Shark Week


Live every week like its Shark Week! Words to live by.  It’s that time again. Time to sit in front of your TV and add to your mental catalogue of places sharks can kill you. I have learned that while sharks are salt water creatures they have been found some miles up the Mississippi river.

On Mythbusters I learned that it is a bad idea to take a flashlight with you under water. Sharks love flashlights and want to get to know them better. They also covered the myth that hot peppers act as a deterrent to sharks - Busted! hot peppers have no effect on sharks or fish in general, so you would not save yourself by using pepper-based mace on Jaws or your gold fish if it turned on you. Who knew?

Currently on Shark Week, they are telling us about a South African teenager whose leg was eaten by a great white shark.. He is rushed to the hospital, he dies several times, he is brought back - Lots of discussion about how chewed on his is. And we break for a commercial where the first lines are You are thinking about steak.

Perfect.

The kid survives but I had to turn the channels. I’ve learned the only place I’m safe from sharks is in my living room.  Sharks are smart and they are everywhere. They could be in your toilet, they could be in your sink, they could be in your bottled water! Not only are sharks smart, sharks are hungry most of the time and we are slow and stupid all of the time, and while we may not taste very good they do think we make good chew toys. It’s rather depressing to think that's where are on the food chain - Chew Toy. Now seals,  sharks think seals are nummy.

Speaking of seals, they aren’t very nice either but they don’t eat people, as far as we know... Wouldn’t that suck? To have to say that you lost your arm to a seal? I think I would lie, I would tell everyone I got chewed on by a shark. A big shark. A great white. In addition to Shark Week I am also watching Blue Planet, and the disk I just finished was concerned with the arctic and antarctic and all the cute little seal munchies that live there - And it’s not just killer seals, the polar bears are genuine land sharks. Did you know that a polar bear can take a beluga whale out of the water all by itself? A whale, even a smallish whale is a whale and a bear can take one down or , actually, lift on up and pull it out of the water bodily. That is just not a bear you want to cuddle up with - Granted as baby bears, they are very, very, very cute.

That may be one area the shark lobby needs to work on. A baby shark looks pretty much exactly like an adult shark, only smaller and a smaller shark is not a cuter shark, it’s just a smaller shark and no matter haw small a shark is it is never a “cute” shark. Seals are deadly predators but at least as babies they are cute. They are so cute. My question is, why hasn’t Disney created a happy, anthropomorphous seal movie? I would watch a happy seal movie. I’ve seen seals in the wild and they look like swimming dogs. Happy dogs. Dogs that could sing and dance! Okay, no feet, synchronized swimming seals that long to be in the Olympics! just add a Randy Newman song and you have a Happy Meal and seven Oscar(tm) nominations.

Is it because they eat penguins? Does Disney have some sort of agreement with the penguin lobby that they won’t glorify one of their chief predators? I’m sure penguins go after something, you can be sure as far as the penguin lobby tells us it’s not a cute something. Of course, maybe it is and the Penguin lobby is just incredibly good at hiding it and in reality it is someone or something that can’t or won’t go to the authorities...

Penguins eat Santa’s Elves!