jaws

I recently finished Ernest Hemingway's classic, The Old Man and the Sea, which I somehow missed out on during school. Hemingway is remembered as the quintessential mid-century outdoorsman; however, a close reading of novel reveals his own confusion about the ocean and the superstitions he projected onto sea creatures, particularly the ominous sharks that star in the dramatic climax of the narrative.

The sharks are portrayed as bloodthirsty, greedy, and mindless killers, "like a pig to the trough, if a pig had a mouth so wide that you could put your head in it." As the sharks attack the old man's mythical fish, he curses and beats and stabs and kills them, narrated in language steeped in the imagery of a man fending off some barbarian horde.

Oh, sharks. When will you stop being terrifying?

Late last week, police charged a man with disorderly conduct for saying he spotted two great whites off the beach of Martha's Vineyard - the selfsame spot where movie-monster Jaws hunted humans in 1974.

Too bad the man's sighting was fabricated, and cleared the beaches for no reason. While the Jaws mythos is still going strong, your chance of being killed by a shark is one in 264 million.