July 2015 - Free2Share

HBO’s new TV series, “The Brink” shows why you should be very afraid; that World War III is just a sneeze away. Considering that the people who run the affairs of the world are very human after all; they are not infallible, they are not unique, they are very ordinary humans with human weaknesses that can wreck havoc with our world and our lives.

Each episode is only 30 minutes and that is enough as you really need to surface for a breath of air; any longer than that and you many be brain dead.

I was either not paying attention to the run-up advertisements or there was no fanfare, and the series just crept up on me, with the first episode on HBO on 21-June-2015. I was just surfing the Astro channels looking for something interesting to record and saw this new series with its first episode later that night. I recorded it and viewed it later and boy! I was blown away.

The series is a dark comedy featuring a geopolitical crisis somewhere in the world and how the main characters react to it or caused it. The first season will focus on Pakistan. The main characters (at least in Episode 1) are a womanising, alcoholic Secretary of State, Walter Larson (Tim Robbins), a low-level Foreign Services officer based in the US Embassy in Pakistan, Alex Talbot (Jack Black) and Navy fighter pilot Zeke Tilson (Pablo Schreiber) who pops pills. Episode 1 ended with POTUS (President of the United States) ordering a pre-emptive strike on a Pakistani nuclear site and a Navy jet streaking in to bomb the site. May God save us all!

Episode 2 has just aired. Catch the two episodes before it gets too far into the season.

If I were to ask you whether these two birds are related, what would you say?

One of them looks like a Black Crow or Asian Glossy Starling (red eyes) while the other looks like a Spotted-necked Dove or Zebra Dove. So how can they possibly be related in whatsoever way? But what if I were to tell you that these two birds are one and the same; they represent the two faces of the Asian Koel (Eudynamys scolopaceus)? Read on…..

One bright sunny morning, there was a commotion among the branches of the Flame of the Forest tree across the street from my house. I quickly scanned the location of the noise with my camera and saw a black crow-like bird astride another brown-speckled bird like as though they were fighting. The black one had a noni fruit (Morinda citrifolia) in its beak, so it would appear that it had taken the fruit by force from the brown one. But as I continued snapping away, not daring to lift my eye from the camera sight, it became clear what the black bird was doing to the brown bird.

It seemed to be a ritual of sorts where the black one was offering a fruit (noni fruit) to the brown one. I later discovered the black one was a male Asian Koel, while the brown one was a female Asian Koel !

The female Koel was initially resisting the male’s overture but eventually succumbed to the male’s very persistent (and aggressive) offering. She finally accepted the fruit and the male looked on contentedly. What a show!