Neenah, WI
Wow, vid, did you really have that Black Knight handheld? Those pics are of my own, including the only box still known to exist. It's ultra rare to even find loose.
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1 week later
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6 months later
Quoted from Bohdi:I've seen it there too. Told my wife to pick me one up for a stocking stuffer last year, and she said they were all out. I have the original Football 2 one. Still haven't picked up a original. Played the hell out of it during the day..
Ew, don't buy that crappy remake, it has LCDs backlit by red LEDs, looks crappy, plays crappy. The LCD lag time wrecks it. Pick up an original original on eBay, with actual LED segments.
1 week later
One of mine was a box. Cardboard box, you ask? Aye, and I know we were lucky.
Python referencing aside, we did actually have a blast with boxes. We'd take a big one, a kid would get inside with some pillows, then we'd surround that box with one a little bigger, close it up, and roll the kid around every which way. Fond memories. Hell, I bet it would still be fun!
3 months later
Quoted from Don44:I had a bowling game that had a lane and a ball and ball return and strings lifted the pins when you hit them. It was back in the 1970's but I can't remember what it was called. I do remember my dad saying it was a real pain in the ass to put tobether. I probably played more than any other toy I ever had. Anybody have anything like this and remember what it was called?
You must be thinking of the Coleco Bowl-a-Matic 300.
Quoted from Don44:That is definitely it. I bowled a lot back then and loved that toy. Did you have one too?
No, just felt like working my mad Googling skillz! Once I found it, I seemed to remember a friend having one though.
2 months later
Quoted from Newport-Bill:Still have 2 sets of the original Jarts plus extra fins with the box! I understand they can fetch good money on eBay.
They are banned, and like with any banned item, one opens oneself to risking large penalties for selling or even giving away such items. eBay yanks any listings of the darts and threatens to review your account, they will only let you sell the empty boxes. I recall they used to allow the fins, but apparently they are a no-no nowadays as some smart alecks used to try to get around the ban by selling the parts separately.
When I was a little kid I once threw a brick in the air that unintentionally clobbered the neighbor girl. I still feel bad about it 50 years later but at least it didn't pierce her skull! So far the CPSC hasn't banned bricks!
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I only had the stick, I was stuck just playing with that while imagining what the hoop must be like.
2 years later
Quoted from Rezdog:This was like magic at the time. Those cans didn’t stand a chance against my light beam. This would never be sold today
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Is this close enough? https://www.sharperimage.com/si/view/product/Wild+West+Shooting+Set/207147
3 weeks later
Quoted from Mr68:Most likely classified as a carcinogen
Not likely at all, it's just isoproponol and methanol.
They wouldn't have handed out evaporating carcinogens to little kids!
3 weeks later
Quoted from mooch:Anyone here ever have model trains?
I always wanted one, well, two, really, in order to crash them and blow them up like Gomez did! But we were far too poor to be buying multiple trains just to destroy them.
Man, it's gotten so that I know what Snopes is gonna say before I even look.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fisher-price-happy-hour-playset/
1 week later
Quoted from mooch:I once had one of these cheap crystal radio kits. Basically just some coiled wire, a diode and an earpiece to listen. I was amazed that I could hear radio stations with no power source.
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Whoa, thanks for the memory jolt!
I vividly remember getting one of these, and trying it out at the tavern my dear old dad hung out at, him having no compunction about having me tag along (this was the early 70s)! I remember it like it was yesterday.
Here's to the memory of the Butterfly Bar on S Commercial in Neenah! (Where I also remember smacking the back of a puck bowler with the puck to get free games! Until they moved the back against the wall, anyway.)
tumblr_mpy8wyHXYB1s2xpeeo1_1280 (resized).jpgQuoted from OLDPINGUY:Oh yes, and a crazy clock too.
Big Rube Goldberg fan.
What about Fish Bait?
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Quoted from ManyQuarters:Got this for Christmas one year in the early 1970's:[quoted image]
I got the one from Lafayette Electronics. It started my electronics career!
There's like an 80% chance I still have it, somewhere...
Dunno if these have been posted before, who has time to look back through 1700+ pics?!
