the peanut gallery
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Posts tagged "elasmobranchs":
10 March 2010. 21:42
Kenyan fisherman attempt to remove fishing hooks from the jaw of a shark on January 24, 2010 in the coastal town of Mombasa. Lately, every time Kenyan fishermen go out at sea in the Indian Ocean, they bring back at least 200 kilos more than normal. Since Somali pirates started operating in the Indian Ocean in 2007, industrial fishing boats are avoiding the zone, apparently leaving more to local fishermen.
..enjoy the ocean while there is still something to enjoy. sharks out-of-water, getting manhandled, are about the most disturbing and premonitory motif for the future I can imagine.
Reblogged from radio free mars.
1 May 2009. 23:51
alright I guess my mind took some liberties with this one.
But it was (reading level) RL4, and I devoured it in grade 2! So what if I kept reading these things well into middle school….
2 February 2009. 1:43
fuck yeah sharks
(a tribute to http://fuckyeahsharks.tumblr.com/)
Footage documenting Henri Bource’s 1964 shark encounter. Arguably the best video-meme the internet has ever produced.
So many horrifying, absurd, and hysterical things going on in such a short amount of time! Where to begin…
Lets go chronologically. We have what seems to be a vintage elasmobranchian documentary in the vein of Jacques Cousteau, complete with oversaturated super-8 color and goofy Japanese voiceover. The score is peacefully oceanic, agitated by creepy intermittent horns. Cut to our diver pal kicking for his life, and suddenly his leg is in the mouth of not the tiger shark we saw before, but a tremendous great white! We see a clearly non-related closeup of water turning melodramatically red, and then Mr. Bource is hoisted back on board by a bevy of fellow frogmen.
Score now reminiscent of Jaws; a second overhead cam captures the ensuing bloodbath—-his leg is completely severed at the knee! His friends rush a tourniquet around his thigh, not to save the leg—-now providing our epipelagic friend only meek sustenance (humans are rather bony creatures)—-but more generally the man himself. Excited chittering from our narrator and continual closeups of poor mr. Bource’s writhing upper-body. The men struggle for a good chunk of life-or-death time just to remove his swim-cap dealy, and we are led out by dramatic wheel-spinning and the unceremonious hoisting and dumping of mr. Bource back onto solid land.
The next two minutes are filled by prolepsis to Mr. Bource’s Australian home, where he is being interviewed by an attractive Japanese journalist. His newly-revealed mustache really says it all in this scene. Apparently he has also learned Japanese in the intervening period, as he is quite at ease responding to her rather astonished native questioning. GONGGGGG! Bource has revealed his artificial leg to the camera—-Japanese filmmaking subtlety at its best. Bource attributes his survival to having ‘did a lot of sports’, while our interviewer stares aghast at his deformity.
Finally, in the last 30 seconds we are presented with a bizarre visual recap of the attack, but now with a very stern male voiceover warning us of the dangers of ‘splashing’. Then an even more ominous voice relates to us three crucial facts:
1. “None of man’s fantasies of evil can compare with the reality of Jaws!”
2. “May be too intense for younger children.”
3. “May be too intense for younger children.”
So, are we to assume the entire clip was a promotional tool for Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film? If so, why/how has the MPAA rating system (started in 1968) been subverted by a mild, though persistent, suggestion of “intensity”? Could the haphazardly tacked-on footage at the end be the work of some rogue video splicer, perhaps trying to add an extra layer of intensity to the document? I have come to understand that the attack footage itself is primarily authentic, which brings us to another question:
Is it O.K. to laugh at a shark attack? Their obscurity, and in this case absurdity, can make them quite hilarious, especially when colored by the dated media of a foreign culture. But still, dude got crippled pretty much forever. But then again, he was quite sprightly in his interview. By the looks of things, the attack in no way hindered Mr. Bource’s dream of someday becoming a legendary pornographic actor/director. Is all well that ends well?
Also—-Are we really to believe that none of “man’s fantasies of evil” can top the clearly corporeal evil that is the Shark? I can at least envision a fantastically large and diabolical shark, or a two-headed shark, or a gang-land shark pointing an uzi at me, cant I? What exactly is the mode of the shark’s evil? Aren’t all creatures lacking a defined moral code bound to be equally good/evil, or neither at all? Not sure that the metaphysical judgment of sharks in this clip is all that scientifically backed…
As you can see, like any great internet meme, this clip—-though highly meaningful—-raises more questions than answers. What do u think??
