Things you miss

In My Humble Opinion
1

After the FedEx Bowl, I started thinking of how things have changed over time, and not always for the better. I’m curious as to what things you all have come to miss.

After this year’s bowl season, I realized that:

  1. I miss the New Year’s Day bowl games. When I was a kid, there was a great anticipation for the New Year’s Day games. The Rose, Cotton, Sugar, and Orange. That was a great day. Even when they added the Fiesta Bowl, it was still a great day. No college football games after January 1st. I loved it. Now, Jan. 1 really doesn’t mean much for college football and I now look forward to watching the NHL’s Winter Classic.

  2. Speaking of bowls, I miss the no-sponsor names. The FedEx, Mobil, Tostitos, San Diego Credit Union, etc. bowls. How cheesy can you get? Everything is sponsored to a disgusting degree.

  3. Speaking of advertising annoyances, I hate the new stadium names. Every city had their own, unique stadium. Candlestick, Riverfront, Three Rivers, The Astrodome, Veterans, RFK, Memorial, etc… now, just about everything is sponsored. I had no idea Tennessee played at LP Field, or Carolina at Bank of America.

  4. Single screen movie theaters. I loved the big screen. The really big screen, in theaters that had real balconies. I do like the new theater seating, but most of the new theaters have so many screens in them that the experience is just not the same. Often, I can hear the movie in the room next to the one I’m sitting in. I wonder how many kids have never had a true “Big Screen” experience.

  5. Drive-ins. I know a few of them still exist, but none where I now live. I loved going there in high school with a bunch of friends and watching bad movies with a broken speaker hanging off my window.

  6. Record Album cover art. I loved buying a new record and listening to it while looking over the art-filled cover. There was a lot of effort in designing an album cover… the CD just doesn’t provide the space.
    That’s all for now… what are yours?

2

There used to be a shredded cheddar cheese available that had small bits of jalapeno embedded in the shreds. I can’t find it anymore, and I miss that.

3

Rachel’s Brownies. Oh, they were good. Then they sold out to some horrid corporation who changed the recipe, overpackaged the hell out of them, and then made them disappear forever.

Haagen-Dasz honey and carob flavors.

Frusen Gladje.

Buc-Wheats cereal.

Tiger’s Milk drink mix. Not the bars, the delicious stuff you mixed into milk.

Dannon yogurt in the old cardboard containers. And Danny Bars!

Hm. I don’t even eat sugar anymore but these are all the things I miss.

4

They’re people, not things, but I miss the hell out of Sam Kinison and Chris Farley.

5

The Sunshine Biscuit Company used to make the Golden Fruit Biscuit, or Garibaldi Biscuit, a bland pair of glazed biscuits with a raisin filling. They tasted ‘meh’, not good, not bad, but I sometimes get a craving. (Yes, the Vermont Country Store catalog sells them for some obscene price, but I have a recipe and make them once in a great while).

Yardley cosmetics. I had it all, back in the day - watercolor eyeshadows, pearl white lipstick, the shampoo, the perfumes (Oh! de London), lip glosses - you name it, I had it. It smelled so nice, and I so adored Jean Shrimpton, their model. Now, an empty lip gloss pot or empty perfume bottle can be had on eBay for an incredible sum!

Along that line, Love’s Fresh Lemon cologne and shampoo, which actually smelled like real lemons. Why is it so hard to find a fresh lemon scent? It either smells like furniture polish or is mixed up with a dozen other ingredients.

The Scholastic Books flyer, offering books for sale to school children, that I would run home with, read feverishly marking off my choices, and returning it to the teacher with money from my mother. Is it still around? I hope so, for a big reader like me, it was heaven.

I miss the State Fair when it was tacky, honky-tonky, kind of dirty and dangerous (to a teenager, anyway). There were freak shows and girly shows. Now it’s all strictly controlled and Disneyfied and family-friendly-fied. Anyone who wants a wine cooler is confined to a small corral and has to drink it there, not walk around like the beer drinkers. ???

