The SL Enquirer: Shark week

Summer is known for her iconography, things like beach days, cookouts, fireworks, parades, baseball and so forth. It is also known for Sharks,

Sharks- unfairly- are summer's main Villain. A shark could kill you in a blizzard if you crossed paths, but you are more likely to run into Mr. Toothy during the summer months, when you are swimming. This sort of ties Summer and Sharks together. That's why the Discovery Channel does Shark Week in July, and it's why LeLoo's World is currently doing Shark Week.

I talked to LeLoo for a while, forgot to ask her what the sim does the rest of the year (I know she does some Halloween stuff, which I will check out at a future date), but we can get to that later. People like LeLoo, who have an interest and start building that interest into an actual sim, are who make SL go. What she is doing now is Shark Week. LeLoo is a shark lover, and she gives the sim over to the Fish Fatale every July. She expects to leave the sim up for about three weeks, so get to steppin'.

Sharks predate man, predate Moses, and at least some ancestor of theirs probably ate a dinosaur. They are, as Dr. Hooper described them, a perfect engine. They swim, eat, f*ck... nothing else. There will never be Shark Culture, Shark Science, Shark Economics... they are not in the running for Species Most Likely To Create Space Shuttles. Sharks have little need for all that stuff humans worry about, which is a shame because they'd really enjoy all the attention and celebrity that they get on the Discovery Channel. They just hang out and chow. Very few sharks right now are saying, "I haven't written anything for a month, Lanai is going to fire me."

Sharks and humans should never meet. Humans aren't designed for the water, and we only move through water with great difficulty and innovation. We need things like boats, inner tubes, scuba tanks, submarines, flippers, masks and wetsuits. Sharks, who need to be pushing through water in order to breathe, are equally unsuited for the dry land part of the Surf & Turf. Sharks are aware of this, and only come ashore by accident. Humans, on the other hand, figured out ways to survive in the water. Sharks, just by doing what they do, disturb that equation.

Humans pretty much run the planet, and are the masters of all they survey. That gets a bit touchy if a tiger or a cobra is around, but that's why the gods made guns and Rikki Tikki Tavi. For the most part, humans can avoid being killed by animals if they avoid areas that Lions or Crocodiles hang out. However, you can get Offed by doing something as simple as swimming, and it doesn't matter if you are swimming under the lights of New York City if a shark comes around. In fact ("fact" in this case means "legend,"), the first white guy eaten by a shark in America was killed in the Hudson River.

An American can laugh off a bear attack as a deep forest thing. They can laugh off alligator attacks as a Florida thing. But we all like to go to the beach, and we all like to go swimming. When we do that, we sacrifice our place at the top of the food chain. Humans don't do that too often, and the psychological effect is profound.

The Discovery Channel does not devote a week to people getting hit by lightning, although- according to the stats I'm looking at- you are 50 times more likely to die from a lightning strike than a shark attack. Come to think of it, I'd watch a show where it was just people getting hit by lightning, so maybe that's a bad example.

OK, you are 800 times more likely to die of Extreme Cold. Aside from people who live in alligator country and want to laugh back at Yankees who laughed at them getting snatched by a crocodile, very few viewers would tune in to watch a week of programming devoted to people freezing to death. It would be a week of basically the end of The Shining. Freezing people just sit still and freeze, if you were clicking by and saw a show on it, you'd think the video broadcast had seized up. Bad for ratings. No Va.

There are at least some years where more people are killed by a vending machine toppling over onto them as they try to shake a Snickers loose than are killed by sharks. There is no sim on SL devoted to vending machines falling over onto people. I know... I checked. I'd also watch a show about that, but we're near the end of the tangent.

Freezing to death, getting hit by lightning or having a Coke machine fall on you, while killing you as dead as a shark would, won't eat you afterwards. That fact, plus the shark's basic Jungian archetypical role as America's Dragon, propel them into Superstardom.

Shark Week at LeLoo's World is a fun visit. It is a beach scene, although my Cape Codder beach radar tells me "Atlantic Canada" for some je-ne-sais-quoi reason. You can very easily spend a pleasant SL beach day here without even being interested in sharks, I posed with two sandcastle snowmen and floated on an inflatable shark which didn't try to eat me. One thing I learned as a wandering reporter is that sim design should have a main theme, like Sharks, but should also have a basic background blueprint, like Atlantic Canada. This sim nails that. It is a perfectly normal beach... with a deadly twist.

If the editors include the picture with me, the shark and the surfboard, know that I spent quite some time trying to flip from shore onto that surfboard for a more effective, close up shot. I was a cheerleader for the SLCS for a while, and I was- and am- very good at the flipping part. I can pretty much flip up onto any surface, and land on a dime. I'm known for it in the circles in which I travel. I could not stick that jump. I tried 25 times, each failure dunking me about 20 feet deep in the ocean. I had to walk out, too. I couldn't just flip back onto shore. The surfboard was about a half meter further than my best leap, even with a running start. Pissed me off... but that's not the sim's fault.

The other stupid thing I did was try the Dunk Tank. This is the basic carnival dunk tank, where you throw a ball at a target and dunk the person sitting over the water tank. This may be a Massachusetts thing, but this is a job usually handled by an insult comic in a clown suit at all the carnivals I go to. "Try to drown the rude, rude clown." However, at Shark Week, the water tank has a shark in it. I was by myself on this assignment, so I couldn't throw the ball while concurrently sitting on the dunking platform. I offered a fellow visitor 100 Ls if she'd sit there while I dunked her, but she declined.

I did sit on the platform (I nailed that flip), and even dropped into the tank for a picture with the shark that came out so well that I declined to use it. I jumped back on the platform, and then jumped off the platform afterwards. Too late to stop myself, I realized that I was emulating Fonzie. I was jumping the shark. I always knew that day would come, but the sudden self-realization was like a hammer blow.

Shark Week At LeLoo's World.... http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Friends/56/162/36