I must confess, I am not impressed by the mystique of sharks. They don’t do much for me. I don’t live in terror of shark-kind, and Shark Week is about the only time I’ll change the channel off the Discover/Animal Planet/National Geographic trinity that forms most of my non-cartoon viewing. (I’m sure, mind you, that if one was attached to my leg, I’d be an instant convert to the Way of the Shark, but barring that sort of conversion-on-the-boat-to-Damascus event, I’m just not a shark person.) I just don’t get the glamour. To me, they’re a big fish. Sure, a cool fish, a fish that’s really well in touch with its environment and has teeth like ginsu knives, but still…fish. And other than the fact that they can eat us, I don’t really see what makes the shark a more interesting fish than, say, the flounder or the viperfish or the elegantly dressed parrotfish, let along the giant manta ray.

(Okay, that one show about the leaping big whites in South Africa who had learned to jump out of the water in pursuit of seals, those were pretty amazing. But a lot of it was the edge-of-the-seat cheering for those acrobatic little seals. You gotta admire any mammal that will do flips over the back of a great white shark and place all its faith in the fact that great whites don’t corner very well.)

Nevertheless, this struck me as pretty cool:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040913/shark.html