Sharks: Benevolent Undersea Protectors or Evil Life-Hating Death-Machines?
by Dick ValentineIf you had to think about that question for more than three seconds, you are probably a shark. The only excuse for not knowing the answer to that question instantly is that you think I'm just coddling sharks to placate my readership and would have chosen "Sharks: F*ck Sharks, F*ck them to Hell" as the title of this article, which is constructive criticism that I can accept.
If you weren't growling uncontrollably and franticly looking for the nearest pointy object to defend yourself with as soon as you read the word "Sharks" then you are probably at least a shark sympathizer, in which case you need to listen up and get an ear full of the truth. I'm taking a stand. Sharks are a menace. They are menacing. They are menaceful. Menaceistic. Menacesque. Look, the point is... they're bad.
A shark is nature's equivalent of a nuclear torpedo. It is hydro-dynamically streamlined, self propelled, and will blow you the hell up. If you don't die in the initial attack, the trauma of actually encountering an animal specifically designed by God for the sole purpose of ruining your shit will leave you a haunted, shattered husk of a human being, not unlike the cancer that lingers behind to torment and slowly eradicate the unlucky survivors of Hiroshima.
Sharks only have two functions - swimming fast and killing faster. Every part of their anatomy is furthering one of these two aims. Their skeletal, fin, and skin structures look like something NASA designed as a suborbital rocket. It's made of light, durable, aerodynamic, organic super-materials. This is the stuff MIT doctoral dissertations are made of. They don't waste time with hands or prehensile tails or claws or any other appendage that could ever accidentally be used for anything other than going fast enough to catch up with whatever they are trying to kill, and then killing the crap out of it. Instead they have teeth. Rows of teeth. That regenerate. Hell, some sharks can actually use their tails to knock their prey unconscious. That's a twofer.
The only reason humans have been allowed to live as long as they have is because sharks are stuck in the ocean. During the cold war, the USSR performed genetic experiments on sharks in an attempt to breed a lighter than air shark that could fly the way other sharks swim. This plan was immediately scrapped and the guy who proposed it was executed when they realized that this would wipe out all life on earth. They decided to take their chances with nukes instead. It was the safer option.
Sharks have been perfecting the art of killing anything that gets within reach for the past 450 million years. You could say they are getting the hang of it. To put it another way, stepping foot in the ocean is essentially the same as walking into the Reichstag in 1940 wearing a yamaka embroidered with the Star of David and mentioning the fact that you believe blond hair and blue eyes to be the signs of sexual impotence.
You're might be thinking to yourself, "Well sure sharks are as lethal as a 50 caliber bullet fired by mother nature herself and twice as hard to kill, but at least I can hide, right?" Wrong. Sharks have electroreption, which is basically the magic ability to detect the minute electromagnetic fields that all living things produce, even over vast distances. This is so sensitive that sharks can literally feel the electromagnetic fields of the earth and use them for navigation. When you step into the ocean, the shark knew you were there five minutes ago and is already on his way. Good luck.
Which brings me to my next point. Once a shark gets to you, you're done. Game over. No continues or do-overs. As the French would say, fin. (As a side note, it is extremely telling that the French word for "end" is a part of a shark's anatomy) Some people like to pretend that you can stop a shark attack by using some sort of repellent or by using your thumbs to gouge out its eyes. First of all, we can't even cure the common cold with chemicals, so what makes you so sure a little blue dye poured in the ocean is going to deter the personification of death from having its way with you.
Secondly, a shark is covered in dermal denticles, which in lay man's terms means skin that would put the hull of a space shuttle to shame. When the shark closes its eyes on impact, this is going to be covering them. You have a better chance of stopping him by gouging your own eyes out and hoping the shark has pity on you, which it won't. Plus, even if you did miraculously manage to inflict an eye wound, you would only piss the shark off more. He doesn't even need his eyes. He can feel your electromagnetic field. His eyes are really just there so he can jack off to shark porn and look more foreboding.
If you don't believe me, then show me what a big strong man you are and go swimming with a school of hammerheads some time. I'll be the guy laughing from the shore, not that you will be able to hear me over your own blood curdling screams. And don't point to the hundred or so discovery channel programs showing divers swimming peacefully with sharks. It's communist propaganda bullshit. The discovery channel has been a pro-shark front for years. Their board of directors is made up of five sharks, a squid, a school of fish who are two scared of the sharks to ever vote against them, and the rotting corpse of Steve Irwin (needless to say, he doesn't vote much).
