My mother said she always wondered about the empty nest feeling mothers have when the kids all leave--hers kept coming back. And they brung more with 'em.

Personally, I don't see how a flimsy rod attracting lightening would be good for the house. I saw a long, ranch-style house hit by lightening in the center, and the whole middle of the house was gone.The power is too great to ground it that way through a mere wire. On tall buildings, though, the rods connect to the steel superstructure and they have been photographed grounding the lightening perfectly. When I was a child, we saw in our social studies book a photo of lightening hitting the Empire State Building with no harm done. It was taken at night with shutter open on B setting during a storm. Now such pictures are common.

Airplanes are another matter and it is a mystery to me how they survive regular lightening hits. In 1967, an airliner exploded when lightening hit the fuel tank, so they adopted methods of keeping the lightening on the outside aluminum skin--when charged, the plane is the source of a lightening bolt rather than the target. Of course, most of the flights are above the storms.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-when-lightni/