Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

… makes me wish i had hoarded more linguine

We have all the best words.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

I’m only here for the duck photos.

Fuck if i know. i just get yelled at when i try it.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Women: they get shit done

… down to kool-aid drinkers and next of kin at the trump White House

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Wetsuit optional.

Good luck with your asparagus.

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

Too inconsequential to be sued

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

How do you get liars to care about the truth?

How has Obama failed you today?

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

The math demands it!

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Bad Charts (Open Thread)

Bad Charts (Open Thread)

by | 149 Comments

This post is in: 

Saw this on Twitter, and it made me laugh:

The chart is terrible, obviously. If I were represented on it, I’d be the horrifying giantess whose head protruded through the top of the frame. The Latvians, etc., would be hiding from me, and I’d be deciding which WNBA team I’d be happiest with as a starting center. Anyhoo, bad charts. Open thread!

Reader Interactions

149Comments

  2. 2.

    Yutsano

    I am aghast, I am. Especially since someone or several someones thought that could possibly be a good idea.

  3. 3.

    Alison Rose

    Clearly, my midget self was meant to be born in India. When asked for my height, I like to say that if I stand up real tall, I’m almost 5’1″. That’s also partly why my answer to “which fantasy world would you want to live in” is always The Shire. Among the hobbits, I’d be the tall one for once in my life!

  4. 4.

    JDM

    They thought it was a good idea because when they did the pictures properly it turned out average heights just weren’t different enough to look impressive, so it was a choice between accuracy or standing out.

    You’re not suggesting accuracy might be preferable?!?

  5. 5.

    catclub

    also, four cheers for Pelosi having  NFLTG: This may have already appeared on the blog.

    PELOSI ON GOVERNANCE

    JIM CRAMER: CAN WE GIVE A HUGE CHUNK OF MONEY TO THE PEOPLE WHO ARE DISINFRANCHISED? TO MINORITIES WHO WANT SO BADLY TO STAY IN BUSINESS AND CAN’T? AND TO PEOPLE WHO ARE TRYING TO GO TO COLLEGE OR HAVE STUDENT LOANS WHO ARE MINORITIES, WHO ARE THE MOST AFFECTED BECAUSE THEY HAD THE LEAST CHANCE IN OUR COUNTRY? THAT’S GOT TO BE SOMETHING BOTH SIDES CAN AGREE TO.

    NANCY PELOSI: PERHAPS YOU MISTOOK THEM FOR SOMEBODY WHO GIVES A DAMN FOR WHAT YOU JUST DESCRIBED.

    CRAMER: GEEZ.

  6. 6.

    Gin & Tonic

    Not only is it terrible, it isn’t even internally consistent. The distance between 5’3″ and 5’4″ is *not the same* as the distance between 5’4″ and 5’5″.

  7. 7.

    Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]

    Look up Edward Tufte’s “The visual display of quantitative information” It’s a beautiful book, and shows exactly how terrible this graph is.

  8. 8.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    One of my pet peeves with chartology, a vertical axis that represents a tiny range of values to make the range look bigger. Like those stock market charts that go from 9990 to 10010 or whatever.

  10. 10.

    Ruckus

    I am 11 inches taller than my older sister was. In my freshman class at HS I was chosen to go up on stage and be made fun of for being the shortest in my shop. I’ve stood next to Micheal Jordan at my current height and felt, small. Had a customer in my bike shop who was 6’4″, a woman customer, only two inches shorter than MJ. Takes all kinds/colors/heights to be a human race. And it’s better for it.

  11. 11.

    EthylEster

    @Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: Exactly. Two major sins. 1. Not starting the y-axis at zero. 2. Using symbols whose size/area has nothing to do with the data it purports to “chart”.

    I complain regularly at Kevin Drum’s site about his tendency to #1. But he would never commit a sin as egregious as #2

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: Great minds! This really is a nefarious way to undermine the meaning of the data. Relative magnitude is crucial to interpretation.

  12. 12.

    germy

    HARLOW: What evidence do you have that unemployment benefits are a disincentive for people to go back to work?

    KUDLOW: This University of Chicago study

    HARLOW: I talked to the author of the study last night. It doesn’t say that

    KUDLOW: Well, we can argue one academic versus another pic.twitter.com/NkgabFntXS

    — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 7, 2020

  16. 16.

