This is my 300th post. Actually on this blog there are 301 posts. I have had one guest written post but that’s a different story.
As it’s a milestone and, in part, inspired by yet another XKCD cartoon I will be looking back and making us all feel old.
I just remembered a conversation I had on New Year’s Day 2013 that I noticed that the first people born at the start of the 21st century were just turning into stroppy teenagers.
Can you remember where you were when the 21st Century ended? I can, some friends and myself were out in Preston trying to find a pub that would allow people in. We finally found one at random. It seemed that we had gatecrashed the pub’s party. I think a sign mentioned it as one of our party commented on it. I had to dig him in the ribs and remind him that we were in and shut up. It worked as we stayed in the pub well past midnight.
Remembering that fact and that time marches on, got me thinking about time.
The main thing, that links with the above statement, is that the people who were born on the day of the 9/11 tragedy in 2001 will be turning into teenagers in, just under, a month’s time.
The stats from the XKCD cartoon, published in 2014, that got me thinking about ages have a set of statistics about gaps in time.
The conjectures made were:
Forest Gump, the film, is closer to the end of the Vietnam war than today. The Vietnam war ended in 1975 and the film came out in 1994. A 19 year gap compared to the 20 years between the film’s release and today.
Today’s new American parents remember Season 5 or 6 of The Simpsons as the earliest. The average age of new American parents were born in 1990 and season 5 & 6 of The Simpsons came out between 1993-5. So the parents would be just about to go to Kindergarten.
These parents would be turning ten when Eminem “got big”. Releasing his second album.
Not only that, if we get back to American parents. I have already mentioned new parents. Now, parents who are having their second child are three years younger than when the film Ghostbusters came out. Using the average age of first time parents, 24, and adding the average cap between children as three years. That means that these parents were born in 1987. The year I started doing my A-levels!
The final, quite astonishing fact is that today’s new grandparents are younger than Keanu Reeves. He was born in 1965. The grandparents were, on average, born in 1966. They are turning 48 this year.
Feeling old yet? I know I am whist writing this post.
