Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, thanks to his dear college roommate, is always on the prowl for neat shark stories. Alas, the past weekend has been filled with sad shark stories.

In case you missed it, on Saturday a 14 year old girl was killed when a shark repeatedly attacked her off the coast of Destin, Florida. Now it seems a young boy has been attacked off the Florida panhandle.

Two attacks in three days. One fatal and this one “critical.” Your Maximum Leader certainly does feel for the parents and friends of the children. He also doesn’t wish anyone be attacked by sharks.

One wonders what could be causing those sharks to attack these kids? From everything your Maximum Leader has heard sharks are not man-eaters but “man-biters.” It is almost as if there is something particularly unflavourful about humans to a shark. At least until recently…

So is there a reason? Is this one bad shark? Is the shark’s normal prey in short supply? Have the sharks finally caught on that Americans are fat and tender? Are people just behaving badly in the water?

(Excursus: Okay… That whole line about Americans being fat and tasty is a little much. Your Maximum Leader will say a decade worth of Hail Mary’s in atonement.)

One wonders. Of course one wonders if this will cause a spat of sportsfishermen to head to Florida to kill them some sharks… If so, one hopes that they could freeze some of the fins and send them to your Maximum Leader so that he can get a little fresh Shark Fin soup. Which he does love in fact, but rarely gets for two reasons. First, is that he objects to killing sharks for the fins only. Second, it is prohibitively expensive in the few restaurants which serve it.

Humm… One can also hope that no one else is attacked…

Carry on.