Sharks, sharps, flats.

We played a lot of card games in my house when I was growing up, and if someone were to have a particularly good run my mother might call him a card shark. Interesting to note that was kind of a misnomer, except it wasn't. 

The term card shark is well-known, and was the name of a popular game show, but it doesn't make much sense. While the term shark is used for someone very driven at work (especially lawyers), we don't usually append the term shark to an activity to show someone is good at it. A good cook is not a kitchen shark; a great writer is not a word shark. But a pool shark is someone really good at pool, and for the same reason as the card shark -- it comes from cheating.  

We're gonna need a bigger pot.

In centuries past, sharks were not considered the magnificent beasts that the aquariums tell us they are now, but rather were considered parasites, ones that fed on others, as with loan sharks. So we might think that a card shark is either a mighty beast or a parasite that lives on smaller prey, but that may not be how the term originated. 

The word sharper as a noun likely came to the English language from the German schärfen, for sharpen, a way of calling someone a cheater, at least according to Grammarist. I suspect it may come from cheaters doctoring card decks by trimming or notching particular cards in a subtle way so they could tell what their opponents were holding. Oddly, I haven't seen that possible explanation online, but we know that deck doctoring is why new cards come in sealed boxes -- to avoid such tricks. 

Over time the card sharp, a kind of odd phrase, seems to have accidentally become card shark. But while the card sharp may be a cheat, a card shark is more often someone who's just really good at card games. (Different dictionaries, however, will define the terms differently.) It has been my experience in the real world that calling someone a card sharp is an accusation of cheating, but calling him a card shark is not. Whether the player is a card sharp or shark, though, he's not someone you want to go up against. Or at least, you'd best be a master at either method of play to go against him. 

Personally, that's why gambling has been the one vice that's had limited attraction for me -- there is no limit to the amount you can lose, and in a short time. What fun is that? I work too hard for my dough.

Shaaaaaark!!

It's the annual Shark Week on the Discovery channel, and they're preempting all their regular programming for a humongous Sharkathon. They've been doing this since 1988. Twenty-nine years of sharks. I remember seeing ads for it before I even got the Discovery channel. I can't believe they're still at it. 

The ratings for this are still great. Last year they dipped a bit because they moved it to earlier in the summer, desirous of avoiding competition from the Summer Olympics. Now they're back and, I presume, sharkier than ever. Speaking of the Olympics, the Shark Week festivities opened this year with the Michael Phelps vs. Great White Shark swimming race. (Spoiler alert! Shark won.) 

I'm puzzled by the shark appeal. 

We have a lot of ways of thinking about sharks. We may see them as: voracious eating machines (Jaws), nature's amazing beautiful swimmers (oceanographers who hated Jaws), subject of comical movies (Sharknado and sequels), or dinner (people who like seafood that tastes like pee). Discovery tries to thread the needle, on one fin showing sharks as maniacal death beasts from hell, while on the other fin placating ichthyologists by saying nice things about them. 

I suppose what you think of sharks depends on your perspective. If you're in a restaurant, that's one thing. If you're in the ocean, that's another. If you're on I-64 near Louisville, you're probably not thinking about them much at all. 

But that proximity is part of the interest, isn't it? I don't follow Shark Week, but I'll bet many of the shows make the viewer wonder What would I do if that was me and a shark was coming my way? And there are not a lot of good answers to that. Sharks occupy a space in our psyche that mammals do not. There are a lot more teddy bears than teddy sharks. Sharks kill more people in the US than bears or snakes or dogs or poisonous spiders, so even though an infinitesimal number of deaths are caused by sharks, compared to cars or cancer or coronary disease, they beat other critters cold. 

The thing about sharks, though, is that to get sharked to death -- contra Sharknado -- you have to be in its element. Even the best human swimmers are pretty weak compared to stuff that swims down there all the time. If you're in bear country, you and Grizz are kind of on equal footing, but if you're in shark country, Bitey Face has all the advantages. So what makes a shark attack so terrifying is that you've yielded so much to your opponent already. It's like beginning a chess game with one pawn, a rook, and your king. And your king's in check.

So you really have to stay away from the water. Back in 2013, when I was writing on my old defunct blog, a Canadian moose made the news by becoming supper for a shark, which then nearly choked to death because it just ate a huge freaking moose. 

Now, the moose in question was probably dead when the scavenging shark found it. Our lesson: if you don't want to be eaten by a shark, it would help to not die on the beach.

And that's pretty much my goal, not to be eaten by a shark. So I'll be staying in the living room. If a shark tries to break in here, it's in for a world of hurt.

Sharker image.

You know it's really sad for the Discovery Channel when their big whoop Shark Week programming resorts to reruns of Jabberjaw. 

But it's even sadder when they have to get old episodes of Misterjaw (featuring his pal Catfish).

And when they go a game show based on the old Ideal Game of Jaws game....

It is very difficult for anyone under a certain age to understand the effect that the movie Jaws had on an astonished world. Back in the 1970's and early 1980's, one enormous movie could kick the culture into an unpredictable direction, and it happened several times: Jaws, Star Wars, The Sting, Saturday Night Fever, E.T., Raiders. I'd say in the 1960's the only time that happened was Dr. No, and even with Bond it took a fast run of movies to really dominate and change the culture. Apologies to Steven Spielberg, but compared to Jaws, he's been in a sophomore slump for 41 years,

These days I do believe popular culture is so broken and scattered that one movie can no longer have that power. I think it's a good thing, really. I mean, do we really need the Jaws game? A Saturday morning shark cartoon? Two Saturday morning shark cartoons?

The power of Jaws is still in force today. No Jaws, no Shark Week. No worldwide reports when a shark bites someone in New Zealand. No big scene with Bruce and Sharks Anonymous (or whatever they called it) in Finding Nemo. And definitely no Sharknado.

And no way would I have tried shark in a Spanish restaurant a few years back. I thought it would be funny to bite a shark before he bit me. What I didn't know was that uncured shark meat is full of urea, and so my nice shark steak tasted like pee.

So sharks, if you see me in the water, don't worry. I won't bite you. You taste terrible.