Still have both of these "computers." Well, not "still," they're not the actual ones I had as a kid, but I collect weird stuff...
And like my Lafayette kit earlier, I just stole the pics off the web. I wouldn't leave batteries in anything, ever! 
ScienceFairDigitalComputerKit (resized).jpgoriginal-digi-comp-digital-computer (resized).jpgQuoted from VanishingVision:There was a larger set called Big Big Loader as well, and I believe you could connect the two of them.
Or you could just buy Big Big Big Loader!
5c54a1e6b9e35_58893b (resized).jpg
No luck Googling for a Big Big Big Big Loader, though.
We had an SS Kresge's in our Fox Point Shopping Center (a strip mall before they were called strip malls), with a lunch counter, parakeets for sale, and a pinball machine right by the front door that I still get to reminisce about when I visit the thrift store that now occupies the space.
Quoted from OLDPINGUY:Those were so much better!
Before that, These Balsa Wood Flyers were lucky to make it to the end of the day![quoted image]
Especially when one attaches bottle rockets to them!
We'd use ones with no report until we started to get tired of it, then go out with a bang!
1 week later
Hey, it occurs to me that the thread title implies my childhood is over. "Were"?
I have way more toys now as a relatively successful old child than I did as an economically disadvantaged young child.
I even just picked up, at an auction, the same model stereo I had in my bedroom as a teenager! After unseizing the turntable (a victim of the same grease they used on EM steppers, apparently) it's like I'm back in my parents' house! I keep expecting to be told, "TURN IT DOWN!"
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Quoted from EdisonArcade:A firepit on wheels.
I'm surprised no one had thought of it before.
Love it! I knew I saved the drum out of my old front load washer for some reason! I'm copying that idea!
1 week later
I was (and am) a huge nerd, but I never got into the whole D&D phenom somehow.
Back in college (80s), everyone I knew of who was into it had hygiene such that I didn't want to be around them, as I recall.
I played a few RPGs on Nintendo back then, but as for the whole rolling 20-sided dice thing, no dice.
Funny, now my own daughter goes to D&D nights (not this year tho).
My late mother played just about every RPG for NES, SNES, Genesis, and PS1. Reminds me, I should start unloading them to pay for my R&M! I looked up just the NES and SNES titles she left me and it came to almost $5K! One of them, SNES Earthbound, is worth like a kilobuck alone!
1 week later
Quoted from cottonm4:The talking doll that started the talking stuff.
Except she didn't. I remember my sister getting a hand-me-down from a cousin with a much more 50s-looking box.
So naturally I start Googling to find it, but, whoa! The real first talking doll was from way before my time!
01_edison-talking-doll-of-1890_baehr-proeschild_custom-4ca23349e9f646c88800301129acc711e4f3e2a6-s600-c85 (resized).jpg
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/05/05/404445211/edisons-talking-dolls-can-now-provide-the-soundtrack-to-your-nightmares
Edit: Okay, article, it was AMONG the first talking dolls. I still wonder what was first. Probably in Europe somewhere.
2 weeks later
Oh geez, that miserable Atari Pac Man version was right up there with the sad implementations of Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Defender, Zaxxon... That console just didn't have the juice to do most arcade games justice.
And those games were $40 in 1977, equivalent to over $170 today! No wonder I repeatedly felt so burned, wasting my paper route money on that crap. Wish I had learned after the first one!
Time heals all wounds, though -- soon I will start selling my late mother's extensive NES/SNES RPG collection, which I recently priced out at 5 large!
Quoted from DCP:1 to 31 in binary
10000
01000
11000
00100
10100
01100
11100
00010
10010
01010
11010
00110
10110
01110
11110
00001
10001
01001
11001
00101
10101
01101
11101
00011
10011
01011
11011
00111
10111
01111
11111
You got all the binary numbers from one to 31 all right, but they are out of order since you reversed the order of the digits.
16,8,24,4, etc.
Quoted from mooch:I think they used Elmer’s Glue to seal the cartons because I always had a hell of a time opening those as a kid.
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Our grade school expected you to eat all of your lunch. To think of all the asparagus and other (to a kid) inedibles that I smuggled into the trash inside those little milk cartons...
