Infinite Jest features, among many other things, a world organized by what David Foster Wallace described as Subsidized Time: years that are sponsored, like stadiums and podcasts and certain exceptional humans, by commercial brands. One of these spans is the Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster; another is the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken; yet another, the focus of the novel, is the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. Which is all, like so much else in Wallace’s work, disconcerting in its familiarity: The world of 2015 may not (yet) have found ways to sell time itself in annual increments, but it has given rise to weird micro-holidays—celebrating everything from pancake-eating to lawyer-hugging—that have come about through both commercial impulse and cultural fiat. (Happy National Chocolate With Almonds Day, you guys! May your candy brim, this year and every year, with healthy fats.)
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- The website 'TV Tropes' coined the term 'Voodoo Shark,' which is defined as an attempt to explain away a plot hole that ends up falling flat. The reason for this is that the explanation is a plot hole in itself that only raises more questions.
- A bull shark haunts the rivers of Mississippi. Subscribe to Discovery TV for more great clips: http://www.youtube.com/subscriptioncenter?adduser=DiscoveryT.
And now we find ourselves midway through television’s most biting manifestation of Wallace’s Subsidized Time: Shark Week. The seven-day stretch when we, the basic-cable-watching public, come together to gawk at/laugh at/wonder at/be terrified by Great Whites and hammerheads and megalodons. The appeal of Shark Week is obvious. The festival—Stephen Colbert once compared it to a high holiday, which was probably more accurate than we’d care to admit—is cultural rather than religious, and therefore less divisive than your Christmases or your Easters or your Earth Days; it is also fanciful and educational and winking in its irony. It has featured a show called Ultimate Air Jaws, which is exactly what it sounds like, which means that it’s awesome to pretty much anyone who isn’t a harbor seal.
Recommended Reading
The Evolution of Shark Week, Pop-Culture Leviathan
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Sophie Gilbert
Recommended Reading
The Evolution of Shark Week, Pop-Culture Leviathan
Why Were We So Cruel to Britney Spears?
Sophie Gilbert
Shark Week, in other words, is an extended national holiday, and a beloved one. There is, at this point, a Shark Week drinking game. There is a “Fuck Yeah Shark Week” Tumblr (“a blog devoted to the awesomeness that is shark week, an annual, week-long series of shows about sharks on Discovery Channel”). Fans have nicknamed the event “the Super Bowl of the ocean.” For several years, the Discovery Channel building in Silver Spring, Maryland, has outfitted itself with an enormous inflatable shark to mark the return of the festival. (The shark’s name? “Chompie.”) Shark Week’s offerings—shows that have, in combination, made the 28-year-old fish-fest the longest-running cable event in U.S. history—include such docudramas as Voodoo Shark, The Shark Takes a Siesta, Shark Shooter, Shark After Dark LIVE, and I Escaped Jaws (parts I and II). The Discovery Channel has yet to offer Raiders of the Lost Shark or Zero Shark Thirty as part of the proceedings, but it has aired a show called Shark of Darkness: Wrath of Submarine, so you have to figure that the explicit Hollywood tie-ins are, at this point, only a matter of time.
Pin up las vegas review. Given all that, it’s unsurprising that Shark Week has come in, recently, for the sincerest form of flattery: It has spawned imitators. Lots of them. For the past few years, Nat Geo Wild has been simultaneously airing its own version of Shark Week festivities in the form of “SharkFest”—an attempt to capture some of the massive viewership that Shark Week has long enjoyed. (Last year, during its run in mid-August, Shark Week drew more than 42 million viewers, Discovery claims.) The attempt has been successful: The programming for SharkFest, a spokesperson told The Washington Post, has seen a 20 to 30 percent growth in viewership every year since its inception.
This year, though, the cheeky knockoff has grown even more teeth: Nat Geo began blatantly advertising itself as an alternative to Shark Week. “We want you to confuse the two,” the narrator in one spot admits. “And you will. And we don’t care because it gets us ratings.” (He announces this, by the way, as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” plays in the background.) He adds: “We’ve done it for years, and we’re gonna continue to do it.”
The Voodoo Shark Costume
Nat Geo has a point with all this shark-baiting—and not just because individual cable channels tend to blur together in viewers’ minds, particularly when those minds are addled by promises of Sharkzilla in Action. Shark Week, the ur-SharkFest, has recently come in for controversy, most notably in its eager appropriation of science both pseudo- and just plain bad. In a particularly egregious example, in 2013, Discovery aired the “documentary” Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives, which featured a search for a shark that has been extinct for millions of years. The network, pretty much ignoring the outcries against the show, came back the next year with Megalodon: The New Evidence, which presented no evidence, new or otherwise, for the current existence of the long-dead creature. In another incident, reported by NPR earlier this week, the marine biologist Jonathan Davis found his quotes—about a “legendary shark of the bayous called the Rooken”—taken out of context for Voodoo Shark. (Davis was also, he says, asked by a producer to let himself be bitten by a shark—because “that would be so exciting.”)
While “this year we’re focusing quite a bit on research and science, more so probably than we have in the past,” Howard Swartz, Discovery’s head of development and production, told NPR, the Shark Week brand, such as it is, has taken a hit from all the backlash. In addition to the questionable science, the event has also been criticized for encouraging unnecessary fear about sharks—when in fact, as the cliche goes, they have much more reason to be scared of us than we do to be scared of them. (Shark populations, marine scientists point out, are on the decline around the world, in large part because of humans.)
