How Old Are You?

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Originally Posted by LSchefman

I see I'm the only 800+ year old on the Forum. Feels a little weird, I guess.

I don't remember the date of my birth. Even if I did, it wouldn't matter, because the calendar was different in those years in Constantinople, where I was born. You see, it started on September 1, and the year the Church figured was the year of creation, 5509 BC. And it was based on the Julian calendar, that gained about three days every four centuries. Anyway, it's a little difficult to remember, but if you're thinking, "Fall, 1195 AD," you're probably pretty close. Anyway, I left to join some sort of crusade, and subsequently found myself in Europe, where I picked up my first guitar around 1210. Here's a picture a friend painted of my first band. I'm playing the Guitarra Latina on the left, and my buddy Andronikos, who came with me on the journey, is playing the Guitarra Morisca, that's more like a Moorish instrument. By the way, those band outfits were pretty hip at the time. I mean, sure, the cloaks were long, but there you see the precursor to Spandex, i.e., joined hose....

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Les,

I always look forward to your posts, and this one is A+ in my book. Thanks for helping get my day started in a fine way!

Lloyd/Goldtop

Dirt

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Originally Posted by LSchefman

I see I'm the only 800+ year old on the Forum. Feels a little weird, I guess.

I don't remember the date of my birth. Even if I did, it wouldn't matter, because the calendar was different in those years in Constantinople, where I was born. You see, it started on September 1, and the year the Church figured was the year of creation, 5509 BC. And it was based on the Julian calendar, that gained about three days every four centuries. Anyway, it's a little difficult to remember, but if you're thinking, "Fall, 1195 AD," you're probably pretty close. Anyway, I left to join some sort of crusade, and subsequently found myself in Europe, where I picked up my first guitar around 1210. Here's a picture a friend painted of my first band. I'm playing the Guitarra Latina on the left, and my buddy Andronikos, who came with me on the journey, is playing the Guitarra Morisca, that's more like a Moorish instrument. By the way, those band outfits were pretty hip at the time. I mean, sure, the cloaks were long, but there you see the precursor to Spandex, i.e., joined hose.

http://i1088.photobucket.com/albums/...na_morisca.jpg

Man, those things were bloody heck to tune. We didn't even have tuning forks. We had a pitch pipe. Try tuning a guitar to a pitch pipe.

And there was no acquiring more than one guitar back then. First of all, they cost a year's wages. Second, you waited for more than a year just to get yours built. Everything was private stock. So you basically worked like a dog for a year to buy the thing, and even then, the hard case was extra. Lots of guys just used a gig bag. Back then, we called them "sacks." I opted for the hard case. Took me an extra six months to get it. I played that thing for...gosh, I don't know...150-175 years.

Hey, Guitar Center was a little tiny lutheir's shop in some town where you walked down the street and people emptied their chamber pots on your head if you weren't careful. The guitar sounded better as it got older, and never needed a re-fret, because the strings were gut. Although I'd been trained in law to serve in the Imperial Court by the time I got out of school at 12, I liked music better, and was glad to have left Constantinople. By the time I was 8 or 9, my parents were dead from plague, and honestly, Constantinople was a pretty restrictive environment. Going to Spain was like being set free! No one knew who ruled anything, you could pretty much go and do as you pleased. Great times. It was like the 60s.

It's not so bad being the oldest person around, actually. I have a lot of musical influences, and have lived in some interesting times. One day I'll have to tell you about the time I did a gig at the Marquis de Lafayette's. Awesome dude, great party. Ben Franklin got absolutely loaded, and was one heck of a lot of fun, dancing with the French women. But that'll come later. Anyway, by then I'd switched to keys, and had a very nice harpsichord to write on, but since you're guitar players, it's probably a dull subject around here.

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Just think Les....when you finally expire, you will be resurrected on the banks of the great river...and you'll be 25 again. At least, that's what Phil Farmer told me just before he died. And he was in his 90's.
But what are you going to use for your guitar? The iron-trees are not able to be cut down. Whatever...I'll see you then. Unless you're ressurected along with your original demographic...then, we'll be a few million miles apart from each other and probably won't meet up until we get to the tower.
Back to your usual channel.

