EFTA00384212.pdf

From: Will Ford To: undisclosed-recipients:; Bcc: IMIEla t `Ma> Subject: Sep 6th tidbits & quotes Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 11:46:21 +0000 Attachments: mime_part_l.pdf "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it." - Mark Twain Volvo invented the three-point seat belt, then gave free license to all other auto manufacturers to use it. • Fantasy football leads to an estimated $20 billion loss in productivity every year. • North Dakota has the most intense fantasy football participation by state. • The first ever fantasy football draft was held in 1963 and the first overall No. 1 pick was George Blanda. • The best all-time single season fantasy performance was Tom Brady in 2007. • However, Brady followed his record-breaking performance by suffering a season-ending injury in the first game of the 2008 season, costing an estimated $150 million shift in potential winnings for fantasy owners who drafted him that season. "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." - Ralph Waldo Emerson DEPT. OF WILDLIFE - CAPE FEAR - Tracking the sharks of New England. BY ALEC WILKINSON (SEPTEMBER 9, 2013) - When I was a child, growing up summers in Wellfleet, people said that there couldn't be sharks in the water, because the water was too cold. They had apparently not read Thoreau. In "Cape Cod," published in 1865, he writes that he saw "the relics of a human body, mangled by sharks." A wrecker—someone who scavenged shipwrecks—told him that he had caught a "man-eating shark fourteen feet long" where Thoreau had just swum. "Man-eater" is a bygone name for a great white shark; scientists simply call them white sharks. They were also called "white death." Their undersides are white, and their tops are gray, and a modem name for them is "the men in gray suits." They are solitary animals, and in the Atlantic they are sufficiently uncommon that no one knows how many there are, although it is assumed that there are not many. Now and then, gillnetters catch them unintentionally, but a fisherman in New England might spend his life on the water and not see one. I saw only one shark as a child, at Newcomb Hollow, in, I think, 1960, washed ashore after a big storm. I don't know what kind it was, but I recall it as being about ten feet long. The beach was still wet from the rain, and the shark lay at the end of a track its body had made in the sand. Someone my older brothers knew had wrapped a rope around its tail and tried to drag it into Gull Pond, to scare the tourists. The appeal of white sharks to the imagination is so obvious that it hardly needs stating, but, even so, like all big, fierce creatures, they exemplify the mysterious and ungovernable parts of our lives. White sharks roam the ocean the way unspecified urges and figures roam the psyche—liable to appear abruptly, often destructively, and whenever they decide to, on their terms, not ours. When I think of white sharks, I think of the maps from antiquity that have whirlpools and sea monsters and blank areas where the unknown begins. Once you enter the ocean deeper than your knees, you become part of the food chain. In July of 2012, a white shark in Truro, the town north of Wellfleet, grabbed a man named Chris Myers by one of his legs. Myers kicked the shark in the face seven or eight times with his other foot. He felt he was kicking something indifferent and immovable, like a refrigerator, he told me. Eventually, the shark let go. Then it rose to the surface, as if, Myers said, to display its bulk. White sharks engage in a reconnaissance tactic called spyhopping, in which they rise from the water for a few seconds, and the shark may simply have been trying to determine what it had mistaken for prey. When white sharks get big, they like to eat big things, meaning seals, which have a lot of fat. Shark EFTA00384212 scientists regard a bite such as Myers received as exploratory. White sharks have very sensitive noses and mouths, and they like to feel things with them, the way we use our fingers. It is reasonable to assume that the shark bit Myers, felt bones and not fat, and retreated. Myers had damage to his tendons and needed forty-seven stitches. The attack was the first in Massachusetts since 1936, when a white shark bit a sixteen-year-old boy in Mattapoisett, near New Bedford, who died while being operated on. For the rest of last summer, Truro put signs on the beaches warning about sharks, but college kids kept stealing them for their dorm rooms....To finish reading, see attachment... EFTA00384213