Lightyear - June 18

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about our main man known as Buzz Lightyear. The 2022 film, known simply as ‘Lightyear’, seemingly throws everything else that we knew about BL out of the window… only it does not. In the cartoon series ‘Buzz Lightyear of the Star Command’ (or something along those lines), there were a couple of episodes with an evil, Zurg-like Buzz… who came from an alternate universe. He appeared on the show irregularly, but was still defeated, but he was still Buzz. Therefore, what is the point?

The point is that ‘Lightyear’ is set in an alternate universe, that is what! Until now, the ‘Toy Story’ franchise’s installments, (a heterogeneous bunch in their own right), were set in one universe – let us call it ‘Universe A’. But ‘Lightyear’ and all of its’ associations, are taking place in a different universe – ‘Universe B’, one where sexual minorities and important characters, played by POCs appeared in the early 1990s, unlike, say, our universe, where they, (and especially the former), didn’t. Therefore, all that we knew about BL from the previous ‘Toy Story’ installments is not really relevant anymore – it is a different Buzz, with a different crew, in a different world. ‘To infinity and beyond’, indeed – to infinite multiverses! Anything else?

Aye, I met an opossum earlier this week. Real life might suck, but sometimes it does deliver. Pause.

Let us try again. Until I met it, I thought that an opossum was just a variant rat, especially since I have seen the latter, both in pet shops and in the wild. Same for mice. However…

Let us start with mice. They are the smallest out of this bunch – I could easily hold a mouse on one finger. The rats I saw were two or three times bigger than a mouse – the size of my head, (the males were usually bigger than the females), and I would need one, or both, of my hands, to hold one, (we are talking about pet rats here – wild rats, especially Norway rats, should be avoided). And the opossum was two or three times bigger than a Norway rat – it was the size of an average house cat or a small dog, and the one I met was distinctly unfriendly, so no physical contact with this one either.

The second point are the teeth. Mice and rats are rodents; you put a mouse and a rat alongside a squirrel, a chipmunk, a marmot, and, say, a beaver, and they will all have baseline similarities to each other, especially in the teeth: huge incisors, no canines, and some premolar and molar teeth. The ‘professional’ carnivores and herbivores have different dental formulas, but you still can, usually, figure out which tooth is which. The opossum doesn’t really have this differentiation; from what I could see: all of the teeth in its’ jaws looked mostly the same, not unlike the teeth on a saw, (sorry for the lame pun). Obviously, an opossum is a competent biter and chewer in its’ own right, and I had no intention of having it bite me – it looked quite formidable for a creature the size of a small dog – but I’m guessing that it was a very different biter and chewer from a rodent. Then again, the opossum is no rodent, but a marsupial – it is proportionally closer to the kangaroo and the koala than to rodents or to us. Though keep it mind that among the marsupials, the opossum family – most of which live in the American tropics, and only one species – the common opossum – lives in North America instead; the point is that the American opossums are treated separately from the rest of the (Australian) marsupials, but let us move on…

The final topic is the tail – in the earlier days people assumed that the common opossum’s tail was prehensile, like a spider monkey’s but to me, it certainly didn’t look like it; it did look a bit like a rat’s, or a mouse’s, tail – long and hairless, but it also looked fairly thick: maybe the opossum uses it to store fat for the winter or something, The point is that the opossum has authentically surprised me, and I have certainly enjoyed observing it. Real life does suck, but sometimes – not so much.

This is it for now, see you all soon!

Ms. Marvel, series premiere - June 8

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so here is a shout-out to Mr. Nicklaus Brendborg: this learned worthy, while writing – and publishing – his treatise on old age, aging, and immortality, talked about – well, mentioned, really – the naked mole rat. That is fair enough, but he implied that the ‘ordinary’ rats and mice used in labs are its’ relatives. Yeah, no – the terms ‘rat’ and ‘mouse’ are very broad; the term ‘mouse’, for example, includes not only the various rodents, but also the so-called marsupial mice – distant cousins of the kangaroos and the koala, and close cousins of the quolls, the numbat, and the extinct Thylacine. By contrast, the term ‘rat’ includes several genera, including, obviously, the naked mole rat, as well as several of its relatives from the parvorder (or infraorder) Phiomorpha, but the ‘true’ rats aren’t closely related to them; this parvorder actually includes the Old World porcupines, (not the ones found in North America, but the ones found in Africa, Asia, and sometimes even in southern Europe); proportionally, the naked mole rat is a much further relative to the lab rats (derived from the black and Norway rat stocks, mainly), and lab mice, (variant house mouse, primarily), than we are to the apes. For Mr. Brendborg, a man of science and philosophy, to make such a mistake slash generalization is just rude and wrong – so let us end this rant for now, and turn onto ‘Ms. Marvel’, the series’ premiere.

