Thanks for the cite. Those are not the thing I was thinking of from the 1960s. Though I sorta think I do remember the thing you cited.
could it be wacky wafers? i really liked those, the banana flavour was yummy.
I love fake banana flavor. The best is a banana popsicle on a hot day.
But a close second is the banana-shaped candy that are maybe 15% of a package of Runts. Imagine my glee when I walked into a candy store (It’Sugar) and there were bins of loose candy to scoop…
… and there was one of JUST THE BANANA RUNTS!
ooooh! that would be the best ever!!
Oh yes. Bananas are fine. I’m not a big fruit lover but bananas have to be near the top of the list if not my favorite among fruit. Even as a kid it was maybe the one fruit I was always cool with.
But fake banana flavor? That’s a whole other story. If real bananas tasted like fake banana-flavored things, I’d probably eat them every day. Banana-flavored candy, drinks, popsicles, you name it.
OH YES. Every now and then I’ll find a store like that and I check to see if they have all-banana Runts available and sometimes they do. I’m also not a big candy lover (I guess I really don’t have a sweet tooth in general), at least not as an adult anyway, but banana Runts have held up for me.
I liked them when Willy Wonka made them. I also remembered when they would fizz.
I had this happen to me last year. And, I had it happen with the State Dept of Transportation. When I moved four years ago, I changed my address with everyone. Turns out that the bank doesn’t let their system send updates to the company that actually makes the debit cards and the state, while getting my Driver’s license updated with the new address, just plain failed to send address updates to the car licensing software. Even though, I updated the address again, when I paid the annual fee online. Grrr.
Be forewarned! These are made by a different manufacturer than Runts. Sometimes they’re sold under a cute name, like “Banana-rama.” They don’t taste bad – in fact, I keep a small jar of them on the kitchen island – but they have a noticeably different taste.
I never had the fizzy ones. 
ETA: My mom remembers them! She didn’t like them.
Huh, the cops actually found my car.
It was in the parking lot of a supermarket about a mile away I go to all the time. They damaged the ignition getting it started and left cigarette ash next to my gearshift.
But here’s the part that gets me: I did put my pedal lock on my brake, and it was still there when the car was found. I have absolutely no clue how they drove it.
Took it to my usual repairer of cars. It’ll be quite expensive to replace the ignition, even more so to make it so that the new key also unlocks the doors, so I’m not gonna bother. (Don’t have comprehensive insurance option on a 22 year old car.) They didn’t tell me of any other damage or such.
So it could’ve been a lot worse. But still, the wasted money and especially the cigarette ash really grinds my gears.
Does your pedal lock force the brake pedal down so the brakes are clamped on or does the lock prevent the brake pedal from being depressed so the brakes are always off?
If the latter, one can drive an older pre-computerized car for months on just the emergency/parking brake with totally inoperative ordinary wheel brakes. Don’t ask how I know this.
Those parking brakes are not meant for that, are not as strong, and are expensive as hell to fix/replace.
When the parking brake finally failed, I donated the car to my employer, USAF, and we took it out on the bombing range, left it there, and bombed the shit out of it for the next couple years.
Feexing? It don’ need no steenkin’ feexing!! 
Not really a rant, but I paid off the snowplow guy today and am feeling correspondingly poorer. But at least I’ve finalized the contract for the winter. The guy has done a couple of plowing jobs already on the basis that as a repeat customer I can be trusted to pay up, but he wasn’t likely to do that much longer. And we apparently have a major storm coming over the next few days. I always enjoy looking out the window as his mighty truck does what used to be back-breaking work.
I was subjected to Johnny Mathis and his Guinea Pig Chorus singing “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas” at the supermarket, resulting in a compulsion to commit a violent felony right there in the produce section.
The only thing that saved me was mentally rearranging the lyrics to fit the only tolerable version of the song.
Today, I got a form from the government in the mail. It says it must be returned by . . . today.
