Happy 100th birthday Jimmy Carter

Some trivial notes:

Carter has actually written more best-selling books — metric is NYT best seller list — than have been written about him. (20 to 16).

The ratio for Trump, although the idea of Trump actually writing a book is obviously as fictitious as a dog composing a sonnet, is 5 to 172. Trump has had 50% more best selling books written about him than arguably the single most consequential president in American history, FDR.

BTW Harry Truman inaugurated the modern practice of selling a post-presidential memoir for big bucks that don’t stop there, and there’s a funny story about that too, which is that before Ike was president he sold his memoir for a fat stack as the kids say, and Truman pushed through a tax ruling that gave Eisenhower a huge tax break in re the proceeds. Basically the IRS allowed Ike to treat the book proceeds as capital gains rather than income because he was supposedly an amateur as opposed to a professional writer. Then ten years later Truman was extremely annoyed when Eisenhower didn’t return him the favor when Truman published his memoir.

If age-adjusted mortality rates were to remain the same over the lifetime of infants born in America today (despite all the characteristic LGM dooming they will almost certainly decline quite a bit) fully three percent of the girls and one percent of the boys will reach 100, so that’s around 80,000 new centenarians every year in the year 2125, if man is still alive, if woman can survive. This is a topic for its own post, but I’m interested in the informal limitations that clearly exist regarding the ability to discuss things related to inherent biological differences related to/caused by biological sex, of which longevity is a super obvious example. The stats I quote above in which girls are three times more likely to reach 100 than boys are quite consistent cross-culturally, although of course the inherently complex intersection of culture and biology has everything to do with why girls live so much longer than boys. This can be tricky stuff obviously.

I just found a charming coincidence that I haven’t seen noted anywhere, so I’ll put it here: Pete Rose was born on Opening Day 1941, and died on the last day of the 2024 season. Speaking of books, George Will could probably get three books out of that fact by itself.

I saw Pete Rose in real life once, under auspicious circumstances. This must have been around 1990 or so, at the Del Mar race track north of San Diego. I was leaning against the rail with my friend Dave, who likes to bet the ponies (I don’t gamble generally) when Dave noticed that the kind of degenerate looking middle aged guy also leaning against the rail ten feet to our left was none other than Rose himself. We stared at him for an impolitic moment, then went back to waiting for the race, which featured a horse named Hailthefoxybabe that I put $10 on at 13-1 strictly because of the name. She then proceeded to win, and I told Dave we should leave on that note. He said “but I haven’t won yet,” and I said maybe you should go talk to Pete Rose about that.