So, what have we here? Last time, when we have talked about the ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ series, we talked about how Disney was playing it safe with SW now, producing new content that is only fan-approved. Whether that is a good long-term strategy is another matter, but this is what Disney does with SW. And what about MCU?

First, in ‘Ms. Marvel’, Disney is playing it safe, again. The series’ opener, ‘Generation Why’, is an introductory chapter through and through; in it we meet Kamala Khan, a modern young woman with a strong personality and personal values, whose relationship with the rest of her family is loving, of course, but there’re some pesky personal issues that initiate the rise of a conflict between them – a generational gap or whatever the modern term is… Wait a second…

…In ‘Encanto’, we have Mirabel Madrigal, who is a teen/young adult, who is a good person, (some character flaws notwithstanding), who loves her family and vice versa, but due to some pesky personal issues she and the rest of her family end up fighting…before making up.

…In ‘Turning Red’, we have Mei-Mei, who is a teen, who is a good person, (some character flaws notwithstanding), who loves her family and vice versa, but due to some pesky personal issues she and the rest of her family end up fighting…before making up.

…And in ‘Ms. Marvel’, (the TV 2022 series), we have Kamala Khan, who is a teen, who is a good person, (some character flaws notwithstanding), who loves her family and vice versa, but due to some pesky personal issues she and the rest of her family end up fighting…before making up – wait, what?

…Without a doubt, there are some differences between our three protagonists; i.e., Mirabel is the only one without powers in a power-ful family, (pun intended, sorry), while in Kamala’s case it is more of a reverse, (so far), and Mei-Mei and her mother both have powers to turn into giant red pandas now. Conversely, though…

In ‘Encanto’, the Madrigals are depicted – each of them is depicted – in a unique and a standout way, to a point where Julietta and Pepa’s families don’t appear to be very closely related at all, from a physical P.O.V.

In ‘Turning Red’, the citizens of Toronto – for example, Mei-Mei and her friends – are depicted in all of their multicultural glory, where each and every one of them is unique, in a standout way.

And in ‘Ms. Marvel’, we are about to meet the citizens of New Jersey, all of whom are depicted in a way that promotes America’s multicultural glory, with its’ characters depicted in a unique, standout way, each and every one of them…

Again, there are differences – ‘Turning Red’ and ‘Ms. Marvel’ don’t display the same high level of individualism as ‘Encanto’ has, but their levels are high enough…and then we come to the religious issues. ‘Encanto’ takes place in Colombia, (late 19^th century-first half of 20^th century, most likely), so the odds are that it is a Catholic, rather than a Protestant or Orthodox, community, though that is only a minor element in the movie. ‘Turning Red’… yeah, this one is a bit fudgey, but there are religious-cultural elements as well. And in ‘Ms. Marvel’, we learned from the trailers and the teasers, that Islam will be playing a BIG role in the TV series. Ergo-?

Ergo, while being something of a variation on the theme of a politically correct progressive young woman main character, ‘Ms. Marvel’ is also a propaganda piece, (unlike ‘Encanto’ & ‘Turning Red’, presumably): it aims to show ‘the life and times’ of a Muslim family in the U.S., how it lives, (as a unit), and how it functions, (as a unit), how it is both same and different from the WASP American families, and so on. So-?

So nothing. This week’s episode – ‘Generation Why’ – was pretty much just that: an introduction to yet another politically correct progressive young woman character, and another introduction to a politically correct and properly presented Islamic-American family. People, who like this sort of thing, will like ‘Ms. Marvel’; those who do not, will call it ‘Woke’, and will not. Such ‘soft power’ may be better than the ‘hard power’ that Putin’s Russia is trying to execute in Ukraine, but it has its’ own flaws – but that is a discussion for a different time. Is this it?

…Wait! There is more! There is the Avengers-con! And the magical bracelet from one of Kamala’s grandparents! (A person has two parents, but four grandparents – and we are talking a standard nuclear family here, anything more derived, and we get much more confusing numbers). And Bruno! But we do not talk about Bruno- wait, sorry, wrong Bruno. In ‘Encanto’, Bruno is a seer, (with a strong moon symbolism, but we will not get into it here). In ‘Ms. Marvel’, Bruno is just a teen/young man, who got friendzoned by Kamala so hard, that even the crappy Avenger-con feels sorry for him. No, seriously, there is a feeling that Disney/MCU is poking fun at itself – first there was the Avengers musical in ‘Hawkeye’, which was nothing more than window dressing in that series, and an unnecessary one at that, and now we get the Avengers-con, which was the weakest part of the episode, and as for the ‘magical bracelet’… well, we already talked about it: between AoS and ‘InHumans’, the InHumans became especially toxic and anathema to Disney/MCU, so Kamala will get to be something else other than an InHuman. Good for her!

