved, for better or for worse, COVID-19 or not! …That said, real life sucks, and I am no prize either, I do not deny it. The lockdown has made it all worse, more acute, as everyone is cramped together and everyone is making an effort to get along, and as time goes along, the effort becomes more extreme. Our family actually has it easy, as we have time away from each other, and so the effects of the lockdown are not as extreme, but they are still felt, and we fight, but we usually have space to get away from each other, and that is important, because otherwise we would have killed each other instead. What next?

The head of the Russian space program is dead from COVID-19, which is kind of bad news for team Putin and the latter’s plans for the Russian domination. Pre-COVID-19, he was supposed to annul his old presidential experience and start everything anew, but now everything is falling apart instead; his new PM got COVID-19 already, (but he is not dead), and now this.

…Plus the windmills of God mill slowly, but exceedingly small; the patience of the Russian proletariat may be long, but it isn’t infinite, and when it ends, it’s explosive – just look at 1917, for example. In addition, Lenin is not gone either – he is right there, in the Mausoleum, next to the Kremlin. Yeltsin, the person (putting it mildly) that made it possible for Putin to become a president at the end, made plans to inter the first Soviet general-secretary ever in a proper grave, but somehow it never amounted to anything and in the end, Yeltsin was the one buried, because he died first. Well, when you were as bad an alcoholic as he had been, it was only a matter of time until he was dead for real – and so he is. The rest of his family and entourage lived on, and Putin was a part of it, at least until 2014-5, when the entire mess with the Crimean peninsula began, as Putin began to push his new, independent politics, and you can see as to where it had led the Russian Federation – in the past. In the present, with COVID-19 running rampant in the RF, Putin’s plans became derailed, and it is anyone’s guess as to where RF will go from there; Putin’s regime will endure for a while, because his opposition is hardly any better than he and his supporters are, but it will end. What will happen next is anyone’s guess, so what else?

A brief return to the jaguar – we have talked about the biggest cat of New World repeatedly in the past, so I decided to talk about it again, because why not? Let us begin.

…Neither lions nor tigers live in the Americas, but it has big cats of its own – the jaguar and the puma. Not everyone can distinguish a jaguar from a leopard, for the two cats are similar, and so are their spots, but the jaguar’s spots are bigger than a leopard’s are, and they are different – not plain spots, but rosettes with a smaller spot in the middle. In addition, a jaguar’s head is proportionally bigger, and this feline itself is taller but shorter than a leopard is. Pause.

…The jaguar is a natural climber, swimmer, and runner; it loves the water almost as much as a tiger does. Of all the big cats, only the tiger and the jaguar willingly go into water – even into such great rivers as the Ganges and the Amazon – on a regular basis. Sometimes a jaguar will feel so comfortable sleeping in the water that the current, supposedly, carries the cat out into the ocean… but I am not so sure about that.

In addition, a jaguar is an avid fisher, stalking fish from the shoreline for hours. As footage has proved, the jaguar also attacks caimans, (distant relatives of the crocodiles, close kin to the alligators), and turtles, including sea turtles, which it encounters on the seashore. It ambushes the reptiles as they come ashore to lay eggs and it flips them upside down to make a food cache. The turtles do not die, and their meat is not spoiled, but neither can they right themselves and escape back to the water…

Finally, the jaguar can be found almost anywhere, from the wet jungles, (where it is always possible to catch something nasty, like rickets), to the prairies and open ground in the rest of South America; they used to come into North America as well, but by now, most people admit that they are gone from it in the wild state; they may return, but the Donald’s wall might ruin that – but the Donald’s wall is another story…

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

CD, 'B Sides' - May 2

Obligatory disclaimer: real life is not very good, to put it lightly. Now onto C&D.

In this week’s episode, ‘B Sides’, the script writers took ques from the C&D comic arc ‘Shades of Grey’, complete with a villain who enslaves others by getting into their minds and draining them of their energy, in a matter of speaking. Put otherwise, this is a variant vampire mixed with Killgrave from Netflix’s JJ, complete with a female minion (ala JJ), who has been completely brainwashed, in a matter not unlike how Kara/agent 33 was brainwashed on AoS S2.

