Fast Company asks, “What do you want to do with your life?”
I answered, “You mean specifically or just in general? I want to be famous. I’m in marketing and advertising, and that will get me rich. But nobody gets famous by doing advertising.
I’m actually a writer. I’d like to write a book. About the insignificance of human struggle. How we invent this full complicated machine of society and then strap ourselves to it. 
We are kind of like mice who would build our own little mazes, and then pat ourselves on the back for having made it through the thing. I would write a long book about insignificant conflicts being resolved by unimportant people who finally achieve a meaningless purpose.
It would be a history.
I think this would be an appropriate revenge.
I want someday for some fourth or fifth grader to have to write a report about me and my life. So that people will reverence my choice of music and pay homage to my taste in breakfast cereals. My fourth grade teacher once told me, ‘By learning about people who have done great things, we learn how we ourselves can achieve great things.’
I remember that she had us write four-page research papers on famous people. For a fourth-grader, a four-page paper is like writing our own novel. She assigned each student the name of a person who did something meaningful and important in history. One girl was assigned Barbara Walters, a kid was assigned Sir Whatever-his-name-is, the guy who invented baseball. You see, she tried to match up each kid with the personality of some great person.
I was assigned to write my four-page report on P.T. Barnum.
He’s a famous person who lived a long time ago. He’s best known as the guy who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” He spent his whole life tricking people, lying to them, and stealing their money. He is also the guy who started the Barnum and Bailey circus. I learned everything about P.T. Barnum for that four-page paper. I learned where he was born, how he grew up, I studied all the tricks, all the deceptions, and all the great scams this man came up with. I read about his family life, his favorite pastimes and all the witty things he said when he was drunk. A few of us fourth-graders gave oral presentations at the sixth grade graduation. There was a girl dressed like Jonas Salk, a boy dressed up like Roy Rogers that was kind of funny, even a fourth-grade Jane Goodall. I gave a two-minute oral presentation on P.T. Barnum. Everyone thought it was real cute how my mom had gotten me a sparkling bow-tie and a little tuxedo jacket with tails. I had a top hat with blue sparkles on it, and even a pair of spats mom had put on over my penny loafers. I don’t remember what I said for those two minutes, but I remember I was scared as hell looking out at everybody’s moms and dads and I thought, “What did P.T. Barnum do that made him so famous that I’m going through all this?”
And I couldn’t lay my finger on too much.
So I knew that what I wanted more than anything was for some fourth-grader someday, probably after I’d died and my grandkids were all grown up, to have his teacher assign him to write a report on me, and he’d have to look me up in the encyclopedia and study everything I’d ever done.”
“And what would it say under your name in the encyclopedia?”
“I don’t know, yet. That’s what still remains to be seen. But it would be a long entry, maybe a couple of columns with a long bibliography. You know, where it says ‘See Also’ and gives all those references. I mean, getting into an encyclopedia isn’t too hard, William Henry Harrison and Lee Harvey Oswald both have their names in the encyclopedia. But their entries aren’t 
too long. Killers and Presidents always make it into encyclopedias, but their entries are usually short. I mean, all they need is one lucky shot. I’d want to have something worth reading two columns about, like changing people’s lives by writing a famous book. I’d write about me . . . and you, and all the dumb stuff we do and our motivations and the pride we find in our triumphs. Kind of a C.S. Lewis meets Vonnegut attitude. But more biting than a Swift pamphlet and more lucid than Judy Blum. I mean, that already has more substance to it than anything Salinger ever wrote. More reality than most of what kids are forced to read in schools nowadays. If people can get famous for not doing anything, then why not me? I mean, why the hell not? Just do something like everybody else and get my name printed up, followed by a lot of ‘see alsos.’”
Many of you have already found this. This image was taken from space of a hill that looks a lot like A Native American Listening to His iPod. Google Inc.– the same company that gives us Google.com, Blogger.com, Google Moon, and a host of other fun things I use everyday provides Google Maps for Free. This site is great fun, inspiring Andy Samburg to call it “the best. . . Double True.” But I want to tell you that there are things to do on GoogleMaps even after you’re done finding your house, your job, and cyber-stalking your exes from Global Satelites.
Google Sightseeing is one of many spin-off sights where people are posting the funny stuff they find as they mouse all over the planet. Sightings of UFOs and monsters, as well as rumors of amassing armies on the Chinese-India border abound, complete with KML coordinates and clickable photos. Here are some other funny sights at Haha.nu. Including the boy who built his own Location Balloon.
] And I read the whole thing through. I was also seduced into reading 
