Certainly do! Had to put baking soda in it? About 2-3 inches long. Gray. Less exciting than watching paint dry.
My biggest disappointment was that throwing knife, though. When the ad said “guaranteed to stick every time” I took that to mean that if I could hit something – a tree, a door, a bird, a wasp – this knife was going to do like the ones in the movies, and that was to be way better than any of the knives I had been throwing already, which was to stick up once every four or five tries.
So in the week or more it took for mine to come, I was practicing with rocks to hit stuff I wanted to stick a knife in. When it finally came, maybe 10 days later, I had the sad awakening that you had to hold it just right and stand just so many paces away and have your arm straight and several other special moves in a just so fashion. And then it still wouldn’t stick up but maybe one in four or five tries.
I hope somebody else mentions some of the other ripoffs in my childhood so I can relive the anger and frustration that I had managed to repress.
I had one of those as part of a doctor kit. It was a little like a crude diffraction grating (just recalling from childhood memory), and made everything imaged double. One image was fainter than the other, and where they overlapped, the object looked opaque; where they didn’t, it looked translucent. If you used your imagination and turned it on your hand, it did look like you were looking at bones (the opaque part) inside flesh (the translucent part). Of course it did the same thing with a tree, book or a refrigerator.
I felt cheated, but at least I got it as a gift.
I had one of the submarines, too, and it worked most of the time. It used baking powder, not baking soda. The reaction with water caused gas to be formed (CO[sub]2[/sub]?), which made the object float to the surface, where it tipped over and released the gas bubble, then sank again to repeat the process. Hours of fun. :rolleyes:
One of those ads was for a plan to make loads of money by selling seeds door-to-door. Each pack was maybe 50 cents, and I got to keep maybe 10 cents from each one. I built my vast empire of 60 cents that way, and it only cost me $4!
The first time, I was a kid, and was entirely convinced that they would look like monkeys and do tricks and stuff. They were quite the disappointment, but I liked them anyway. They came to a nasty end when I picked up the jar to look at them and spilled them all over my brother’s bed. He still gives me shit about that to this day.
The second time, I lived with a woman who believed all the hype. I told her many many times that the hype was overblown, and that they really weren’t all that amazing. She wouldn’t believe me. She bought them, and failed to be amazed. She finally ended up dumping them out.
The third time, a fellow Doper sent some to me. When they hatched, I was amazed at how many there were. It was quite spectacular. They all died a few days later.
I’m sure he thought about it. I did quit loading his cigs when he told me that he lit one up while he was in traffic, and said that it nearly caused an accident.
I only started loading them when my doctor told me to either get him to smoke outside or divorce him. I have asthma, allergies, and I’m sensitive to cigarette smoke. The loads were just my little way of saying that the smoke affects me adversely.
Cigarette loads are fantastic, I bought a litte tin of those and loaded up my Grandmothers smokes with a half stick, I cant even imagine what a full one would do…my Grandmother was quite the practical joker.
what the hell is with the snow storm generator things? do I even want to know what kind of insane chemical would cause that kind of reaction?
My Mother bought me one of these when my old apartment had roaches. The roaches found it to be a nice warm place to mate. I suspect the red LED light also helped set the “mood”.