Let's Just Clear This Up Once And For All...

No matter how many times I say this to my staff to be passed down to you ladies in the ranks, THE QUESTION KEEPS COMING BACK.  Let me just POST IT ON THE INTERNET for you:

Isaiah Shoels -- in spite of his intriguing surname, and the fact that the word "Lake" appears on his football jersey in this photo -- was NOT one of our recruits.  He was 100%, entirely Homo sapiens.  And that's a pity, because the best information available suggests that he was JUST OUR SORT.    He would have made a great fish.  But because he got waylaid in the Columbine High massacre, well, I guess it just wasn't in the cards.

Coming Soon!

(I especially like the tag line.)

SNOW SHARK

WHAT CAN I POSSIBLY SAY ABOUT THIS MOVIE SHARKTACULAR???

Well, let's start with the basics...It's a 2011 release, written and directed by Sam Qualiana and pretty much starring himself, his neighbors and his relatives.  For instance, C.J. Qualiana features as the beleaguered sheriff, and Ben, Kathy and Simeon Qualiana can be seen muttering darkly among the good people at the town hall meeting.   I daresay a lot of non-Qualianas in the cast and crew were cousins and stuff from the other side of the family...

But the real star of this show is the SNOW SHARK.  I have to tell you, THIS IS THE GREATEST IDEA A HOMO SAPIENS HAS EVER HAD ABOUT OUR CARTILAGINOUS SISTERS.  Sam Q. doesn't give the time of day to blame fool ideas about evolution or scientifically-proven features of piscatorial biology -- you know, like the fact that Sharks live in water.  He even scoffs at the laws of physics.  He just came up with a 15-foot Great White that swims through the snow, or maybe underground, but apparently only when the ground is frozen.  Yeah, it hibernates during WARM weather. This is a feat of bizarreness far outstripping the Horta in the "Devil In The Dark" episode of Star Trek.  Remember, the creature that moved through rock the way we move through the air?  Gene Roddenberry got that idea to work.  The idea in this movie does not fly at all.  It...SWIMS.  In the SNOW.

There is no way not to enjoy the ragtag group that first encounters the SNOW SHARK by accident.  It's the sort of scientific expedition you hardly ever get to see these days.  Professor Jonathan Hoffman, half of the bifurcated Captain Quint character in this movie, seeing a moving object in the snow he can't quite merit at the beginning of the movie and hearing a nutty rumor about "something in the snow in these parts" that kills, immediately realizes that the recent earthquake must have waked up an unknown species from the Cretaceous Period -- not the Jurassic or the Devonian, gosh darn it, the Cretaceous -- and is eating all the local wildlife.  He doesn't THINK this.  He doesn't SPECULATE.  He KNOWS.  Remember when Worm Guy from Fraudzilla took one look at the monster from a thousand yards away -- a creature that strongly resembles a microcephalic, carnivorous dinosaur --  and declared it an obvious case of an animal that reproduces asexually?  Hoffman makes Worm Guy look like, well, a scientist.

You also have to like the way Hoffman and his assistants stand puzzling over a pool of blood in the snow with two deer's feet, a deer's tail and a deer's head sticking up in the air -- plus a sadly misplaced raccoon's hindquarters.  The professor holds his tape recorder to his lips and says uncertainly that he...THINKS...it's a deer.  This is supposed to be an expert in the environmental sciences.

Sam Qualiana inexplicably skipped over the usual wrangling about whether or not to close the woods to hikers and hunters.  Everyone believes the legend of the Snow Shark and stays the funk away from there... But all the precautions are FOR NAUGHT as the killer Shark moves in on a hot tub full of heavily tattooed, pink-haired body jewelry models in their own back yard.  Then some kids drinking dad's beer on the sly, out by the burn barrel.  Next, a guy in the parking lot of his downtown business.

So the sheriff -- whose be-munched son was one of the kids out by the burn barrel -- calls in some reinforcements.  There's a pretty blonde animal biologist who wears puffy sleeves out into the woods to hunt for killer sharks; a queerly over-intense cryptozoologist, wearing thin khakis and a necktie out into the snowy wilderness; and the other half of the Captain Quint duo.  This guy wears beard stubble and a bush hat, and carries a pearl-handled revolver, a 9mm Glock, a machete and a crossbow to dispatch the menace.  WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES:

>> This is about what you can expect these days in terms of human scientific know-how. IT GIVES ME HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, LADIES.  Even logic, supposedly the precious jewel of human intellogence, is left behind in the bloody snow.

