I am exactly 5 years younger than Mike Patton of Faith no More. He was just a shaver in those trippy videos back in the day!

For me the strongest such reaction was to learning Gary Shteyngart is my age. Also Zadie Smith, but I learned her age not long after I had already learned Shteyngart's, so I was a bit inured.

Eminem, Cameron Diaz and Jude Law were all born in the same year as me. Zinedine Zidane, too.

Kurt Cobain and Bitch, Ph.D. were both born about the same time I was.

When I discovered I was a year older than creaky Brett Favre, it was a little disheartening.

Yeah; while I've never been much of an athlete, having pro athletes my age get too old to play has been weird.

I am Borat's age.

Wow! I am the same age as Rob helpy-chalk and Bitch Ph.D. Now I really feel old.

Lives are lived on different clocks.

"Lives are lived on different clocks."

I hate linear time.

You people are all babies. I have a son who is in his 30's. I have resisted the notion that I am completely over the hill, but you all are not helping.

Lives are lived on different clocks.

Streuth. Some people pack an entire life into twenty-odd years.

"Some people pack an entire life into twenty-odd years."

Yes, and then you have kids and they spend the next 30 years slowly sucking the life back out of you.

That's not quite what I meant.

13:
So you don't have kids?

I believe the definitive line on this feeling is Tom Lehrer's: "It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

I hate linear time.

It was quite an odd feeling when I realized that the actor currently portraying Doctor Who is younger than I am.

Two random moments: The good one, realizing you are the same age as the playboy centerfold thus theoretically able to date her. The creepy one, realizing you are now old enough to be the father of the centerfold.
Not happened yet: recognizing a friends daughter in porn.

17: Close enough to round up?

It seems wrong that it took this thread 17 comments to get to sex. But yeah, the pro athlete thing is the brain-itcher for me. I think it's just because I think that people who are bigger than me should be older than me. Since my grandfather has shrunk to Herve Villachez proportions, this should be an easier bias to shake.

I am old enough to be the grandfather of a centerfold, though my son isn't quite old enough to be the father of one.

10: It's very, very relative. My oldest will be 40 this year and on my birthday Adolf made his fatal mistake by heading his panzers towards Moscow. I need a nap.

I'm getting close -- what are they, 18, 19? If I'd had a kid young, I could have had an 18 year-old any time now.

Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, Gary Farber.

23: Am I the only one thinking supergroup here?

Michael Jackson, [...] Gary Farber.

Farber used to be black, too.

Jenna Jameson! Ryan Adams. L'il Kim! Hilary Swank. This helped.

Jenna Jameson. Huh.

Re the pro athlete thing: I once worked with a guy who, when he turned 30 (I was 22 at the time, and 30 seemed a long way off), came into the office and said, "I suppose I'll finally have to face the fact that I am never going to score a goal for England."

re: 22

My mum became a grandmother in her thirties (when my little sister had her first).

24 -- Thomas Kinkade can do the album cover art.

Moqtada al-Sadr!

Madonna and Jackson I'm fine with. What makes me feel old is knowing about Annette Benning and Andie McDowell.

Vanilla Ice and I were born less than a month apart.

18: Butch Stroll, who comments at B's, once popped a porn movie into the VCR only to find that it starred an x-boyfriend of his.

And Ol' Dirty Bastard less than two weeks!

I think ben and I once discussed somewhere the disturbing realization that Scarlett Johannson was younger than us.

What trips me out is seeing people who were born in the mid-eighties turning up in the media. My brain still wants to categorize the eighties as Not That Long Ago.

Kirsten Dunst! Jessica Biel! Anne Hathaway! Joanna Newsom! Elisha Cuthbert! Ian Thorpe!

All these people and more are my age!

I'm the same age as Paul McCartney's (one-legged estranged) wife, which I find somewhat disturbing.

Also, Pauly Shore!

Here is Stroll's post. It was internet porn he saw his ex in. They had had a rough break up.

I think the last time I had this sensation vividly was on reading a Vanity Fair profile of this guy. He's a year older than me, but still.

