"Uncle Jesse"

For those of you who are now worried (given that I have a brother named Jesse), you can stop. The 'Ring of Power' is still firmly in place on my finger, and (at least figuratively so) on the fingers of both Toby and Beth (to the best of my knowledge).

But what I was really going to talk about here is the Netscape entertainment news headline I saw yesterday: "'Uncle Jesse' Files for Divorce." The thoughts that immediately sprung to my mind were:
1) wow, Uncle Jesse (from Dukes of Hazzard) would be really old by now.
2) was he even a big enough star _during_ the Dukes of Hazzard for people to care about his marital status?
3) is he even still alive?
4) How is it possible that people would care about the marital status of this guy ~20 years after his all-too-short-lived TV show ended?
5) Do people even still remember "Uncle Jesse?"

Obviously the headline intrigued me, so I clicked on it...only to realize that they were referring to John Stamos who was the "Uncle Jesse" of Full House fame.

Then it hit me - wow...I just completely missed a pop culture reference, and not out of innocent ignorance (as is the case with much popular music), but simply because my memory stretched back a little further apparently than that of most of Netscape Entertainment News' readers.

JM found my first grey hair when I was 19, and they've only multiplied in the nine years since then...I got my first matching pair of eye wrinkles a few years back, and just recently my crows' feet have added a second toe...but now I'm really old. I watched Full House, just like everyone else who's lived in the past 15 years (who could help it? It was everywhere for a while), but it never even entered my mind that they could be referring to _that_ "Uncle Jesse."