The Little Mermaid is 43, and other moments of lucid decrepitude.

[Kane Jones]

Ever since I reached older than 22 it's always made me realise the fast passage of time whenever I remember 9/11 was closer to my birth than now. Currently it's on;

Years between my birth and 9/11 = 11
Years between 9/11 and now = 16

Probably more mad for me because I remember 9/11 like it was yesterday.

Naff off, you young bastard!

Yeah, that's too far MoonDust. I was about your current age when 9/11 happened. Rub my old nose in it, why don't you? In many ways you're crueller than those terrorists.

[phantom_power]

I have just read that Bebeto's son, he of the "rocking baby celebration" from World Cup 1994 is 23 now and has just signed for Sporting Lisbon. That and seeing a seemingly adult Lennon Gallagher the other day makes me feel very old

[Replies From View]

I have just read that Bebeto's son, he of the "rocking baby celebration" from World Cup 1994 is 23 now and has just signed for Sporting Lisbon.

I was 97 years old when the charity Sporting Lesbian was founded.

Beat that.

[Phoenix Lazarus]

I'm older now than Lord Lucan was when he vanished, and when his cousin, Freddie Mercury, snuffed it.

[Twit 2]

It's now closer in time to the Big Bang than it is the distance to Belgium, which is an area about the size of Wales.

[greenman]

We were reminiscing about 1995 UK Eurovision entry Love City Groove the other day, and realised that, to our son, that was the equivalent of a song released in 1959 to us. And we did feel like farty old cobwebs.

For me anyway a big issue tends to be less an acknowledgement of my own age and more just how little things have moved along musically compared to the decades prior to the early 90's. I spose you could argue its finally in significant decline in the last 5 years but the long horrible drawn out nature of standard indie pop/rock is especially depressing to look back on. Like someone forgot to shoot it in the back of the head in the late 90's/early 00's as happened in most previous mainstream movements.

[Paul Calf]

Yeah. There was no RnB/rock and roll/punk/hip-hop/techno-house to punctuate the period. Unless you count grime and uk garage. Do you count grime and uk garage?

[BritishHobo]

I saw Steffan Alun at Mach Fest and he had a lovely bit about hearing one student if she remembered that film, Arthur Christmas. "THAT'S A NEW FILM! It's not even out on DVD yet!" But aye, it's six years old; students who start uni in September will have seen it in primary school, pretty much a lifetime ago for them.

On an unrelated note, I had a bizarre thought today while reading A.N Wilson's 'The Victorians' - Jack the Ripper's murder spree was closer in time to my nan's birth (thirty-two years) than the Moors murders were to mine. It's insane to me to think I met someone for whose family Jack the Ripper was recent history.

[non capisco]

The baby from the front of 'Nevermind' has aged at a normal rate got an adult bloke to do a photoshoot for him because he was probably too occupied with his dummy, rattle and rusks that day.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Rocko's Modern Life doesn't feel all that modern any more.

Remember on the 90's where, for a brief while, things actually felt they were getting better? Member?

[Paul Calf]

Iain Banks described it as "the long decade between the fall of the wall and the fall of the towers". Quite potent, I thought.

[Paul Calf]

I saw Steffan Alun at Mach Fest and he had a lovely bit about hearing one student if she remembered that film, Arthur Christmas. "THAT'S A NEW FILM! It's not even out on DVD yet!" But aye, it's six years old; students who start uni in September will have seen it in primary school, pretty much a lifetime ago for them.

On an unrelated note, I had a bizarre thought today while reading A.N Wilson's 'The Victorians' - Jack the Ripper's murder spree was closer in time to my nan's birth (thirty-two years) than the Moors murders were to mine. It's insane to me to think I met someone for whose family Jack the Ripper was recent history.

I met my great grandmother who was born in 1889. Her parents would have been well aware of Jack's existence.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Iain Banks described it as "the long decade between the fall of the wall and the fall of the towers". Quite potent, I thought.

Not bad. I watched 3 Colours for the first time just after brexit. Despite the content was bleak, there was this sense of hope and togetherness looming over the horizon as Europe became closer together; it just added to my sense of weltschmerz really.

[Dr Rock]

The Damned are currently enjoying their 40th year as a musical act. This is the same as if, in 1976, when they formed, somebody from 1936 was still doing gigs.

[touchingcloth]

Happy Days was filmed in the 70s and set in the 50s, and That 70s Show was filmed in the 90s and set in the 70s. We're now far enough adrift that the same thing could be done with a sitcom about the 90s, except...it couldn't really, could it?

[Icehaven]

Happy Days was filmed in the 70s and set in the 50s, and That 70s Show was filmed in the 90s and set in the 70s. We're now far enough adrift that the same thing could be done with a sitcom about the 90s, except...it couldn't really, could it?

There might not be an actual TV show (yet) but 90's nostalgia has been everywhere for a while now, and seemingly not just because those of us who were 'there' are now at least mid 30s so expected to want to get going on missing our youth, the actual youth are quite into the 90s too. My 20 year old cousin adores the Stone Roses and posts pictures of himself dressed like Ian Brown on facebook all the time (not that I'm advocating that). Another 27 year old cousin loves Friends. It's just the same as how me and my friends liked The Clash and The Cure and so on (as well as mostly music from our own time) when we were that age. I suppose the magazines we read told us how influential they'd been on our favourite bands, so we listened and liked, and the internet has made this much easier for kidz to do now than it was for us to raid charity shops and older relatives record collections.

[touchingcloth]

^I've seen enough posters for student "retro" nights dotted around the place to appreciate that nineties nostalgia is very much out there, but it does feel like that decade isn't as culturally separated from this one as the 90s were from the 70s were from the 50s. In That 70s Show the generation of fusty parents have wildly different sensibilities from their laid back kids, and the gap between the 70s when it was set and the 90s when it was filmed just seemed much vaster than 20 years in a way that the gao between the 90s and now doesn't.

