Sometimes you hear a tale about someone from the past so vivid, so funny and so surprising that you wish you had a chance to write his obit. But Jonathan Weisman and Madonna Lebling did a fine delayed obit, on the politics page no less, about John McCain's maternal grandfather. And it looks like a tip into the story came from a Washington D.C. cabdriver.

Wright arrived in Muskogee a gambler and bootlegger and left a wealthy wildcatter who owned some of the most valuable property in the region. He bartered for that land with gold coins and liquor, as Native Americans were receiving parcels of property from the federal government, according to Murray Clifford "Cliff" Smith III, a District cab driver whose grandmother was Wright's wife's sister. Smith's mother, Margaret Lawson Smith, was a cousin and playmate of Roberta Wright.

We'll have a story in tomorrow's Washington Post (here it is ) that is yet another example of why people read obits. A man with the obit-worthy surname of Graves wrote in an e-mail "My father was a pre-eminent reader of newspapers, both the Post and numerous Russian newspapers.... In a twist you might find interesting, he actually made a rather prominent intelligence breakthrough by reading Soviet obituaries."

Well, that correspondent certainly knew how to get an obit writer's attention.

Tangentially, I wrote an obit back in 2004 about a scientist, Ancel Keys . Here's the relevant paragraph:

In 1947, he noticed the increasing numbers of deaths from heart attacks, as noted in the newspapers' obituary pages, and began to study 283 businessmen from the Twin Cities, conducting examinations and taking blood samples every five years. It showed that smoking, high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol were frequently seen in men who had heart attacks. After a decade of work, he determined that saturated fat chiefly determined blood cholesterol levels, a breakthrough that stunned the meat-and-potatoes populace.

See what you get from these little life tales?

The "survivors paragraph" in a typical Washington Post obit is fairly rigidly formatted, and for good reason: It's quite common for people, who define family broadly, to seek to include what my grandmother called "shirt-tail relations." It's also unfortunately common for some people to try to exclude a family rival, black sheep or ungrateful sibling.

Families have never been as neat and defined as society tries to believe, however; grandparents raise the children of their own missing children, cousins grow up in an uncle's household, a neighbor takes in a stray child and is more of a mother to her than her biological mother.

But the world is changing and as I read this Ellen Goodman column, I mused on how an obit writer in the future will deal with the gender-changing parents, the surrogate mother who's really a grandmother, and the brother or sister who becomes the sister or brother.

Not all hermits are wackos.

Rolan Craig, a Coloradoan who died June 12 just days shy of her 110th birthday, could shoot, fish, ride horses, herd pigs and cows and "made the best peanut butter cookies in the world," said her great-granddaughter.

From vacuum tubes to the Internet, this inventor did it all. Of course, the Net and computers have many fathers; here's another one.

TV journalist Ron Hunter (his photo is here) anchored the news in Chicago with Jane Pauley before she departed local news
for the "Today" show, and Maury Povich, who would later gain fame in
syndicated daytime TV.

The dangers of gambling: The guy who started Hardee's lost controlling interest in it in a poker game.

Who would you rather dress? Twyla Tharp or Big Bird? This guy did both -- and that finally explains some of those wild ballet costumes!

The constant tension between families who wish to see their dead relative's life through rose-colored glasses and those of us who insist on a more balanced report (yes, even in the obits) gives rise to some interesting discussions.

I had one last week in which a bereft friend said

"I mean, Osama bin Laden is still out there somewhere, but (name deleted) isn't."

Generally speaking, mentioning bin Laden, or Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin or other nefarious world figures in the same breath as the subject of the story is frowned upon here, unless there's a stronger link between the subject and the criminal. Osama's childhood friend? Sure, that's an exception. The righteous opponent who fought against him? I'm happy to go into that. Not saying that Name Deleted wasn't a better person than bin Laden, but it's off the point.