"Thomas Kinkade can do the album cover art"

I really hate Kinkade's stuff.

I was born the same year as Billy Bob Thronton and Billy Idol--I'm sure there is a message to be taken from that.

Chatting with philosophers a while ago. One says, "My favorite early modern is Locke." Why? "Because his major work came out when he was fifty-eight, and that makes me feel better. Hume is just depressing."

I'm sure there is a message to be taken from that.

That you still have a shot at Angelina Jolie?

re: 43

I had a look at some of his (Locke) letters recently. Originals, I mean, not reprints.

And yeah, Hume is depressing.

Is 37 really that strange, Ben? A girl I went to high school with and still talk to every once and a while was Anne Hathaway's roommate at Vassar.

I think ben and I once discussed somewhere the disturbing realization that Scarlett Johannson was younger than us.

Yeah.

Hume is depressing.

I don't know if he's as depressing as fucking Rimbaud is. At my age, Rimbaud had so moved on from poetry nine years earlier.

re: 48

Yeah, but Hume was important.

[You can imagine me ducking and running for cover ...]

46: I didn't mean that in a "how strange" way.

Continuing on the "37 isn't strange" tack, Kirsten Dunst was very famous at age 12.

Thats alright, ttaM: I like Hume too.

Not happened yet: recognizing a friends daughter in porn.

The question is, when that happens, do you still beat off?

My wow moments are things like:

Suspecting my doctor is younger than I am.
Realizing that today's college students were born when I was in high school.
Realizing that by the time my mom was my age, I was in college.

Like never before.

Oh, and how could I forget:

Spending a lot of time on a website where I view people the age of my college students as peers and friends.

Actually, that doesn't really make me feel old, just immature.

re: 53

I once googled an acquaintance's name -- for non creepy reasons -- and found a porn shot of someone with the same name, and wierdly, the person really looked like them. I'm 99.99% sure it wasn't them.

I don't know why I am telling this story ...

That you still have a shot at Angelina Jolie?

That's an encouraging thought! (I seem to remember an earlier thread where this was a minority opinion, but off the top of my head, I can think of few women who I woud like to spend a night with more than Jolie).

Speaking of masturbating, here's a story you don't see every day.

Almost 10 years ago I was watching a movie on tv starring Gary Cooper. My grandmother saw Cooper and remembered him being a big star when she was young. I'm still not as old as she was when that movie came out.

Wow, I thought Jessica Biel was a lot older. On the other hand, I thought she was the same person as Jennifer Garner, who is in fact a lot older.

Over at the baseball messageboards there seems to be an annual thread where the newbies say "Whoa dude, I think this guy is the first major leaguer younger than me", and then some other people say "Ah, I remember the first major leaguer younger than me...I think it was Alex Rodriguez" and some guys say "Ha ha you newbies, for me it was Larry Dierker. The real shock is when there's a manager younger than you, and then he gets fired from his second job."

So anyway the point is that for me it was Edgar Gonzalez.

It's hard to comprehend that Jake Gyllenhaal is less than 2 years older than me. That's a compliment to him btw.

Does 59 involve maggots?

found a porn shot of someone with the same name

At my last job, we hired this guy as the medical advisor for a pain medication study. But if you google the name "D/ave H/ardman", you might wonder how the busiest man in porn found time to get an MD.

Wait a minute, that wasn't the point. The point is that I was actively observing major-league baseball so that I could detect the moment at which a player younger than me appeared.

62: No, it's not disturbing at all by Apo-link standards. In fact, I can't figure out exactly why they threw out the couches -- those are some fastidious fratboys.

Does 59 involve maggots?

No, but it does involve a fraternity having to call the police to remove a random woman who wandered into their house and masturbated for a half an hour on their couch.

re: 66

That whole story sounds like the upshot of some elaborate dare ...

A woman wandered into a frat house and started masturbating... and they threw her out?

Like I said, a story you don't see every day.

65: I kinda liked the story. Maybe it'll make a few fratboys rethink the conventional wisdom on the desirability of sexual overtures by complete strangers. Obviously they threw the couch out (and asked her to leave, which if you gave a random group of frat boys this scenario they'd say that it would be totally hott) because it fucking creeped them out.

