As an adult I met the DC version - Count Gore de Vol Count Gore de Vol - Wikipedia by the way, at an SF convention.
Me too. Somehow I found it intuitive to use. But a lot of work.
Pay toilets.
Yes! Amazingly, I (think I) remember the moment I became aware of the increase. I was getting ready to buy an Action Comic with Superman and inexplicably present father Jor-El on the cover.
Superhero comics were notorious for their Clickbaity misleading cover art.
Horn and Hardart:
And people who were down on their luck would buy one nickel item, make lemonade from the free lemons and sugar at the tea counter, and make (urgh) “tomato soup” from the free ketchup, hot water, and crackers.
Still very common in Europe - although not like the North American type I remember where you put a dime in the stall handle, and turned it to open the door. In Europe - you usually pay/tip an attendant.
Yeah this surprised me when we went to Germany. Oddly the first bathroom I visited in the Frankfort airport was real bad, but free. All the others where clean as a whistle and very nice with individual toilet stalls with real doors and and nice vanity areas.
Y2K. That was a really big thing in the late 1990’s, but do any teens today know what it was?
I’m probably too young (b.1963) to remember that, but weren’t sugar cubes more notable as a delivery device for an entirely different kind of drug in the ‘60s?
Ha! I wasn’t going to say it, but the only time I’ve encountered a sugar cube was one time when I dropped acid with a friend in college (this being about the year 2000).
ETA: The LSD, from an eye dropper, was added to the cube, in case that’s not obvious.
They did administer polio vaccine in sugar cubes. I liked it. I didn’t like being singled out in elementary school every year for a chest x-ray due to tuberculosis (TB) exposure. Only 2 other kids in school had to do so. It was embarrassing.
Much less the joy of spinning the record backward with your finger and hearing “turn me on dead man”
ELO record says: The music is reversible!
Ditto. I don’t really remember getting the Salk vaccines but I remember waiting in line for the Sabin and getting handed a cube in one of those paper minicups by a white-uniformed nurse. I don’t know if there was a fee my parents paid or not. With the pushback on Covid vaccines I’ve thought of that memory; a more innocent time.
I also remember PSAs about hanging around public swimming pools can lead to polio so, just to keep it with the intent of the OP, the warnings about doing such.
Here’s to my sweet Satan
The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan
He will give those with him 666
There was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.
- Stairway To Heaven
Once you’ve heard it, you can’t unhear it.
LSD on sugar cubes must have been something from the days of Timothy Leary. I did acid approx 5 times between 1976-1981, and was a habitué of the demimonde, to put it politely. All LSD of that era was in poppyseed-size microdot, or sheets of blotter paper with grid perforations. Images printed in the grid could be quite imaginative, and by rights should be in the collection of MOMA or the Smithsonian.
At age 4 I did enjoy my polio vaccine sugar cube, and in fact asked the doctor for another. I also have a smallpox scab on my arm. Brad Pitt’s smallpox scab was left un-spackled as a historical anachronism in Troy, and Tod Armstrong’s scab is prominent in the scene in Jason and the Argonauts where Nancy Kovack heals a cut on his arm.
As a veteran, I stood in line and was vaccinated with the the same vaccination gun as dozens of other horny young men at the height of the AIDS epidemic, some of us bearing the virus acquired in San Diego, Tijuana or the fleshpots of the East. I’m unaware of any HIV transmissions this way, but the more robust Hep-C virus was later proven to have been passed.
The TV had to be on channel 3 to play video games.
If the president was making a speech or holding a press conference, your night was shot.
Dwane Johnson was showing not one but two smallpox scars as the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns.
Back in the day, having a mobile phone meant that your kitchen wall phone had an extra long cord, so you could talk in the living room.