My girlfriend would jokingly say older than dirt at 41 but with her being more than 10 years younger I'm feeling better than I ever have :rofl:

With 65 votes, the average age of the Official PRS Forum member is 39.4.

There are no members reporting in their teens.

There are no members reporting in their 70's or older.

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Originally Posted by ]-[ @ n $ 0 |v| a T ! ©

With 65 votes, the average age of the Official PRS Forum member is 39.4. There are no members reporting in their teens. There are no members reporting in their 70's or older.

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It appears to be almost exactly a bell shaped curve.

Hans...doesn't that put you right at the mean and median?? That makes you the quintessential PRS owner.

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Originally Posted by docbennett

It appears to be almost exactly a bell shaped curve.

Hans...doesn't that put you right at the mean and median?? That makes you the quintessential PRS owner.

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I am ".1" from the average age of the sample population - which is quite small (so far).

32

I remember when I was in college 10 or so years ago, I tried to visualize what my life would be like around this time...with the impending 12/21/2012 apocalypse right around the corner. Assumed I'd have a couple kids I'd be worried about. Nope!

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Originally Posted by james

32

I remember when I was in college 10 or so years ago, I tried to visualize what my life would be like around this time...with the impending 12/21/2012 apocalypse right around the corner. Assumed I'd have a couple kids I'd be worried about. Nope!

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That's funny. When I was a kid I used to wonder how I would look on 1 Jan 2000 (at 27).

The answer was (looking back 12 years): Pretty good! :biggrin:

35 in less than a month. I look a little younger which isn't such a bad thing these days. Not great when you're sixteen!

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Originally Posted by rugerpc

Now ask us how old we feel... act... look...

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feel - 10 years older
act - wise beyond my years
look - please don't bother
:D

Geezers rock ...

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Originally Posted by wilerty

Geezer Butler rocks...

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Fixed it for ya, Bill. :laugh:

http://hilobrow.com/wp-content/uploa...Butler_LRG.jpg

Old enough for Medicare :santa:

So you're probably curious; how is it that I was able to live this long, yet evade the suspicions and fury of jealous townspeople and even leave marriages before I was discovered to be what I call a "slow ager." That's right, I'm aging. I'm not immortal. I just age more slowly. But sure enough, after 20 or so years of doing things like growing a beard, putting on weight, thinning my hair, etc., to simulate age, there comes a point when I have to leave. Because living as long as I did was a sure sign of the work of the devil, or worse. Think the Inquisition was bad? Yeah. So did I.

For most of my life, it was difficult to leave loved ones, but they knew my secret, understood and protected me. Eventually I discovered a sure-fire way to fly the coop: I joined armies when it was time to go, and went off to war.

Until the 20th Century, a battlefield's activity ended in the evening when it got dark. The dead and mortally wounded were simply left in the field, and burials did not take place for several days. Although I arranged for myself to have "safe" jobs, such as doctor*, or interpreter (I had learned Latin and Greek was my native language in Constantinople; these were the international languages), I could usually arrange to be present on a battlefield for a short enough time to be "killed." I carried a bladder of animal blood with me. When the time was right, I would spatter the blood over my chest, fall down in the heat of battle, and simply lay in place until nightfall. Then I would make my escape from the army, and move on. The men left on the field who were still alive to see me would not be alive by morning. Should a peasant come by stripping corpses, the sight of a bloody man getting up from the dead was frightening enough that they were afraid to follow me.

The thing is, and I learned this from experience, you don't want to join the army that, you know, loses the war. That's a sure way to have big trouble. You want to be in the army that wins, unless you can arrange to "die" and disappear at a good time before the end. So it was always tricky picking the right army to join. I learned early on, don't get into an army because of the causus belli; it doesn't matter if you like the goals of the nobles or politicians or not, your mission is to pick the right army so that you can arrange the death deep in enemy territory where no one will recognize you. Join the losing army, and you're fighting on your own turf, and believe me, it's a lot harder to get lost in your own country. Think I could have gotten lost in the French army in 1918 or 1940? They didn't make it out of the neighborhood, let alone out of France. So. There were other armies.

