JP Stormcrow writes: In lieu of groveling about in the detritus of the expressed will of many of our neighbors in this glorious shining city on the hill, here's something else.

Unexpected and Unwanted Reminders of the Passage of Time

Of course very personal instances of these come fast and furious for some of us, but I recently had one of a completely different nature that's haunted me a bit.

In a book I was reading, the primary narrator was a woman seemingly in her late twenties. At some point her mother describes a memorable summer while she was in college as being right after Songs from the Big Chair by Tears for Fears came out. This brought me up short, and my immediate thought was that the author had clearly made a mistake--the timing couldn't work; the mother must have been older. But no. It's not even a close call, it works easily, not even requiring her to have given birth at a particularly young age. Not sure why it initially struck me as implausible. Maybe in part because I tend to be an immersive emotional reader who was viewing things through the lens of the daughter, so the mother coded as 'old' to me rather than her in fact being a decade or so younger than me. Sigh.

So this is all just to point out that Songs from the Big Chair came out closer to the end of freaking World War II than to today.

Have a nice day.

Heebie's take: What's really sad is that Stormcrow's ability to do math is slipping. Songs From the Big Chair came out in 1985.

Unless he's literally going down to the month??? Let's see... February 25th, 1985 to November 25th 2024, versus September 2nd, 1945 to February 25th, 1985... carry the 1...

Nope, he's still short. In about three months, this will be really timely.

That said, one of my favorite games is to chase down as specifically as possible what was happening 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Slowly, more and more of those will get absorbed as "commenting on Unfogged".