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The Brown Panda
During my spiritual journey, I found myself on a quest to find the Brown Panda. Some people call it a red panda, but I was always told it was called a brown panda. Anyways, I was on this quest throughout Asia in search of this animal and I had many adventures along the way. I will expound upon my many adventures in future blogs. Today I am going to talk about Pandas.
Let me introduce you to a little known animal. His name is the Brown Panda. The brown panda is dwarfed by the black-and-white giant that shares its name. These pandas typically grow to the size of a house cat, though their big, bushy tails add an additional 18 inches (46 centimeters). The pandas use their ringed tails as wraparound blankets in the chilly mountain heights.
The brown panda shares the giant panda's rainy, high-altitude forest habitat, but has a wider range. Brown pandas live in the mountains of Nepal and northern Myanmar (Burma), as well as in central China.
These animals spend most of their lives in trees and even sleep aloft. When foraging, they are most active at night as well as in the gloaming hours of dusk and dawn. Brown pandas have a taste for bamboo but, unlike their larger relatives, they eat many other foods as well—fruit, acorns, roots, and eggs. Like giant pandas, they have an extended wrist bone that functions almost like a thumb and greatly aids their grip.They are shy and solitary except when mating.
Females give birth in the spring and summer, typically to one to four young. Young brown pandas remain in their nests for about 90 days, during which time their mother cares for them. (Males take little or no interest in their offspring.) The brown panda has given scientists taxonomic fits. It has been classified as a relative of the giant panda, and also of the raccoon, with which it shares a ringed tail. Currently, brown pandas are considered members of their own unique family—the Ailuridae.
Brown pandas are endangered, victims of deforestation. Their natural space is shrinking as more and more forests are destroyed by logging and the spread of agriculture (http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/red-panda.html).
So there you have it. The Brown Panda is a beautiful animal and his habitat is endangered. Please help to save the forests of Southeast Asia. Thank you.
Movie Review of the Day:
I tuned in to The Karate Kid III on HBO the other night and I rediscovered my fascination with "underdog sports flicks". The movie was much stupider than I remember and the acting was very wooden. Pat Morita did a good job, as always, but Ralph Macchio was whiny, stupid, and overly chubby. His love-interest, the cute but forgettable Robyn Lively, never develops into anything more than a "firm-handshake" friend. Then she just disappears before the end of the film. I suspect old Danial-Saan may be playing for the pink team, if you know what I mean.
The plot is retarded. Daniel is back in LA, his apartment building is being torn down, and now he lives with Mr. Miyagi. Now Daniel wants to defend his title at the All Valley, but Mr. Miyagi says that "fighting to protect honor or family, OK. Fighting to protect plastic trophy, not OK."
Then Daniel says that the new rules allow the current champion to only fight in the final round. Let me explain to you how stupid this idea is. As somebody who has competed in many martial arts tournaments, there is no way that any self-respecting tournament is going to let anybody only fight in a championship round. The other fighter would be tired from all of his qualifying matches and the champ would still be fresh. This is a totally unfair advantage, IMHO.
So this "bye" into the finals is an obvious plot loophole to avoid tagging another twenty minutes of montage and footage to the end of the film which would essentially be the same as the final 20 minutes of montage and footage in the first film of the series. The idea of a respected tournament giving a bye to the reigning champion seems without precedent and if this occurred in the real world almost certainly would be met with disdain and protest by tournament competitors.
Now for the controversial part. I like Thomas Ian Griffith and Martin Kove. They are very capable actors and Griffith seems to move like a trained martial-artist. What bothers me is that these two were shoehorned into this lame script. I bet that these two actors could have written a better film on the back of a cocktail napkin during a night of drinking after a Dodger's game. The whole scenario, where this rich-kid businessman is going to plot and scheme to get revenge on Danial-Saan and Mr. Miyagi by humiliating them at the tournament is just lame. And the whole "John Kreese is dead" subplot is was just stupid.
Now we get to the biggest leap of faith. Thomas Ian Griffith, who is YOUNGER than Ralph Macchio, is playing a Vietnam Veteran. WTF??? How in the hell is a guy who was born in 1962 going to play a Vietnam Vet? If we forget about the age thing, let's ask ourselves, why is a super-rich kid even going to join the military during the Vietnam War? Didn't he ever hear of daddy buying him a deferment?
What is the most annoying thing about this film? The character named Snake, played by the retarded Jonathan Avildsen in an astonishing act of nepotism (his daddy directed this film). He is not tough, he is not threatening, and he can't act his was out of a wet paper bag. His catchphrase, "You know it," is just plain lame.
Finally, Sean Kanan, who looks like a young Sasha Mitchell, is a nice villain but he is used in such a retarded manner. He never gets to do anything but utter threats and throw a few kicks. I know that Kanan is a better actor than what was captured in this turd of a film.
What I want to know is why Daniel, who fought Chozen for HIS LIFE in the previous film, now acts like a wimp and a crybaby when he's fighting for a freaking bonsai tree. This movie is fun to watch but you have to put on your "suspension of disbelief goggles" to truely enjoy it.
Fun, yes. Believable, nope. I would actually watch part 1 and part 2 and forget that the series continued. I pray that somebody goes Bryan Singer on this film and makes a third film worthy of the first two. Now we need somebody to play Danial-Saan and Mr. Miyagi.
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