For example, I thought I was making a foolproof choice joining Napoleon's army and heading across Europe into Russia. Napoleon had never lost! I wound up nearly freezing to death on the steppes, which was of course a good place to pretend to die, but it was really too cold to lay down, and there were the wolves. Fortunately I managed to straggle farther and farther behind, and wound up finding a nice woman to settle down with for a while in Vilnius, Lithuania where the few other survivors got sick with Cholera struggling to get back to France. Thousands died. Their mass graves have only recently been discovered. Of course, I knew, but I wasn't telling.

She felt sorry for me, and was kind of cute except for her mustache kind of thing, but I digress. You really have no idea how many women had mustaches before the discovery of depilatories and bleaches...their teeth didn't last long either, so the slight mustache wasn't much of a deal breaker on looks. If they still had a few teeth, you were a big winner. My teeth of course, were sturdy due to my unique physiology, and I had a variety of musical skills, so I had no trouble with the ladies.

That's where I bought this absolutely fantastic kankles, which is kind of like a psaltery, an instrument I knew well from the middle ages. It was gorgeous, inlaid with ivory, and made mostly of flamed Balkan maple, Acer hyrcanum, with a beautiful German Spruce top. The maker called it his "Double Eagle." I wasn't crazy about the matte finish, but fortunately the shop that built it was headed by Paulius Raimondas Steponas, and they had something like a PTC. So they put a gloss finish on it, and in fact, stained it Elzbieta Verde, which was kind of a greenish stain.

I bugged them to make a padded gig bag for the thing, and they finally padded a burlap sack with horse hair, lined it with rabbit fur, and put buttons and a rope on it so I could carry it like a backpack.

Things were great in Vilnius, but I knew I had to leave after a while, and fortunately, the First Schleswig War broke out in 1848. I made the fateful decision to join the Prussian Army and go to war against Denmark.

* You might wonder how I was a doctor when I lacked modern medical training. Well, before about 1870, army doctors needed to know basically five things: how to saw limbs off, how to cauterize, how to bleed a patient, how to use a syringe full of mercury on a guy with syphilis, and when to call the priest. Oh yeah, and astrology. And of course anything but a slight wound was bound to be fatal. From the 13th to the 19th centuries, death on the battlefield was probably preferable to existing cures for diseases from natural causes anyway. And wars were excellent vacation opportunities (because, honestly, there weren't other kinds of vacations except pilgrimages), plus the whole pillaging thing. I had left Constantinople before I could learn Byzantine medicine, which was based on the Roman work of Galen, who knew more about fixing soldier's wounds than American Civil War doctors; the Romans and Byzantines knew how to remove cataracts, for god's sakes, but in the West, they didn't even know what a cataract was. So we let a lot of blood. Read omens. Stuff like that. In the Byzantine world, I'd have had to know something. Not so much in the West.

Was it the thing about the woman with the mustache that killed this thread?

With 81 votes, I think the average age is holding at 39.4.

I am shocked that we haven't seen a single teenager yet.

In case I didn't blatantly state it in this thread I'm 34.



oh yeah and Les....those meds must be amazing you really gotta share! Puff puff give!

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Originally Posted by docbennett

It appears to be almost exactly a bell shaped curve.

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I hate Gaussian based math....here it works...however people see bell curves where they shouldn't....drives me crazy!

not picking on you doc...Gauss and Quetelet on the other hand....

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Originally Posted by CantankerousCarl

Old enough to remember that MTV used to show music videos.

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Haha! Yes! I remember when MTV wasn't loaded with self-righteous muffin-top hags. (Did I just say that out loud while I typed it?)

I'm the same age as the Chevelle that had an aluminum LS6 454 and yanked the front wheels off the ground from the showroom... :evil: