Still in Kona.

If you ever have the chance to go night snorkeling with giant manta rays, trust me: you must go night snorkeling with giant manta rays.

If, like me, you are from a part of the world where people do not snorkel with giant manta rays as a part of everyday life, do not worry.  It is actually very easy.

In Ohio, when I was growing up, the closest thing to snorkeling we had was a bunch of guys who would wait for the middle of February, punch a hole in the ice, rip off their shirts, and dive into the freezing water.  There would be TV cameras around, and a lot of people going Woooo and Yaaaa.  And this would make the evening news for exactly the same reason that uncontrollable fires and 14-car pileups make the news.  It would also look about as appealing.

But in Kona, there are companies you can pay to transform your body into a rubber-clad piece of driftwood and hurl you off the side of a boat in the path of exceedingly bright lights.  The lights attract plankton, and the plankton attract 1500-pound giant manta rays, and the 1500-pound 12-foot giant manta rays attract me, so now you’re reading about it.

So, sploosh.  Blurble.  Blurble.  Blurble.  Wait.

Then, MANTA RAY!  GIANT MANTA RAY!  And it’s headed right for us!

The manta rays are harmless, although a few hundred thousand plankton would probably disagree tonight.  They feed.  You watch.  Sometimes the mantas decide to take a second to scope you out.  This involves you holding very still while they run the length of their body along yours, six inches away, in sort of a slow, undulating arc.

If you’ve ever had a lap dance from a 3/4-ton marine animal, you know exactly how this feels.

If you haven’t, then you must go night snorkeling with giant manta rays.

That is all.

Nice job, NBC.

20-year-old kid gets a little overexcited for maybe two seconds, is instantly punished by life itself, and you catch her in a small lie while she’s trying to explain it to herself a few minutes later, then rake her over the coals for another half-hour.

And yet somehow, on your Sunday morning talk shows, you never seem to have the ability, ever, to confront anyone in the White House or the Congressional leadership on their stream of obvious, ongoing, shameful lies on about thirty different subjects.

Gosh. If only the media could have the same balls around the powerful as they do around a humiliated and disappointed 20-year-old girl.

Yeesh.

UPDATE: I wrote the above while exhausted at the end of a long day of snorkeling, and I believe my head may have been underwater a bit too long.  This may be the most unclear thing I’ve ever posted, and my bad. It’s in reference to an instant-classic Olympic flub that I assumed (wrongly) would be all over the news for its sheer embarrassing glory: American snowboard racer Lindsey Jacobellis was within seconds of winning a gold medal, with one of the biggest leads anyone will ever see in that sport: only one competitor was even still standing, and she wasn’t even within sight. So young Lindsey began hotdogging a few seconds from the finish line, and immediately not only fell down, but threw herself from the course entirely. By the time she managed to climb back up and regain her direction, zzzzip! went her pursurer right by, and that was that.

It was an amazing example of hubris being instantly punished, and NBC seized on it by repeating the video over and over, interviewing her immediately afterwards, while she was still in shock and trying to rationalize her foolishness, then repeating the video again a few more times, and then interviewing her yet again. And when her rationalization was obvious crap, they said so, with a bluntness one never sees in the news division.

So that’s the reference.

What I forgot, of course, is that unusually few Americans are even watching the Olympics this year, partly because NBC always manages to make the games almost completely unwatchable, interrupting a perfectly enjoyable three-hour block of Visa card commercials with short bursts of actual athletics. These are terribly distracting from the main subject of the Olympics, which is of course Bob Costas. I understand that for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, NBC is planning not to show any events at all, but merely let Bob Costas sit around a studio with friends, strumming a guitar, while Visa card ads play continuously on three cable networks. This will finally eliminate all those pesky images of world-class athletes which so vex the Olympic viewer.

Anyway, Lindsey Jacobellis flying too close to the sun is what the post up top was about. My bad.

In Hawaii at the moment, at Kona on the big island.

Flying here, I actually saw this, I swear to you:

A nice woman in her early 40s was asked to step out of the security line for what seemed to be a random pat-down.  The TSA employee patting her down went about her business, and then suddenly fixated on a small hard spot underneath the woman's shirt, maybe four inches below her left breast.

The TSA worker patted and poked this object several times, with an increasing look of concern.  

Finally, the screener asks: "Ma'am, what is this?"

"Oh, that?  It's nothing" the lady says.

The screener's radar goes up.  Time to call for backup.  "Ma'am, I need you to tell me what this is."

The lady pauses, looks the screener straight in the eye, and with a withering look I hope I never receive, delivered a full and complete explanation.

"That's my rib," she said.

Just learned that the kind folks at Wampum have included this here blog in the first round of voting for the 2005 Koufax awards for Best Writing and Most Humorous Blog.

The voting isn’t open yet.  But you might enjoy clicking over and checking out the other blogs listed.  (I’d say "competition," except I really don’t see it that way.)  If you appreciate Wampum’s work — and they have a terrific blog themselves, in addition to the Koufaxeseses — you might even throw a buck or two in their tip jar on the left.

Fox News has spent much of the morning repeatedly interviewing a doctor
who claims that the physicians attending Whittington (at least some of
whom, let’s not forget, are White House doctors) have said things that
don’t add up and may have been less than observant in their initial
care.

Subtle message, easily missed: if Whittington dies, it’s not Cheney’s fault — it’s medical negligence.