It’s not an easy moment to be a Gen Xer who wants to ignore the passage of time. HBO Max rebooted Sex and the City, but Carrie and the gang are about the same age now as the gals on The Golden Girls. In the new Scream sequel, Neve Campbell is the only returning cast member younger than Wilford Brimley when he made Cocoon. Jackass Forever came out last week, and it seems like a remake of The Sunshine Boys, with more scrotal injuries.
Listen, we can ignore that we’re getting older, or we can lean in to it. Here are 17 fun and/or scary facts guaranteed to freak you out.
- Kurt Cobain has been dead longer than he was alive.
- Mario, the cartoon plumber from countless Nintendo video games, is just three years away from the recommended age for colorectal cancer screenings. It's almost time to get his pipes checked.
- Mathematically, Billie Eilish could have feasibly been conceived by any of the horny campers in 2001's Wet Hot American Summer.
- Not one person in the world knows your phone number by heart.
- Remember Certs? You can’t buy them anymore. They no longer exist. They were taken off the market in 2018 because they’re filled with hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Which means we spent our childhoods sucking on hydrogenated cottonseed oil and nobody cared!
- Zion, the as-yet-unborn son Lauryn Hill sang about on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill? He’s now a dad.
- The first time Mr. T said, "I pity the fool," in Rocky III, was 40 years ago. So now you can unironically say, “I pity the fool who doesn’t get a prostate exam during his annual checkup!”
- We're the last generation who listened to David Bowie's "Heroes" and understood the lyric "I can remember standing by the wall" as clearly referring to the Berlin Wall. Which, by the way, has now been down for longer than it was up.
- Half of the cast of Friends now qualify for senior discounts at Denny’s, Best Western and Kroger grocery stores.
- It’s been 32 years since Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and child-shrinking technology still doesn’t exist.
- Charlie Sheen, Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, Kiefer Sutherland, Flavor Flav, Michael Jordan, Kid Rock and Snoop Dogg are all grandparents.
- The youngest member of Pearl Jam (Stone Gossard, 55) is older than the oldest member of the Traveling Wilburys circa 1988 (Roy Orbison, 52).
- We’re as close today to the year 1970 as 1970 was to the year 1918.
- Former MTV VJ Kurt Loder is 16 years older than Ian McKellen was when he first played Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In only slightly better news, Billy Idol is exactly as old as Jerry Stiller was when he first played Frank Costanza on Seinfeld. With a rebel yell, she cried “Serenity now!”
- If Cameron hadn't destroyed his dad's 1961 Ferrari GT California in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, it'd be worth enough today to pay for a four-year Ivy League education for up to five of his kids, with enough left over for a summer home. Fortunately, he grew up to be the world’s laziest billionaire in Succession.
- Since you left school, they no longer teach cursive, dodgeball or Pluto being a planet.
- Floppy discs, Sony Walkmans, the Simon game, a Furby and the board game Mouse Trap are all parts of museum displays.