    EthylEster

    @germy: My favorite comment is “Trump’s backside is so huge it can fit the heads of Geraldo and Mike Pence inside it at the same time.”

  17. 17.

    Barbara

    @catclub: Every time I read another article about what it would take to turn the pandemic around, I feel like screaming that they should be pointing out that FIRST, those in charge have to actually care about the dismal state of affairs and every indication is that they are totally indifferent.

  20. 20.

    Anotherlurker

    @Ruckus: I know what you mean about comparative size.

    I felt like a mouse , standing next to Shaque.  He isn’t just tall, he’s massive.

  22. 22.

    Ken

    There is an entire twitter tag* for chart crime, https://twitter.com/Chart_Crime that I sometimes look at. There’s a pretty bad one near the top now, “Teen Social Networking Stats”, which is a pie chart with the wedges labeled 73%, 37%, 201, 22%, 25%, 8%.  Yes, that’s 201, not a percentage – it’s the average number of Facebook friends.

    * Is “tag” the right word? I don’t twit much.

  23. 23.

    raven

    I’m starting “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson. When I ran youth sports programs we offered training to coaches and the most likely to need it were the least likely to take it. I’m sure this book will be the same but I can safely report it is compelling.

  24. 24.

    RandomMonster

    As someone who does technical illustrations from time to time, I think of all the ways that information could have been correctly communicated.

  26. 26.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: The axis offset-from-zero can be a valid decision when charting stuff — for example, if you went by time along the X-axis, do you start from the Big Bang 14.3 billion years ago if you’re graphing out, say, the US GDP figure or do you start from, say, 1950 AD?

     

    Saying that there are some charts where an offset is questionable. One of them is on the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) website where they graph out ice coverage of the Poles. For some reason the Y-axis on their chart of Arctic sea ice coverage goes from 2 to 16 in units of million square kilometres. Would it really be impossible to show the data on a chart running from zero to 16 instead?

  28. 28.

    Ken

    @Baud: They’re both the same academic. Kudlow mis-read the paper and got called on it. It’s the “I have Marshall McLuhan right here” skit from Annie Hall.

  29. 29.

    Sab

    I am 5’5″ and my family ridicules me for my shortness. They used to laugh every time I ran by with a stepladder. Now I just ask/demand that one of them gets stuff off high shelves.

  30. 30.

    Llelldorin

    @germy:

    Edmund: I was under the impression that it was common maritime practice for a ship to have a crew.

    Rum: Opinion is divided on the subject.

    Edmund: Oh, really? [starting to get the picture]

    Rum: Yahs. All the other captains say it is; I say it isn’t.

    Edmund: Oh, God; Mad as a brush.

  31. 31.

    JPL

    @Ruckus:I am 11 inches taller than my older sister was.   At first I thought this was going to be a logic puzzle.  For an instant, I wondered if I needed a pencil  😁😁

  34. 34.

    jonas

    @Baud: The author of the article, it seems, which is pretty funny considering Kudlow only has a B.A., and it’s in history, not economics (accd. to Wikipedia)

  35. 35.

    JPL

    I’m 5′ 7″   and spouse was 5’10”.    One son is an inch taller than his dad, but the other son is 6’4″.    My little brother is over 6′ and the other two were 6’4.    Apparently grand imp is tall for his age, but not off the charts except for his shoe size.

  40. 40.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @Alison Rose: come sit by me! Six feet away of course. I used to be 5’1” but time has shrunk me. I am taller than my mom and she was taller than her mom. Each of us married a tall man which always looks silly in photos. I look funny  trying to get the last wet towel out of the bottom of the washer! 😆

  43. 43.

    debbie

    My Latin teacher was from Latvia. Worse than a general and even taller than that chart.

  44. 44.

    trollhattan

    @germy:

    That’s Kudlow in a nutshell. And Mnuchen, and Navarro, and….

    But you have to give him bonus balls points for implying openly stating a study’s author does not understand his own study.

  45. 45.

    jl

    @debbie: My Latvian connections are not giants, and are very nice and sweet and friendly. So, maybe your experience was due to the horrifying effect that teaching Latin has on a human being?

