Monthly Archives: August 2013

Day 45: 8/9/13: A Very Brief History of Shark Gods

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I wonder if the 2010 Roger Corman-produced mashup Sharktopus had its  roots in a Fijian myth? (Trivia: Long before he produced Sharktopus, Corman made She Gods of Shark Reef.)

In the ancient story, Dakuwaqa, a shapeshifter and sometime shark patrols the islands hassling the innocent creatures of the reef and generally being a jerk. The Octopus God restores harmony to Fiji by wrapping  Dakuwaqa in a deadly tentacle hug until the shark  god agrees to not only protect the underwater creatures, but to guard Fiji’s divers and shark feeders as well.

1949’s Omoo-Omoo the Shark God, involves a ship captain who’s cursed when he steals the sacred pearl eyes from a shark god idol. Omoo-Omoo looks like one of those allegedly scary or cool movies that aired on Channel 56 and so vexed me as a child. I’d wait and wait for the monster promised in the title, only to find out its scenes had been mostly cut and the movie really consisted of two hours of ponderous dialogue between a buxom female scientist and an army captain who refused to take her seriously.

Today, I started thinking, as I do each time September rolls around, about a world beyond teaching. I am so excited about volunteering with Shark Angels. I started making a list of things I could do to help sharks. Then In a moment of synchronicity, just as I was wondering how I could I get started in non-profit work, an ad came on the radio for Antioch’s Masters Program in Nonprofit Management.

Maybe the shark gods are sending me a message.

Day 44: 08/08/13: Cranky Quint & The Horror of Gill Nets

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Jaws, Marine Conservation, Pop Culture and tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Here is a rather candid remembrance of Robert Shaw from Jeffrey Vorhees, who played “the doomed Alex Kintner” (a.k.a. boy on the raft) in “Jaws”:

“Everyone filming it here was really nice, except for one guy, the old drunk, Robert Shaw. He ignored the island kids. They would have baseball games and cookouts for all the extras and kids on the island—-all the actors would show up, except for Shaw. He wanted nothing to do  with “The Island People,” as he called us. As a little kid, I would go over and talk to him, “Hi! How are you today?” He would just glare and say, “Just go away.” He was always drunk, just a mess….”   From “Just When You Thought it Was Safe: A Jaws Companion.”

Hopefully a small donation I made to ban gill nets made the ocean a little safer for sharks. Here’s the deal:

Each year, California drift gillnets kill more than 3,500 thresher, mako, and blue sharks as they fish for swordfish. The bycatch rate of sharks – as well as ocean sunfish, marine mammals and sea turtles – in California’s drift gillnets is the highest of any fishery along the US Pacific Coast.

Day 43 08/07/2013: The Limits of Man

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Shark attacks evoke really conflicting responses in me.   It’s gruesome. It’s terrifying. It’s sad. Of course, I feel badly for the people who die.

But I feel equally sorry for the animals killed in retribution for the attacks, like the proposed slaughter of 90 sharks in Reunion.

Sharks are predators. Sharks live in the ocean. Sharks are one of the few animals that remind us that we too have a place in the food chain. Sharks don’t care that we work in offices, that we love our children,  or that we tend to view life with a keen sense of irony.  When they attack out of error, curiosity, or perhaps genuine hunger, they take from us not just skin and bone, but our particularity, our human special-ness. Sharks reduce us to  meat. Continue reading →

Day 42: 08/06/2013: On Feeling Small

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Today I posted a shark poem, but thought my actions aren’t really worth talking about. I’m so consumed with other work, I managed to just sign and share a petition against OCEARCH, a very “fishy” if you will great white shark tagging operation that claims to serve science, but is probably more about tracking great whites for the benefits of fishermen.

Then I remembered that this morning in my class at Sci-Arc, which is made up of international students, someone asked completely out of the blue (we were discussing the role of the architect and society), “What’s Shark Week? Why is it such a big deal here?”

My students don’ t know about my obsession, and suddenly in this architecture/ESL class, I was talking about sharks. I took the opportunity to give the grim statistics and balance the sensationalism of Shark Week with the reality of shark slaughter. It was a small moment. But I suppose that’s what this year is: 365 small moments linked together, some bigger and more important than others, but each of them some sort of step towards…what? Will I move beyond simply “raising awareness”? How can I inspire action and change?

I realize too that I like writing here every day. Even if it’s nothing more than a fragment. There is something about the “every day-ness” of it that I’ve come to rely on.

Day 42: 8/06/2013: Sharks’ Teeth by Kay Ryan

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Everything contains some

silence. Noise gets

its zest from the

small shark’s-tooth

shaped fragments

of rest angled

in it. An hour

of city holds maybe

a minute of these

remnants of a time

when silence reigned

compact and dangerous

as a shark. Sometimes

a bit of tail

or fin can still

be sensed in parks.