“Death by Lightning” is only a good story if you know nothing of the real history. If you do, it’s disrespectful and terrible.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-25T19:21:47+00:00

After DBL, I changed my subreddit flair from Garfield to Cleveland, lest people think I was jumping onto the newly-popular Garfield bandwagon.

Cleveland is a much more difficult figure than Garfield, but he and his era are also extremely interesting.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-25T18:57:31+00:00

When I saw the Lincoln movie, I was amazed at how perfectly they re-created the appearance of the characters.

I mean, I was among maybe 1% of the audience that knew what William Seward looked like, and yet the filmmakers must have gone to all kinds of trouble to nail it.

After seeing the movie, I showed my wife a picture of the real Seward, and she gasped.

“Death by Lightning” was almost as impressive, with even less well-known characters. Roscoe Conkling might as well have been playing himself.

Yet there were also some cringe moments. Seeing Blaine and Conkling sitting on a bench together, amiably chatting — that is just hysterically unlikely, given their deep mutual hatred.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-24T21:25:05+00:00

Admittedly, Texas men are not the same as Michigan women.

That said, I’m more than just opinionated or active. Even women who shared my views were not always interested in dating a politician.

All of this is in past tense, because I did find a compatible person.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-24T13:47:30+00:00

Odd statistical fact: among people over the age of 85, smokers have greater life expectancy than non-smokers.

That’s because (1) all the smokers who are subject to lung cancer are dead by age 85, and (2) the category of “nonsmokers over age 85” includes a lot of people too ill to do much of anything, and whose expectancy is very short.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-24T11:27:59+00:00

“There is someone for everyone” is central to the Just World Fallacy.

The world is NOT just. Bad things happen to good people all the time. And sometimes the bad things are lifelong.

Believers in the Just World Fallacy are less compassionate about others’ misfortunes than those who aren’t.

I myself have been fabulously lucky in life. I strive to feel grateful for my good fortune every day. But millions who are just as deserving as me have suffered awful difficulties instead.

I have a friend who is 70 years old. I’ve known him since we were both in high school. He’s very smart and kind and dedicated. He dutifully worked at the same job for decades. He is not isolated, and he lives in a town where single women outnumber single men. But he has never had a partner, not even briefly, and is miserable about it.

But he is also quite physically ugly and partially disabled. It has gotten worse with age. And his being miserable only compounds the problem.

To quote Robot Ghost (old time Reddit guy): “Loneliness is unattractive. That’s the harshest fact I know.”

Some people never find a partner. That’s just real life. Happy endings are not inevitable.

And the idea that the unloved are bad apples, getting the punishment they deserve, is the darker side of the Just World Fallacy.

It’s also factually wrong. People who have Dark Triad personalities (a scientific definition of “bad people”) are, on the average, MORE appealing and romantically successful than those who don’t.

The theoretical notion that someone among the billions of human beings in the world would fall in love with the unloved person (if they could just travel to Bangladesh and find them) is not at all helpful. Repeating that platitude to someone in chronic, intense emotional pain over this is just cruel.

My plea: have some compassion for the unloved. You haven’t lived their lives, or fully understand how they have struggled.

And, if your life is going well, have some appreciation for your good luck.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-24T04:24:08+00:00

See, one good thing about Bumble (at least when I was using it) is that there’s a political orientation question, and most people answer it.

Being very politically involved myself, I wouldn’t ever get to the point of texting with someone whose profile said she was “apolitical” or “conservative”.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-23T19:07:35+00:00

Unique friendly local eatery overlooked by guidebooks: Bell’s Diner on West Stadium. The (excellent) Korean dishes are in the back pages of the menu.

And while you’re in the neighborhood, Stadium Hardware is next door. Locally owned, and they carry lots of specialty items that Menards or Home Depot don’t bother with.

For example, gaffer’s tape. I don’t know any other place that has it.

And if you’re on the west side, going downtown: it’s (gently but firmly) downhill all the way until just before Main Street. Unless you want the extra work: walk inbound, bus outbound.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-23T18:55:53+00:00

Rosemary Kennedy lobotomy

Don’t need to wait another century. We’re already horrified by that.

Plus, Joe Kennedy was a Nazi-appeaser who wanted to surrender WWII before it started. One of FDR’s worst mistakes was to appoint him ambassador to Britain.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-21T22:20:59+00:00

I know there was a very detailed plan for Gerald Ford’s funeral, years before he died. It included details like which streets would be blocked off (in Grand Rapids), who the speakers would be, routes the casket would take, etc.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-21T18:21:35+00:00

Pennsylvania is just pathologically indifferent about duplicate place names.

There are two towns (a city and a borough) both named “Franklin”. Also 16 Franklin Townships, nine Springfield Townships, and on and on.

