Man, woman overboard!

In another of the weekend's bizarre stories, a man and woman fell 50 to 60 feet off a cruise ship's balcony in the Gulf of Mexico early yesterday morning — fortunately, they're OK, but the incident is raising questions about exactly how they managed to fall in the first place.

The man, 22, and the woman, 20, fell from the balcony of the woman's cabin aboard the Grand Princess when the ship was about 150 miles off the Galveston coast. Friends of the man and woman told the crew that the pair had gone overboard at about 1:30 a.m., eight hours after the ship had sailed from Galveston. Crew members set off in rescue boats and were assisted by the Coast Guard and a nearby cruise ship; they found one of the pair at around 5:30 a.m. and the other about 30 minutes later, according to the Chronicle. Both were examined and found to have only minor injuries, but the woman is expected to leave the ship in Costa Maya, Mexico, for further medical attention.

All of which makes us wonder: Isn't it sort of hard to fall off a cruise ship? Yes, says USA Today's Gene Sloan: "On balconies, railings are solid and, more importantly, impressively high. Ditto in public areas, such as pool decks," he wrote this morning. Indeed, the railing on the woman's balcony was four feet high, which means it would have taken some effort to get over. Interestingly enough, though the man and woman weren't reported to have been traveling together, the Chronicle reports that the man was naked when he was rescued — we don't know if that fact will end up being a factor in the investigation, but it does make us think there might be more to the story than we're hearing. (It also makes us think of this. You can thank us later, after you've hummed it for about a week.)