Jaws 2010

This photo was froward from Alison in North Palm Beach.

This was at the beach right by my house. The Channel 5 helicopter spent half the day bothering everyone at the north end to get these shots. I was so pissed off I called their news room and told them to go to Singer Island or use file footage. It's not like this doesn't happen every year and every year they shoot the same thing, migrating sharks looking like herds of cattle. The difference this year is that someone actually got eaten. Not a good time to be in the water in any case.

A kite surfer was reputedly bitten by a great white this past week, rising the total of shark attacks for 2010 in the USA to 3. 2009 saw 34 possible assaults mostly in California and Florida. New York had none, mostly because the ocean temperature excludes swimming ten months of the year. Only one attack resulted in a fatality. Sharks seem to bite and then released their victims, as if humans tasted bad.

Back in the 1970s Dr. Joyce Brother suggested that the primary reason for human survival was not our larger brain or adaptive thumb or the ability to stand upright, but that human flesh smelled bad and tasted even worse. Animals such as deer do not run in fright. Our odor is an insult to their refined senses. Dogs have no such prejudice, then again they spend most of their live with a runny nose pressed to the ground in search of exotic pisses.

This week's shark attack got a lot of press. Everyone has seen JAWS. We are terrified of these aquatic monsters, who kill one of us a year. Cigarettes are a major cause of death in America and no one runs from them. Maybe the US government should put a fin on the tube of a cigarette. Nothing else seems to scare the American public more than that vee of cartilage vectoring through the water.

As for anyone swimming in Florida during the President Weekend.

The odds of getting attacked by a shark are slim.

Certainly worse than driving a Toyota with a racing accelerator.