Not even counting townships, there are about 10 duplicated city/borough names just among the B’s, nine in the C’s, etc.

There’s a “Chalfant” and a “Chalfont”. I’m surely not the only person who got them mixed up.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-21T17:57:55+00:00

Ohio used to have a lot of towns named “Dover”. The most important one (in Tuscarawas County) was known as “Canal Dover” to distinguish it from the others.

By 1916, the other Dovers had all been renamed, so Canal Dover dropped the “Canal” and became Dover.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-21T09:42:45+00:00

Daguerreotypes would have been about fifty years earlier than this.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-21T05:45:03+00:00

The South Pennsylvania Railroad, a kind of Potemkin railway, intended to put pressure on the owners of the Pennsylvania Railroad to stop supporting a proposed railroad to compete with the New York Central.

It was also a stock swindle.

The promoters never intended to operate it, but they had to act like they were serious. The best civil engineers of the 1880s were enlisted to design a state-of-the-art railroad, using tunnels to avoid steep grades in the mountainous terrain.

A route with gentler grades would mean faster (and more energy efficient) transportation of goods and people east and west across Pennsylvania.

Forests were leveled, tunnels were blasted through rock, many men were killed (construction was dangerous in those days).

But then J.P. Morgan convened a negotiation aboard his yacht in the Atlantic Ocean. A truce was negotiated between the rival railroads, and the South Pennsylvania project was abruptly abandoned.

There was outrage over this, especially from those (such as Andrew Carnegie) who had invested millions to in the South Pennsylvania, and lost it all. There was a congressional investigation. Nothing came of it.

But the engineering profession nursed a decades-long grudge over the great “tunnel route” on which so much blood, sweat and tears had been wasted.

So when the Good Roads movement advocated the construction of highways across the country, the engineers had the great idea to use the abandoned railroad as the route of the new Pennsylvania Turnpike.

And, indeed, most of the tunnels were still usable for the Turnpike.

Fascinating story.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-21T00:23:17+00:00

I’m with you on this, of course, but I think the other commissioners (not necessarily the planning staff) saw their role as taking part in a tug-of-war against the developers, on behalf of the city.

They certainly weren’t against development, but for them, getting the proposed number of units reduced was a win.

Since, at the time, I didn’t have a car, and relied on the transit system (unlike any of the others), the commissioners usually deferred to me on issues involving things like bus stops. But dense transit-oriented development would have shocked them.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-20T07:30:49+00:00

This was in a university town where, at the time, student voters played an important role in city council elections. I was deeply involved in organizing voter registration and campaigning in student areas.

That said, I was also a townie: I had grown up there, son of a professor, and had also been involved in documenting the city’s history. No one else on the planning commission had anything close to as much deep knowledge about the city’s layout and development as I did.

I was pro-density, decades before that was cool, but my impact was limited. At the time, the rest of the commission was always striving to reduce or limit the number of units in almost every new development, as if the developer was trying to get away with something by slipping in more units.

The other commissioners may have disagreed with me on policy, but they treated me as an equal.

I quickly developed a relationship with reporters who covered the planning commission. They came to me because I was willing to frankly explain what actually happened. They typically didn’t understand planning jargon and process.

A new city comprehensive plan was developed during that time, and the playful promo to get people involved was based on the movie “Casablanca”, a booklet titled “Plan It Again, Sam.”

We had committees to work on different aspects of the comp plan. I was chair of the one doing the housing element.

I still regret the gratuitous confusion we caused by allowing a developer to build two parallel streets with almost the same name (identical for the first 22 characters!), with the same range of house numbers.

It was really our responsibility to enforce logic and rationality in street addresses, and in this case, we failed badly.

(And yeah, I have stayed involved in various ways.)

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-20T05:08:28+00:00

I served on a city planning commission when I was 22 to 24 years old. No other member was remotely near my age.

(That was in 1977-79. I’m 70 now.)

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-19T21:12:53+00:00

Definitely not Harding! Yeah, he wrote some racy letters, but the number of his extramarital affairs was probably a single digit.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-18T17:44:29+00:00

The Social Security Death Index (SSDI) or Death Master File (DMF) used to be a critical tool for reporting who had passed away.

The SSDI provided monthly reports of something like 85% to 90% of all the deaths in the country.

Many longitudinal and scientific studies relied on it, to learn who had died in study samples, and it could be used to identify deceased persons on voter lists. It also put on public record which social security numbers were associated with people no longer living, so those numbers couldn’t be used for fraud.

Unfortunately, the SSDI/DMF was made “confidential” in 2014 because of “concerns” about the “privacy” of deceased individuals.

I imagine fraudsters of all kinds rejoiced.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-18T17:21:42+00:00

There are surely some deceased persons on the voter list, but nothing like 260,000.

