Speaking of promotional items: Plastic dodecahedrons (12-sided figures) with months of the calendar on each face. They once were very common in offices. (If you don’t know what I’m referring to, try searching that auction site for “dodecahedron calendar” and for “dodecahedron souvenir”.)
And mechanical bull riding.
Does it still exist?
It’s not a calendar, but this instantly made me think of Big D peanuts. See how well it worked as advertising? - I can still remember the brand decades later. They were a brand of peanuts sold in pubs, with the individual packs of nuts presented on a sort of cardboard poster of a scantily clad woman, covering the image. The display would be hung behind the bar - illustrated here, scroll down one screen:
https://www.retrospace.org/2011/07/sex-sells-26-big-d-nuts.html
- the idea was, if you bought more peanuts, more of the scantily clad woman would be revealed.
And I just found a wiki for them. This is how they are described in Wikipedia.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the product was notorious for its saucy promotional displays, whereby the packets of peanuts were tessellated in front of a picture of a scantily clad woman. They re designed their pack formats in 2016 and moved away from the card designs of previous years.
That seems to imply they were still doing it five years ago. Sheesh.
j
Did you ever read J.D. Fitzgerald’s books Papa Married a Mormon, and Mama’s Boarding House? In the latter you get to see the kids as young adults.
It hasn’t been that long since they had one at an outdoor bar outside Nationals Park. My kids and I tried it, and I think their smaller size made it so they could stay on longer than old Dad.
The house we moved to in 1958 had a concrete incinerator in the back yard. It had 4 trapezoidal sides, held together by wires cast into each corner. We’d burn all the paper trash back there. One day, a few years later, one of us boys tossed an aerosol spray can in with the trash before lighting the fire. The explosion blew apart the rusted wires, laying out all four sides onto the ground.
My evil dad was a college frat boy at Franklin College just before WW II. He told us the frat had a “privy council” dedicated to turning over outhouses.
We used to use them to burn leaves. We were doing it at my neighbor’s house and somehow a aerosol can got mixed. It exploded upward, luckily.
It’s called a dustbin because, after the rags and bones man takes the rags and bones, glass and metal, all that was left was the ash from the coal fires.
Thank you! I’d always wondered about the etymology.
Interestingly, in US English “ash can” is an archaic (mid 20th century & before) term for what Commonwealth English calls a “dustbin” and modern US parlance calls a “garbage can” or “trash can”. Presumably from the same trash-picking proto-recycling history.
So an example of something from our dustbin is a dustbin.
Whether they needed it or not.
Well, the nice thing is that they didnt need to be carried, they walked home by themselves.
Until the mid-60’s, our local tennis club had a sign posted on the gate: WHITES ONLY. It was understood that it was referring to the apparel to be worn on the court.
A boy who had a crush on me in high school made me a dodecahedron with cartoons and other pictures glued on. I had it for a number of years, but it finally just fell apart.
Tidying up some stationery in my office, I happened across a pocket calculator. It was long unused, with a dead battery. Have we dispensed with them as well? Time was, when we used to write things down on paper, you would do any sums you needed with a calculator; these days if you’re writing something you’re probably using a keyboard, and have an app handy for that sort of thing. If you’re out and about, you’ll have something on your phone you can use.
I checked and you can still buy them - but if they’re not a thing of the past, they very nearly are, I think. Which in turn made me think of slide rules - I still have one somewhere, you know…
j
I’ve got an abacus.
Show off!
j
I have both. And can use them.
I have a pocket calculator. I find it handier than an app, because 99% of the time I use it is at my desk. And it’s solar powered so there’s no battery to run down.
Oh you modern things, stick with Napiers bones for authenticity