TV test patterns - Broadcast stations shut down after midnight. The test pattern followed the end of the last program. If your TV was wonky you’d see it easier with the test pattern because geometric shapes would be askew.
bottle inserts for sprinkling water on clothes because clothes irons didn’t have reservoirs.
grocery stores with bottle returns. Pop and beer was sold in reusable bottles and you dragged them back to the store and put them on a roller system.
road tar. When it got hot it would bubble up and kids would run barefoot on them popping the bubbles.
Smudge pots - they were placed near road hazards as a warning at night.
railroad crossings that used loose lumber between the rails to fill the gap. You came to an almost complete stop when crossing or risk tearing the suspension of the car out.
Roads with no side markings, reflectors, rub strips or anything that gave you a warning except the marks down the center.
Mosquito foggers that would drive through the neighborhood spraying God knows what.
Teachers asking to borrow your boy scout knife to open a box.
You still need one, so that when you get back to your room and you see a certain mark drawn on it, you know that your roommate is having sex, so go away. A bit more subtle than a tie on the doorknob. (My girlfriend and her roommate would draw a star.)
Movies disappearing after a short period may not be such a bad thing. Friends back in Texas informed me that Look Who’s Talking played for a full year there, moving to one dollar house or another after leaving the first-run theater.
Novocaine, seriously? Synthetic local anesthetics have been around for well over a century, although it is true that some people do have a serious allergic reaction to some of them.
Oh, and more about phones: in our area, no one actually owned their phones, they rented them from the phone company.
My brother discovered a neat trick: dial 1191, hang up, and your own phone would ring. That only worked as a prank a couple times, because the ring was protracted. Then a repairman came to fix one of the phones, and my brother learned to dial 118, wait for a tone, then dial, like 3 or 4 and hang up and it would sound like a normal ring. We had at least a phone upstairs and one downstairs, so it could be a pretty good prank.
OTOH, we do now have relatively recent second rate movies cluttering up the HBO and Showtime schedules for as much as ten or fifteen years. If a movie is only just old enough that the characters have lousy, primitive mobiles but everything else looks much the same as today, it’s not old enough to have camp or nostalgic value.
Beloit College publishes an annual list of things that the incoming students have no experience with. Since this is dated, those just out of college a few years can see how much things have changed in the time between when they were frosh and currently.
It’s not that easy to get painkillers nowadays. My wife had a tooth infection that gave her a nasty toothache, the dentist couldnt see her right away, and all he would prescribe for her was a Tylenol 3 (basically, Tylenol with a very small amount of codiene). Even after the tooth extraction surgery all he would prescribe was a tylenol 3. I used to get lortabs after a tooth extraction. I had a severely pulled back muscle a few weeks ago, and all the doctor would offer me was a muscle relaxant and over the counter tylenol.
I’m pretty sure it’s the DEA crackdown on prescription drugs that are of interest to addicts that causes this: to put it in perspective, I had not asked for painkillers for YEARS prior to being told all I could use for my pulled back was over the counter Tylenol. I think for my wife it was at least a year since she had gotten any prescription painkillers.
So, the days of being able to get treated for pain with powerful drugs may be history…
I had a neighbor, where I was sometimes sent to be baby-sat, who had an early version of a TV with a remote. It was wired, not wireless. So you could change channels from a little boxy console on your lap, but it had a wire stretched out across the floor to the TV.
The Fine Bros on YouTube run Kids React/Teens React/Seniors React and YouTubers React. And lately they’ve been running kids’ and teens’ reactions to things that are before their time.
Modern-day fun signs: Clover brand milk, a regional brand in and around Sonoma County, Ca., has a cartoon cow mascot named Clo, and a long-running on-going series of silly cartoon billboards with Cow and Moo and Clo puns. http://cloverstornetta.com/category/billboard-gallery/1990-1999/
The Sunday paper used to have a “TV book” with listings for the next week. I was about ten when we got a guide on the screen you could control (as opposed to the channel that scrolls slowly through the listings for the next couple of hours), so I don’t know when these went away.
I get two NBC stations. One is from a small town and until a few years ago it signed off on, IIRC, Sunday mornings.