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

Quarantine entry #105 - July 4

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Yesterday, we had an argument/fight again. I hate those, but, sadly, it seems to me that the main way that anything changes in our family is through conflict, which brings us to arguments slash fights. I hate those, but they are unavoidable and necessary. Pity that COVID-19 made everything worse. What next?

As we are starting to finish our bird of prey talk, let us turn to owls instead. There are two types of owls – the ‘true’ owls and the barn owls. The latter differ from the true owls by coloration, and their ‘facial disk’, (if you ever saw an owl, any owl, on a photo, you would know what we are talking about), is proportionally larger and whiter than that of a ‘true’ owl. In addition, the barn owls and their relatives are generally paler than their cousins are, and finally, they have no ‘horns’.

…The horns, of course, as tufts of feathers that grow on heads of such different owl species as the screech owl, the long-horned owl, and the great horned owl, among others. Sometimes they are barely noticeable, as they are in case of the short-horned owl, or even more so – in case of the snowy owl, but they can be there. Most scientists, (ornithologists and otherwise) agree, that these tufts serve no practical purpose, but are more of a decorative feature on those owls. Maybe it helps them in courting each other?.. The point is that no member of the barn owl family has those tufts, but some ‘true’ owls do. What next?

Owls swallow their smaller prey whole, and spit up what they cannot digest as pellets. Some other birds do that as well, from hawks to the nightjars, (also known as nighthawks, but they are completely separate birds from the birds of prey), but it still isn’t entirely certain as to just who are the owls’ relatives? In addition, the modern classification revision does not make it any better, either.

…Yes, there was a revision of avian taxonomy sometime in the past, (unlike the mammal, which appears to be a more modern development). I missed it, and so I’m not going to dwell upon it; basically, the point is that the owls’ similarity to hawks, falcons, eagles, vultures and so on is only superficial and practically skin-deep – the two groups of birds are able to co-exist, but only because the owls are nocturnal. Yes, they can see during the day, but they are not doing as well during that time, as the other birds’ mob them, and in some case – as in cases of the corvids – those birds themselves can be quite big. Anything else?

Here is a piece of original fiction to round up today’s entry instead. I hope that you will enjoy it:

Once upon a time, when a red fox and a hare were busy with an eagle owl, a different bird, a great grey owl, was sitting on a different tree at a different spot where the forest met the open field, and it too was busy hunting.

Any owl is Meta - they got soft feathers, silent wings that make no noise whatsoever; their talons are twisted and sharp- no one can escape from them, not a mouse, not a squirrel, not a sleeping bird. This particular great grey owl was hunting mice.

...It is still late winter and mice are hidden from sight by a thick layer of snow, but an owl’s hearing is sharp enough to penetrate it, and the great grey owl has specifically long legs to reach through the snow. There! There a mouse is scurrying. The owl spread its’ wings and launched a spectacular aerial attack right through the snow.

The snow exploded. This particular mouse made its’ winter home in a bear’s den, and the owl, unwittingly, scored a perfect hit on the bear’s nose. (It was hard to reach, but those long legs and sharp talons are good for something).

The still mostly asleep bear was not amused. With one shake of its’ massive head it was free, with one snap of its’ huge jaws it snapped the owl up and sank back beneath the snow to wait for the proper end of winter. The end.

PS: Oh, and the mouse was in another corner of the den, sleeping its’ own nap in its’ own home, lined with the bear’s fur because it was small enough to get away with this - but that is another story.

End

This is it for now. See you all soon! Comments? Criticisms?

Quarantine entry #65 - May 25

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Sometimes nothing goes your way, and you just have to accept it. What next?

Let us talk voles. Despite their similar-sounding names, they are not related to the moles, but rather are distant cousins to some of the mouse-named rodents, and close relatives to the hamster-named ones. Pause.

Yes, we have talked about moles in the recent past, and we did mention voles – maybe – when we have talked about mice much earlier. While voles and mice are similar-looking – both are small rodents with long, hairless tails, the voles are less likely to be found inside human homes; they prefer open spaces instead. Mice like those that surroundings that are cramped, with plenty of nooks and crannies to hide in; voles – not so much.

…On the other hand, despite them not being related to moles and shrews, (remember, we have talked about them?), voles prefer to dig tunnels to get around, while mice – not so much. Consequently, despite being roughly the same size, voles are stockier than the mice are; their eyes, ears and noses are smaller than those of the mice; the shrews, since we’re talking comparisons here, also have small eyes and ears, but their noses and snouts are skinny and elongated, almost like proboscises, instead. That is not surprising – shrews, moles and co. do not have much in common with rodents like mice and voles, aside from the latter being eaten by the former, if the opportunity presents itself.

