Test your Spanish skills, readers:
(But if you want to cheat, click on the cartoon for an English version.)
Briefly noted:
-
And it's not just their asses that are old. Jeff Maurer provides A Brief History of Old-Ass Presidents.
How old-ass is Joe Biden? He is 80 years and 162 days — old-ass by any objective measure. But how old is he according to dodgy, unscientific measures developed for entertainment purposes? Let’s dig into that a bit…
In 1820, the median American was 16.7 years old. Yes: The median American back then was some sullen little snot who thought her parents were SO LAME because they didn't use new technology like the precision lathe or the miner's lamp. Except that 16 year-olds back then could probably fix a wagon and skin a moose and also had three kids of their own. At any rate: America was a different country back when someone the age of Finn Wolfhard — 20 — was presumably eligible for free coffee at Mac-Donald’s Meat Dispensary and Hasty Brothel (as McDonald’s was known back then).
Health, generally, was different in those days. We didn't have dieticians and MRIs and magical copper socks; we had doctor-slash-lumberjacks who would chop off appendages that showed signs of gangrene. If — through some miracle — you managed to dodge the viruses, wild beasts, and Englishmen that made life so perilous and lived to, say, 70, then it probably wasn't a good 70. There's an excellent chance that at that age, you were a half-sentient bag of arthritis sitting in a corner with one of those big, funnel-looking horns affixed to your ear.
Maurer does something actually interesting: displays the inauguration-age of each president as a percentage of the US median age at the time. He calls this the "Old For His Time" (OFHT) metric. And the record holder? Spoiler alert:
One thing suggesting that this metric might not be completely useless is the fact that the oldest OFHT president was William Henry Harrison. And William Henry Harrison was initially famous for being old, and soon after famous for being dead. I'm sure WH2 hates it when people tell this story, but: Harrison was the oldest president ever elected, and to prove his virility, he gave a two hour inauguration speech on a cold, rainy day with no jacket. Then, in one of history’s most extreme cases of being publicly proven wrong, Harrison’s “I’m virile” argument was convincingly countered by Mother Nature, who gave him pneumonia and then killed him. D’oh! They didn’t write headlines like MOTHER NATURE TOTALLY DESTROYS WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON’S VIRILITY ARGUMENT back then, but it would have been apt.
Yes, I'm a sucker for people doing math. And making fun of presidents.