Led Zeppelin used one in live appearances – Page played it in The Song Remains the Same (actually, he didn’t really know how to play it, it was more of a special effect).
FWIW, the first place I ever saw a theremin played was, incredibly, on an episode of Pettycoat Junction!
Incidentally, there was a fascinating documentary about the life of Professor Theremin, who was long thought dead, but was located after the fall of the Soviet Union. He appears in the film.
Got all those here.
Lots of wide open space, tho, even in the 'burbs. Woods, rivers, fields, etc, everywhere.
There’s a book on this subject: Going, Going, Gone: Vanishing Americana, by Susan Jonas and Marilyn Nissenson (Chronicle Books, 1998 (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0811819191/qid=1108334983/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/104-3262639-5251944). It covers lots of things you don’t see any more, like soda parlors, door-to-door salesmen, home delivery of milk, wedding-night virgins, men’s clubs, and blue laws.
How bad do you want to see one?
A $5 and SASE will get you two each with consecutive serial nos.
We have some at a lockbox at home, actually. If I want to see one, I’ll just ask my parents in a week or so. We also have $1 bills as well, I do believe.
Sorry but those are still being sold. I was in a craft store just this weekend and almost bought a kid’s woodburning kit for a project I was working on. Decided against it because it did not have interchangable tips for the soldering iron. Though I was surprised that they were selling the kit for kids but no sets geared toward adults.
Rabbit ears for the TV.
We had a heck of a time finding a set ( Radio shack, which is not really near us and the internet had not been invented yet by Gore.) for our first years of marriage , before cable came our way. And we had no neighbors…God…it was like being on Little House on the Prairie, only with 6 channels. Oh.The.Horrors!
Mercurochrome. Remember that? Putting it on a boo-boo to clean it. What ever happened to that stuff?
Cloth diapers are not completely gone, thanks to the internet.
This thread’s making my home sound like some sort of old and forgotten-about things museum.
Most of my phones are dial - one touchtone phone is grudgingly plugged in to access our voice mail.
Despite appearing to be the home of not just high-tech but ultra-tech, Fry’s sells several varieties of rabbit ears. I picked up a set just two weeks ago.
In the kitchen, we perk our coffee, have a glass blender and somewhere, we’ve got metal ice trays.
Oh, and what about my 25-pound Compaq portable computer with amber plasma screen?
We used to have metal icetrays. It was my Dad’s job to remove the ice for whatever softdrink we were having and believe me, we learned a lot of interesting new words as he tried to take the ice out of the tray. They generally were words you are not supposed to say at Sunday school. I still have a metal ice tray myself, although it hasn’t caused me to invent new swears.
I must be living in an old fashioned neighborhood, because once I heard a funny noise and went to check it out–and there was a kid playing with a pogo stick! Later I saw a kid playing with a hula hoop. Never thought I’d see that.
I see ice cream trucks every summer.
I have many vacuum tubes, and a tester.
I’ve got three slide rules, numerous 5.25" drives, 3.5" drives, 2 Betas I can’t get to work, and a bunch of other ‘outdated’ equipment.
I hate all Windows wordprocessors and prefer to use Wordperfect.
Ianzin
The hairdresser iron filings toys are easy to get here. Most grocery stores have them for a dollar or two.
Nivlac
I see Zeros and Zagnuts all the time.
Somebody mentioned big wheels. What happened to them? AFAIK the toy companies that made them are still in business.
Television ads for Big League Chew. It’s bubble gum sold in pouches, in shredded strips like tobacco. The pouches are covered with sport cartoons and it’s aimed at young athletes. I used to see ads for it all the time. They still make and sell BLC. But, I never see it advertised.
Milk bottles…
There’s another book somewhere about it 
Bicentennial quarters (back in… oh, '93 or so I remember they were somewhat common)
Kids with super soakers (though this may just be a case of me growing up and not being around them anymore)
Scratch and sniff stickers (again, may be same reason as above)
Markers that smelled like cherry or orange or the never-smells-like-grape (again… may be same reason as above)
Transformers toys
Lite Brite
Magic Rocks?? (not sure if that is the name… the things that grew into little multi-color underwater stalagmites complete with plastic castle or sunken boat)
a movie with a real plot that isn’t just special effects.
Wow… there’s one big early 90’s flashback for me.
Hot air popcorn machines
Good cereal toy prizes (Those mini license plates, wacky wall-walkers…)
“Guvment” cheese
A paregoric is a camphorated tincture of opium, as a matter of fact. It is a patent medicine of the same ilk as laudanum.