That's probably in large part due to me being someone who came of age in the 90s, so the changes have all crept up on me slowly. I gather from teacher and parent friends that kids these days are way more tolerant than they were in my generation - playground homophobia is not nearly so rampant, I understand - and the latest lot of university students sound like downright abstemious squares, all gym and healthy eating and alcohol shunning. So maybe there's yer show.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Yeah some newly built student accommodation near me boasted gyms. Pretty sure you're not allowed to smoke in them either these days.

I don't get it. P.E. is for schoolchildren and convicts.

[Cuellar]

Yeah some newly built student accommodation near me boasted gyms. Pretty sure you're not allowed to smoke in them either these days.

I don't get it. P.E. is for schoolchildren and convicts.

Yeah I'm pretty sure you're not allowed to smoke in gyms.

[MoonDust]

Talking of the 90s now being considered retro, does anyone look back at pop music from the 90s with rose-tinted nostalgia? Like, I hated the Spice Girls as a kid, but listening back they had genuinely catchy songs and are better, in my opinion, than the chart music bile we're hearing these days.

However people probably thought this about 70s/80s pop music in the 90s, saying similarly that Spice Girls are shit compared to what was 20 years before.

With that in mind I dread the day, in the 2030s, when pop music is sooo bad, that looking back at Ed Sheeran prompts one to think "hm, he wasn't that bad, in hindsight."

[Sebastian Cobb]

Talking of the 90s now being considered retro, does anyone look back at pop music from the 90s with rose-tinted nostalgia? Like, I hated the Spice Girls as a kid, but listening back they had genuinely catchy songs and are better, in my opinion, than the chart music bile we're hearing these days.

However people probably thought this about 70s/80s pop music in the 90s, saying similarly that Spice Girls are shit compared to what was 20 years before.

Pop music was perfected in the 60's with The Shirelles, The Crystals and The Shangri-La's etc. It's been downhill ever since.

[touchingcloth]

Nah, popular music was perfected in the 80s. The 1880s with Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado.

[Paul Calf]

Pop music was perfected in the 60's with The Shirelles, The Crystals and The Shangri-La's etc. It's been downhill ever since.

Jaqui and Carrie are seething.

[checkoutgirl]

With that in mind I dread the day, in the 2030s, when pop music is sooo bad, that looking back at Ed Sheeran prompts one to think "hm, he wasn't that bad, in hindsight."

Well the sixties had very popular acts who were pretty terrible like Cilla Black but the Stones still popped up on Top of the Pops every now and again. It's hard to think of a band like The Rolling Who or the Stones getting any traction in the charts these days. Also there was never a song as bad as Fly Like a G6 by Far East Movement in the sixties, music that bad hadn't been invented yet.

Bur overall it would be a mistake to think all music was better 20 years ago. The only people who can say that with much confidence are the people who were in their teens and twenties in the sixties. It was a freakish period for music. Similarly the seventies was the freakishly good period for film.

Nobody's going to look back at now thinking Mumford and Sons or Kings of Leon were geniuses. Unless you liked them at the time of course.

[MojoJojo]

On the original theme, I worked out earlier that if I had gone backwards through age from when I was born, the second world war would just be ending/starting.

I guess these are all manifestations that knowledge of stuff before you were born is all abstract.

[chocky909]

New Indiana Jones movie starring Harrison Ford is due in 2019. Ford will have been playing Indy for 38 years.

Bruce Willis played John McClane in all 5 Die Hard films from 1988 to 2013. that's 25 years.

Hopefully Macauley Culkin will film a Home Alone sequel in his seventies and blow them guyz all up outta the water.

[hedgehog90]

Talking of the 90s now being considered retro, does anyone look back at pop music from the 90s with rose-tinted nostalgia? Like, I hated the Spice Girls as a kid, but listening back they had genuinely catchy songs and are better, in my opinion, than the chart music bile we're hearing these days.

The 90's embodied purity, hope and joy, culminating with the release of Rollercoaster by B*witched.
It was all down hill after that.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Well the sixties had very popular acts who were pretty terrible like Cilla Black but the Stones still popped up on Top of the Pops every now and again. It's hard to think of a band like The Rolling Who or the Stones getting any traction in the charts these days. Also there was never a song as bad as Fly Like a G6 by Far East Movement in the sixties, music that bad hadn't been invented yet.

Bur overall it would be a mistake to think all music was better 20 years ago. The only people who can say that with much confidence are the people who were in their teens and twenties in the sixties. It was a freakish period for music. Similarly the seventies was the freakishly good period for film.

Nobody's going to look back at now thinking Mumford and Sons or Kings of Leon were geniuses. Unless you liked them at the time of course.

Cilla Black existed just for racist middle class white people who didn't want to listen to good soul records though, much like Pat Boone did with Fats Domino records.

From what I can tell the 'production line' methods used by both commercial pop (like Spector) and by people like Motown meant that people didn't seem to give a shit about individual artists (to the point that Spector recorded the Crystals And Then He Kissed Me with Dolores Brooks, while the real Crystals were busy touring somewhere) and 'the kids' didn't really have stand out tunes or artists, the key thing they wanted was stuff that was new so essentially nobody gave a shit about Will You Love Me Tomorrow two weeks after it came out yet decades later it is considered one of the most flawless and complete works of contemporary pop ever created.

[Twit 2]

More time has now passed since the Gulf War than the 2nd World War is to a person born after the 1994 World Cup semi-final.

[Captain Z]

That length of time would fill 400 Olympic-sized swimming pools with 35 blue whales laid end to end.