I have a beach-ball-sized globe sitting on a shelf here at my desk, and I was looking at the Western Hemisphere the other day, and I noticed something I’d never seen before.

If you left Los Angeles/Long Beach and headed directly south (into the ocean, and just kept going) … you would not strike land … until Antarctica.

True story. There is nothing between us and that big ol’ mass of ice/rock.

We are at about 118 degrees west longitude, and if you follow that line down the globe … you’ve got a whole lot of nothing.

The closest you come to land, once you’ve cleared Catalina Island … is something called Ducie Island, a speck in the ocean well below the equator. And we wouldn’t actually be close to Ducie Island, as we stuck to longitude 118 west. It would just be the closest dry land during the whole trip — but still about 200 miles from us in our boat or plane.

Ducie is located between two other massively remote (but better-known) islands. Pitcairn Island, to the west, the island where the Bounty mutineers (Fletcher Christian and that crew) went to hide from the English navy in the 1700s … and Easter Island, to the east, known for its bizarre tiki statues and, of late, for being a case study (Jared Diamond’s book, “Collapse”) of a man-made environmental disaster.

Just struck me as an oddity that you could find any latitude/longitude and follow it for almost 100 degrees of the circumference of the earth and not hit land. But you can do it right from where I’m sitting.

Which reminds me. I believe every household in the country should have the following reference works on hand: A dictionary and an atlas. Every house also should have a globe, to give everyone a better sense of what is where than a flat map, which becomes less useful the bigger the area involved is. So that any time you wonder, “what’s south of where I’m sitting?” … you can look at your globe and say, “Wow. Nothing but Antarctica!”