(I post this because I’ve heard the term but I’ve never looked up the definition before. I think it’s an interesting word in its own right.)
5.75 inch floppies. I still have a huge amount of 3.5 inchers, but I haven’t seen the truly floppy floppies in a long time. (As a matter of fact, I’ve not used any floppies at all since I broke down and bought a 512 MB jump drive. My old sneakernet is a lot faster now. ;))
Software sold on floppies. I think everyone has moved to CD-ROMs now, regardless of how much data they’re actually selling. But I don’t really buy software much at all these days: I can download what I need online a lot more easily.
The old PC graphics characters. Remember those glyphs? IBM shoved them into the 0x80-0xFF range of the ROM character set to compensate for the lack of graphics in the PC’s default text mode. In fact, I haven’t seen EGA/CGA/VGA-style graphics in over a decade, I’m sure.
AOL floppies. Those were neat: For a while there, AOL was shipping people megabytes and megabytes of free storage. Flip the write-protect guard and you could write to them anything your heart desired. These days they only send out coasters.
Ataris. Amigas. Commodores. Any PC that isn’t made by Apple or a clonemaker.
Band printers. In fact, daisy-wheels aren’t even used much for letter-quality printing these days. I guess they think laser printers do an acceptable job of letter-making these days. Come to think of it, Selectrics aren’t quite as common, either. I guess the IBM golfball’s days are over.
I have a set with rabbit ears. They aren’t ‘pure’, though: They have a third circular element between the two long antennas, and they have their own source of power to boost the reception. I can usually get the CBC and local stations pretty well on that set.
Uh, people decided that putting a toxic heavy metal on open wounds perhaps wasn’t the best idea? :smack:
Cecil’s done a column on it, BTW.
Both of the libraries in town (the public and the college) have made cards formerly of their catalogues available to patrons as scratch paper and bookmarks. They do very well in both roles.
I haven’t been to a toy store lately. But, as recently as a few months ago there was a line of Transformers (Transformers-Armada IIRC) in stores.
For a few years, they did go almost entirely to prizes you had to mail away for. Then, during the dot com era, there was a time when you had to go online and use a code inside the box to get a prize. Happily, the General Mills and the rest have gone back to prizes that are inside the box. At the market today, I pased a bunch of boxes with an Incredibles disc shooter inside the box.
BTW- I feel proud seeing just how much obsolete stuff from this thread I have.
I haven’t seen Grape Bubble Yum in years.
Sometimes nostalgia trips like this are simply innocent entertainment… and sometimes they’re bent to a conservative political agenda. Especially when the focus is on something from the past we’ve “lost” and have to “regain.” I can appreciate the sentiment in a mystical sense, since I would like to see the Goddess worship of early humanity restored. But when it’s used politically, I’m wary of a reactionary right-wing agenda.
Bob Dylan seriously annoyed me when he sang
And get rid of those damned “Ay-rabs” while you’re at it.
Ezra Pound wrote, I think it was in “A Lume Spento”—
That sounds inspiringly Traditionalist, even Guénonian, expressed in a romantic way. And then old Ezra turned out to be a fucking Fascist. Damn it, Ezra, you had to go and ruin all that poetry.
And then Loreena McKennit, not the least bit political or right-wing, wrote and sang “The Old Ways”—
Wistful, aching Celtic romanticism that carries on the cultural trail pioneered by Yeats and Joyce, the uncreated conciousness of my race. Celts are not in a position to dominate other nations by brute force, so their nationalistic consciousness is not taking a Fascist turn. Even though Yeats himself went Fascist in his old age, in his dotage. Loreena is in no way an artist who could be exploited by the right wing. She is free from all that.
I have a pair on top of my computer monitor at work.
Great internet reception.
Believe it or not but I still have folks who stop by and believe it, too!
Those round, metal, spin-around things at the playground.
Boxes of cookies stacked against the window of McDonald’s drive-thrus
Late night movies
Roller skating rings.
Roller skates (roller blades don’t count)
Drive-in movies.
Those long, skinny Jolly Ranchers.
Fifty cent brand-name soda from the vending machine
Those little booths you could sit in and watch a quick cartoon. I haven’t seen one of these in so long that I’m starting to think I imagined their whole existence.
State Policemen with a yardstick measuring how high your rear bumper was off the road. I used to see this all the time when I was much younger, but the trend these days seems to be how low you can get to the road.