68: Maybe it was this woman.

68: See?

That whole story sounds like the upshot of some elaborate dare

To me it sounds like someone having a severe manic episode.

A woman wandered into a frat house and started masturbating... and they threw her out?

One of those things that sounds awesome in a porn movie, but in reality is probably way creepy.

If he'd been a bit luckier, the late Ted Bundy would be the same age as me. Poor guy, you make one small mistake and you get busted for 40 murders.

Speaking of Anne Hathaway, doesn't she verge on bizarre? If her eyes were a teentsy bit bigger and wider, and her mouth a teentsy bit redder and wider, and her teeth a teentsy bit whiter, and her bust likewise enanced, she'd look like some kind of honky anime figure. all of her secondary sexual characteristics are exaggerated right up to the border of satire.

severe manic episode

Yes...sounds exactly right.

I'm the same age as 50 Cent! That's awesome.

Also, the story linked in 59 is sort of mind-blowingly odd, especially this sentence: "Fraternity members asked the woman to leave the house, but she refused and continued masturbating for about half an hour, Nye said."

They brought in Bill Nye the Science Guy?!?! Sweet.

"Obviously, she was very disturbed," Nye said. "It was not how a normal person would respond to people."

.....

Fraternity members said they will throw out two couches in the living room because of the incident, Nye said.

Police said the break-in appeared to be an isolated incident.

Two couches? Girl cooties, sure, but why two?

Thank God it's an isolated incident> We wouldn't want Michigan to experience a rash of masturbation intruders.

I've only seen Hathaway in Brokeback Mountain (and didn't realize that was her until I just looked her up on imdb), and no that didn't occur to me from her performance there.

I presume she switched couches at some point.

51 - And Johannson's breakthrough role was when she was 16.

It's the Hathaway picture at Kotsko's which is the most widely circulated pictr I think.

I walked across an Ivy League campus yesterday, and was secretly hating all the kids there getting their hoity-toity education (really, being able to sleep in). Then I saw a girl and her parents doing the college tour thing, presumably for matriculation next fall. Doing the math, I realize she was born in 1990. Then I really started hating the kids.

83: Very soon there will be kids in college who can't remember when Bill Clinton was president.

Oddly, though, the Republicans among them will still blame him for everything.

I'm a little younger than Stephen Colbert. Besides birth-year and state of residence, we apparently shared other interests as well:

"During his adolescence, [Colbert] also developed an intense interest in fantasy role-playing games, especially Dungeons & Dragons, a pastime which he would later characterize as an early experience in acting and improvisation."

Strange to think of a TV celebrity as just another nerd you might've explored the Caves of the Unknown with.

I read 84 and then began to right a comment about how laughably wrong it was, since Clinton's presidency just ended a few years ago. But then I started actually doing the math in my head. Now I want to cry.

Woo hoo! I was going to gripe about how old I am but most of the people my age listed on nndb are still (barely) in their prime. Stay healthy, Beckham!

Don't get me started on how young college kids are, though.

87 -- It is a common human impulse after all, to right a wrong.

I'm sometimes disturbed that we have commenters here who don't recall the Reagan presidency. And then it occurs to me how absurd it must seem to other commenters that hardly any of us remember JFK getting killed or Vietnam.

I'm kind of happy that the bar directory stopped including birthdates a couple of years ago, because it was getting way too depressing to see each year's crop of new admittees that were born along about the day before yesterday. OTOH I still keep the old ones around--sometimes you need to know!

86 - His movies suck, but I was really cheered to discover that Vin Diesel is a big comics-and-D&D nerd. It somehow transforms him in my mind from a Seagal-in-training dirtbag (without the Buddhism or mob ties) to a possibly charming mook who stumbled into a way to make a lot of money making movies of old Gamma World modules.

And then it occurs to me how absurd it must seem to other commenters that hardly any of us remember JFK getting killed or Vietnam.

I don't feel that way. In fact the Roshomon quality of experience, the fact that events are remembered mostly by their impact on us personally, becomes more-and-more what I expect. I use the same documentary and narrative reconstruction methods to understand things that happened in my life as I would to understand something that happened in 1865.