  50. 50.

    jl

    @trollhattan: From what I know of the studies, they address different questions, not an fancy arcane academic dispute, but a fairly straight forward common sense issue.

  52. 52.

    Chetan Murthy

    I seem to remember some work that suggests that body-height sexual dimorphism in humans is strongly correlated with access to modern medicine.  Basically, genetic variation to produce smaller females is -strongly- selected against in primitive societies, b/c without adequate medical care, smaller women die more often in childbirth.  Modern medicine pretty much remedies that, so the mutations survive in offspring.

    And of course, tall males are selected-for everywhere in the world (sexual selection, sigh, I’m 5’8″).

  53. 53.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Ken:  I like this one:

    Two numbers (not necessarily different) are chosen from the range of positive integers greater than 1 and not greater than 20. Only the sum of the two numbers is given to mathematician S. Only the product of the two is given to mathematician P.

    On the telephone S says to P, “I see no way you can determine my sum.”
    An hour later P calls him back to say, “I know your sum.”
    Later S calls P again to report, “Now I know your product.”
    What are the two numbers?

  54. 54.

    jl

    @🐾BillinGlendaleCA: “The chart is only a few inches tall, so that’s a pretty low bar. ”

    Thanks, I didn’t understand the post. Also, people don’t look like blank purple and pink paper dolls, and not all women wear weird hospital gown shaped skirts. Wow, the graph was worse than I thought.

  55. 55.

    Chetan Murthy

    The designer of that chart clearly didn’t think of including any Dutch . I hear they’re all giants and giantesses for reals, yo’.

  57. 57.

    Betty Cracker

    @WaterGirl: I’m 5’8″, which is tallish for a female, but not astounding or anything, the way that chart would depict it. The other day at the grocery store, I saw a vertically challenged lady struggling to reach some TP on the top shelf, and I asked if I could get it for her. After I placed it in her cart, I noted that being tall comes in handy sometimes, and she replied, “I wouldn’t know.” :)

  58. 58.

    Chief Oshkosh

    That chart looks like is was made by the Public Health Dept of the state of Georgia.

  59. 59.

    clay

    One of the first things taught in my Stats class is that area is the key to interpreting a chart.  So while the heights of the figures may be accurate, the chart makers also increased their areas proportionally.  The reader’s brain absorbs the latter, not the former.

  63. 63.

    jl

    @clay: Yes, the human perceptual and mental machinery often does not interpret the figure as the author intended, and therefore does not reflect the real information in the data. That is one reason that graphs with perspective can be so misleading.

    The great nurse and statistician Florence Nightengale was, I think, the first person to look at that issue carefully and take it into account when she prepared her graphs, IIRC.

  64. 64.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Betty Cracker: I’m with her. I’m 5’2″, or I used to be. I ask people for help in the grocery store all the time.

    I can’t remember which store it was, but one place I used to buy jeans had them on the shelf compartments with petite in the top one and tall in the bottom ones. How did someone do that and not see the problem?

  66. 66.

    Martin

    @JPL: But his sister can shuck twice as much corn per hour. If they’re both on a train going 100 miles from New York to Pittsburgh at 40 miles per hour, how old is the shepherd?

  67. 67.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @debbie: it’s interesting how a camera lens distorts reality.  I attend a lot of baseball and women’s soccer games and I have always found the men to be thinner in person and the women, like Alex Morgan, to have much more muscle mass (in a good way) in person.   Also, games are way louder in person.  For tee vee they turn down the crowd noise by 80%.

  68. 68.

    jl

    Final shot at the graph: truncating the vertical scale at around 4 feet 10 inches has a particularly unfortunate effect, when combined with representing height with human paper doll profiles. I don’t know one Indian person that small. I never saw one carried around in a purse, at least.

  73. 73.

    Jager

    @EthylEster:  I asked my doc what she thought trump weighs, she thought for a minute and said, “With that gut, those hips, thighs, and butt, well north of 300.”

  75. 75.

    Brachiator

    A few years ago, there was a BBC News story about Dutch men and Latvian women being the tallest nationalities. Also, Asians and Asian Americans seem to be getting taller, and most of this seems to be due to nutrition. A piece of the BBC story:

    When it comes to height, Dutch men and Latvian women tower over all other nationalities, a study reveals.

