Shark Week Returns!

Do you remember the end of Dickens' A Christmas Carol? When Scrooge awakens to find that it's Christmas morning and he hadn't missed it; that there was still time for redemption if he kept Christmas in his heart every day? Well, that exquisite mania is exactly how I felt earlier in the week when I discovered that, for the first time in 3 years, I hadn't missed this year's Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

Shark Week is like seven Christmases in a row, which means it more closely resembles Hanukkah. But instead of presents, menorahs, and Manischewitz, you get shark-themed versions of Myth Busters and reenacted footage of shark attacks paired with interviews of people who lost limbs to shark encounters.

The thing that always gets me is that these amputees are never bitter. Their standard answer is that the sharks were just being sharks when they bit off their leg and left them with a grotesque stump. That's sort of like the non-baseball equivalent of saying it's just Manny being Manny, except sharks achieved their awesomeness through millennia of evolution.

To whet your appetite for Shark Week, here are some facts about sharks:

• Sharks don't actually have bones in their bodies; their skeletons are composed of a mimetic poly-alloy like the T-1000.
• Sharks have to swim constantly. If sharks stop swimming, the earth will stop rotating.
• The Whale Shark is the biggest fish in the world. It's the size of the island kingdom of Tonga.
• A Great White shark's only natural enemy is Cthulu.
• Experts estimate that your chances of being attacked by a shark are 1 in 65,000,000. However, 95% of Shark Week programming focuses on shark attacks.
• Although Shark Week runs from August 2-8 on the Discovery Channel, it is recommended that you live every week like it's Shark Week.