Three men in a boat

 

So I re-watched “Jaws”. I never grokked this production the first couple of times I saw it. It hardly scared me and I found it boring! Today, I rather consider it very, very strange. Indeed, it comes across as two entirely different films. The first half is a rather (stereo)typical horror flick with all the usual ingredients. The monster attacks a wholesome all-American resort, munching on stoned hippies, children and stupid hillbillies. There is an idiot mayor, a scientific genius and a stable police officer just trying to do his job. OK, maybe it´s a *bit* original. Like the tiger shark who turns out to be a rare guest from Louisiana!

The second half is the real “Jaws”. The three main characters Brody, Hooper and Quint confront the super-sized shark in a boat that´s obviously too small and fragile (rather than calling the coast guard or navy). Quint turns out to be half-mad and personally obsessed with killing great white sharks. He is the “Captain Ahab” of the story. The whole thing makes zero sense, except as a bizarre male rite of passage. The shark is too large and too intelligent to be a normal animal. Indeed, it seems to be intrinsically *evil*.

Speculations about allegorical meaning are difficult to fend off. The three men on the worthless barge represent different kinds of Americans, perhaps different generations: the old and crazy war veteran Quint (who is presumably working class), the middle-aged and middle-class police officer, and the young well-educated scientist (implied to be upper class). Is this a vision of an America united against its external enemies? (“Jaws” was released in 1975.) Or is the shark a symbol of Nature showing its fangs? 

It´s intriguing to note that the irrational sailor Quint and the “rational” scientist Hooper turn out to be equally crazy (at least after a fashion). It´s also interesting that the person who eventually kills the shark is Brody, the stable White middle-class guy with an official police badge. He does so in the old fashioned way – with a rifle and some explosives – while Quint and Hooper tried various alternative techniques which completely failed. Order has been restored on Amity Island (note the 4^th July parade – Amity is of course a symbol for America and its proverbial way of life). At least it´s been temporarily restored until the sequels, but Steven Spielberg had nothing to do with those.

So I suppose “Jaws” is at least somewhat interesting…

Well, actually

 

AI´s fantasy picture of a basking shark 

"Sveriges hav - Nordsjöns giganter" is a somewhat peculiar nature documentary, probably German in provenance, but I haven´t been able to locate the original version. The Swedish title means "The Seas of Sweden - Giants of the North Sea".

Ahem, the North Sea is *not* Swedish...

Indeed, most of the docu seems to be taped on or around the Shetland Islands, which are (of course) British?! Not sure who came up with the idea to call this a "Swedish" documentary. Some old Viking romantic? Dude!

But sure, if you like dramatic vistas, this might be for you. Killer whales, basking sharks, grey seals, sea otters, dolphins, skuas attacking and eating puffins, the invasive red king crab...you get the picture. Shetland sure looks pretty dangerous, LOL. 

  

The Goblin Shark feat. Marvin

 

"The best cryptid evidence" doesn´t strike me as very "cryptid". Note that the Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot fame isn´t included in this survey. All animals featured (except maybe Marvin) seem to belong to known and currently extant taxa. So-called cryptozoologists don´t really care - they want to find a giant ape-man, a surviving dinosaur, or something to that effect. 

So it seems the Patterson-Gimlin film is unique, being the only good footage of an *actual* cryptid (i.e. a monster). But it´s precisely it´s singular character that makes it so hard to believe...   

The land of desolation

 

So I just watched the nature documentary "Wild Ireland: Kingdom of Stone", about the apparently world famous karst landscape between County Clare and County Galway known as the Burren. I admit I never heard about it before! Or maybe I did, since parts of this docu reminds me of - surprise - other documentaries about western Ireland.

Animals shown include the pine marten, Daubenton´s bat, whooper swans and the butterfly known as the marsh fritillary. In the Atlantic Ocean we also find the finback whale (the world´s second largest animal) and the basking shark (the world´s second largest fish). The basking sharks occasionally gather in one place and swim in a large circle, nobody really knows why. But yes, it does look majestic.

The Burren also has an interesting human history. Here we find Neolithic grave monuments, abandoned churches and monasteries, and a mysterious tower once inhabited by none other than W B Yeats (who apparently saw whooper swans as near-divine). Indeed, the landscape is man-made in the sense that Neolithic farmers cut down all the trees, presumably to give room for agriculture and cattle. 

"The Kingdom of Stone" has a romantic (or Romantic) undertone, and frequently shows ravens (?) flying across the bizarre landscape of karst and ruins. Ahem, Ireland is a modern, globalized territory these days...

Still, could be interesting on a boring Wednesday evening. 