    The average Dutchman is now 183cm (6ft) tall, while the average Latvian woman reaches 170cm (5ft 7in).

    The research, published in the journal eLife , has tracked growth trends in 187 countries since 1914.

    It finds Iranian men and South Korean women have had the biggest spurts, increasing their height by an average of more than 16cm (6in) and 20cm (8in).

  77. 77.

    Aleta

    From the twitter feed in the post, I learned this:

    Priya Krishna  @priyakrishna
    ·Aug 6

    I’m leaving Bon Appétit video. Here’s what’s been happening over the last few months, and some thoughts.

    https://twitter.com/priyakrishna

     

    She has a cookbook that looks good.  Could be a way to offer financial support if one wished to, and if affordable.

    eta: I remember a few months ago when Bon Appet., having been  made to address radically different pay to so-called ‘international’ cooks, made reform announcements.  Apparently they did not follow through for all.

  78. 78.

    Croaker

    @germy:   I think you were missing part of the conversation so I the opportunity to correct the original text.  Must have been a transcription error.

    HARLOW: What evidence do you have that unemployment benefits are a disincentive for people to go back to work?

    KUDLOW: SNIFF…SNIFF…This University of Chicago study...SNIFF..SNIFF

    HARLOW: I talked to the author of the study last night. It doesn’t say that

    KUDLOW: SNIIFF…Well, we can argue one academic versus another ...SNIFF…Much Sniffing here

  80. 80.

    EthylEster

    @Chetan Murthy: And of course, tall males are selected-for everywhere in the world (sexual selection, sigh, I’m 5’8″).

    Take heart. There are many females out there who are looking for a guy who is of the same scale as they are.

  82. 82.

    Brachiator

    A woman co-worker was 5 ft 11. Her husband was maybe 6 ft 5. Their kids were tall and lanky. I used to call their home the house of giants because they had a lot of big and comfortable furniture.

  83. 83.

    Alison Rose

    @pamelabrown53: LOL! Yeah, even in my ever-present-at-the-time platform combat boots, I was still a good ten inches shorter.

    I don’t mind being a shrimp, TBH. As a woman, I’d rather be shorter than average as opposed to taller than average, based on what I hear from my tall women friends. Except for being able to reach the top shelf without having to get out the step stool.

  84. 84.

    satby

    I’m 5’1″ . Oldest son is 6’4″ in his bare feet, younger son has short man syndrome because he’s a measly 6′.

    BUT,#1 son was almost 23 inches at birth, so more than 1/3 of my height. Not a comfortable pregnancy at all.

  85. 85.

    jl

    @EthylEster: The wonder of pie charts is that there are several different characteristics of the charts that can give a very different impression of the data, depending on the details, and how different people interpret them. There is amount of circumference covered by a slice, angle of each slice at the center, area of circle covered by a slice, rate at which slice edges diverge from each other. Not a linear relationship between all of those ways of measuring ‘slice’ and how people perceive them. Might as well do a paper doll chart.

    So, since a pie chart doesn’t really give consistent info, why not add color and perspective and 3D to confuse things even more? Might as well make it pretty and have some fun with the confusion.

  86. 86.

    trollhattan

    Tallest hooman I’ve seen is Yao Ming, made extra impressive viewed from a court-level seat. His legs are like tree trunks (compared to, say, Manute Bol’s toothpicks).

  87. 87.

    dmsilev

    @clay:

    One of the first things taught in my Stats class is that area is the key to interpreting a chart.  So while the heights of the figures may be accurate, the chart makers also increased their areas proportionally.  The reader’s brain absorbs the latter, not the former.

    This is a point made in the classic text How To Lie With Statistics, which is a truly excellent book I’d recommend to everyone.

  88. 88.

    Brachiator

    @EthylEster:

    Take heart. There are many females out there who are looking for a guy who is of the same scale as they are.

    There was some throwaway show about relationships where a group of men and women talked about, or maybe even picked dates.

    Maybe a bunch of guys were shown and the women were told about things like education, employment, income, etc. A similar round-up of women for a group of men.

