Comments & Curiosities:

How long do you want to live? It’s a tricky question. Continuing last week’s theme of the “Best Cities” for this and that, I found an interesting survey on CNN Money online — the 25 counties with the highest life expectancies in the United States.

If you want to live a really long time, I guess you have to live in one of these places.

Go ahead — ask. You’re dying to know. How did we do? Not so fast there, missy. We’ll get to the good stuff; you just have to be patient. Besides, you’ll live longer. Ready? We begin.

The county with the highest life expectancy of them all is, drum roll, please — Montgomery County, Md. If that’s where you pitch your tent, you can expect to live exactly 81.31 years at birth.

Life expectancy is always measured “at birth” because if you weigh 195 pounds in the second grade and spend the rest of your life smoking, drinking hard, not using a seat belt and slamming double-doubles at In-N-Out, you’ll be lucky if you make it to 81, let alone 81.31.

I’ve been to Montgomery County; It’s a nice suburb north of Washington. I’m not sure what the big whoop is, and people there don’t look especially old to me, but I say God bless them. They have a good score, and they should be proud.

The No. 2 county for life expectancy is Story County, Iowa, where you’ll live to be only 81.02 years old. Nothing against Story County, but you better think long and hard about passing on Montgomery County. That .29 years doesn’t seem like much now, but you won’t be so flip about it when the time comes.

The big deal in Story County is Ames, Iowa, which is where Iowa State University is. Go Cyclones.

There’s also the “…nationally respected Reiman Gardens,” according to CNN Money, “which has indoor and outdoor botanical exhibitions and a butterfly garden.” Oh, OK. I feel older already.

No. 3 on the list is Carver County, Minn., which includes the towns of Chanhassen and Chaska — as if you didn’t know that — and is “…home to more than 50 of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes and 70,000 Minnesotans who fish, sail and otherwise enjoy themselves.”