Time

[ad hoc]

As of last week (Jan 26th) the Berlin Wall has been down longer than it was up.

That kind of knowledge does my head in

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Mine too! Nice fact.

Edit: also, although this comment belongs on the Mundane thread, that reminds me I must reply to an email new year message from my friends in Berlin. I've been playing too much chess to keep up with that sort of important personal contact.

[Snake Plissken]

Well, that got my day off to a good start.

[Ginger Yellow]

The Wall coming down is basically my first political memory. Well, that and Free Nelson Mandela.

[Patrick Thistle]

The Miner's Strike is my first political memory.

Not counting being bundled into a car when my parents were given half an hour warning that gunmen leading a Marxist coup were on the way to kill all the white people in the village.

[Gangster Octopus]

Which part of Wales was that?

[Satchmo Distel]

Live Aid is already farther back in time than the Coronation was at the time of Live Aid.

The year 1984 will soon be farther back in time from now than it was forward in time when Orwell wrote the book.

Similarly, the Miners Strike will soon be farther back in time than the 1940s were when the strike started.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

My birth date is nearer the start of World War I than today.

[Satchmo Distel]

My birth date is nearer the start of World War I than today.

I will cross that point when I turn 52 in September. For World War 2, I crossed that point in 1993.

[hobbes]

I had one of these a few years ago, when I realised quite out of the blue, that on that day my Dad had been dead for more of my life than he'd been alive.

Oh and I think of late period Cure being 1987's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and onwards. They'd been around 9 years then. This summer is their 40th anniversary gig.

[EIM]

I'm now interviewing people to work behind the bar who weren't born when I started doing bar work.

[Snake Plissken]

Yeah, I went to Terrorvisions first ever last ever gig. Which is longer ago now than they originally lasted.

[Satchmo Distel]

Oh and I think of late period Cure being 1987's Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and onwards. They'd been around 9 years then. This summer is their 40th anniversary gig.

That's a separate thread in its own right: a band's most fertile period will be compressed* and there's a very long stretch where the band and its fans go through adulthood and middle age. The Beatles, The Jam and The Smiths avoided it by splitting up, but their individual members followed the pattern (McCartney, Weller, Morrissey). They can't avoid being defined by what they did before the age of 30 (or 25 in some cases).

This is most notable for me in that I admire The Beach Boys and Stevie Wonder, who both stopped being 'relevant' around the 30 years of age mark but whose post-30 music I can occasionally still like, and whom I've loved going to see live when they were 65+.

*but it doesn't feel compressed at the time. The Smiths as a recording act was 1983-87. It felt like a decade. The Clash or The Jam ditto for 1977-82 (although The Clash made post-Jones recordings)

[Walt Flanagans Dog]

Apart from the usual music references we all tend to use - e.g. Nevermind now being almost as old now as the Beatles' first album was when Nevermind came out - a common reference point for me is that Boys of '66 series that the BBC ran in the lead up to the 1986 World Cup. Half hour episodes in which they showed what each of England's World Cup team was (then) now doing 'in later life', with their memories of that day (then) 20 years ago. At the time I was 14 and it seemed like another century, now that series itself is nearly 32 years ago.

On different timeframes, there's that whole set of comparisons - Cleopatra's lifetime being closer in time to the invention of the iphone than the building of the pyramids; woolly mammoths still roaming the earth when the pyramids were built; Oxford University being older than the Aztec civilization; the grandchildren of whatever American president from a long time ago still being alive.

[WOM]

Phil Collins remade You Can't Hurry Love 16 years after the original, which seemed really ancient then.
That was 36 years ago.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Yet it still feels like longer.

[Satchmo Distel]

Vera Lynn's next single is "Does anyone hear remember Roger Waters?"

[wiblflibl]

I've lived in England longer than I lived in Wales.

[hobbes]

I used to take the piss out of my Mum for listening to 60s music 20 years later in the 80s.
It was with some chagrin that I reminded her of that as I was listening to Absolute 80s in the car in the summer, a mere 30-ish years later.

I also remember the Beatles as being an olden days band when we used to sing Yellow Submarine at pre-school. In 1976 just 7 years after it was released. I've got t-shirts older than that.
In fact, I've a PWEI t-shirt from 1990 I still sometimes wear.

[WOM]

My old partner Debi used to joke "Please...I have shoes older than you!"
My motorbike-riding Docs really are older than a lot of the 'kids' I now work with.

[Incandenza]

My birth date is nearer the start of World War I than today.

There is a website that can come up with facts like that for dates entered, but I can't remember what it was called.

[Kevin S]

Wolfram Alpha does the job.

[elguapo4]

Probably not the right thread but one of my favourite pieces of historical trivia is that between President Obama's birth and Kennedy's assassination,Presidents Hoover,Truman,Eisenhower,Kennedy,Johnson,Nixon,For d,Reagan,Bush senior,Clinton,Bush junior,Obama and Trump were all alive,probably the most leaders of any country to be alive at the same time

[Patrick Thistle]

Which part of Wales was that?

That was before I lived in Wales

[Patrick Thistle]

(But you did make me laugh, GO)