Monday, August 8, 2011

Proof That Life Begins At 40

9:36 AM

Admin Aldino Car Rent

By Julian Champkin

There's stil plenty of time for fame, fortune and bicycle riding.

NOT LONG AGO, I reached 40, When Howard Florey was that age, he was working out how to mass-produce penicilin. By the age of 40, Jonas Salk had devised so much as bandage.

Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was in his fortieth year when, with Edmund Hillary, he became the first to stand on the summit of Everest. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius gained control of the Roman Empire in A.D. 161. He was 40 at the time. Me? I don't even control my garden; the bank owns that.

Has life passed me by? When I was young I had such ambitions, too. First, I was going to be a famous explorer and discover a lost African tribe. Ferdinand Magellan spent his fortieth birthday on the way to Cape Horn. Then be found and named the Pacific and named the Pacific Ocean. When you think about it, there is nothing bigger to discover on Earth than the Pacific Ocean.

After years of suffering and exile in Africa, I would return home to make a major scientific invention that would benefit the world. William Fox Talbot helped to invent photography when he was 40. Michael Faraday invented the electric generator at the same age. On a chicago squash court in 1942, Enrico Fermi was working on the first sustained, controlled nuclear chain reaction. Yes, he was 40 then.

There is still a chance for me to become immensely rich. Henry Ford did not found the Ford Motor Company until he was topping 40. Aristotle Onassis bought his first fleet of warsurplus ships at 40, and they set him on the road to untold wealth.

At this point in my planned life I was going to have been prime minister. Again, there is time. Winston Churchill's life seemed in ruins at 40. Aristotle bought his first fleet of warsurplus ships at 40, and they set himon the road to untold wealth.

At this point in my planned life I was going to have been prime minister. Again, there is time. Winston Churchill's life seemed ruins at 40, when he resigned from the British War Cabinet in 1915 over the fiasco in the Dardanelles. He went on to fight and win a second world war.

By now I was also supposed to have written by the world's greatest novel. Thomas Carlyle had written his seminal work. The French Revolution, by the time he was 40. Unfortunately, a servant used it for lighting the fire,so he had to write it all over again. James Joyce finished Ulysses by the age of 40. Both leaped to sudden fame on publication.

There is still time to create my own school of philosophy. Friederich Nietzsche was writing Thus Spake Zarathustra when he was 40.

I am trailing them all fairly badly, but at least I am one up on Tolstoy. I am not thinking of something much more useful. When he was 66, he learn to ride a bicycle---a fact on which author Jeremy Baker has based Tolstoy's Bicycle, his book of who did what at which age.

I managed to ride a bike when I was just seven years old---and without training wheels, too.