6

I miss bonfires in the fall. In high school, we used to have these fabulous bonfires in the fields on my friends’ property. There usually wasn’t a particular reason for the bonfire - a bunch of us just got together and bummed some beer from older brothers or even parents and sat around drinking and eating hot dogs.

I miss smelling the corn in the summertime everytime I’d leave my house. I used to live almost right in the middle of a bunch of cornfields, so whenever I’d go to volleyball practice in the summer I’d open all my windows and inhale. Those cornfields have long since been replaced by a Target, office buildings and restaurants. The old crop-duster airstrip is gone and so is the old, ramshackle house we used to make our way to through the fields.

Sometimes I miss being in college. It was nice living in an environment where my only responsibilities (well, until my sophmore year anyway, when I got a job) were eat, sleep, study and hang out with my friends. I certainly don’t miss the pot-laced air in the dorm, though. That place was really skunky.

I miss Tab. I haven’t had it since I was 9 or 10, but it tasted really good when I was a kid for some reason. I’m sure I’d hate it now.

7

gal Crown Sours. Evidently, they don’t exist any more.

I’m with the OP on the bowl games. College football ends January 1. Anything else doesn’t count. The four bowls made New Year’s Day special.

Same with album cover art.

Burning leaves. It was the scent of fall, but fire departments have put an end to them.

8

I miss those electric wall clocks that you had to plug into an outlet. (As opposed to those battery-powered, one tick per second clunkers).
Those clocks were powered by a hysteresis synchronous motor that would keep time very accurately. And they were very quiet - unlike those battery-powered, one tick … :mad:

9

Eating anything I want and still having six pack abs.

10

Cheese Kisses.
Raisins, Rice & Rye Cereal.
Grape Tang.
Forever Yours Candy Bars.
Scoundrel Perfume.
Rag City Blue Jeans.
Gunne Sax Dresses.

11

Sometimes I find myself missing Bulgaria. It’s funny because I spent a lot of my time there dying to leave, and I definitely don’t miss living in such a small town or not having running water in the winter or trying to teach English to a bunch of hellions. Just, sometimes I find myself imagining walking down the street in Sofia or Plovdiv or even my village and it seems so familiar and real that it’s hard to remember that now I live in America and those places are thousands of miles away, and even if I were there, someone would probably do something that would annoy me (like tell me Americans don’t speak English or be really unreasonably rude or start telling me some crackpot theory about how Bulgarians invented baseball) and make me wish I were in America.

I am conflicted.

12

Does anyone remember Suddenly Smores?

13

I miss the Firebird.
Particularly the third gen.

14

I miss Bois Cheri vanilla tea from Mauritius. Does anyone know where I can order it in the US or Europe? It is available in Dubai, but alas, I am not there right now.

15

Koogle…It was flavored peanut butter

Soda in 16 oz GLASS bottles and real sugar…it was much better.

That 5-10 pound block of Gov cheese…damn them were nice grilled cheese.

All those things I used to do prior to computers and the internet…boy life was boring…or was it? :dubious:

16

Not quite what you’re looking for, but I miss being young and able to eat anything I wanted and still be totally skinny. Doesn’t work anymore.

17

This is fine, and so are people. Anything (or anyone) you miss.

Some of these replies have made me remember things I miss… especially real honest-to-God sugar and Coke in the 16 oz. green glass bottle.

[homer]
mmmmmmmmmm sugared cola.
[/homer]

18

This is why god invented Mexican grocery stores. So Americans can drink Mexican Coke.

19

That’s probably what I miss most. And being seen as datable by 20-ish girls.

Yep. The taste wasn’t awesome, but something about the texture & flavor together really represent being about age 8 to me. I really miss those.

From the OP: Yes, they have pretty well ruined college football. I refuse to pronouce the sponsor’s names. It was, is, and always shall be the Orange Bowl, not the “[sponsor name] Orange Bowl”, regardless of how I feel about the particular sponsor.

It used to be that the Rose Bowl was always the Pac 8/10 vs Big 10/12 and was the de facto national championship, all other conferences being rightly seen as both weak & insignificant. As a USC alum, I miss those days.

20

I miss Popples and Pound Puppies. Yes, I am a creature of simple tastes.