I have to admit that prior to the advent of Donald Trump I never knew that such a thing as Shark Week existed. And frankly, I could have gone an entire lifetime not knowing that either Trump or Shark Week was in the world and probably would have been much better off. Alas, that was not how things were to be. So since we’ve got both, might as well let the Lincoln Project give us a much needed laugh, right?
Yes, now every boat owner must face the terrible dilemma of having to choose electrocution or death by shark.
Of course, Chief Brody was smart enough to use electricity to kill the shark in Jaws 2, and his uncle didn’t even work at MIT. pic.twitter.com/m9Q8c4fzyH— Gadfly (@GadflyDer) July 5, 2024
From what I can gather, there’s a triple feature every night which comes down to six to nine hours of shark movies. If it’s your cup of tea, good for you. I saw Jaws back in the day, because it was such a blockbuster, but as a genre “shark movies” leave me less than cold. Maybe one of them ate Donald Trump in another lifetime and he remembers that, ya spose?
And are sharks afraid of people? If not, they should be: “The statistics bear this out for sharks in general: while 100 million sharks are killed by humans yearly, only five to eight people die in shark attacks worldwide. Where the Cape is concerned, one of the area’s 3 million summer visitors was indeed killed by a shark five years ago, but the previous fatal attack was in 1938, and no one has died from a shark attack since 2018.”
And yet our fear of sharks (aka “galeophobia”), even inland or in places that have never known a shark attack, continues unabated, intensified by media whose ratings depend on dramatic taglines like “Killer Shark Circles Man and Eats Him Alive.” What might be the deeper, less conscious reasons for this terror?
One obvious trigger is the shark’s appearance. Divers and fishermen in Australia, who come across Great White Sharks more than most, describe their “black and beady” eyes and their “diabolical, gruesome, terrifying” jaws and teeth [1]. Certainly the sharks’ speed and power in an aquatic environment lend force to their evil aspect.
Possibly because of their exceptional skill at detecting and ambushing prey, sharks are often considered intelligent, cold-blooded, even vengeful: characteristics embodied by the rogue shark in Jaws, which echoes to some extent the portrait of that great white whale, Moby Dick, in Herman Melville’s eponymous novel.
Sharks and trans gender body builders. Go figure.
Sharks are perfect machines. They eat and make baby sharks and that’s about it. In their way they are beautiful creatures but they are not whales/dolphins which do show flashes of intelligence. They also apparently do not like the taste of humans and attacks on us are a case of accidental identity: we look a bit like their fave food source, seals, when we’re flopping around in their home. They deserve a lot better than having their fins end up in someone’s soup bowl or being killed because some dumb-ass is scared of them. Hill-billies of the universe –that be us.
I’m kind of curious about Von Shitzinpants’ fear of sharks and electrocution while boating as I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a pic or heard/read anything indicating he was a beach-goer or boater/fisher. Of course he never seems to feel the need to expound upon pretty much anything he knows absolutely nothing about and hasn’t ever experienced. More of that incomprehensible babbling I guess. I have to admit, he does do incomprehensible babble quite well.
Didn’t make sense –He always feels the need to expound upon…rather than what I typed. Sorry. Tired. The hill-billies in mt feel the need to light off fireworks until 0200 never mind we’re several inches behind in precip so far and likely to have a stellar fire season. I do hate independence day and wish it’s celebrations would go the way of the dodo. That or the po-po would actually enforce the fireworks laws on the books.
Give all that SWAT gear to the Fire Dept. Protect us all from psycho po-po and lead to some serious enforcement of fire laws.
Given the level of mass murdering going on here in America, you should be more afraid to go to the store than swimming far out to sea. FACT! Math doesn’t lie…people DO!