I’m glad you got your car back. Something that happened to a coworker of mine recently… someone stole her car right out of her driveway… drove it a mile and half down the road, found a car they liked better, stole that car and left hers in the other victim’s driveway. So she got her car back… while feeling strangely rejected.
I want to offer a blanket apology to all asthma sufferers because I really didn’t get how much it sucked to have asthma until I developed it myself. I guess I’ve had it on some level all my life, around cigarette smoke or dust or certain triggers, but I started having this persistent cough + hives every time I got sick, which could only be calmed down with steroids. Allergy testing revealed… no allergies, which was strange, but I was diagnosed with cough-variant asthma.
So I guess this is my life now. Every time I get sick, I get those symptoms + triggered asthma and I can’t fucking breathe. And I guess I always thought of asthma as coughing a lot, but no, it’s feeling like you can’t fucking breathe and it sucks. Right now I have the flu. Having the flu sucks. Having the flu + asthma sucks even worse. Having the flu + asthma + stress incontinence from childbirth… oh, what fun! Sometimes I cough so hard I think I’m going to throw up.
At least I finally have some meds for the asthma. I have a preventative inhaler and an emergency inhaler. Before I had the meds or knew that I had asthma, the last time I got sick I thought I might actually need to go to the hospital. I ended up in urgent care. This time, with the inhaler and antihistamine, it’s manageable. Not great fun, but manageable.
Also, apparently you can not be allergic to anything and still have asthma. So there is a bunch of shit triggering my asthma right now that I’m technically not allergic to. That doesn’t explain the hives though, does it??? (No hives right now, thank god… I suspected my red bedsheets and getting rid of those truly seems to have calmed down the hives.)
Asthma does suck. I was diagnosed at age 2 and had it until maybe 10 years ago or so. (I no longer have it, instead it mutated into eosinophilic esophagitis, or EOE, which is a rare disease that also sucks and can potentially kill me.) But yeah, not being able to breathe is not fun. It limited anything I could do growing up and even as a younger adult. For the first time in my life, I can actually go outside and go for a run. (Though now I’m old enough that it hurts me in other ways.) I was able to participate in sports to an extent, I was able to play soccer in high school, but my trick there was to have caffeinated soda in a water bottle instead of water. (Caffeine can help counteract the effects of an asthma attack, or prevent it, though it’s nowhere near as effective as a real inhaler or other medicine, and I always had an inhaler for emergencies.) I could even have an attack if I laughed too hard. Ugh.
I’m sorry you’re going through it. It really, really sucks.
Yikes. That sounds incredibly difficult. I’m lucky I can run. I sometimes have a reaction after a run, but not during. Also I did not know that about caffeine…I quit caffeine this year. But I’m sure it would help in a pinch.
The main trigger seems to be something in my bedroom. I suspect dust mites.
Aside from my decades of personal experience, here is a study about its effects on asthmatics.
The first part of the study’s conclusion is:
Caffeine appears to improve airways function modestly, for up to four hours, in people with asthma.
Again, not a substitute for medicine. But it’s handy if you don’t have an inhaler, or its impractical or inconvenient to have or use one. And I’m not joking that drinking it allowed me to play sports I wouldn’t have been able to do. Not that I was much of an athlete, but I might not have been able to do it at all otherwise.
Apology accepted. I always got made fun of for running so slowly. I just couldn’t get enough air in my lungs. The legs were willing, the lungs were weak. Yes, asthma can really suck when you get sick. I have blacked out from coughing so hard I couldn’t inhale. I’m so glad you have those inhalers. They are awesome and have saved me many a trip to urgent care.
Regarding the sheets: it may not be the sheets themselves, it could be the laundry detergent or fabric softener if you use one. I found out the hard way, when I flew to CA for a race and stayed at a friend’s house. I use dye free, fragrance-free stuff for almost everything to keep those reactions at bay. Good luck to you!