Quoted from mooch:Here’s you and me the first day with a Rubik’s Cube.
This gave me a flashback to having wasted money once buying the "Ultimate Solution to the Rubik's Cube," which came sealed in an envelope.
Open the envelope, there's a bunch of stickers you're supposed to stick over the original stickers. There, you solved it!?
I hope the perpetrators of that scam are rotting in hell.
Quoted from cottonm4:Anybody ever think they could draw good enough send these charlatans any money? When I was young I did not realize this as the scam it was. I wonder if anybody ever won any of the prizes.
I'm betting the prizes were something like the guy at the state fair midway who would guess your weight or age for a dollar. If he guessed wrong, you would get a small stuffed toy that cost him 10 cents.
" Just draw the pirate and send your drawing along with $2.95 for shipping and handling and our team of artists will review your drawing. You might just win a prize."
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My dad copied the turtle and pirate as I recall, sent them in, and received a "prize" of a discount on their art course.
He actually bit and signed up, I think GI bill paid for most of it, they sent him art supplies and "assignments" and it seemed legit enough to me, but I was all of 8 or so, so what did I know.
He never did become a world-renowned artist, though.
I had fun with the pitch-back I earned selling seeds door to door, and with the pup tent from selling Christmas cards.
I was an enterprising young lad! We lived on a county highway, and on the shore of Lake Winnebago, the perfect location for selling night crawlers for 50 cents a dozen. I even wired a button on our garage to a buzzer by my bed, so customers could summon me no matter how early they needed some worms. Jeez, thinking back, I guess I was black market! No sales permit, no sales tax collected, no income claimed... despite a rather elaborate smiling-worm-on-a-hook sign my dad made for me. That was 50 years ago, I guess it's safe to come clean now!
Quoted from fuseholder:This on the back bedroom door. Never made a week, when mom saw it.
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I know I've seen that Vampirella poster before, but somehow I didn't remember that there was a bat in it.
Quoted from Atari_Daze:70 pages of postings, this may have been noted before, I loved these! Every elementary school book fair I would get the Mad Libs.[quoted image]
Anyone else get in trouble when your mom got ahold of a Mad Libs you and your friends filled out with dirty words?
Thanks a lot, neighbor's babysitter!
Another memory, in 9th grade I think it was, my group of friends got a little aggressive in our prankstering with homemade, pocket-sized slingshots fashioned from coat hangers, tape, and rubber bands.
Our ammo? Little U shaped pieces of the lead used in stained glass, pilfered from the art classroom, which I just learned is called "came."
Man, if we had known that back then, it would have been even funnier.
Anyway, I never shot mine at people, just wanted to add some surrealism to the other kids' days.
Sitting in a quiet library, suddenly *THWACK* echoes across the room. What the heck was that? everyone thought.
One time, I remember like it was yesterday, first try, I aimed at the room's bell and DING!
I recently ran across a leftover piece of that lead stuff that had been kicking around in a box since way back then. Made me nostalgic.
Quoted from Rezdog:Thought the future had arrived when I first flipped this over to side 2
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Thought I was losing my mind when I got the album Monty Python's Matching Tie & Handkerchief. Side Two has two grooves, so when you drop that needle, you never know which Side Two you're gonna get! And of course the first time you realize it's a different Side Two is very confusing. I almost had to go see a milkman.
Quoted from mooch:I noticed that on the box lid art the Captain is missing his right eye, but art on the game board shows his left eye missing.
What, you can only wink with one eye? 
No eye patch...
Quoted from bob_e:the original NERF ball
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I "stole" a NIP original Nerf Football in an online auction lot back in September of 2019, where they had no idea what they had and didn't even list it in the lot contents! $12.
A guy on eBay wants $400 for his! He might get it, too, I remember seeing one sold for $300 not long after I scored this one.
nerf football lot (resized).jpg
Almost as good as when, a year later, the same sort of thing happened at the same auctioneer, I shanghaied a kinetic art sculpture that originally retailed for like 2 grand, for ten bucks!
Quoted from littlecammi:Any of them worth anything?
Zelda is worth a few hundred. Still sealed would have been nuts, say from $2K to as much as $7K depending on moon phase, etc.
About any complete, untrashed boxed game is worth between 50 and 100.
The big money is in RPGs though.
Quoted from LTG:You need to beat the orange up some. Loosen the innards.
LTG : )
Yeah, when you juice an orange you don't just stick it on the juicer! Gotta breach all those membranes (what an appetizing word!) to allow the juice to escape.
The tricky part of a Squeater is beating the orange up enough first without splitting the skin and making a mess.
Quoted from LTG:I got it at a renaissance festival. You could pick one. They'd split it open. A geode with real pretty crystal formations inside.
I didn't want mine split in half though. I didn't want to lose the magic that some day a dragon might hatch.
LTG : )
But how will you ever know whether Cookie Monster needs to get out?
Cookie-Monster-social-mike-bowers-Facebook (resized).jpgQuoted from littlecammi:The Beatles Flip Your Wig Game (complete with all four band member pieces).
You may flip your wig when you hear what that game is worth!
Quoted from littlecammi:Not really toys, but do any of you remember the small metal ashtrays
Nope, never saw those, but I had a pretty sheltered, rural childhood...
I forgot about that Jaws game too. Now I know where the plastic fish skeleton that is still kicking around 46 years later came from!
Quoted from EdisonArcade:Dug it out to give to Nephews. They'll love it!
Are you sure you want to give it to your nephews? Brings hundreds of simolians on eBay...
Quoted from cottonm4:a tube of toothpaste that advertises it will make your teeth whiter; Never white; Always the comparative whiter.
You're too kind. Nothing does anything anymore, it HELPS do things. And nothing claims to do it the best, all they can claim is that nothing else is better.
Quoted from pinwiztom:chips (in a box) from my childhood in Midwest,
they probably still make these don't they.[quoted image]
Yep, still in a box! Triple packed! Tastier than Lay's and a better value!
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Quoted from cottonm4:I also like Teaberry gum. But I do not remember it being wintergreen flavor. Matter of fact, I don't remember what is tasted like. But wintergreen does not ring any bells.
Some say it's similar to wintergreen. It's minty, anyway.
But the real question is, did it really cause chewers to break into spontaneous dance?
Quoted from smalltownguy2:This is one of the only toys that I saved from my childhood. Luminations.
[quoted image]
Have you solved it? If I recall, it involves some pretty obscure math. Not that I figured it out, I looked it up and was glad I didn't spend any more time on it.
It reminded me of Nemesis Factor, an awesome 100 puzzle gadget from 2001 (when my childhood reached its forties). The puzzles start out easy enough, and get harder as you progress. I remember getting farther on it years ago than I have during my more recent attempt; some of the puzzles are downright maddening. It even keeps track of your progress, so you can walk away and pick it up again later, and also tracks the progress of up to four other puzzle solvers! It also has two hints for each level, often puzzles in themselves. (It talks.) Lots of frustrating fun for $10-$20 on eBay.
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Quoted from zombywoof:This reminds me of a spot that we used to call The Scoop.
For some reason this flashed me back to a 70 foot jump to the water, called the Aardvark, at a nearby abandoned quarry.
My first time there, we saw an ambulance(!) leaving as we got there. Come to find out a guy in my high school class got too drunk and jumped it one too many times. But that info didn't wreck the day for us, we didn't learn about it until we got back. (No, I didn't jump it myself.)
Another guy we knew thought it was bullshit, called the guy's house and asked his mom if he could talk to Bob. What a dick! But he's gone now, too.
RIP, Bob and Ty!
(Sorry, this isn't exactly a favorite memory!)
Quoted from cottonm4:What is the next toy that comes after the kissy face?
6b6b04df4683150f1da257b23029508f (resized).jpg... couldn't find one with bra hooks...
Especially after people shag on it!
At a microscopic level, ALL carpet is nasty. I'm gradually removing all of it from my home.
Quoted from Mr68:My handel was The Boogieman
Having a last name starting with a Q, I was somehow dubbed with the CB moniker "Quacko."
Quoted from littlecammi:Stringed cans? That highly technical device is best left for the use of trained professionals!
Especially this version, looks pretty high tech to me! (Mine.)
16142354032921889672310511554157 (resized).jpgFond memories of watching wrestling with my dad way back in the 70s, before it got so goofy and over the top and they still at least pretended it was real. Nevertheless, I could always be sure of him uttering, sometime during the show, "What a crock of shit!"
1 week later
Quoted from Mr68:Have any of you gone back to your childhood home and neighborhood?
Yep, back in '92 I left Phoenix after 12 years and not only went back home to Wisconsin but even moved back in with the parental units for a while, being still single and all. That was kind of trippy! Stayed in the area, got married, had a kid, bought a house a couple towns over.
But that childhood home is gone now, they decided to tear down their admittedly tumbledown cottage and replace it with a double wide, a non-ideal choice for such expensive lakeside property, but it was all they could afford.
Eventually, after my wife died tragically, I used a chunk of the settlement money to buy a nicer house than I ever expected to live in, a half mile from my parents, so I could be closeby as they got old and needed more and more help.
After they died, five years apart and both at home, the property was eventually sold to the fishing club that owned the property next door, who were probably the only people to whom it was worth the assessed value, and I was granted the right to visit anytime and even use the house for free on occasion if I want, as they have it set up as a vacation rental. So that all worked out I guess, being able to visit without the expense of buying it myself. I originally had hoped to build a new, custom home on the property but it was not to be, oh well. It was for the best, I decided I didn't want a county highway 20 feet from my house after all, despite growing up like that.
And I still visit the old stomping grounds when I take my bike rides past the place and down the lake roads, brings me back every time.
I saw Rush several times at the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena, or as we referred to it, the Brown County Echo Chamber.
Buncha other bands over the years, too.
Torn down in 2019. 
BrownCountyArenaMay2007 (resized).jpgRush or Bust (resized).png
Added over 3 years ago: I should have pointed out that is me on the Cutlass. I miss my hair!
Quoted from OLDPINGUY:Sorry for the delay (Vaccine day!).....But thanks for the guesses!!!
Heres the original Tag. Its Called a POPKANE!
Man, if that had been from Wham-O, I'd have found it! Thanks for the puzzler, it does a brain good to noodle over such mysteries.
Quoted from mooch:More unnecessary noise: When I was young, I couldn’t resist twanging any ruler I had off the edge of a table or desk to make loud wobbly noises. I spent a lot more time doing this with rulers than I ever did measuring things. So I guess twanging was their main purpose.
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Seems like I got yelled at for doing that every time we got our rulers out!
Quoted from Mr68:So I'm coordinating with him to bring me a case. - I'll blame this thread for my nostalgic beer thirst.
My good old mom used to mail me 12 packs of Stroh's while I was in college in Arizona.
Quoted from cottonm4:some Tia (sp) stick
Thai, like in Thailand, Thai food, etc.
tumblr_oqkekusuTn1tpri36o8_1280 (resized).jpegQuoted from LTG:Though probably the only kid cheering for the lions.
LTG : )
20210321_124517 (resized).jpgQuoted from Rezdog:Also little known fact that Lou Reed’s uncle (mothers side) holds the patent for the BIC banana ball point pen. : )
[quoted image]
Except... the BIC Banana was a marker, not a ball point, as evidenced towards the top of this page.
And Andy Warhol's banana is somehow pertinent? You been smokin' banana peels, son?
Quoted from BMore-Pinball:learned to program BASIC on this
[quoted image]
We're into the post-adolescent period of my childhood now, but I was a Radio Shack Color Computer person.
Ooh! Ooh! 64K of memory! I had the 5 1/4 inch disk drives, a *gasp* hard drive, and everything!
Rainbow Magazine had a running contest for two-liner BASIC programs, but sadly I never sent in my two creations which would have blown them away.
I even wrote a 6800 emulator (in Assembly!) and got Black Knight (yes, the pinball) running on it good enough to see the attract mode pattern running on my monitor! (Then the project of updating BK ran out of steam...)
