"Cage goes in the water, you go in the water. Shark's in the water."

So I bought myself a little something as a reward for not smoking. I was going to wait until a week had passed, but it was only on sale until Sunday. For $18 I got the Discovery Channel Shark Week 20th Anniversary Collection boxed set. At Best Buy you get a bonus disc, "Dirty Jobs: Jobs That Bite."

I can completely relate to the title of this Discovery Channel program.

I hadn't been inside Best Buy for a month or so. They have all their flat-screen televisions mounted on the walls now, so there's this impressive line of HDTV running almost the entire length of the store, but they still insist on splitting the HD signal 1287 times so the picture quality still looks like sh!t on every single television. I don't get that. I never have. I mean, for a television, isn't the way the picture looks the single most important aspect? Over and above being mounted to the wall? "Man, you can't see sh!t and everything's all jittery, but it sure does look good on that wall. Like a Jackson Pollock painting, only not on purpose."

Anyway, Shark Week. You can find this 4-disc boxed set for around $20 retail just abot anywhere, and it's well worth it for the most part. There are 14 different shows spanning the 20 years that Discovery Channel has been showing Shark Week, around 12 hours worth of material. You get a lot of bang for your $20.

I have only watched a couple of the shows so far (my TV time has been curtailed through the Summer), but I have already come to the decision that I really only like watching animals eat people in crappy 1970s movies starring Bradford Dillman. Stephanie Star Smith, I wish to marry you.

I just can't really get into real-life-animals-on-humans snackery. The narrator always makes a point to say the sharks are misunderstood creatures, but that doesn't stop the rest of the film crew from using horror movie music and quick "Psycho" camera cuts during the recreations. It gives off a number of conflicting vibes: Am I supposed to be enjoying this? Why can't they pick actors who vaguely resemble the people they are supposed to be portraying? Do I need to understand the shark's motivation in this scene? Are the shark actors paid scale? Is that unintentional pun one of the worst jokes I have ever posted on this blog?

Yes. Yes, it is.

One of the expert dudes they talked to was this guy from South Africa who was a pretty straight shooter. They were giving all this advice on how to avoid shark attacks, talking about breaking up your profile and junk, and he was all like "Once that shark sets his sight on you, there's nothing you can do about it except get bitten."

So, I didn't get into the shark attack programs too much. I did like the other shows I watched, though, so I'll get into them later on today. With pictures!