The Week in Sharks: ...and Other Things that Like the Taste of Seal

"In fashion, you're either in or you're oh god oh god my leg." Heidi Klum—supermodel, erstwhile fashion svengali, and all-around German person—considers scuba-diving in shark infested waters to be her bravest moment ever.

Even braver, the New York Daily News gushes, than "showing off her pregnant belly in tight outfits on Bravo's 'Project Runway,'" because fat people suck and are from space.

In her Parade Magazine interview, Klum explains how the shark schmooze helped her conquer her fears. "I'm not saying that everyone should swim with sharks," she says, "but sometimes you have to jump over your own shadow in order to learn something that you will never forget for the rest of your life." Such as, say... optics?

Klum made the dive as part of the Discovery Channel's Shark Week in 2003, which further goes to prove Lunar Weight's point.

Bollywood icon Zayed Khan also got fabulous with the cartilaginous. On a recent underwater shoot, he basically bro'd out with his toothy would-be antagonists. "They came and flapped their bodies next to us and slapped our shoulders like buddies," Khan told the Times of India. Little did he know they then turned around and put most of the contents of his trailer on eBay, since no one likes to work for scale. Or for denticle.

{from Parade and the Times of India, respectively; Lunar Weight hereby humbly threatens to bite Zooey Deschanel if it'll get her to consider hanging out with us an honor}




Or maybe Zooey'd dig us if we "sharked ourselves". As part of the Shark Week promotional run up, Discovery.com offers you the chance to morph yourself into that manic, sodden, Dunst-mouthed freak on their billboards.

Discovery's own flacks describe the e-mutilator as "totally viral." By which they presumably mean "akin to having smallpox." Since what those earnest nerdlings who haven't grown to embrace their own inherent attractiveness really need is a way to obliterate said attractiveness entirely.

Oh well. It beats blatant, unrepentant racism.

{from Discovery.com, who, to be fair, probably hate themselves as much as they hate their audience}




LW appreciates a good chomping in the name of class warfare, but it ain't gonna happen this time. A Great White sighting off the coast of Martha's Vineyard was reported, but an airborne search by what Bloomberg referred as "a fish spotter" failed to find confirmation.

The search failure may, in part, be due to the fact that people were making that shit up.

Because everyone's kinda bored right now.

Fortunately, some good came out of the silliness. The press managed to cite Jaws at every fucking opportunity, because, epistemologically speaking, nothing can be considered to possess material or temporal form unless Steven Spielberg has made an ass-ton of dough off of it.

{from the Boston Globe, and every bored hack stuck at a science desk bitterly driving staples into a Malcolm Gladwell voodoo doll}




Biologist-poet describes a whale shark on the move as "a bird as large as a bus". Though humans only ever encounter whale sharks placid and (prosaically) tail-propelled near the surface, when at depth, these largest-of-all-fish use gravity, fins, and the always-good-for-party-conversation laws of fluid dynamics to glide through the water column.

This unique method of swimming could be a means to conserve energy, or it could be an attempt to get Gerard Manley Hopkins to take that stupid windhover and shove it.

{courtesy FOX News, which claims to also have a whale shark video, but when LW clicks on the imbed, it plays lots of footage of Heath Ledger gallivanting about looking like a cross between Steven Tyler and a White Stripes groupie, then freezes}

June 27th: Shark Week to Begin, All Chance of Sex to End

The Discovery Channel just released the lineup for this year's Shark Week. Shark Week runs June 27th through August 2nd, putting the "yes!" in "chondrichthyes!"

We'll quickly editorialize here regarding a persistent flaw in the week-long celebration of all things aquabitey: documentaries about shark attacks are not shark documentaries. They are documentaries about people stupid enough/delicious enough to get bitten by sharks. If we wanted to watch Eating Stupid/Delicious Person Week, we'd release barracudas into Heidi Montag's swimming pool.

Still, we're anticipating a week of denticles and Dewar's. We may even try to liveblog it, though the majority of our speech will consist of "Dude! See that? Awesome!"

Though to be fair, it's never not fun to watch Les Stroud find new and innovative ways of getting himself killed.

{from TV Squad; show descriptions in the lede link, if you have no faith in sharks to be unconditionally awesome (though that makes you a dirty dirty sea lion lover, ork ork)}

The Week in Sharks: They've Been Getting Laid Far Longer Than You, You Tasty Monkey Morsel You

Oldest preggers fish found. Australian scientists discovered an embryo in a fossil primordial fish (called a placoderm, which is Latin for something awesome). Not an egg, not a teenage fish with separation issues, not a plastic fish doll that cries when you tip it over and seems to have been mutilated in a fit of prepubescent fishminism, but an embryo, replete with placenta and umbilical cord. This internal gestation of young mirrors the reproductive gizmos of many species of chondrichthyes far more than it resembles fish proper, and this is the earliest proof of this type of reproduction found to date.

Since this particular placoderm dates back 375 million years, it is almost undoubtedly a forerunner of both sharks and us monkey folk. Also, since it dates back 375 million years, it probably gave fishlip-service to chastity and then got it on freaky upside-down style in the kelp fields with a rough-hewn but earnest nautiloid.

{from Nature via those bedroom-eyed fish-sexers at Reuters}


Sharks, like Americans, go to Mexico but still end up eating American. Three sharks attacks and counting in the Yankee colonial outpost of Zihuatenejo, Mexico, have surfers panicking, which will hopefully briefly quell the whole self-righteous, in-touch-with-Gaia shit that also, at least in Southern California, somehow melded seamlessly with roofies. The be-denticled culprit(s) have yet to be identified, but Mexican officials—including the fucking Navy—are just merrily a-slaughterin'.

This technique is of questionable effectiveness so far (it presumes a single or select group of monkey-snackers, whereas no sharks actually enjoy monkey-snacking; we taste sort of rank, and anyway, it's been widely known for centuries that you just don't eat raw food in Mexico. Furthermore, from an anthropomorphological perspective, as Capt. Malcom Reynolds once said, "If anyone tries to kill you, you kill them right back"), and while no one's necessarily any safer, at least the media's been able to have a field day. So there'd be many a Malcolm Gladwell in the making disappointed if the Lunar Weight solution gets adopted: figure out a way to design a surfboard and refine surfing technique so that every buoyant Spicoli doesn't necessarily resemble a sea lion with cerebral palsy.

But until that day, the Spring Break nom nom noms will likely continue.

[edited to add] And then there's this not-so-much-green-as-puce perspective from the Michael Weiner nee Savage of ichthyology.

{from the stoically inedible AP, via ABC news}


Basking sharks enjoy great syrup, Pete Doherty. British scientists tracked basking shark migrations "from waters southwest of the Isle of Man to Canada." And like reporters, the massive, planktivorous sharks were proven to have no real conception that "the Isle of Man" and "Canada" may differ in their levels of specificity. Whether or not basking sharks made derisive comments about Quebec in their ancient, mellifluous basking-shark language remains the realm of speculation.

What is apparent, however, is that the basking shark—already endangered—ranges too far be easily protected with traditional imperial pluck and vigour <sic> from hunting by people who feel that their tummies can make better use of shark fins than said fins' owners can.

Incidentally, the two sharks tracked for this study were named "A" and "B". Hey science! Show some poetry! Lunar Weight recommends "Shark" and "That Other Shark".

{from the UK Times to us noble savages}