Wednesday: Hair appointment canceled, rapier and main gauche

I had a delightful walk with M. It was sunny and a little above freezing so no serious fears of ice. Had to watch out for puddles in the shade but that was about it.

T.'s hair appointment was canceled. *sigh* Could have had date night! Oh well. I schedule him a dermatology appointment, and then the hair got reschedule on top of that, so I had to move it again. Also, oh well!

R. hung the brackets for my rapier and main gauche. They look wonderful on the wall. I have not had them up since the condo; I worried about my kids messing with them. Nerd central in my office is coming along nicely. I am contemplating options to put the wands up now.

I sorted through some of the holiday cards on the mantel. I have not put any away in the scrapbooks yet, but I am getting close. It is That Time of Year.

The United States' Centralized Birth Registration System of 1933

I was reading a long piece at the New Yorker about Jeanne Calment.

It contained this parenthetical remark: "(The United States didn’t have a centralized birth-registration system until 1933.)"

I have done a fair amount of genealogical work, quite a lot of which involves US records. I am here to tell you that the US does NOT have a centralized birth registration system now and has not ever. And is unlikely to ever have one. That is a State level responsibility. I do not know who Lauren Collins is, but if you are going to try to convince me that you are Up To figuring out the truth of allegations and counter-allegations about whether the Jeanne Calment who died in 1997 was actually 122 or somewhat younger, then, you cannot really be making errors of this magnitude.

In general, I am skeptical of super-centenarians (and I say this as someone with a lot of ancestors and collaterals who made it past 100). More importantly, when I realized that I have not one, but two first cousins who have birth certificates for different years from different countries, I recognized that no matter how good your BMD system is, someone is going to monkey with it. It might be difficult to monkey with it now (altho, having just read Tara Westover's _Educated_ and learned that she was able to get a delayed birth certificate in her teens, I have some questions even here), in the 1930s, it was pretty fucking straightforward to get a bunch of officials and relatives and People Who Know You to go along with a scam. A little bit of money helps. A sob story helps. Being a close relative helps.

If you feel like reading the article, here it is:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/was-jeanne-calment-the-oldest-person-who-ever-lived-or-a-fraud

From my perspective, the argument about the taxes is irrelevant. Could the family have paid the taxes? Sure! But that does not matter, because any family that produces someone who marries a double second cousin is a family that has fucking machined the art of keeping assets in the family. The only argument that matters to me is the simple observation that basically, no one lives that long, and everyone who seems to get close is someone who has habits that make it even more unlikely they lived that long, and has really great documentation in an area that has holes in the documentation. People who say they are 140 but were born in a place that had no documentation are not taken seriously by people who track this shit. And once the documentation hits a certain quality level, you no longer get supercentenarians. Because all of the supercentenarians (not the 103s and 105s -- the 120s, like Calment) are probably frauds.

ETA: I got to thinking about the question Collins raises towards the end about the notary public.

Googling found me this:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/notary_fraud.html

So much about this is hilarious -- the comment about Greece, in particular. Spain really caught my eye, because they had that enormous scandal recently about events during Franco's era, in which women were told their baby had died in childbirth, and then the baby was given to a supporter of Franco to raise. (Spain caught my eye for other reasons as well. And I do always love it when people from Greece make efforts to show that their "system" for recording real estate transactions is ... not risible.)