>> Even when I was a human I hated Santa Claus, and it gave me great pleasure to see how he bought it in this picture.

>> They never solve the mystery of how there can possibly be such a thing as a SNOW SHARK.  It's just there and it eats you if you go out in the woods.  I don't think anyone even asked, did they?

>> This movie strongly reminds me of that Jaws ripoff called Trees -- remember the one about the killer Christmas trees?  Somehow it had the same feel to it, and even the actors looked very similar.  Not to mention the nondescript little town where it all takes place.

>> The ending is happy, but I won't give it away.

You have to see this one.  It shows that WE ARE WINNING.

Why Is This Operative Smiling?

I'll tell you why.  She's one of the Stealth Escolars sent in to impersonate our embattled Tuna operatives, protecting her sisters from ANNIHILATION and a cruel death in little flat cans, while simultaneously giving the Naked Apes a case of the runs they'll NEVER FORGET.  That, in short, is a smile of satisfaction for a JOB WELL DONE.

I, personally, am disappointed that our ruse did not hold up longer.  We DO need more Tuna to survive the next few years in order to follow through with our plans.  And there is nothing that makes me happier than a Shaved Monkey with EXPLOSIVE DIARRHEA.  I know many of you feel the same way...

But we have more in store for them. 

MUCH more. 

Stay tuned!

Fish On Drugs

AND THIS JUST IN FROM UMEA UNIVERSITY IN SWEDEN...

 

The Shaved Monkeys bordering the North Sea appear to have -- amazingly -- become ALARMED at the effects of all the mood-altering human drugs seeping into the local waterways.  Benzodiazepines (drugs like Xanax, Librium and Rohypnol) in the water are making our sisters BEHAVE BIZARRELY -- though not as bizarrely as humans do, I CAN TELL YOU THAT. 

 

(Remember that sorry incident when president Bush, George the First I mean, barfed on the Japanese ambassador?  He had benzos on board that day.)

 

And that's just ONE of the drugs they pour into the water everywhere they live.  They flush them down the toidy when they are through taking something, and the ones they swallow still get PEED IN OUR FACES.

 

The fish in Swedish rivers are eating too much zooplankton, leaving safe areas to go exploring and generally behaving like a bunch of drunken monkeys, will they or nil they...

I like several things about this news item:

>> They never consider for an instant that the same drugs might be affecting their own drug-addled species the same way.

>> They have absolutely no idea how to stem the tide.  They have no suggestions.

>> This sort of concern can only spur us on the EVER GREATER RECRUITING EFFORTS.  The sooner we get rid of them... 

CATFISH

Well, I just got through reading the second edition of this remarkable volume, a 2011 publication produced by Jim Wise who calls it a work of "creative nonfiction." CreateSpace independent publishing platform, USA (ISBN 146118004X). 

WHAT CAN I SAY?  This is an unassuming little potboiler about GIANT, RAVENOUS CATFISH of the Flathead, Blue and Channel types living it up in a lake in Tennessee.  Our hero -- a parks & recreation guy named Jim Wilson, in love with an EPA gal named Jessie Johnson -- has had a dread of the water and recurring nightmares ever since a nasty run-in with a Water Moccasin, and he was already prejudiced against OUR WHISKERED SISTERS because his gramps, who used to take him fishing, said they were icky.  So this situation does NOTHING TO SET HIS MIND AT EASE.  One Swimmer, boater and Catfish noodler after another falls afoul of the menace.  The bad old paint-factory owner ignores the warning signs and sets up a floating stage where he's going to hire the Dixie Chicks to perform for every boat moored on the lake. WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES:

>> Too much Naked Ape mating ritual.  Not enough Killer Catfish.

>> There is no omniscient narrator in this story, and in scene after scene we 'hear' Jim Wilson's distinctive, folksy voice describing a scene of CATFISH HORROR that we quickly learn he never saw.  In some cases, nobody saw it but the KILLER CATFISH and the screaming Shaved Monkey victim.  This leads me to wonder whether Jim is in denial about his true relationship to the Catfish.  Are they telling him all this and he's kidding himself that he doesn't have a direct pipeline to their knowledge?  Or is it worse than that?  Is he s recruiting operative TOO DAMN DUMB not keep his lips sealed about things he MUST NOT REVEAL?

>> And why would Gramps, a Southerner all his life and an avid fisherman, have ANYTHING against Catfish, for frog's sake?  Catfish are practically sacred down there.  Is there a more secretive and personal reason he is throwing them back when he catches them?  Here's MY theory:  he was recruited by those moustachioed ladies YEARS BEFORE and cannot bring himself to KILL and EAT one.  Maybe his winces of disgust as he takes them off the hook are really signs of EMPATHY for his injured sisters.  Seriously, WHAT OTHER EXPLANATION IS THERE?