90: The only public events that I remember during the Reagan administration were the Challenger explosion and the 1988 presidential debates--and the only reason I remember the debates had to do with the fact that I thought it was funny that Bush's name was Bush. (For reference, I was able to vote in the 2000 election by a day.) I think I remember Glasnost, but that might be a lie. I'm not sure.

hardly any of us remember JFK getting killed or Vietnam.

I first misread this as "JFK getting killed in Vietnam, and it struck me that that's how we see the past--the further away things are, the closer together they seem.

I remember the book depository where they crowned the king of Cuba. Martin X was mad when they outlawed bellbottoms.

(For reference, I was able to vote in the 2000 election by a day.)

Imagine you'd been born two days later, and lived in Florida. Imagine how pissed off you would have been by the eventual outcome.

And glasnost was a lie. So was the moon landing. JFK is really a cyborg living underground - his clone was killed in Dallas.

96 is awesome.

Sorry, 96 was me.

I've played the "What's the first 'world event' you remember?" (which I believe I stole from a thread here last summer) conversational gambit when I'm out with groups of people and there's a lull. It's especially good with people of diverse ages, but always interesting.

I think ben and I once discussed somewhere the disturbing realization that Scarlett Johannson was younger than us.

Haha, oldies. Apparently I share my age with Kiera Knightley, Dizzee Rascal, Reggie Bush, and Michael Phelps. The only one that really makes me sad is Dizzee, who had a fantastic album and a Mercury Prize four years ago!

100: "First scary movie you saw" is my standard one, though the "what was your first concert" thread here was more interesting than anything produced by the movie one.

I looked over the list for my birth year and inevitably, when there was an actress whose name I didn't recognize, she was starring as Schlumpy Mom on Kiddie-Oriented Sitcom. Sigh.

I'm 24. As 25 approaches, I've started having a quarter-life crisis. Nothing big, just "Do I really want to be living in this tiny town?" and stuff like that.

And yes, I too was surprised by the fact that it took a whole 17 comments to get to sex; that was my first thought when I saw the post. I've had very few "I'm as old as who???" moments in relation to celebrities or strangers. However, my only sibling is a sister four years younger than me, so she was always the benchmark in my head for what "young" means, her as well as all her friends. So throughout the last year or two of college, I kept on meeting women socially or through clubs, and every time I looked them up on facebook or just got to know them a little more, I was surprised/disappointed/guilty to find out that they were "just kids."

I'm sorry, but "quarter-life crisis" is about the third-stupidest book-marketing gimmick ever. It's called "growing up."

"Quarter-life crisis" may be a dumb gimmick of a name, but I think, as a term, it accurately describes a phenomenon that many people experience in a way that is significantly more specific than merely "growing up." I know I went through it--I recently left a PhD program with my masters and my sanity--and quite a few of my friends are on professional (and other) paths that as recently as a year ago they had not expected to be on.

I'm not questioning the phenomenon, and maybe "coming of age" is a better term than "growing up," but treating the difficulties and choices of early adulthood as something novel is pretty silly.

I'm the same age as K-Fed too. If he's got three kids and two wives, should I feel inadequate?

Is "Quirky/lone" in the top two stupidest book-marketing gimmicks ever? Please say yes. And yes, I am afraid of S/sha C/gen finding me and beating my anonymous self with her amazing power of making stupid book-marketing concepts.

Also, I tend to win the "what was your first concert" discussion. 12th birthday present from/with parents: Jackson Victory Tour.

109: The third-stupidest thing was just an allusion to a line from one of Douglas Adams' books that I thought was funny at about age 18 and have been using since. It was a bit of dialogue about something being widely recognized as the third most improbable event in the history of the universe, prompting a question about what were the first two, to which the response was something like "probably just coincidences."

One of my earliest memories is watching a moon landing on TV, but I think it must not have been the first one.

108: Yes, but for being reprehensibly sexist about who you share pictures of your ass with, not for inadequate numbers of wives and/or kids.