Kidney failure. Diabetics can also exhale acetone if their blood sugar goes too high.
I’ve been doing some fruitless googling and dredged up another memory of this device. The part you rode didn’t look like a spaceship. Rather, the leading end of the flat part you laid on had a plastic bubble. Say a quarter of a sphere maybe? Kind of a cross between a windshield and a dome for your head. The fact that it seemed a little like a spacesuit helmet is probably why I first described it as looking like a spaceship.
My sibs and I begged our mom to get some and make it, but she never did. When I moved out, that was one of the first things I tried, and I found out why she wouldn’t cook it. That stuff is NASTY!
JMHO, of course.
I wish I had one of those as a kid. I did (and still do) have an Agent M movie camera/machine gun.
And yet, billions of dollars were spent year after year on armaments when all they had to do was send you and me into battle. Oh, the senseless waste. 
Three more:
Major Matt Mason (and all his friends and equipment);
No idea what this was called, but you would take a mini-Tootsie roll and stick it in the hole of this plastic machine, clamp down the plastic mold, pump the handle, and it would form a skull or two halves of a whistle you could stick together and it really whistled. Then you ate it;
We had some battery powered car that would run on this rubber tube (soda straw thickness) track that you could shape into any squiggly course on the floor (taped it down?) and something would eventually trigger a spring loaded catch underneath the car and flip it over and across the room. Or something similar.
I don’t remember its exact name either, but that thing was popular into the 1970s. I had an opportunity to play on one a few times, and loved it.
Anyone remember Squarts from the late 1980s? Those things were selling for a LOT of money on the 80s version of eBay. I’m having no luck finding a picture of them, so I’ll just say that a chain of gas stations in the Midwest sold them; they were 1-quart water bottles and had a cute story printed on the side, kind of like a Dr. Bronner’s package.
SmartAleq, which post/toy are you referring to?
This.
Except it was Disney’s The Lion King.
Those awful clackers. The ones we had originally had really large clack balls on them, made of some kind of super heavy resin compound and I swear they weighed half a pound each. Strung on cord with just a plastic ring in the middle and the weight of the balls would offset the string sometimes so they’d go wonky. One friend of mine got a couple teeth chipped and another one had the balls go wrong and smacked into his arm, cracked the radius. That’s when I decided no way am I playing with those things again.
To this day, those creatures on the Freakies cereal box make my stomach turn over.
Oh my God! I haven’t thought of any of those things in a LONG time… I used to love those worm things… I think we used to call them worms anyway…
I used to think Fizzies were SO cool… and if you started drinking early, there would still be some left that hadn’t dissolved yet… For some reason I thought that was great.
I remember the plastic with the straw - you always wanted to make a perfect ball, but the rubber or whatever would droop on one side, or not blow up in certain areas - so always seemed to look like a weird ball-egg. I still loved it.
I loved this show! I always wanted to go to military school and play Army all day for real! :o I forget the name of the kid who played McKeever, but the Colonel was Allyn Jocelyn, who was also in (among many other shows) the pilot episode of The Addams Family as the politician who didn’t want the Addamses to endorse him.
“Work? WORK!!!” :eek:
What did the “G” stand for in “Maynard G Krebs”? :dubious: 
I was expecting the Wham-O Superball:
These were **awesome**! They were parodied in ***MAD Magazine***: "Made from the same material as US Air Force B-52 tires!" :DI just Googled the show and remembered that Jackie “Uncle Fester” Coogan was in it too. He played the sergeant who always watched McKeever’s back.
Gary McKeever was played by Scott Lane. Looking at the cast list, I see a lot of other well-known actors guest starred: Joe Flynn, William Schallert, David White, Charles Lane, Soupy Sales, Jim Backus, and Ann B Davis, to name a few.
I used to puff on those when I was channeling Sgt Saunders from Combat! 
Same here! Ok, that was two of us.
“Maynard’s middle name is Walter, named for his aunt. The “G” is silent, he would explain.”
The elegance of a bygone age. 
She’s one fiiiiiiiiiiiiiine lookin’ woman! :o
Night After Night was great. Allan Havey’s back and forth with Nick Bakay was superb. I still remember the first episode of The Dennis Miller Show where he was the announcer and tried to interact with Miller. Miller gave him this harsh stare letting Bakay know to Shut It Up. And you wonder why the show got canceled so soon.
Then Bakay got into junk like Sabrina, King of Queens, Paul Blart and Mom. And one episode of Young Sheldon.
Both Bakay and Havey appeared on Seinfeld, which brings up Jon Hayman who did a lot on that show which brings up Sports Monster!
I remember the “Monty Haul” columns, but at the time I read them I had no idea they what other cultural phenom they were referencing. I assumed that “Monty” referred to Monty Python.
I also remember a few cartoons that used to run in the back of the “Dragon” – Fineous Fingers, Wormy, and Phil & Dixie. I loved those.
Things that (it seems) only I remember:
- Simon (electronic game that was a huge rage for about a year in the early 80s)
- Night Flight (TV show that aired all the videos that MTV refused to air- for either being too edgy, too metal, not new wave enough, etc.)
- Fridays - sketch comedy show
- The band Sparks
On a more serious note, I know a lot of younger gay men who have no idea what the pink triangle signifies or know the slogan “Silence = Death”.