Reaching Lifelong Goals

One of the fun things about a site called “Stumble It” is just that, stumbling onto some interesting online content.   While hitting the “Stumble This” button yesterday, I found the most amazing picture.   A search of the Internet calls it “most famous men on one photo”.   I do not know where this image originated, but I spent some quality time with it.   A thumbnail will not give you the same effect.  You need to view this image in it’s full size.   There are both famous men and women all over this piece.   See how many you can identify.    There are some pretty obscure ones, and it takes a historian’s eye to catch them all.

I would suggest clicking on this link to bring up a 1600×600 size image to enjoy it in it’s fullest.  Maybe I’m just a History Geek, but I was really impressed with this work of art.   (set it as my desktop…)   This image is on the web in a number of places, blogs from Israel, Denmark and India come up in the search.   Where it is from originally, or it’s artist, I have not been able to track down.    This brings up all kinds of questions about copy write issues and reprinting “intellectual” properties.   The Internet has muddied the water on these issues for a number of years.   I have many images of World War One aircraft on my hard drive that have come from many sources.   I do not use them for my own commercial gain.   Most folks that are in hobbies related to history (I build scale models of Ernst Udet’s WW1 biplanes) scan the Internet regularly for any research data that is out there.   The use of these images for reference in your hobbies is common these days.   I also have used these images on my blog posts to illustrate information about a specific subject.   Is this copy write infringement?   Legal minds have been working on this issue for quite some time now.    Not being an artist, I really can’t relate to this issue from their perspective.

Anyway…..   back to the image at hand.   If you start at the top left corner and work your way across the painting, the “easy” famous persons stand out.   Some of the more obscure persons require a little thought and research.   That is the fun of this image to me.   I pick one person from the group and try to find the image online that matches my “guess”.    I’ve been able to identify most of the famous people on this painting.   See how you do.   Be careful, it is a major time leech…   good thing I don’t have any homework to do right now…