The body found

 

It´s actually quite funny that the media creates a panic (or is it a silly season) everytime some carcass of a sea animal washes ashore. The term "globster" for seemingly mysterious carcasses was apparently coined by notorious sensationalist Ivan T Sanderson. I assumed it was Charles Hoy Fort (who was definitely on the same wave length, LOL). 

This week, the unidentified fishy object is a "mermaid globster" (no less) from Papua New Guinea. Or strictly speaking the small Simberi Island a bit north of the PNG mainland. The experts are *baffled*, baffled I say, except of course they really aren´t, with guesses ranging from a whale of a tale to the pudgy dugong, but alas, nobody guessed a plump mermaid on a suicide mission.

The natives of the volcanic island, who presumably have better things to do, didn´t take any DNA samples and promptly buried the rottening mass of ectoplasm at an undisclosed location. Well, at least the media spared us the details!

So it seems we have to wait a few months until the next globster comes onland, hopefully with its monstrous mer-squid-megalodon DNA intact...  

Mermaid globster found in New Guinea

The death of Megalodon nerds

 

One of the more tiresome alternative "theories" is that our oceans are stalked by a mega-sized primordial shark, Megalodon (no apparent relation to Meghan Markle). 

A "fucking nerd" on Twitter nicknamed Lana explains why Meg is most certainly dead and gone. And if you don´t have access to Elon Musk´s private blog, the second link goes to a curious docu prepared by the very same Lana on pretty much the very same topic! 

Not sure if the denizens of these cyber-haunts believe in Meg´s flesh-blood-and-cartilage existence, but if you do, plz study the material linked below, LOL. 

"Fucking nerd" Lana on why Megalodon´s most certainly dead

Megalodon - Lack of Plausibility for Survival

I learned a new word today

 

Or rather term, the term in question being "Zuiyo-maru truther", a person who still insists that the carcass found by the Japanese fishing boat Zuiyo-maru in 1977 actually was a plesiosaur...

Twitter thread on the topic

The epic of the Greenland shark

 

Credit: Panda Planet(?)

The epic of evolution and all that stuff was fun as long as it lasted. I mean, it really *was* our "religion", wasn´t it? The epic ended with humanity leaving a scorched Earth billions of years into the future in highly advanced space ships to colonize new worlds in the galaxy...

We have been religious all our lives, without even realizing it. Where does the religion of evolutionary Progress originally come from? Oetinger? Hegel? Some obscure Jewish heresy that immanentized Lurianic Kabbala? 

In reality, the zenith of cosmic evolution was just a blip of about 300 years. Which is nothing. There is a species of fish, the Greenland shark, that can live longer! And, of course, trees. Crazy hubris, if you think about it! So the zenith of our civilization, which was supposedly also the zenith of *cosmic* evolution (and the fulcrum of the entire universe) lasted *less* than some freaky cartilaginous fish in the high Arctic, wtf. 

HA HA HA. I´m laughing at myself for un-ironically believing in it for so long...

Look at us, we can´t even cope with a bloody COVID pandemic. The crown of creation! 

But sure, I suppose we could still turn this tiny little planet into a desolate wasteland by nuclear war and/or anthropogenic climate change, just to make a point about our fantastic cosmic importance. There, Mr Universe, there, look who´s boss now!!! If we can´t create a perfect utopia, maybe we can at least trigger the perfect storm? Then we can go under in flame and fire, convinced that we have thereby demonstrated our UNIQUENESS and SUPERIORITY.

After all, the Greenland shark can´t do that, so there, Western modern civ just proved its superiority. Secret king wins again!

The Western myth of progress and the epic of evolution is just the latest (and strangest) Judeo-Christian heresy. Or cluster of heresies. Amen.

The god species

 

From Wiki: "The Greenland shark has the longest known lifespan of all vertebrate species (estimated to be between 250 and 500 years), and is among the largest extant species of shark. "

Also Wiki: "The Greenland shark had been estimated to live to about 200 years, but a study published in 2016 found that a 5.02 m (16.5 ft) specimen was 392 ± 120 years old, resulting in a minimum age of 272 and a maximum of 512. That makes the Greenland shark the longest-lived vertebrate."

The industrial revolution began around 1750. It will probably be over by 2100. So this witless fish can live longer than the supposed eternal zenith of the God species Homo deus...

But sure, I suppose we could prove our "superiority" as a species by making the Greenland glaciers melt, thereby drowning the sharks or whatever will happen to them if the entire ice shelf comes tumbling down. 

There! The crown of divine evolution has spoken!!!