…Yes, AoS S6 is returning to TV next Friday, (May 10, 2019), and from the current trailer, we can already see that Gregg’s new character is a villain of some sort, rather than a hero; or at least – an anti-hero. Gosh! How new and exciting! Not.

Since S1, AoS had had the following themes in its plot: doppelgangers with different alignments often played by the same actors. Dalton did it with Ward…period, and also with Hive in S3. (Hive was never Ward; Ward may not have had any powers ever in AoS TV canon, but he was the more dangerous villain out of the two by far; I am a fan of his, but how he destroyed Coulson’s morals at cost of his own life? Brutal. This is what Coulson got from messing with a suicidal man – but we have digressed). Wen did in S2 as Palamas, (primarily in the first half of the season), and then in S4 as the LMD version of herself. Actually, everyone in the ‘main cast’ of AoS S4 got replaced by LMDs at that time – and later on they got to play slightly different versions of themselves, (including Dalton as Ward, cough), so Gregg playing a different character that just happens to look like someone else, cough, from the past is nothing new.

…Furthermore, Gregg’s new character just happens to look exactly like the old main male lead who had conveniently died between S5 and S6, so there’s no conflict of interest, and no need to juggle two roles and being the showrunner for at least the S6 premiere episode either. Consequently, odds are he will not be killed-off in the first few episodes, because AoS needs Coulson.

Well no, not really, but the cast and crew of AoS clearly consider Gregg to be an integral part of the team or something, so he is going to stay at AoS for S6 at least. I may be wrong, but I am still making this bet. (There are noises that AoS is going to be cancelled in summer 2019, but considering that it just got revamped by being associated with the MCU’s CM movie, it is not very likely). Ergo, his new character will probably be redeemed or something along those lines, as the AoS S6 title promo implied. AoS already planned to do something like that in S2 with Ward, but then they threw a curveball…the end of that. Coulson/not Coulson will probably be luckier, cough, but where were we?

…Talking about movies, I suppose. A trailer for yet another film came out today – ‘Crawlers’. Basically, it is a monster movie about an Anglo-American heroine, her father and dog, getting stuck in a hurricane-driven flood with some monstrous alligators who eat people. Oh Hell.

Where to begin? First, there are supposedly three species of crocodilians living in the U.S.: the American Alligator, (2-5 m long), the American Crocodile (2-4 m long) and the Spectacled Caiman (1-2 m long). The latter is an introduced species, yet another exotic reptile that escaped into the wilds of Florida and the rest of the southeast USA. Of the three, the American Alligator is the most common, but also – is the most retiring and does not like to attack, kill and eat humans as a rule. The American Crocodile and the Spectacled Caiman are more aggressive, but they also have a smaller range than their Alligator relative does; plus I am honestly not sure that there are wild/feral Spectacled Caiman living on the USA territory – the sources are controversial and can go either direction. What is the point?

…My point that the alligators of ‘Crawlers’ are unrealistic, and given that we see the movie’s main character destroying their eggs, they are unreal. Unlike the eggs of fish and amphibians, the eggs of reptiles must be kept dry and out of water; the nest of crocodilians, (including the gharials, the most aquatic of them all) are always kept well away from the water, and the mother crocs and gators bring the young to the water via a journey, (short or otherwise), in their jaws – just look at a BBC or a NatGeo crocodile special, for example. If there was a flood in a crocodile or alligator nesting area, it would be a disaster, as their nests and eggs would be lost. (Yes, just as their bird/dinosaur cousins’ crocodilians make nests. They are different from bird nests, but still nests). Ergo, no gator (or croc, or caiman) nests in a hurricane/flood area – they do not really exist. ‘Crawlers’ reptile monsters’ offspring just wouldn’t be able to survive – baby crocodilians are really fragile and vulnerable, unlike their parents…

Back to C&D, since on one hand, they already have a doppelganger of their own – Mayhem, via detective O’Reily – and on the other, they are located in the southeastern USA, where alligators and etc. live, but not really. It is already clear that Dy is in trouble and Ty is going to save her, and she will save him, and together they will rock, as they rocked in the ‘Shades of Grey’ comic. Good luck to them!

…This is it for this time; see you next time!