The new craze in sports broadcasting is lying to the viewer about the starting time of events. The guide on TV will say a game begins at 8 o'clock, but that's actually when the network begins it's pre-game coverage, not the actual game. The game itself will kick off sometime around 8:15. The first 15 minutes are spent getting everyone's "final thoughts" about the game you are about to watch, which is what they could have done during the half-hour pre-game show that just finished, but that is neither here nor there. I just can't watch it, because I can't stand CBS's pre-game team. [sidebar: I actually don't know anyone who prefers CBS's studio team, but I could just need to expand my circle of friends.] I think Marino looks smarmy, Cowher is too happy to laugh at everyone else's bad jokes, Sharpe is a mumble-mouthed idiot and Esiason just wants to poke at Marino the whole time. I would feel bad for James Brown, but this is what he gets for leaving a good show over on FOX for this debacle.
The point is, I would rather watch 15 minutes of anything else and then change over when the game starts. So, I was flipping around the hundreds of channels that are available to me when I saw the single greatest show name in the history of television programming on the National Geographic channel: The Whale That Ate Jaws. I love everything about that title. How was this not the highest-rated show on television last night? Who can resist tuning into a show with that title? Jaws is one of my favorite movies and we all know that shark week is a rating boom every year. Now you're telling me that they can't even stand up to whales? How big was the shark? How big was the whale? What kind of whale was it? I was full of questions.
The show centered around video captured by a scientist a few years of a Killer Whale eating a Great White shark. Turns out there is a colony of Orca whales in the waters off of southern California who have learned to kill just about anything that gets near them because, due to a lack of fish in the area, they need to be able to eat whatever gets close. The list of options includes Great White sharks, which they have figured out how to kill quite easily. While the rest of the program was filled with the typical science show "Well, we don't know for sure, but here's our best guess" graphics that drive me crazy, it was still pretty interesting. The most unusual thing I learned was that the day after capturing the video of the Orca killing a Great White there were no Great Whites in the area. The scientist had been tracking the movements of over 100 Great Whites and they all took off right after the attack. So, for all the talk of Great Whites being badasses, in actuality, they're kind of pansies. In light of this revelation, perhaps we should re-think our position on the 1977 movie Orca. Maybe with this new information it should supplant Jaws as the best "killer-sea creature" movie?**
** Yeah, just kidding. Orca was terrible.
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