Word: sharked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) on 30 Rock once sagely declared, "Live every week like it's Shark Week!" But what does that mean? You could say it means to seize the day, to live as if at any moment, a hammerhead might chomp through your torso...
...could mean something else. Shark Week--returning Aug. 2 to Discovery Channel--is not actually a week when people get attacked by sharks. It is a decades-old TV ritual in which millions of people watch in awe of toothy monsters that will never get within biting distance of most...
...live every week like it's Shark Week, then, might be a metaphor for living in our media environment: to spend every week titillated by unlikely threats, getting whipped into frenzies, yawning over high-minded stuff like health-care policy and supping from the delicious chum bucket of hysteria. The President is a secret Kenyan who faked his birth certificate! Terrorists are coming to get you! And the world is going to end, six different ways! But first a word from our sponsor...
Coincidentally, one of the best recent critiques of how media overkill works is airing during Shark Week. Summer is high season for media freak-outs. This year, we've had celebrity deaths, political sex scandals and a conspiracy theory that President Obama was born outside the U.S., revived by the likes of CNN's Lou Dobbs. Sharkbite Summer (Aug. 4) looks back eight years to when a few high-profile shark attacks sent the media into their own feeding frenzy. The summer of 2001, postrecount and pre-9/11, was notoriously slow on news. (Hence, it was also the season...
...attend to top-secret conferences, but not to give opinions, only as an extra body - "room meat." And he's so fearful of scandal that, if left alone at night in a hotel room on a trip to Washington, he'd be "trying to spank one out over a shark documentary, 'cause I'm scared if I watch a porno it'll end up in the Register of Members, Interests." (See TIME's top 10 expensive military planes...