Shark Fin Soup for the Soul

     As I was slurping away my shark fin soup today, I couldn’t help but wonder what it is exactly that makes shark fin so tasty to other people. It’s chewy, stringy, and to be honest, rather tasteless (luckily, there’s Tapatio, the messiah of condiments). Then it came to me. It hardly matters that shark tastes similar to the shoelaces on my awesome brand new Onitsuka Tiger California 78s, it’s all a matter of power. As humans, we not only stand in the top tier of the food chain, we are indisputably the apex. Eating animals has always been more of a pride issue for our species, as we eat any animal we want, just because we can. Now, the shark is doing not so bad on nature’s ladder, but it’s time to show them who’s the real boss. So the next time you drink shark fin, or bite into your alligator sandwich, you can smile to yourself, because this event represents your indomitable reign over nature’s proletarians. Damn, it feels good to be king.

Alien

     I know I’m a bit behind on movies, but it’s never too late to check out a classic. Recently I watched Alien, a supposedly outstanding sci-fi semi-horror movie made in 1979 which grotesquely depicts the future of space travel. I’ll assume from this point forward that anyone who has not seen the movie already won’t mind spoilers.
     The movie begins with your average futuristic space ship: enormous, fully equipped with artificial gravity, a cockpit with too many colorful buttons minus their labels, and a computer which lacks a user-friendly interface. It’s bringing over 20 million tons of ore back to earth, which, by Newton’s first law, would take several atomic bombs simply to move it at a snail’s pace. But physics fallacies aside, the “old-school” retro feel (think Star Wars) is not present here. Instead, it’s as tasteless as the watered-down orange juice at my school’s dining commons. Unfortunately, even when the action begins, this doesn’t wear off.
     Through some boring circumstances, the crew lands on a desolate planet completely devoid of any life form, except, of course, for an invincible alien species that evolved to survive on… nothing. But despite its non-necessity for dietary supplements and lack of predators, it possesses copious amounts of teeth, blood that burns through anything except its own skin, and a complex biological defense mechanism that allows it to reproduce itself in another being, impervious to stomach acid. As in all horror, the main characters lack any sense of caution, and through some more stodgy circumstances the sucker winds up on the spaceship, thanks in part to an android that’s filled with milk.
     People’s imagination of the future is always so silly, because the things they dream up never seem to be the case. In the present, we don’t communicate with each other in those video phone booths from Blade Runner, and our cars do not hover one and a half feet above the ground. Similarly, our future will not comprise of cloaking suits, androids, and plasma grenades. In fact, I will be as bold as to say that anything people dream up today will most certainly not be in the future.
     But despite my meaningless gripes, the movie Alien did raise up an interesting question. After the movie was over, I was wondering the same thing all the other moviegoers wondered after this movie. What would happen if Alien went and fought Predator?