The national media wasted precious inches this week in its endless, dry and rather pointless coverage of the Super Tuesday primary elections. Blinded by its incomprehensible quest to champion the story with the fewest number of interesting angles, it overlooked a veritable news gem which broke early Monday morning at the California Yacht Club in Los Angeles. Instead of reading about how Al "the Bore" Gore and George W. "I-went-to-Yale-so-I-stink" Bush were probably going to capture instead their respective party nominations (duh), we should have found the famous French adventurer Remy Bricka adorning the front pages.

Who, you may ask, is Remy Bricka? The pretentious thing would be to make the reader feel intellectually inadequate for not recognizing such an important pop culture icon. But since the writer herself had never heard of the man before she was assigned the story, we'll pity the reader somewhat. Quite simply put, Remy Bricka is a man who can walk on water--literally.

In fact, Bricka might just be the world's expert on water walking. He accomplishes the feat by balancing himself with a double-sided paddle on a pair of cance-like skis--and for overnight trips, he uses as his "rest stop" the catamaran that he drags behind him and which is stocked with supplies. In 1988, Bricka walked 3,502 miles across the Atlantic Ocean from the Canary Islands to Trinidad--a stunt which landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records for longest distance walked across water (though one has to wonder what kind of competition he was really getting in that category).

And this Monday morning, as hundreds of frazzled journalists followed hundreds of frazzled campaign staffers and their equally frazzled (though hiding it quite well) candidates from bake sale to support group to school at a hundred different press conferences with equally bad lighting and equally stilted speeches, Bricka set off--unfettered by the petty questions of politics--into the wide blue yonder. He plans to walk the Pacific Ocean to Sydney, a trip which will take him across 7,800 miles in six months, provided he struggles forward at an average of 14 hours a day. One oceanographer was quoted in the New York Times as saying: "People are lost at sea every year because of this foolishness--this guy sounds like an excellent candidate."

Foolishness? Perhaps. Well, definitely. But disregarding the danger of death by strange sea animals, high winds, dehydration, etc., it might just seem tempting to some of these politicians and their entourages. But, seeing as we're not as dumb as Bricka, we won't hold our breath waiting.

--Alixandra E. Smith