>> This book is a good example of why you should not ignore the contribution of a good copyeditor.  Sheesh, this book is a mess!  Even I, a former human travel agent and NOT THE BEST SPELLER, know that "whole" and "hole" are two different words.

You may be sure that I will be looking very seriously into good old Jim Wilson, I mean Jim Wise.  If he is a genuine security leak and not just a bad writer, he will be KILLED.  And EATEN. 

By KILLER CATFISH!

Thought For The Day

DINOSHARK

WHAT A DELIGHT THIS MOVIE WAS!  This is a 2010 release, with a cast of sexy women in bikinis and toothsome men with Don Johnson beard stubble.  The only one I recognized besides Eric Balfour (I first saw him in Skyline) was Roger Corman, who was also the producer.  There is only one DINOSHARK in this picture, but rest assured, ladies -- she's a dilly. 

When this arrived in my P.O. box -- if we had my mail delivered to the front door of the Manoogian Mansion, surely our cover would be blown -- I eagerly tore it open and saw three of the most welcome words possible on the cover of the disc box:  ROGER CORMAN PRESENTS!  Imagine my delight when Corman turned out also to appear in this film.  Does it get any better than this? 

PLOT SUMMARY:  A glacier calves in the frozen North, and we see a number of fishlike shapes breaking themselves off the new iceberg and swimming away.  Nearby, a diver is checking the hull of his boat off the coast of Alaska and is rather suddenly recruited for Dagon.  The last thing we see is something BIG and TOOTHY swallowing his emergency beacon.  Meanwhile, a beach bum named Trace, having fallen on hard times in the United States, returns to Puerto Vallarta to resume running some sort of shady charter-boat business.  IMMEDIATELY people start disappearing into the sea, as an immense, spiny operative  -- who looks like nothing so much as a cross between a  Great White and an Ankylosaurus -- puts the munch on one swimmer after another.  WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?   

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS SHARKTACULAR MOVIE:

>> Luckily, everyone in this version of Mexico speaks fluent, unaccented English.  You can only really tell you're in Mexico because everywhere you look, there are people in these immense sombreros, dancing colorful native dances or playing guitars and singing colorful native songs.  I'm serious about the hats, man; they would look oversized even if the DINOSHARK wore them.

>>  Luckily, this movie conforms to the odd little unwritten rule for human-made TV and movies:  everyone has a job, but nobody ever actually works.  Therefore, Trace, his friend Luis the bartender, and their new acquaintance Carol -- who is some sort of biologist who coaches a women's water-polo team -- have UNLIMITED TIME to hunt down the toothy menace.

>> Luckily, the DINOSHARK keeps them very busy.  There is no lull in the story for dumb stuff like character development or exposition.  Someone is getting recruited for Dagon in just about every scene.

>>  Luckily, Trace is not only totally unable to find any work to do, but he is also ARMED TO THE TEETH.  I've never seen a gun like the one he has under the seat cushion of his boat.  Jesus, you could blow up the sun with that thing.

>> Luckily, Roger Corman HIMSELF is on the job in this movie, looking at the DINOSHARK poop scraped off the emergency beacon shat out at one of the death scenes.  Like most brilliant scientists in movies like these, he spends the whole movie squinting in a worried fashion through a microscope lens.  He can identify the alien cells at a glance as being from a DINOSHARK, but what does he do about it?  Well, nothing.  Ever.

>> Did I mention the women's water-polo team?  Luckily,  not one of them dared put her face in the water even once in the course of this film, and they thrashed in the water like drowning squirrels.  This made them easier for the camera to spot, and easier to bite and swallow as the DINOSHARK closed in to eat them.  They were almost my favorite part of this film.

>> One thing I really love about the DINOSHARK is the way she jumps gaily out of the water after eating someone.  She also flings herself out of the water as she's preparing to sink a boat, by crashing down onto it mouth-first, so the whole schmeer is bitten in two and swallowed -- lost with all hands.  Yes! 

>> Luckily, the local security force is hopeless.  They go out and the DINOSHARK eats the boat immediately.  Nobody is sent out to see what became of them.  This allows Trace, Carol and Luis to face the menace on their own, in a boat that must have been sprayed with DINOSHARK repellent.

I have to say I loved this one.  I plan to submit a request to R&D to start working on developing a prototype DINOSHARK.  This idea is just too good to pass up.