woo hoo shark week! shark week is always pretty awesome, but this year i've been a little distracted. partly that has to do with work starting so early in the summer now so i've been dvr-ing all the shark week programs and watching them later. but when you look at the whole list of shark shows on your dvr list it starts to look a bit much y'know? and so i started off the week by listing down all the shows and writing my "what have we learned" notes under each one (and i had a LOT to write, kinda of embarrassingly), but at the end of the week i was just getting kind of bored with it all, fast-forwarded a bunch of the shows and in general had other things on my mind, so i'm re-editing this post and just dropping the most interesting things learned during shark week!
- discovery channel seems to be too willing to show re-enactments and re-creations for my opinion. i guess it's nice to have the visual cue, but if it didn't happen, it didn't happen. no need to make stuff up. i especially didn't like "blood in the water," the first shark week program, it was like a fake documentary about shark attacks in the early 1900's that inspired "jaws" with of-the-time-period interviews and everything... lame.
- also, another disturbing trend of perhaps a loss of perspective and un-biased-ness (for lack of a better word), i've noticed that a lot of the programs on discovery, the history channel and all those wonderful stations have been assuming that people who lived long ago (and not so long ago, like in the early 1900's) were retards. in "blood" they speculate that a string of shark attacks reported in the news were instigated by a new jersey heat wave that, for the first time (they supposed), drew people from just wading in the shallows of the seashore to swimming in the deeper ocean. are you kidding me? you mean to tell me that even though people have been alive for thousands of years they only started swimming in the deep ocean in the early 1900's? please. like the ancient mayas could not POSSIBLY have built any of their own pyramids and buildings because they were all too "primative?" lame. which is why i was so happy when "secrets of the bog people" (a show about 7000 year old remains preserved in a bog swamp in florida and how they were able to extract preserved brain matter from excavated skulls, showing that people 7000 years ago had the same brain structures as modern day man... meaning while they may not have had the collective knowledge accumulated and transmitted over the years as we do now, they were no less able to think about, perceive, and reason with the world around them as we are able to do today) showed that just because people lived a long time ago, doesn't mean they were automatically idiots. in fact, i might argue that people living back then were, on average, even smarter than people now, because back then, survival of the fittest was a principle very much still in effect. today, however, medical advances and social conventions are helping people who might not have passed on their genes 7000 years ago do so today. and if you've ever seen the movie "idiocracy," you'd understand that there is what i believe to be a very real possibility that the "smarter" people of this world may be weeding themselves out, or are at least being overrun with those with less-than-ideal-geneology. makes sense right? well, i work in a school, haha.
- not too much new info to learn about sharks i think. seems like they're having trouble coming up with new scientific discoveries and so that's why there's this glut of sensationalistic shows... too bad. perhaps people aren't so high up on shark research as they were in the 90's, or maybe i'm just really smart (of course), but these shows seem to be more bark than bite (heh heh).
- still, cool video at least. "deadly waters" showed some crazy guy jumping in the water with a bunch of sharks in different places around the world. he highlighted some of the places in the world with the most shark attacks (the carribbean, south pacific, south africa, australia, florida, duh) and fed them a bunch of (creepy) human analogs (including a "chum-sicle" and prosthetic arms and legs).
- remember the summer of 2001? apparently it was "the summer of the shark." y'know how once one story gets out to the media they start LOOKING for more stories like it right? that's how people remember things, through the news. so "sharkbite summer" detailed a bunch of shark attack stories, including ones where people fight back. i like it when people fight back after a shark attack, because, damn, i would right? i'd be so mad, like, "wtf shark? why you gotta be such a little bitch for?" haha, well, more likely i'd say "owowowowowowow" but still. so in this one story, a shark attacked a boy in about 3 ft of water, his father was nearby and grabbed the shark by the tail and dragged both the boy AND the shark onto the shore. they took the boy to the hospital, but back on shore one guy killed the shark, stuck his arm down the shark's mouth and pulled out the boy's arm! then they rushed it to the hospital and re-attached it. whoa right? geez.
- "shark tribe" was a cool show, it was about two tribes in papua new guinea who go out in skinny little canoes and catch sharks by hand, with no bait. they just use a coconut rattle, a rope, and a stick. scientifically reasonable, yes, but mix in all the culture and tradition that they associate with "shark calling" and that makes it a pretty cool story of people living in the "modern" world whose lives are just totally different from ours (or mine, at least). still, they weren't able to catch a shark on the show...
- when you google "shark week" for images, you come up with retarded things man, these are all just random pictures from one search.
anyway, all in all shark week is shark week. cool videos. freaky stories. makes you want to go out into the water and also makes you not want to go into the water. but right now the sun is shining, it's a saturday afternoon, and i'm going snorkeling! wish me sharks...
no wait... don't.
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