F*** Sharks.

as shark week comes to yet another close, i'd like to look back for a moment and reiterate something that i've sworn for many, many years:

i hate sharks.

any animal that could possibly kill me, i'm obviously going to have a problem with. sharks? not too fond of 'em. granted, i can stomach that underwater conveyer belt in a tube that they have at sea world, where sharks are swimming all around you. those are four foot long, bottom feeding sharks... the kind that if you looked at it the wrong way it'd turn on its tail and flee.

last time i was at sea world, i didn't catch any great whites, tigers, bulls, or hammerheads... and for good, sound reason: those things will straight up murder your ass.

i don't understand why people swim so far out into the ocean. if i knew that somewhere - somewhere - in the ocean, there were giant fish that could strike from out of nowhere and swim off with one of my appendages in its mouth, i would not go that far into the water. if i knew a man-eating shark was spotted off the coast of england, for Christ's sake, and i was splashin' about in the water at cocoa beach, FL. like a jackass, i would still not go beyond the point where i could touch the bottom with my toes.

do you know how long it takes a great white shark to get from england to cocoa beach? you don't? well i bet its not that long - sharks swim super fast, and they have lots of teeth, and they will kill you.

me? i'm staying out of ocean water that rises above my friggin' waist. screw sharks. i'll watch them annually on the discovery channel - because, as we all know, shark week is visual heroin and no one can say 'no' to shark week - but i will not give them the time of day in person. no way.

i'll stay in the kiddie pool, thank you very much.

- brian

Mo' Channels, Mo' Jacko

hi.

so kris and i decided to stick it out another year at camden of hunter's creek. why not. its roomy enough for the three of us, and there's no rush to buy a house yet (the exception being the inevitable drum set that i obtain once i own the house to sheath it in). there isn't a whole heck of a lot of gun play to be had around these parts, and as long as you can tolerate the background hum of the 417 expressway nearby - and the occasional motorcycle rev-fest from the mechanical college students next door - its a pretty, little decent place to live.

our rent didn't go up either this year, but - get this - we were forced to pick up cable for our next lease. that's right: forced to get cable.

evidently, the property decided to purchase a giant cable package through brighthouse networks, and, in order to get a sweet rate on all of their cable packages, every tenant was forced to get cable.

including us.

so now we have cable... and i love it. history channel, comedy central, discovery channel... awesomeness abounds. having an HDTV was fun and all for DVDs and the Wii, but now that we have HD channels... holy crap. if kris and i ever divorce, i'm totally marrying my television set. seriously.

this cable, however, has become a double-edged sword over the course of the last few days. while it does give more channels than we could possibly ever watch, every single Goddamn channel is talking about michael jackson!! every single one of them! why the hell are people so worked up about this? a week ago he was the laughing stock of the entire entertainment industry: plastic surgery gone wrong, child molestation, creepo parenting, financial turmoil and scandal... you name the sleaziness, the guy had his hand in it.

but now? he's a legend. a legend.

really? really folks?!

are we supposed to pretend that those last, fifteen, creepy, creepy years never, ever happened? remember the two - count 'em, two - court trials where he was brought up on sexual assault charges for having sleep overs with little boys. or how about the fiasco where he screwed paul mccartney out of all those beatles songs that paul wrote himself? and what about his trusty, pet chimp 'bubbles,' his purchasing of the elephant man's skeleton, his blanketed kids, the surgical masks, the whole nose-falling-off thing, all that hullabaloo at neverland ranch...

neverland ranch?! c'mon, people!!

here's my suggestion, television (listen carefully): remember him for who he was. that's totally cool in my book. yes, he was a talented musician for the first half of the spotlight, and you can talk about this... just so long that you mention that he was a bat-shit crazy pedophile for the second part. if you're going to glorify the former, media, you best argue your case for completely ignoring the latter...

...'cause that's how this guy's going to remember jacko, folks.

gross...

- brian