Al Franken Has Mad Mapmaking Skills — And He Can Prove It
Al Franken is known as a former Saturday Night Live writer, current senator from Minnesota, and possibly a future presidential candidate. You can add one more descriptor to that list: impressive amateur cartographer.
For years, Franken has impressed audiences and constituents with his ability to draw a map of the United States from memory. Here’s the most popular video displaying his talents, taken at the 2009 Minnesota State Fair:
Franken first publicly showed off his skills on a 1988 SNL Weekend Update feature. He has since used his talents to impress both middle schoolers and celebrities alike.
Franken has given two stories to explain his mapmaking skills. In one version, he picked up the skill after he lost a bar bet to name all 50 states, reasoning that if he could draw them all at once, he could name them. In another, he learned the states’ shapes and locations as a child from a puzzle game in which each state was a piece.
The senator also creates a new map every year for one of his colleagues as part of the Senates’ Secret Santa gift exchange, which he organizes.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter at @aidenpink.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO