Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

When it's effing SHARK WEEK and your lousy-ass Dish TV suffers a fatal malady brought on by a goddamn rain shower and the company can't fix it until after you've moved into a new house halfway through the week, just as you have to pack up and go to upstate New York for a wedding anyway. Do you understand what I am saying, people? I AM MISSING SHARK WEEK.

This is so, completely, utterly, cosmically unacceptable.

All I've been able to do is read about Shark Week on the internet, which informs me that I am missing the most awesomest television of the entire summer. From the write-up in Time Out New York:

The overall impression left by Shark Week is that modern civilization is in some sense temporary—that even as we flatter ourselves into thinking our species has subdued the planet, we are, in fact, just visiting. We chew up and spit out nature, but when it bites back—even just a nip—we react with terror, and fume at the very idea that in the 21st century, there are still some beaches or lagoons where humans shouldn’t swim.

“I was down in water with the great whites in Australia, in a cage, and I had this 18-footer come in and ram it,” Stroud recalls. “Here we are doing this film, we’re experienced, we have great equipment, I have this great cameraman, we think we’ve got it all figured out. But this shark, if he really had a mind for it, could just say, ‘You know what? That’s it. You’re all going down.’ ”

I can think of at least one satellite television company I would be thrilled to unleash a fleet of tiger sharks on right about now. ARE YOU LISTENING, DISH TV? I AM MISSING SHARK WEEK AND YOU ARE TOTALLY ON MY LIST.

A final note on The Da Vinci Code, which I finished last night: if this book is to be believed, it takes a brainiac team including a well-published British Royal Historian, a world-famous Harvard symbologist, and a Parisian forensic cryptologist about 75 pages to solve a riddle that a young junior professor of 18th-century literature can figure out before reading the last line. I'm not kvetching, and I'm not boasting. I'm just saying that I think I should be more famous and better paid.

I did keep turning the pages right up until the very end, too enthralled with yelling the answers and impending plot twists to the characters even to get up and refill my wine glass. Which, in this reader's estimation, is a pretty fun way to spend a cold evening.

OK, enough of this Dan Brown business. When was the last time we had a good shark post? Or, for that matter, a good robot post? Do you see where I'm going here? Could it be ... robot sharks?

Pretty damn close. According to Discovery News, the Pentagon is funding research into neural impants that will turn everyday, run-of-the-mill sharks into "Stealth Sharks."

"The Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails," said the report, carried in Saturday's edition.

"By remotely guiding the sharks' movements they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted," the article said.

Without even mentioning the ethical issues of taking endangered wild animals and transforming them into remote-controlled drones of the U.S. military, it seems to me that this is a Very Bad Idea. Have these people never seen The Day of the Dolphin (the Oscar-nominated film in which George C. Scott and his hot lab-partner/wife teach dolphins to speak English by forging creepy paternal bonds with them and then watch in horror as their humanoid dolphin-son is abducted and used in a plot to assassinate the president)? Have they never seen Deep Blue Sea (in which a team of scientists have the bright idea to cure Alzheimer's by injecting mako sharks with a serum to make their brains grow really, really big and then are shocked when the sharks get really, really smart and take over the lab and eat everyone, including LL Cool J's parrot)? Is our government really funding a project to develop A Button that controls the minds and wills of a global Army of Sharks? Is no one on the Pentagon's payroll to ask questions like, What if the bad guys happen to get the shark remote? What if rewiring the brains of the ocean's most ferocious and ancient creatures doesn't exactly line up with the current national agenda? What if the sharks turn out to be as clever as they are in every movie scenario of this sort and turn around and eat us all en route to inheriting the earth?

For the second time in this post, I cannot help but feel that I have untold marketable skills that are not being put to use.

Seriously. Because I woke up at 5am with honest-to-god back pain. I know many people suffer from back pain, but, until 5am this morning, I was not one of them. And now I've got this weirdly intense ache just under my left shoulder blade that is, at times, so painful it makes me feel a little nauseated. So far, no amount of the regular pain killers has had any effect. Is this what being old is like? Oy.

I don't know if you've heard this sad news: 14-year-old girl killed by shark in FL. I know it's hard to remember that sharks aren't malicious killers when this kind of thing happens. But, in the interest of perspective, I can offer you this table of comparative risks, which usefully reminds us that, before we begin freaking out about shark bites, we should spend some time freaking out about lightning, tornados, bicycles, toilets, and NYC squirrels, among other things.

Now don't you feel safer?