Nordic sharks

"Sharks of the Icy North" is a stunning documentary made by Christina Karliczek Skoglund, who I assume is Swedish. The documentary itself is German, however. It follows Karliczek herself as she dives at various locations off Scandinavia, Germany and Greenland, searching for the shark species typical of these waters. The footage is superb, and some of the sharks shown are fascinating. 

There´s the almost brilliantly bizarre basking shark (the world´s second-largest fish), the Greenland shark (which is said to become over 300 years old) and the self-luminescent "Velvet belly lanternshark" (what a name). If you´re a die hard sharkie nerd, I suppose you might also fancy Karliczek´s moving pictures of the small-spotted catshark, the school shark, the spiny dogfish and the rabbit fish, the latter being a distant evolutionary cousins to the sharks. Personally, I was also intrigued by Helgoland! Do people actually *live* at that weird place? 

My knowledge of cartilaginous fish clearly needs some honing, since I assumed that the velvet belly was much larger (actually, it´s only 25 centimeters long) and the Greenland shark much smaller. Like all living creatures, sharks are threatened by climate change, but so far, they can roam wild and free in the silent expanses of the Northern seas... 

Absolutely recommended. 

Back to Galapagos

 

"Oceans" is the fourth part of the five-part documentary "A Perfect Planet" from the BBC. Or rather ocean, since strictly speaking there really is just one large sea on planet Earth. As usual, we get to see spectacular footage of more or less bizarre creatures. There is the flightless cormorant on the Galapagos Islands (it´s an excellent swimmer and diver) and the sea iguanas, large lizards which seek their food in the oceans...but die of cold unless they swim back to shore within 30 minutes. When really hungry, they simply attack the nests of the cormorants, eating the algae the nest are made of! 

Meanwhile, somewhere else in the Pacific, surgeon fish gather to release their eggs and sperm into the water to be carried away by the streams from any threatening predators...except the giant manta rays, which gather at the same place at exactly the same time, gobbling up substantial amounts of the nutritious mix! Another pelagic glutton is Bryde´s whale, which we see in action somewhere off the Thai coast. "A Perfect Planet: Oceans" also features sharks, sting rays, bony fish of all kinds, and a very bizarre octopus (or is it a squid?). 

The episode ends with another look at how "A Perfect Planet" was made, concentrating on the first part of the series, "Volcano". The team, led by Richard Wollocombe, descend into the crater of the dormant volcano at Fernandina, one of the Galapagos Islands. More people have been in space than down this particular crater, and I can´t say I blame Buzz Aldrin for choosing the former option! The place looks like a cross between Mordor and Dante´s Inferno, with huge rocks constantly falling down the steep slopes. At the bottom of the crater is a mysterious blue-green lake. But why on earth does anyone want to film *there*, and did they ever get an insurance, and if so, how much did it cost? If you´ve seen "Volcano", you know the answer: female land iguanas regularly descend into the crater, despite all the dangers, to lay their eggs in the warm ash at the bottom. How on earth evolution took *this* course is never explained, and perhaps we don´t even want to know...

The next and last episode of this stunning series is, perhaps ominously, entitled "Humans". Let me guess. We get to see a lot of house crows, house sparrows and cockroaches? A perfect planet indeed! :D 

Hell´s Bells

"Mysterious Planet: Giants of the Carribean" is a spectacular but also somewhat confusing documentary about...essentially everything at the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and its oceanic vicinity. Ostensibly, though, it´s about whale sharks! And yes, the sharks are in there somewhere. 

The narrator moves back and forth between the jungle, the water-filled underground caves, and the open sea, just as freely as he crosses millions of years of deep time. It´s not always clear whether what we see is real footage, or the special effects department working overtime. But yes, "Giants of the Carribean" *is* fascinating. 

As late as two years ago, marine biologists were stunned to discover a huge annual gathering of whale sharks off the Yucatan coast, in an area seemingly devoid of plankton (their staple food). What on earth were they doing there? Apparently, there *is* a lot of plankton in the area, after all, specifically the roe of bonito tunafish. Meanwhile, other scientists are exploring the underground "rivers" in the Yucatan jungles, which may even have inspired ancient Mayan mythology about a dangerous subterranean realm of demons and spirits. The flooded caves turn out to have a connection to the Caribbean Sea! Fortunately or otherwise, the only "monsters" in the caves are peculiar shrimps, fishes and (above water level) bats and snakes. There are also mysterious bacterial formations nicknamed "Hell´s Bells". Apparently, the bacteria need neither sun light nor oxygen to propagate. (Life on Mars discovered?) 

