From the Editor

The one strenuous PT exercise I seem capable of anymore is walking; lawn cutting and hedge-trimming are as much as I can stand to do for strenuous upper-body exercise, and they are what I do for most of my income these days. No gym.

So this morning I broke out my ranger beads and rehearsed a basic trick I learned in (of all things) basic training: walk 100 meters counting how many times your left foot strikes the ground, then do the same on the right foot.

Average the two.

What’s left is your 100-meter pace. Got it?

Then I looked up the distance from “hallowed ground,” and just by eyeballin’ that Google map wit’ mah mad land nav dead-reckoning skillz, it shoore do look like this ign’rant enlisted boy would need to march right on 500 feet, or (in the reality-based universe of my calculator, right on 152.40 meters). Which means this good fer-nuthin’ disabled vet needs to march 152.40 meters to get from ground-zero territory to the safety of the place where he might worship.

I’ll have my atheist readers shut up for a moment: I earned my disability rating defending the right of any American to pray at ground zero, including the families of Muslim 9/11 victims. You’ll excuse me if I take this issue a bit personally.

See, if I was walking directly to the 52nd Street Community Center — still close enough to give Sarah Palin offense — I would need about 99 strides to reach it from the holier-than-thou-of-holies.

Ninety-nine strides. At a marching pace.

Maybe 100 is enough for Newt Gingrich? Or most of the staff at NRO?

Now I want to go to New York City and make a video of myself marching across Manhattan asking strangers if they think I’ve walked far enough for a mosque to be built.