By coincidence, on the same day you posted this Digg pointed to an article saying that NY (???) had just banned selfies with big cats. Apparently it’s still a thing.
For some reason I had a flashback when getting gas the other day. I recalled gas pumps that:[ul]
[li]Were purely mechanical and were reset by turning a crank on the side.[/li][li]Had a weathervane-like gadget in a glass ball that spun when gas was flowing. It didn’t appear to serve any practical purpose, but it was kinda cool.[/li][li]Went ding each time the gallon counter flipped.[/ul]And most amazing of all:[ul][/li][li]Couldn’t be set to more than USD .999 a gallon. I mean, how could gas ever cost more than that?[/ul][/li]In addition, they frequently had lighted globes on top proclaiming the grade being dispensed. Texaco’s Fire Chief / Sky Chief / Super Chief come to mind.
As for television sign-offs, this is probably my all-time favorite (though CBC Vancouver used it as a morning sign-on for a while before they went 24/7).
That is beautiful!!!
[quote=“OttoDaFe, post:402, topic:695035”]
For some reason I had a flashback when getting gas the other day. I recalled gas pumps that:[ul]
[li]Had a weathervane-like gadget in a glass ball that spun when gas was flowing. It didn’t appear to serve any practical purpose, but it was kinda cool.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
it let you know gas was flowing and at what rate. it also let you know that you weren’t getting chunks of crap in your tank.
the gallons dispensed numbers let you know that too but at low flow rates the vanes would turn while the numbers didn’t letting you know you had flow.
Caller ID boxes. We were in the early-rollout area for US West when they introduced the technology. The phone company leased(!) us a little white box with a stand that hooked in between the phone and the jack, and had a two line LCD on it that gave the number and a truncated all-caps version of whatever name they had attached to the account. US West was surprisingly good at getting fancy new things to their subscribers. Caller ID, Call Blocking, Caller ID Blocking, Call Waiting, Automatic Callback, CD-ROM phonebooks, all kinds of stuff. I also remember my parents being pissed at something pretty much every month, as evidently they were the Darth Telecom who taught Comcast everything they know about running a billing department.
Early cordless phones. Our first one was huge, had only one handset, and had a telescoping antenna on the top. Even with it, if you got more than ten feet or so from the base, the sound quality descended into AM pocket radio territory. Replacement batteries came directly from AT&T or Radio Shack, because there wasn’t an entire aisle of the things in Wal-Mart yet.
Phone jacks, for that matter. At one point, we had three separate phone lines running into the house, mainly because there were two teenagers and an engineer who worked remotely in residence at the time. (They didn’t call it telecommuting yet. It wasn’t enough of a thing to have a name. I have no idea how Dad got them to agree to it.) One summer, I got my father to tell me how to rewire the phone jack in my room from the first line to the second, so I could use the dial-up internet without getting booted by the call waiting clicks whenever someone tried to call my mother, by telling him that if he didn’t give me instructions, I was going to do it without them. 
I don’t think I ever knew what the phone numbers to those other two lines were – they were used exclusively for dialing out with modems.
We had friends who copied rental tapes by pointing a camcorder at the TV screen and leaving it running. My father thought that method was for the ignorant and unambitious. He went and bought about $5 of parts from the nearest Radio Shack – which carried things other than cell phones and electronics screwdrivers at the time – and soldered together a little black box that went in the signal path between two VCRs. I was aware at the time that we were super cool (read: incredibly nerdy) for having more than one VCR stacked up in the entertainment center, but later I realized that Dad had home-built a circuit for stripping the Macrovision copy protection out of the signal, so the copies would be watchable. It worked so well that I was unaware VHS had any kind of copy protection on it until I got older and witnessed someone else’s setup flipping out over running a cheap DVD player through a VCR.
We did have a camcorder, though. It was huge, and looked like an old-fashioned security camera forcibly mated with a small VCR. It took full-size VHS tapes in a loading mechanism that tilted out the side, like a cassette deck. It came in a foam-lined hard shell suitcase for transport. There was a tripod, but if we wanted it walked around the room for any length of time, it was always handed to my father, who is built like a Wookiee and was the only one who could stand to have it balanced on his shoulder for long. I can’t remember ever not having a camcorder pointed at Christmas, so we must have had one of the very first VHS models, ca. 1985/6 or so. The eyepiece swiveled in line with the body for storage, and then rotated down again so you could look into it while using the camera, with a tiny tiny CRT inside that showed you what the aperture saw.
My parents were so enchanted with the camcorder that a few holidays later, they actually bought us kids a Pixelvision, that recorded a spangly black and white pictures on standard cassette tapes. They were apparently not common; everyone was baffled by my description and thought I was confabulating until I got to college and discovered that they were briefly popular as a hipster-art thing, as they gave an eerie Instagram-filter-ish effect to footage. Now everyone just shoots with their iPhone and Instagrams it directly.
In some of the farthest reaches of rural Thailand you can still see those old-time gas pumps with the bubble head on top where the gas fills first before it’s emptied into your car through the hose and nozzle.
My first car was a '75 Sedan Deville/Land Yacht, and it had the automatic light dimmer. That was awesome, except that we lived on a dirt road, and when the sensor got too dirty, it would “wink” at oncoming cars… 
Yeah, plenty of grocery baggers around here. Mostly teenage boys, but it’s not unusual to see a developmentally delayed adult bagging groceries around here.
Gads, I spent hours arguing with my mother that it wasn’t cheating for me to use a calculator in physics and chemistry, and guess what? She still argues that my kids don’t need calculators in their advanced science and math classes! I seriously cannot convince that stubborn old broad that there’s zero value in spending valuable class or homework time multiplying by hand!
I think that very model of clock is still rattling around in a box at my mother’s. It was cool in its own way, but the slight click of the flipping numbers was annoying, and now and again, toward the end of its useful life, the middle digit would get stuck for an hour or two, until you performed a little percussive maintenance on the clock.
When I was a kid, I spent a couple of weeks with some family friends one summer while my father was in the hospital. I wanted to call my cousin, who lived right across the river from the family friends - in fact, I could see my cousin’s house from the friends’ dock - but it was long distance.
Agreed!
One example I ran into a couple of weeks ago: The daughter of a friend was assigned to read Orwell’s Animal Farm, and griped about how silly it seemed to her. That’s when I realized that, having zero recollection of the Soviet Union, Cold War, etc., no, she had absolutely no context for that particular story.