I guess my humor was too dry. Everything I listed was either snake oil or dangerous. Foot X-rays for shoe buying were a horrible idea. Vibrating belts don’t actually melt the fat away, and smoking is bad for you.
I should have made the humor more explicit.
You mean you don’t think you can melt away fat with a vibrating belt?!?
I figured you weren’t serious. I was just clarifying…also tongue in cheek.
Got it. We are both very dry, like a fine Cabernet.
When I restarted college in 1985 my folks made me a peace offering (we’d been somewhat estranged) of a Smith-Corona word processor. It had the same little LED, except it was beyond the top row of letters, not raised and up at a right angle like the Brother. It had a switchable daisywheel (I had pica and elite and also italics and small caps) and you could type directly to paper like any other typewriter, or type to document and save it and print it later; you could cut copy and paste, or move the cursor to any position and backspace over mistakes and/or insert new text and save.
A year later, one of my professors marched the class to the computer lab and made us learn how to do word processing on the Macintosh (System 3, Mac 512Ke’s, everything on a floppy). I kept using the Smith-Corona at home but gradually switched over.
Want to hear an even more horrible idea? Sometime in the '20s my grandmother, after having her fourth daughter, got a hysterectomy with radium. It took 40 years to kill her.
Growing up, our electric knife was primarily used for cutting off large quantities (12+ dozen) of corn on the cob for freezing. Much quicker and less effort than a regular knife.
I love my stand mixer. Indeed, it is one of the only things that still seems to be built like a 1950’s brick. The build quality is light-years past most plastic crap these days.
That said, if you have no need of one then don’t bother. But, for some tasks (mostly baking), they are excellent.
The only time I break mine out is on Thanksgiving. They are great at carving up a turkey.
This:
It was extremely popular in Spain in the 70s (as you can see by the colour: pure deep 70s): that thing, called simply the Moulinex, though Moulinex is a brand that makes tons of other things too, could chop and grind all kinds of stuff, meat, onions, hard cheese, carrots… It did so easily and realiably to the desired coarseness and was quick and easy to clean. The blades were damn sharp, you had to be careful, but all in all, a good idea.
I see searching the net that there are modern iterations of this device, still I do not have one. This thread gave me an idea…
Apart from that I concur with all the electric can openers, electric carving knives and sink garbage grinders (now that was yucky! And loud - wonder why I never saw one in a horror movie or for disposing corpses à la Fargo final scene).
Also popular in Germany. There were frequent TV commercials for it, but it was called “Moulinette” here. My grandma had one, and I always volunteered when there was something to chop.
Dymo Label maker. Made labels by embossing them one letter at a time. You would peal off the backing and stick it on what ever.
They would often fall off.
That is a good one, but I had it, not my parents. I used it for them. Know what, you just made me go and have a look at the back of the stamp albums I have not touched since I don’t know when except when packing for moving house and guess what? They still have their Dymo Labels attached.
Pretty much replaced by P-Touch and other thermal printers. I had a Dymo or two in the past though.
ETA: That’s what I get for stopping for a meal with a post half-written. Thoroughly ninja-ed. Oops.
True. But I have the modern Dymo brand label maker like this, although mine is now 15 years old: DYMO LetraTag 100H Handheld Label Maker | Dymo
Which device thermally prints your message onto either paper or plastic tape. The modern tape is much thinner and more flexible than the old, embossed stuff. So it lies flatter and curls up almost zero. Solving that falling off problem the old stuff had. OTOH, because it’s thermal printing, it does fade over time in the light and especially in any heat.
the new ones have the handy feature of a bunch of memory so I can print off a fresh label with e.g. my name and phone number any time without laboriously spelling out L-S-L-H Crap! space space space L-S-L-G etc.
I was also surprised to see they still make the old, embossed tape kind: Embossing Label Makers | DYMO®
When I was in college, the aviation engineering students all planned to get their degrees and start building a Rutan Vari-EZ or Long-EZ, the ones with the canard wings. Even then homebuilt aircraft had taken over.
Some people used to refer to certain items as “made for gifts”. That is, very few people would buy one for themselves - but the price was perfect for a gift. Electric knives were the item usually given. But I’ll add…
Ronson “Candles” that used butane gas - expanding their market from cigarette lighters. They wouldn’t drip wax on the expensive linen tablecloth.
Both of those are sort of against the spirit of the OP’s question IMO.
I mean, slide rules and reel-to-reel tape decks were superseded by better/more modern technologies- the electronic calculator and the cassette tape/8-track decks.
By definition that makes them NOT modern. It would be about as absurd as saying a record player is something “modern” my parents had that I don’t, or that an electronic typewriter was something “modern” that they had that I do not. Those are old, obsolete technologies, just like slide rules and reel-to-reel tape decks.
In fact my parents themselves shit-canned all of those things- they got calculators, cassette players/recorders, computers, and CD players. If that doesn’t point out how NOT modern those things are, I don’t know what does.
We had an in house incinerator in our house built in 1960. It was made by Warm Morning. You filled it with thrash and pressed a button and gas flames lit on the bottom.
In the Bond movie “You Only Live Twice” where he flies “Little Nellie” collapsible gyrocopter, the instrument panel is done with Dymo labels. They were fancy enough for Jame Bond (or Q in reality).
WTF?
Hahahhah. I’m sure THAT was pleasant.