Who's keeping track of this?

The History Channel ran a presidents marathon this weekend, taking John Q. Public through a tour of our nation's top dogs.

Lots of cool little facts and "Where did they go?" types of information as well as on-the-fly power rankings of were they good presidents, bad presidents or dead because of strange old time disease presidents.

That evening, as part of the Save Our History program, there was an hourlong documentary about how there had never been a definitive ruling on George Washington and what he really looked like.

To remedy this, a team was assembled to produce three figures for Mount Vernon that showed Washington as a teen surveyor, middle-aged general and an aging president.

It was all pretty cool, down to the backtracking the historians had to do to de-age the only known measurements and facial castings from in his 50s by looking at his underpants. That and going to work on the wooden teeth myths and other variables that no one had really looked into before now.

The two big cornerstones were a bust and life-sized statue produced in France while Washington was alive and while they were incredibly accurate, the original measurements were lost during the French Revolution. This was a total bummer to the science types involved.

While I'm sure the Library of Congress has the weekly weigh-ins for all modern presidents to track Bill Clinton's Big Mac consumption and Jimmy Carter's annual slim down before beach season, I can't help but wonder what we're missing that future historians will be kicking themselves over.

In this booming Information Age, things are better recorded and stored than ever before with knowledge becoming a Top 5 commodity in our society. Still, we can't find the original tapes from the lunar landing anywhere in the NASA archives (the original signals were beamed to Australia and then sent again to the world) and there have to be other pieces of history falling through the cracks.

This doesn't even take into account new technologies - like 3D renderings or whatever else is around the bend - that aren't invented yet. Then again, I'm sure no one thought to record Washington's inseam size what with the fighting the British and not getting eaten by woodland animals things going on at the time.

My money is on DNA as the mystery piece to the future's puzzle and we're already seeing some of this, beginning with Abraham Lincoln's speculated Marfan's Syndrome. Rather than the ugly business of exhuming dead presidents from their family estates, I'd honestly be surprised if there's not a cooler at the National Archives full of presidential blood right this very minute.

In the meantime, I can only imagine how kickass future museums will be with a cloned Richard Nixon causing problems for the museum staff and secretly plotting against the workers in the food court.

(Image from HistoryPlace.com / SaveOurHistory.com)