"I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring" - David Bowie

Today is David Bowie's birthday, and I thought he was like 87 but he's actually only 63! Which means he lived about 100 lifetimes just in his heyday, and we should all be intimidated. For those of you who don't follow the careers of '70s crypto-homo-androgynous-glam rockers as closely as you should, David Bowie is his generation's Lady Gaga (and before you say I'm being insulting or reductive, I think they'd both revel in that comparison). Like Gaga, Bowie is a pleather-wearing, spectacle-worshiping, gender-bluring, rocket-ship acid-trip to the greatest drag show on Earth.

Somehow it all adds up to greatness: Bowie was named "The #1 Most Influential Musician of All Time" by his peers, in 2000 (England's New Music Express magazine polled famous artists). And Bowie was named "The #5 Most Influential Person in Fashion" in a 2008 article that read, "Dressing like David Bowie is easy. Wearing clothing like Bowie is nearly impossible." Bowie cha-cha-changed (sorry guys) the way music, gender identity, and fashion interact, and inspired more than one generation of artists. Your take away: David Bowie did for liquid eyeliner what herpes did for the condom: made straight men want to wear it.

So, in tribute, my top 5 favorite Bowie pop-culture references:

5. Douglas Adams, in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (the 4th in the Hitchhiker's Guide series) describes a character as:

"If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn't exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar."

That's vivid imagery.

4. Bowie judging the "Walk Off" in Zoolander