Wherein I confess to being intrepid.

Today I was intrepid. I've been intrepid before, so this wasn't that big a deal for me. Probably my first intrepidness was bluffing Jean Chambers into asking me, "...just what the heck are you doing?" The fact was, I wasn't doing anything, but I wanted her to notice me, so I pretended to be bicycling boxes full of important stuff by her house and she did in fact notice me and I acted mysterious and we had at least an eight minute conversation. This was fourth grade.

My life is strewn with many such acts of daring and intrepidness. I shan't pummel your fragile 21st Century emotions with the details of the gusto with which I intrepidly ravished the late 70's and early 80's.

Today's intrepidness was more in tune with this century. It was an act of brainy intrepidness. I figured out how to find the 'as the crow fly distances' between any two points on the earth. It involves Google Earth and this site, http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong-vincenty.html.

First you go to Google Earth. As your cursor moves about the map, the exact lat/long figures of the point where the cursor rests are seen at the bottom right. You find your first point and write down the lat/long figures in degrees, minutes and seconds of arc. Then you find the point you want to get to and do the same for that point. Then you go to the site featured above and plug in your figures. Click on "calculate distance" and viola, it gives you the distance in kilometers, which you can then convert into the measurement of your choice, be it miles, feet, deciliters or ounces.

You can do this with the distance from your back door to your outhouse, if you want to and happen to live in France or the deep South... Remember, this is the shortest distance between the two points.

Not bad for a mathematically illiterate curb painter... Yes, yes, I agree, it was very intrepid!