    Men were relatively shallow about what they were looking for. The women were more broadly accepting, except for one thing.

    The women rarely rated a man as acceptable if he was shorter than her.

  91. 91.

    JDM

    When I’m watching a parade I want to be Stephen Merchant; when I’m traveling by air I want to be Kristin Chenoweth. Life just doesn’t work like it should.

  92. 92.

    Sab

    @Alison Rose: That stepstool is a big issue in my house. It is absolutely impossible to train a 6’2″ person to leave anything close to the front of the cupboard. So make them haul themselves off the couch to get it. I didn’t leave it in the back.

  94. 94.

    Sab

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I used to go to the grocery with my mom (5’2″.) I am 5’5″. My sisters are 5’6″ and 5′ 4″. My sisters in law  range from 5’6″ to 5’11”. My mother would never ask for help. She would always jump and tap the bottom of the bottle until it fell. She always caught it. I used to think she was spunky. Now I think she should have complained.

  96. 96.

    prostratedragon

    Oh my-y-y! That is Hall of Fame quality bad. It will be a counterexample in data viz handbooks for generations.

    Not that anyone was wondering, but I’m about 5’4″ as was my mother; father about 5’7″; brother about 6’6″. And yes, our relationship to each other is otherwise unmistakable. (There is height elsewhere on both sides of the family.)

  97. 97.

    Another Scott

    Bad charts are bad.  :-(

    In other news, an extensive FAQ for Virginia’s first in the nation COVID-19 contact tracing app – COVIDWISE:

    e.g.

    How does the app work?

    COVIDWISE is designed to notify users when they have been in contact with other users that have tested positive for COVID-19.

    The app is built on Apple and Google’s Exposure Notification system that allows smartphones to exchange anonymous keys over Bluetooth. These anonymous keys change daily to protect your identity. Each phone shares its own daily anonymous key and stores the anonymous keys of nearby devices locally (i.e. on the user’s phone) for 14 days.

    When people who have downloaded the app are near each other for a period of time determined by VDH to represent a risk (a period which is updated based on the latest research), their phones exchange anonymous keys, and each saves the anonymous key of the other phone. Alongside the anonymous key, phones estimate the contact risk of an exchange using the date, time, and the duration of the contact, as well as the strength of the Bluetooth signal (to approximate distance). Contact risk is used to determine if a user is notified of a potential exposure and is not shared with any user.

    I’ll probably be installing it in coming days. Things like this can help reduce the spread, and we need everything we can get to make progress.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  99. 99.

    dmsilev

    @Patricia Kayden: Lead paragraph from the Post:

    Jerry Falwell Jr. will take an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty University after posting a racy photo to social media from his vacation where his pants were unzipped, his midriff was out, and heis standing next to a woman holding a glass of dark liquid. He later deleted the photo.

    A word of warning: if you value your sanity, don’t search for that photo.

  101. 101.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @germy: That seems to be a common trope among conservatives that the author doesn’t know the paper they wrote.

  105. 105.

    Juju

    I’m 5’10”. I have always felt like the giant in the room, until I found a friend who was 6’1”. She was the person I asked to get things that I couldn’t reach.

  107. 107.

    Elizabelle

    @dmsilev: 

    And he apologized for … the dark liquid.

    Not sorry to hear this. Now we wait for the NRA grifters to get jettisoned, too.

  108. 108.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Speaking of women’s hights; one of my girlfriends was 5’10” and me and friends would call her “Little Hillary” and then found out all her woman friends called her “The Ogress” lol.

  110. 110.

    bemused

    @germy:

    Same old republican crap. They believe or pretend to believe the majority of Americans needing assistance, money from state, federal government are scamming the system. I’ve heard this all my life from people even from people who are just a few paychecks away from not being able to pay their bills.

  111. 111.

    jonas

    @Elizabelle: The “dark liquid”? Is Coke one of the Forbidden Things™ at Liberty? Or is there clearly a half-empty bottle of Captain Morgan in the background?

  112. 112.

    Elizabelle

    LOL.  The WaPost is not allowing reader comments on the Falwell Jr. taking leave of absence story.

  114. 114.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]: One might also cite Darryl Huff, How To Lie With Statistics – originally published 1954, but “age cannot wither, nor custom stale” its near-universal applicability.

