About this time every year for the last few, I have posted something about Sharks. It may have been about the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week or perhaps NatGeo’s Sharkfest.
The former tends to feature B-grade Shark horror movies like Two-headed Shark, Ghost Shark, Shark Beach, Atomic Shark, and a host of other sharky creature features that are basically teenage slasher movies in which the slasher is a shark. The latter group tend to be shark documentaries about shark ethology and untoward shark-human interactions – most often untoward to the humans.
Sometimes, during Sharkfest, we watch old episodes of Iron Chef (classic Japanese). Other times, I flip the channel to get the BBC’s perspective on our American dystopia.
This past week has been the start of NatGeo’s 4-week Sharkfest. Let the carnage begin! A thigh-bite here, a foot mauling there, and the oh-so-unexpected removal of biceps muscle flap over there. A wader, a surfer, it all tastes like chicken, I suppose.
Fortunately, most documented shark encounters, albeit often untoward, do not end in human or shark death. I enjoy these documentaries because they are about science – measuring the speed of a pursuing shark, the strengths of shark bites, shark migratory patterns, etc.
The other night, Susan I were watching a documentary about the strength of the bites of various sharks – Hammerheads, Great Whites, Tiger sharks, and so on.
Susan: “Do sharks have tongues?”
Me: “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.”
Susan: “Probably not because if they did, we would have already seen shark tongue as the secret ingredient in an Iron Chef battle.”
For those who are unsure or do not know, the answer is, “Yes, sharks have a tongue of a sort.“