The sink holes (known as cenotes) in the ex-Mayan jungle turn out to be the last remnants of the large crater that killed the dinosaurs (and a lot of other creatures) at the end of the Cretaceous. One of the organisms killed off in this spectacular Velikovskian manner was a fish even larger than the whale shark. At the time, the ancestors of the whale sharks were small fish living at the bottom of the ocean. And so it goes, around and around, in this crazy world (perhaps ruled by some demonic entity appeased by the Maya, but that´s literally another show!). 

Hell´s Bells indeed. 

What is a cartilaginous fish?

Nationalnyckeln (NN) is an encyclopedia dealing with various groups of animals and plants found in the Nordic countries, principally Sweden. NN is a work in progress, and currently 17 volumes have been published. Originally, NN was supposed to become a mammoth work covering all (!) species of organisms found in Sweden, but it's not clear at the present time whether this goal will ever be reached.

This volume, codenamed DZ 1-34, was intended as the first one covering chordates (including vertebrates), and it therefore contains an extensive introduction to this group of creatures. This explains the otherwise curious presence of dinosaurs and other seemingly irrelevant animals in a book supposedly about fish!

Yes, fish. “What *is* a fish” wonders NN at its homepage, and after leafing through this volume, I can only concur with the questioner. Some of the creatures included are positively disgusting, such as the lampreys and the hagfish. Others are spectacular: the blue shark, the Greenland shark and the basking shark are among those. The volume also describes tunicates, which despite their anomalous looks are evolutionarily closer to fish than to invertebrates. For those interested in such things, here follows an exact breakdown of the contents: lancelets (1 species), tunicates (53 species), hagfish (1 species), lampreys (3 species), cartilaginous fishes (29 species).

Yes, it's in color. And no, it's not really bilingual, the only English texts being in the identification keys and very short species summaries. Still, deserves five stars.

Birds in the monastery

“Ireland's Wild Coast” is a documentary directed by Cepa Giblin and John Murray. The latter is most known for his award-winning “Broken Tail” about Indian tigers. After the inevitable stint in the tropics, Murray returned to his native Ireland and help direct two documentaries about its stunning nature and wildlife, the first being “Ireland's Wild River” about the Shannon.

In “Ireland's Wild Coast”, we are introduced to the Irish Atlantic coast, from Skellig Michael in the southwest to County Donegal in the northwest. Animals featured include seals, whales, basking sharks, blue sharks, outcast dolphins (sic), seemingly feral sheep and a wide variety of birds. At Skellig Michael, Manx shearwaters nest in an abandoned medieval monastery. Donegal turns out to be the winter quarters of whooper swans from Iceland - perhaps the only migratory bird spending the winter in Ireland!

I admit that I found “Ireland's Wild Coast” fascinating. The underlying theme of this production is wildlife taking over after humans leaving. In real life, of course, it's the other way around. Murray himself pointed out when interviewed by Swedish television that Ireland, previously regarded as the end of the world, has become one of its most exploited spots…

Five stars. For the documentary, that is.

Feed the fat guy to the sharks

Once in a while, "MonsterQuest" apparently have to come up with a real monster, or else...

In this episode, "Jaws in Illinois", the search party goes after sharks with the chutzpah to show up in fresh or brackish water, something the aquatic ape known as Homo sapiens finds deeply questionable. Sharks, after all, are supposed to lurk at sea, or gild our shark-fin soup.

Bull sharks in Louisiana, Greenland Sharks in the St. Lawrence River and (perhaps) Great White Sharks in New Jersey are featured. However, only a couple of minutes are devoted to the mysterious shark captured in Illinois (sic) during the Great Depression or thereabouts.

The whole show looks promising, but gets progressively more boring as it drags on. Gee, why didn't they just use the fat guy as bait? There's enough meat on him to feed an entire sea-serpent!

Three stars, if you are a shark aficionado.

The old man and the sea

"River Monsters" is a series featuring Jeremy Wade, a biologist and extreme angler, in his search for *really* large fish. If out-sized catfish, groupers, arapaimas or sturgeons is your cup of tea, you will definitely like this one. It seems virtually any fisherman's tale is coming true in this series!

Personally, I waxed slightly philosophical when watching two of the episodes. The misnamed "American Killers" actually feature footage from Australia and India, as well as the United States. In India, Wade managed to hook a gigantic catfish feeding on the badly cremated corpses which pious Hindus throw into the river. In Australia, bull sharks thrive near a sewage plant in fresh water. Wade's first catch, however, isn't a shark but a "regular" fish which turns out to be even larger: the legendary Goliath grouper.

Frankly, the whole thing looks like a horror movie. Who needs "Night of the Living Dead" when you can watch "River Monsters"? Clearly, this planet wasn't made for us! The fish are still the big fish around here, and some of them are hungry...