  115. 115.

    jonas

    @trollhattan: One time — and it was once for a peon such as myself — I scored a lucky seat close enough to courtside at Staples Center watching Shaquille O’Neal that you could literally feel the ground shake when he ran by. That is a large man.

  116. 116.

    Elizabelle

    @jonas:   Not being of the Baptist fundamentalist mindset, what was in the glass was about the last thing most of us noticed.

  119. 119.

    Ruckus

    @JPL:

    Was he ever good enough to be the clown for the entire class? Last row, right side maybe, but entire class?

  123. 123.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @debbie: A former coworker had come to the USA as a baby from Latvia with her parents. She was very slightly smaller than an NFL middle linebacker, but (I would guess) not as athletic.

    Then again, I spent 3 days in Riga just before 9/11 & didn’t notice the local women being especially, shall we say, substantial. But it was hard to say – anyone out & about was mostly cowering under umbrellas for the duration. (Myself included. It struck me as a very nice city when it wasn’t raining; I gather that isn’t often the case.)

  124. 124.

    Ruckus

    @Betty Cracker:

    I have rather long arms for my hight and normally can reach the top shelf at the grocery store quite easily. I’ve helped a lot of woman get stuff they could not reach without a ladder and most of them seem to appreciate it, but not all of them. I’m sorry that I don’t feel all that bad about it, I didn’t create them, just like they didn’t create me, it just is what it is. I was good at basketball, even for my height but of course couldn’t play worth a damn compared to a decent college player. We used to play at Polly – UCLA campus on Thursday nights, often UCLA players would stop by to make us feel a lot smaller – it worked!

  126. 126.

    Ruckus

    @Jager:

    It is difficult to pack that much shit in a 5’8″ body and make it look in any way impressive. shitforbrains hasn’t managed.

  127. 127.

    Brachiator

    @Martin:

    But his sister can shuck twice as much corn per hour. If they’re both on a train going 100 miles from New York to Pittsburgh at 40 miles per hour, how old is the shepherd?

    145 pounds.

  138. 138.

    billcinsd

    @Anotherlurker:

    I once saw a probably 5-year old kid run into Mark Eaton, when the kid was looking backward at his parents. It was quite funny when the kid turned to face Eaton’s knee

  139. 139.

    billcinsd

    @Robert Sneddon: Yeah, the problem isn’t not starting at zero for a labelled axis, it is having all the feet start at 4’10”, rather than putting the start to say 4′ and starting all the figures at mid-chest

  143. 143.

    Ken

    @Elizabelle: A lot of people including some Liberty U. students have been pointing out that students would be fined or expelled for dressing like that, posing like that, or posting a picture like that.

  145. 145.

    Bill Arnold

    @Ken:

    They’re both the same academic. Kudlow mis-read the paper and got called on it. It’s the “I have Marshall McLuhan right here” skit from Annie Hall.

    He didn’t actually say that he’d read the paper, he sort of tried ineptly to imply it. Maybe he did, but why wouldn’t he have said “yes”?

  146. 146.

    EthylEster

    @Brachiator: The women rarely rated a man as acceptable if he was shorter than her.

    I get that but not that many women are taller than 5’8″. So Chetan is not shut out!

    AND I always think of Danny Devito and Mel Brooks whose (taller) wives always mention their husbands make them laugh.

  147. 147.

    MomDoc

    @Betty Cracker: I am 5’11” so I am always getting things for shorter women in stores.

    My husband is almost 6’1″ and my son is 6’2″ and some change. My mother was 5’6″ and my dad 5’11”. However, both of my grandfathers were well over 6 feet and my great-grandmother was 6’0″ (but her daughter/my grandmother was less than 5 feet tall). Genetics is a funny thing.

    Fun fact: When I met my husband, I was wearing 4-inch heels.

  148. 148.

    Original Lee

    My parents used to belong to The Toppers Club, a social club for tall people that might still be around. Both of them were over six feet tall. There was a period when they would double-date with my dad’s brother, who was 6’6” and liked dating tall women. My mom said they joined Toppers because it was very nice to be able to go out for dinner and dancing and not feel like freaks.

    My sisters and I are somewhat shorter than they were.

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