Categories
Life Work

The Road to Success

I saw the illustrated map titled The Road to Success on the Strange Maps site and thought that there can’t be a more appropriate day than today, the first day of school, to post it. Enjoy!

"The Road to Success" - an illustration made in 1913 showing the obstacles to success as a landscape map.
Click the illustration to see it at full size.

If you’re wondering who the “Caruso” in the “Caruso can’t touch you” line is – it’s spoken by one of the people in the Mutual Appreciation Society building, in the lower-right hand corner, just above and to the left of Hotel Know-It-All – it’s Enrico Caruso, an opera tenor who became a star thanks tp his embrace of then-newfangled recording technology, namely the phonograph (a.k.a. gramophone).

Categories
Life

Ben Franklin’s Schedule

Of the Founding Fathers of the United States, my favourite is Ben Franklin. I’m a fan (and attempted emulator) of polymaths, and Ben was a supreme one, having been a writer, printer, political theorist and practitioner, scientist and engineer, soldier and statesman.

What better way to mark the beginning of what’s going to be a busy week for Yours Truly than by posting Ben Franklin’s daily schedule? Here it is, complete with his morning and evening questions, which we’d all do well to ask ourselves daily:

ben_franklins_daily_schedule

Some folks I know were discussing what he meant by “Addressing Powerful Goodness”, which he does at the start of the day. Someone supposed that it meant a morning constitutional, another thought it might be prayer and a wag suggested it might be “chopping the morning wood,” in that way that wags are wont to do.

Fans of the movie Dazed and Confused might prefer the notion that Ben Franklin liked to drop by George Washington’s place to smoke his fine weed (see this scene), and just for you, here’s a comic depicting just that, with both gentlemen talkin’ gangsta (be forewarned, it’s a little sweary):

george_and_benClick the comic to see it at full size (courtesy of “highplainsgrifter”).