Have you seen Al Franken draw the United States from memory?
That performance has inspired a contest:
It’s good to see a little uplifting, humorous news from Alaska’s Senate delegation. According to Politico’s “Click,” in an effort to encourage American students to pay more attention to geography, National Geographic magazine sent out letters to the members of the U.S. Senate asking them to draw a map of their home state “from memory,” indicate three places on the map that are significant to them, and briefly tell why. The challenge is based on Sen. Al Franken’s (D-Minn.) famous ability to draw the Lower 48’s coastline from memory. One Senator from Oregon seemed to relish the fact that Sen. Mark Begich has a tough job ahead, and joshed that the Senate is eagerly waiting to see if he can draw all the Aleutian Islands accurately. Begich’s office retorted that National Geographic’s new, educational video game, “The Alcan Trail” will soon surpass the popularity of the classic game “The Oregon Trail.”
It will be tough for Mark Udall and Michael Bennet.
I’ll take that bet:
That’s me, vandalizing a Morro Bay, CA beach 10 years ago.
I could do the whole globe, too. Can Big Al do that? 🙂
Oh crap, did I just break the site?
I love Morro Bay, one of my favorite places to go to get out of Taft.
How long did it take to do that?
Maybe about 10 minutes. It was low tide. 🙂
he’s so impressive. saw a nice video of Al Franken drawing the lower 48 at MN state fair last summer.
You want uplifting, see the Ukranian sand art lady perform.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=518XP8prwZo
You’re welcome. 🙂
That girl is gorgeous and talented, and I’m also struck by the choice of Metallica in her song selection there and how well it holds up as a violin piece.
Heh. The metallica/orchestra idea is not a new one. See for example metallica in san francisco:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFDNK-4Z7TI
Or to take the idea entirely too far:
http://www.apocalyptica.com/
As a hard core Metallica fan, I love the Apocalyptica stuff. So wonderful.
This reminds me of a similar contest held among schoolkids in South Carolina in the early ’70s, based on then-Sen. Strom Thurmond’s not-very-accurate observation that our state was shaped “like a slice of pie.”