…However, just like moles, voles prefer to dig tunnels to get around, as we have said above. Hence, the smaller eyes, ears and noses than those of mice. That is not too surprising – the vole branch of the rodent family also features such master diggers as the hamsters, which dig out impressive burrows and tunnels underground. The marmots and the ground squirrels, though, are precisely that – ground-dwelling cousins of the tree squirrels; even the chipmunk, which looks like a small squirrel with a shorter tail, is a very good digger – but then again, most rodents are.

Now the element of water – this gives most rodents some pause. Not so the muskrat, which is also a vole cousin, and is the biggest aquatic rodent after the beaver in the Northern Hemisphere. Of course, given just how much bigger the beaver is, that is a relative second… not to mention that the actual biggest rodent on the planet, the capybara, dwarfs both the beavers, (there are two species of them – one American, the second European/Eurasian), and the muskrat. Anything else?

Taxonomy, I suppose. The vole genera – and there are quite a few of them – belong… well, yes, to the Cricetidae family, as do the New World mice, rats, and similar rodents. The aforementioned hamsters belong to a different subfamily, however – Cricetinae, while the voles belong to Arvicolinae; the muskrat and the lemmings also belong to it.

Of them, the voles of the genus Arvicola deserve a mention, as they’re called ‘water voles’ for a reason – they’re aquatic, even if they’re only distantly related to the muskrat. They are the size of small rat, but are chubbier-looking, and are better swimmers than the rats are, which is not surprising – rats are generalists, while the water voles are specialists. There are animals that are called ‘water rats’ instead, but the European species is the European water vole in question, while the rest of those rodents live… mostly in Australia and Papua New Guinea, having few things in common with the ‘true’ mice and rats, but some species live in Africa as well as the New World. Of them, the Florida water rat/round-tailed muskrat, (Neofiber alleni), deserves a special mention, as it is too a cousin of the voles & the ‘true’ muskrat, but, again, it belongs to its’ own ‘tribe’ in the Arvicolinae subfamily.

…In the South America, the rodents that took to the water are also members of the Cricetidae family, but they are more closely related to the hamsters than voles instead. Are not evolution and rodents exciting?..

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

Quarantine entry #31 - April 21

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Just ask comrade Kim, the great steersman of North Korea, who has been in surgery and is now fighting for his life. How true this piece of news is unknown, but there is no renunciations of this either, so there is that. What next?

People in Nova Scotia are licking their wounds and recovering from their losses; what do the people in North Korea feel is another question altogether, and one that will be answered at a later date, provided that the news of comrade Kim’s issues isn’t fake to begin with, (hey it could happen!). What next?

I admit that I would like to talk to you about squirrels, since our talk about rhinos did not take, but the truth is that the squirrel situation is the same as it is with mice – it is a mess. First, there are the Oriental giant squirrels, (4 species, 1 genus) and a single species of the Neotropical pygmy squirrel, both of which have their own subfamilies.

…On the other hand, we have the terrestrial squirrel subfamily, the bulk of which is composed of marmots, ground squirrels, chipmunks, prairie dogs and the like; the outliers there are the so-called spiny squirrels, but aren’t very spiny, (not compared to some of the spinier rodents).

The next tribe are the Asian ornate squirrels, which are tree squirrels rather than ground ones, and the subfamily of the ‘true’ squirrels, which features both the squirrels that are most usual for the Western society and the ‘true’ flying squirrels as well – as opposed to the scaly-tailed flying squirrels of Africa, whose closest relatives are the springhares. Sometimes animal taxonomy is a crazy thing. And-?

And nothing. Part of the reason as to why I do not want to talk about squirrels is because of AoS – its’ final episodes begin to come out in about a month, (May 27, 2020), and here we are, stuck in lockdown/quarantine/self-isolation/etc. without a working TV in sight. Real life sucks, however petty in scope it may be!..

As for the computer, I got to watch another DW episode – this one being the ‘Ming Warrior vs. French Musketeer’, with the latter winning, spoiler alert! Was it a fair victory? That is prone to discussion, seeing, for example, that team musketeer brought a rapier and a main gauche dagger to the short-range weapons, while the team Ming only had the Dao sabre, but on the other hand…

On the other hand, unlike the DW S3 premiere episode, GWVSNB, which also featured a misbalanced number of weapons, the two contestants in this confrontation were clearly different, with the weapons of team Musketeer being clearly more progressive and superior than those of their opponents’. I.e., the Musketeers’ musket was a better and a more precise weapon than the Ming’s ‘nest of bees’, (a more derived version of the incendiary arrows, I reckon). Put otherwise, whereas DW S3 tried to feature more equal combatants in its’ episodes, the show’s previous seasons – not so much. This what made them more fun than the S3 episodes too, FYI.

The team Musketeer also had a better armor, and at a time when the firearms very still primitive, this was important, still. Therefore, yeah, on this particular occasion, the victory was honestly, yay! Back to squirrels?

Sadly, no. Real life obligations have intruded, and I am afraid that our discussion for today must end. This is it for now, 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!