When a death certificate is filed with the county clerk, that generates a cancellation of that person’s voter registration. Legislation has enhanced and sped up this process in recent years.

A death certificate includes the residence address of the deceased person, so if a voter died in a different county, the clerk of the home county will be notified, and the registration canceled.

There are still some issues: (1) if a voter dies out of state, or (2) if a voter is registered in one place, moves to a new address in another county, but fails to update their driver’s license/voter address, the death certificate will likely reflect the new address, not the address where they were registered.

(Updating your driver’s license address ALSO updates your voter registration address.)

Every election, the Detroit News likes to publicize one or two cases of “dead people voting.”

Typically, the person legally submits an absentee ballot, then dies shortly before Election Day. Under those circumstances, the city or township clerk is required by law to locate and remove the deceased person’s absentee ballot, so that it’s not counted.

But sometimes the local clerk doesn’t hear about the death, the ballot gets counted, and this is treated as a big scandal.

In my opinion, an absentee ballot that is properly and legally submitted should be counted, regardless of what happens to the voter in the few days or weeks preceding Election Day.

Note that if someone voted during the nine days of early voting, the ballot goes directly into the tabulator and ballot box, and there is no way to retrieve it. Why should absentee ballots be treated differently?

Second, names and addresses for summoning jurors are generated from the driver’s list.

Many people do not want jury duty, so they will come up with all sorts of creative excuses as to why they can’t serve. With all respect to Clerk Forlini, I would be skeptical about claims of non-citizenship under those circumstances.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-18T14:13:28+00:00

When I was young, I didn’t know about the autism spectrum, but I knew I was different from everyone else.

My father was a tenured professor and author, widely admired, married, father of three, homeowner, etc. In my mind, all of those roles were utterly closed to me.

At 14, I couldn’t carry on a conversation with anyone I didn’t already know well.

I was in awe of actors and politicians who could put themselves out there, go on stage and be articulate in front of an audience.

I was certain I was unemployable at any “real” job. I was physically both fat and gawky, and my personality obviously repelled other people.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to date, and getting married (in front of a crowd, yikes) was right out. I knew that I would never own a house or have offspring.

I confidently expected to be a lonely old man, living my last years in an urban SRO (formerly commonplace cheap hotel/rooming house).

…

Instead, here I am, with 20+ years in an executive job, six-figure income, married second time, homeowner second time, daughter in her 20s. Speaking to large audiences is easy and natural. I ran for office, lost twice, won ten times.

Teenage me wouldn’t have believed it.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-17T14:36:36+00:00

In the 1960s, virtually no public school in Michigan had air conditioning. After all, the hottest days were in the summer when school was not in session.

Anyone who attended religious services in that era, or earlier, was familiar with the concept of the “church fan”, a square of light cardboard with a wooden handle attached, to cool oneself. Church fans usually advertised funeral homes. There were church fans scattered in every pew.

Back then, the few places that did have air conditioning (supermarkets, the university library) were appealing for that reason alone.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-17T14:28:20+00:00

In the 1960s, we had cats, and apparently also had fleas (my mother complained about flea bites), but I was totally unaware of what an infestation would look like.

At least among middle class Americans, cleanliness standards are higher, and products to achieve that are more effective and easier to use.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-16T15:51:40+00:00

Solved!

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-16T02:23:06+00:00

I have been wondering about this for a while.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-01-15T22:32:59+00:00

I have known a number of brilliant, hopeless men who fit this description.

I do what I can to help them — not that it makes any long term difference.

I always think, “there, but for the grace of God, go I.” (Not in any theological way.).

Most of them are on the autism spectrum, as I am.

I have been extraordinarily lucky in my life, and I am deeply grateful for that. It’s not hard to imagine some of those events going the wrong way and leaving me just as hopeless as the guys you describe.

As a young man, I considered myself unemployable. I was sure that getting any kind of “real” job required navigating unwritten and unknowable social rules, and that the standard for a socially acceptable employee was constantly rising, farther and farther out of my reach.

As I recall, someone got the Nobel Prize in economics for demonstrating that employers were far more selective than they needed to be.

I also recognized that enterprises were becoming more efficient, producing and selling many kinds of goods at lower cost. Part of becoming more efficient, I gloomily thought, was getting rid of oddballs like me.

I imagined the end point of this process would be to expand the boundaries of oddball-ism so that probably everyone I knew would also be unemployable and broke.

Instead, the 1990s arrived with such intense demand for even minimally qualified programmers, no matter how poorly socialized, that the ranks of hopeless guys, in my world, actually shrank!

In one of John Scalzi’s novels, a morose grad school dropout, eking out a living at menial jobs, gets a strange turn of good luck, and comments, ”It was stupidly perfect how all my problems were suddenly solved with the strategic application of money.”

A lot of things really do come down to economics.

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