SharkFest, shrewdly, is marketing itself as the true shark-lovers’ Shark Week—a (slightly) more science-y alternative to Shark Week’s fishy programming. The event, says Geoff Daniels, Nat Geo Wild’s executive vice president and general manager, hopes to “undo the bad rap sharks have been given by Discovery’s over-the-top programming.” SharkFest programming, as a result, includes such relatively calm fare as “Shark Alley,” which follows sardines as they shark-dodge along the southeastern coast of Africa, and “The United Sharks of America,” which puts shark attacks into historical—and not hysterical—perspective.
Which is also to say that SharkFest is premised on the idea that Infinite Jest had its limits: Time, the event suggests, can’t fully be bought or branded—and neither can a species. There can be many Shark Weeks. Just as there can be follow-ups to that event in the form of the “Shweekend” (“shark weekend”)—an actual thing that the Discovery Channel is rolling out, for the first time, later this summer—and, elsewhere in the cable box, in the form of seemingly endless Sharknado movies on SyFy. (The third installment of the franchise, the revealingly named Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No, is set to air on that channel later this month.) As the narrator in Nat Geo Wild’s SharkFest ad sums it up: “You know what's fun? A festival. You know what's boring? A week.”
The VooDoo Sahara by VooDoo Larry Kustoms. Built as a tribute to the Barris Kustoms built Golden Sahara, VooDoo Larry's VooDoo Sahara combined details from both versions of the original Golden Sahara. The build was started in November of 2014 and completed in August of 2016. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The VooDoo Sahara as it sat in November of 2014. Larry got the car as a parts car when he bought a Kaiser for his girlfriend Colette. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Bumper mounts made, and Larry is getting ready to lay out the sheet metal for the rear quarters up to the bumper ends. Once completed, the twin fins will be 8 inches long. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Camaro front clip welded on. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
January 21, 2015, the first side getting there. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The inner structure of the driver side fins were made using round rods. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Early February of 2015 Larry was making all the trunk rain channels and the inner trunk lid bracing. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
8 foot of fin taking shape. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
February 19, 2015 the double fins on the driver side were lined. In this photo Larry has mocked up the 1958 Mercury taillight in the fin. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Larry working on the rear seat and window surround. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
April 10 Larry started to frame out the front end, trying to figure out the right angle of the fender extensions. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
![The Voodoo Shark The Voodoo Shark](https://imageresizer.static9.net.au/F-Dkf2G1MRl0eulIC9RYGNJARoE=/1280x0/vms-tv-images-prod.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com%2F2020%2F05%2F290657%2FVOODOOSHARKS_CTV-ScreensReplace-Legacy-Art.jpg)
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The Kaiser ready for undercarriage welding in April of 2015. Photo courtesy of Lawrence W Grobe, from Pre 62 Radical Kustoms on Facebook.
Photo courtesy of Lawrence W Grobe, from Pre 62 Radical Kustoms on Facebook.
The back of the car was lowered with a 2 inch C-notch in the frame. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Larry working on the hood. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Larry pancaking the hood and fabricating the scoop. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
May 31, 2015. The front end is taking shape as Larry is almost done with the headlight surrounds. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Bullets mocked up in the front end. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The VooDoo Sahara as it sat June 9, 2015. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Larry working on framing out the passenger side fins. After calculating from old photos of the Golden Sahara, Larry found out that he had to add 3 inches to the top of the fins that he first made. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
1960 Chevrolet Corvair headlight bezels were mounted vertically on the car. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Mercury bucket seats installed. The seats were mounted on Monte Carlo swivels. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The VooDoo Sahara as it sat July 30, 2015. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The VooDoo Sahara amongst other shop projects. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Mid August of 2015 Larry chopped the windshield on the VooDoo Sahara. The top was chopped 3 inches. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The top structure on the VooDoo Sahara was made from round rods. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The top sheet metal tacked in place. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The roof from the Kaiser was used to make the 6 foot long fender skirts. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Larry fine tuning the skirts. He also built out the rear quarter panel for the flush fit skirt. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Larry working on the rear end bullets. The lower bullets are for the exhaust. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
September 15, 2015 Larry pushed the VooDoo Sahara outside to check out the profile. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Voodoo Curse Movie
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The skirts on this version had been lengthened to 81 inches. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The grill bar was made from two 1959 Oldsmobile rear quarter trim pieces. A single chrome bullet was mounted in the center of the bar. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The removable T-tops hinged. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
A construction photo of the VooDoo Sahara taken in July of 2016. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The Voodoo Shark Movie
The VooDoo Sahara made its debut at the 2016 KKOA Leadsled Spectacular in Salina, Kansas. Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
Photo courtesy of VooDoo Larry.
The VooDoo Sahara was shown at the 2020 Grand National Roadster Show in Pomona, California. Photo courtesy of Charles LaGreca.
Photo courtesy of Charles LaGreca.
Photo courtesy of Charles LaGreca.
1954 Kaiser Manhattan owned and restyled by VooDoo Kings member Larry Grobe of VooDoo Larry Kustoms in Elk Grove, Illinois. Named the VooDoo Sahara, Larry's Kaiser is a tribute to the Barris Kustoms restyled Golden Sahara. Early in the build, Larry decided that the build was going to have styling elements from both versions of the Golden Sahara, but with a VooDoo twist to it.
In 2014 Larry bought a Kaiser for his girlfriend Colette. The car came with a parts car that Larry decided to use as base for his VooDoo Sahara build. The build was started in November of 2014 with Larry and his apprentice Brian Franse working after hours and weekends.
Debut
The VooDoo Sahara made its debut at the 2016 KKOA Leadsled Spectacular in Salina, Kansas. Play genies and gems.
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Finding a replacement windshield, back or side glass can be a difficult task when restoring your vintage or custom classic car. It doesn't have to be though now with auto glass specialist companies like www.suntecautoglass.com. They can source OEM or OEM-equivalent glass for older makes/models; which will ensure a proper fit every time. Check them out for more details!
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