Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
You’ve gotta hand it to Chicago. Usually, when polluting a river, you’ll do your dumping in the middle of the night when you’re less likely to be caught. Or perhaps slowly pollute over time, so it’ll be much too late by the time people notice. That’s not Chicago style, however. Chicago style is a pizza baked in a deep dish, and – oh wait, we were talking about polluting.
If you were swimming in the Chicago River and saw fins, the water might also temporarily turn yellow. (Mike Boehmer/Creative Commons)
Every year for Saint Patrick’s Day, the city happily dyes the water in the Chicago River green. Do they do this to get drunk midwesterners who think it’s green beer to jump in and start drinking? To teach kids a valuable lesson that nature should be tampered with as often as possible? To cover up the fact that the water is already plenty polluted? We may never know. However, this year, the annual tradition was interrupted… by sharks.
As if the people of Chicago didn’t have enough to worry about, they can now add sharks to the list. In the film, a category 5 storm causes flooding in a coastal town. Having seen Sharknado, of course, sharks also take to the flooded streets to swim around and eat people. In reality, unless they took the L there and jumped into it, sharks wouldn’t make it into the river, and even if they did, they’d probably opt to do so around Shark Week, not St. Paddy’s Day.
This past weekend, as the river began to turn green with fake dye, there was a possibility that it could have also turned red with real blood. Shortly after 10 am, which was when the festivities started, a pair of dorsal fins was sighted. It caught a lot of people off guard, even more than seeing a river turn bright green. Ultimately, however, it turned out to be, much like the river dye, a product of man messing with nature to create a buzz. The sharks, which circled the main part of the river on Saturday from 11:30 am to 4:30 pm, were actually part of a viral stunt for the forthcoming Netflix film Thrash, about a natural disaster.
What’s even more ludicrous is that Thrash doesn’t even take place in Chicago despite the fact that March 17th is more or less a pretty great and traditionally, a rather white holiday. Netflix fessed up to the stunt, stating that the movie will be out on April 14th, although most of the midwestern drunks celebrating a temporarily green river at 10 am on a Saturday probably forgot about the film and are still on a bender until the harsh reality of March 18th.
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
