[whine] Yeahbut, when your two year old sticks it on and takes it off and sticks it on and takes it off and sticks it on and takes it off and sticks it on and takes it off and dunks it into her juice and sticks it on and takes it off and sticks it on and takes it off, then somewhere over Des Moines you have a soggy, non-sticking sticky thing and a heartbroken toddler begging you to, “Make it work, Mommy!” [/whine]
Ah, for the good old days when one good jab into your sister’s shoulder meant Mom had Just Cause to take the damn thing away and put it into her purse until you got to your destination!
Ack! All the google links to a search for “Church Key” show the metal type opener that opens both bottles and cans.
Church key originally referred to an opener for only bottles. It was shaped like a large key, thus the name. It looked a little like a figure 8, with th bottom smaller the the top and both ends flattened. It had a “tooth” on the larger end to grip the bottle top.
[QUOTE=dwc1970]
[li]Those little plastic inserts for 45 records. I’m sure there is probably a technical reason for it, but it would seem to me that the standard spindle hole used on 33 1/3 records would have worked for a 45 record, too.[/li][/QUOTE]
I remember biking to the gas station, buying the big Sweet Tarts, Lik-m-aid, and a 16 (20?) oz Coke and NOT going into diabetic shock after eating all of it.
Okay, I had the Six Million dollar Man stuff, but one day, a kid brought another action figure…I thought it was Mechanical Mike, but my google-fu is weak…any clue with the Steve Austin ripoff was? (He had a mirror thingy for an eye, rather than something you could look through, and I think one wrist could rotate with ‘helicopter action’.)
I remember when Madonna, The Simpsons and heavy metal were terribly, terribly controversial. Around that same time, I was also quite into BBSs.
Oh, and for Canadians: Consumers Distributing.
Speaking as someone who recently completed a university professional certificate, brother to a grad student and also dating a grad student (who just completed his thesis), I can tell you this hasn’t gone the way of the Model T just yet. We recently had a thread on this searches – here it is.
One definitely obsolete thing, though – card catalogues. Not terribly sorry to see those go, but it’s slightly poignant to go to the McLennan Library and see all the old cards in little boxes next to the computer, as scrap paper for jotting down call numbers.
Oh, and patron systems at the public library where they’d photograph your library card and the book together. I remember Elmo, Linda, and Maria discussing this on Sesame Street.
My mother sometimes makes housecalls for elderly, housebound patients. I’m not sure how she transports her doctor stuff on a regular basis, but I know she has one of those black cases – I’ve seen it.
The first calculator my brother bought, with a memory! One you could program! cost $395 – and that was with the HP employee discount.
An every day one: remember when you opened cans of coffee by pulling a metal key off the bottom, threading a tab through it, then carefully cranking it over and over as you worked your way around the can? I always got off track and it would turn into a huge mess of twisted jagged edged metal ribbon.
And the lids were lethal. A friend stepped on one while she was wading in the lake, and got a hellish cut on her foot.
Someone upthread mentioned stereo TV. Anyone remember TV-radio simulcasts? Special TV concerts where you’d tune the radio to a certain station and you listened in stereo? They didn’t do many of those, but they were pretty cool. I have no idea how that was done.
We used to rent halls for parties, which meant that someone brought a portable record-player and everyone brought some 45s.
Are paper dolls a little thing? Tabs on the clothes at the shoulders and waist so they’d sorta stay on. You could make your own clothes if you didn’t like the ones that came with the cardboard figure. We had mad scissor skillz!
Wha…? In my part of the world those citrus fruits with the crumpled orange skin, that was extremely easy to remove, and the easily-segmented flesh (just to make sure we are talking about the same thing) are still called Mandarins. What are they called elsewhere?
And I miss Wrigley’s Spearmint Stick gum. Maybe you can still get it in the USA. Haven’t seen it at a shop for yonks. As kids, there was an UL about how, if you got a paper wrapper for a stick that had all the letters of the alphabet on it, you won a Whole Box of gum (kid fantasies just didn’t get much better than that). And the wrappers could be folded in this very specific way and linked together in a sort of herringbone fashion to create - well - long chains of linked gum wrapping papers. Blokes were too cool to turn them into necklaces.
And wooden clothes pegs. The type that your sister would paint and turn into little people with clothes for school fetes. I’m not sure the sprung plastic contraptions are that much of an improvement.
It never fails! I opened this thread to ask if kids still made gum wrapper chains, and they weren’t mentioned … until the last post. I think I possibly still know how to make one, I might try the next time I see gum.
The only other thing that stands out that I don’t think has been mentioned yet is waiting for the TV to warm up. If we wanted to watch something, we had to get to the TV at least 3 - 4 minutes before. If things went well, it gave you time to run back to the kitchen to get snacks … if you cut it too close, it was agony knowing you were missing the first minutes of your program.
pagers. Cell phones used to be way too expensive. I was in middle school when pagers were big, and my school banned them because of some imagined connection between pagers and gang violence/drug dealing/zombie invasions.
I saw a Discovery or TLC show on this, they were some sort of fad until they discovered they were dangerous.
I remember that we had a party line. And we had a dress code for elementary school. We girls had to wear dresses or skirts, the boys had to wear dress shirts and pants.
I think I possibly still know how to make one, I might try the next time I see gum.