FAMILY FUN NITE AND A FISH STORY

(March 29, 2003. Hey, I thought it was funny.)

It was at my daughter's elementary school. A chance for adults to embarrass themselves playing twister, pop the balloons with your ass, etc. My kid (She’s 28 and married now.—MBS) was the hula hoop champ. I didn't do as well. The hoop was approximately the size of my waistline. Talked with the father of one of my daughter's little friends, an ex-Navy Seal. Little guy. He said "we're in a real mess over there." I mentioned I had read about the Navy training dolphins. Turns out they use sea lions too. He told me they can go down 1,000 feet. Pretty incredible.

If only we could train giant sharks. After all, the world is a dangerous place and we have to get serious about threats to the beaches. The squishes would start protesting. The other side is using savage flyin’ monkeys, and you criticize us using sharks. The moral equivalence thing again. Problem is, after the war ends, we still have these sharks and they want to keep eating people. We tell them to be content with hamburger and the occasional illegal combatant, but they're not satisfied. So now we have to declare war on the sharks. The appeasers come back, tell us to try talking to the sharks. Yeah, right. Then the radicals start up: you trained the sharks in the first place. It's your fault. No, actually it was Clinton's fault. And anyway, it's our responsibility to clean up the mess. So we start going after sharks. Only problem is, now the barracuda are pissed off and the giant squid are getting restless. Too many fish in the sea.

UPDATE: One of the dolphins has gone AWOL. There are reports it was spotted off the coast of Sweden, smoking a joint and hanging out with a glistening bluefin tuna.