Daily Prompt

Stumble and Flow

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

There are the Facebook games that must be visited every 23 hours or else and the world headlines to catch up on and oh! Twitter, of course …

My day does not unfold like Ben Franklin’s typical day, depicted in the image at the top. It is more of a stumble and flow. Rinse and repeat.

A writer and editor named Mason Currey started a blog almost a decade ago with the intent of compiling the habits and day-to-day minutiae of famous and successful individuals. The web site was titled Daily Routines and several years later he had compiled so many entries that a book was published, called “Daily Rituals.” It is a fun website and an interesting book, and they are both great to get lost in and waste time reading, which may not have been Currey’s intention.

That was probably a fun meeting, the one in which they decided to change the name from “routines” to “rituals.” Being that I have named approximately zero things that have become successful, I am not going to second-guess the decision. “Rituals” certainly does sound more interesting—and purchasable—than “routines,” because routines are something we are told we must get out of.
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Supercentury

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Bacon makes everything better.”—a sign in Susannah Mushatt Jones’s kitchen.

As of today, March 10, 2016, the 19th Century is still alive. Two individuals born in the century before last, Susannah Mushatt Jones of Brooklyn, New York, and Emma Morano of Verbania, Italy, are still with us. Each was born in 1899. Thus, the last breath of that century is nearly here. They are the two oldest people on the planet. The third oldest, a Jamaican woman named Violet Brown, turns 116 today, but she was born in 1900; she is the oldest person alive who was born in the 20th Century.

That said, either one of these two women could yet outlive me. (I started cleaning the back porch two days ago and I am still out of breath. I’m 47 going on a not very robust 88.) Further, although each woman is on the top 20 list of longest lived people of all time, they have several years to catch up to Jeanne Calment of Arles, France, who died in 1997 at the age of 122. No one with the paperwork to prove it has lived longer than Jeanne Calment did.

Miss Mushatt Jones is 116 years and 248 days old today. She was born on July 6, 1899, in Alabama, and one of her grandparents was a slave. When Jeralean Talley died in June, 2015, at the age of 116, Miss Jones became the oldest verified person on Earth. “I’m the oldest person in the world? No I’m not,” she is said to have exclaimed to her relatives.

Miss Morano was born on November 29, 1899, 116 years and 102 days ago.
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Coloring

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

For those with synesthesia, the world seems no more interconnected than they assume it always is for the rest of us, until the person with the condition casually mentions how lively and bright blue the letter K always is to a playmate, who then reacts in a baffled way.

It is a condition that an unknown number of people have, but it is a condition to which the modifier “suffers” can not be added, because it does not often have negative effects on an individual’s life. (For some, it must have negative effects, just as any condition might.) It is not known how many people have or might have some form of synesthesia because not many people take the time or are offered the opportunity to describe the way they perceive how they perceive the things they perceive.
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