Unfortunately, humans are pretty hungry too, as can be seen in "Russian Killer", where Wade visits a desolate part of the former Soviet Union, close to the Amur River. Fishermen disappear on a semi-regular basis, and Wade soon realizes that something strange is going on when mysterious people start shadowing him in the streets of a local town. It turns out that the river is home to the massive kaluga, a local species of sturgeon with a lot of caviar inside. On the black market, just one of these super-sized fish can bring in the equivalent of 42 monthly pay-checks for an average Russian worker! Small wonder the kaluga has been hunted almost to extinction, despite being protected by law. The poaching is controlled by organized crime gangs, so local fishermen have both the authorities and the mafia against them if they ever try to catch a sturgeon to complement their meager incomes. A third problem is the kaluga itself, an extremely aggressive fish that can take fishermen with it into a watery grave. Indeed, Wade's investigation starts with the disappearance of three fishermen and their boat!

Of course, humans can extirpate the kaluga. But then what? The planet still isn't ours. With the caviar gone, I suppose we'll be left with the bull sharks...

Don't forget your life insurance

This is the first season of the positively scary series "River Monsters", aired on Animal Planet. Extreme angler Jeremy Wade travels around the world in search for fish that would make every ghost-hunter, bigfooter or ufologist green of envy. These monsters, after all, are real - and they are firmly entrenched on "our" side of the great material-astral divide...

In one episode, Wade investigates reports about freshwater sharks. He teams up with a group of young men in Australia whose main pastime is to catch bull sharks where the local sewage plant meets the river. Sure enough, Wade manages to catch a young shark that seems to be thriving in the mixture of freshwater and plain old kaka. He also catches an even larger bony fish, the Goliath Grouper, which I found to be scarier than the shark!

In another episode, we follow Wade as he searches the Amazon for the Arapaima, a scaly "dinosaur" fish infamous for attacking and overturning small boats. This fish can knock a man unconscious, leaving him at the mercy of the many scavengers of the river. Once again, it becomes clear to the philosophically-inclined viewer that whoever made this planet, certainly didn't made it for us...

Catfish, piranhas and the alligator gar (which really looks like an alligator!) are other monstrous and hungry "big fish" featured in this season of "River Monsters". Next time you go down to the local lake, don't forget your life insurance!

Come on, it's just hungry

This special episode of "MonsterQuest" is essentially a 90 minute long hate speech against the Great White Shark. It's a "monster", a "beast", "ferocious", consciously "stalk" humans like a "serial killer", and can be compared to Jack the Ripper! Northern California's coastal waters are known as The Red Triangle "for the blood that often stains it waters".

And so on...

Has it never occurred to these people that the Great White might just be hungry?

The most sober expert on the show points out that the increase in shark attacks on the U.S. Pacific coast have two pretty logical explanations. For starters, there are more people using the sea today than a generation ago. Another, more ironic reason, is that humans almost exterminated the Great White Shark off the Californian coast during the "Jaws" scare of the 1970's. This made the seal population spin out of control, which eventually made it possible for the Great White to stage a comeback. Great White Sharks, of course, feed on seals. The more seals, the more sharks... Humans, by contrast, aren't on the shark's regular menu, and most attacks are mistakes, territorial behaviour or "test-bites" (sharks test-bite unfamiliar objects).

Yet, "MonsterQuest" acts as if the Great White Sharks were some kind of terrorists or crime gangs, targeting mankind. Yawn. In my opinion, these guys should concentrate on Bigfoot and the Ogopogo!

No time for sushi

A bunch of enhanced sharks go AWOL at a scientific research facility, feasting on the flesh of mad scientists. That's the basic concept behind "Deep Blue Sea", starring Stellan Skarsgård and Samuel Jackson, among others. Poor Jackson is caught and eaten by two jumbo-sized makos in a classical scene. Otherwise, "Deep Blue Sea" is just too long and too boring. But then, I didn't like "Jaws" either. One thing's clear though: the unsung heroes of this story didn't have time ordering sushi, LOL.

Making sense of the carnage

A review of "The Whale That Ate Jaws" 

I found this documentary pretty humorous. A killer whale attacks and eats a great white shark off the coast of the Farallon Islands. What's the big deal, really? Orcas are big, they're bad and they're hungry. They are also partial to shark-fin soup! Yet, the entire event (or meal), which presumably only took a few minutes, have been turned into a pseudo-dramatic, 45-minute documentary on national TV. Ha ha ha. Seriously, is this "MonsterQuest" or what? Only two stars. Really.