By the time I dabbled in OS-9 I was using Unix at work, but I totally understood the draw! (Multitasking)
Quoted from cottonm4:how many megabytes was that hard drive? 30 megabytes?
If that!
I still have the whole system, I should try firing it up sometime.
1 week later
Quoted from Lovef2k:Ha! sucks moose ***k
I always heard that had to be raw.
Quoted from Lovef2k:Imagine today drinking from the same bottle that someone else drank from?
Imagine no more! You can still find it if you look.
One example: https://www.twigsbeverage.net/price-list (they do both returnable and non-returnable)
Glass bottle soda pop is a proud Wisconsin tradition.
I found a website that was documenting the list of glass bottlers nationwide, but sadly it hasn't been updated since 2017.
Vicks, Sucrets, vaporizers, allergy shots, inhalers, Aminophylline, vaseline under my nose, Sudafed, Theodur, my childhood had a laundry list of remedies that never really worked to alleviate my chronic congestion and headaches when I was a kid.
For some reason, though, when I went off to college, all those problems went away since I no longer lived in a blue haze of cigarette smoke! How about that!
At least it kept me from beating myself up playing sports when I was young. That's paying dividends at 60!
1 week later
I remember we had a milkman for at least a while when we were little. ('60s)
Must have been when my dad was working out of town and my mom didn't want to bundle us all up for a trip to the store every couple days. We drank a lot of milk!
However, here in America's Dairyland at least, you can still get regular home milk delivery as long as you live in a sufficiently dense population area and are willing to pay about double what it costs at the grocery store.
I remember my sister and I getting real excited whenever the Jewel Tea man stopped by.
Wow, we must have been really little, preschoolers. Must be some of my earliest memories.
I was always fascinated by how much stuff he would carry in on the off chance we wanted something.
My mom must have bought something, for him to keep coming, but I'm drawing a blank what it could have been, and Google was no help. Probably something interesting to kids like cleaning supplies!
1 week later
Quoted from DCP:That reminded me of "Krazy Ikes". Anyone else have these as a kid?
[quoted image][quoted image][quoted image]
That was one of the toys my grandma had stashed for when us grandkids were dumped on her.
That made me remember, oddly, a bean bag frog she also had in there, which I am off to eBay to look for! Crazy how things we haven't thought of for 40 years can drift to the surface!
Edit: No luck. Might have been handmade. Maybe my sister wound up with it...
3 weeks later
Quoted from swampfire:I wonder how many people went to the hospital after doing that.
Why would they? A mental hospital, maybe.
Quoted from zr11990:Has anyone ever seen one of these.
[quoted image]
Yeah, not uncommon.
Ooh, you have the original 120v version! Now they sell it with a wimpy battery powered light.
Quoted from Mr68:Sunburn.
Her pose indicates she's making several copies and possibly a christmas list.
Giggle. Well, there is nothing to fear from a photocopier, any UV that is emitted (if any) would be mostly blocked by the glass.
The cover is there mainly to prevent toner waste (black borders) and only secondarily to protect your eyes from the bright but mostly harmless light.
Surely they use tempered glass. Like on pins, which aren't meant to hold ANY weight!
Maybe it was an early model. Surely, once the photocopier manufacturers heard about the sit & scanning, their lawyers would have told them to beef up the glass.
I have most of that Time-Life series. The title always makes me think, if they weren't unknown, they wouldn't be mysteries!
I'd like to see a series of encyclopedias called "Ex-Mysteries of the Known"!
1 week later
Happy to hear your surgery was successful, OPG!
I had not related this previously here on Pinside, but I also had a somewhat close call in the heart department a couple years ago.
Not even knowing I had anything wrong heartwise, I mentioned to my doctor at a checkup that I had had a pretty bad flareup of my hiatal hernia one night after an oversized midnight snack, so bad that it made my left arm sort of numb.
Red flag! Now, I had never had any other chest pain, or shortness of breath or lack of endurance whatsoever, I hand shovel my driveway and push mow my lawn, so my heart was as good as gold as far as I knew, but a numb arm incident means you get checked out. One resting EKG later I was scheduled for a treadmill stress test. Not a bad idea for someone my age, regardless.
I thought I killed it, made it to the end, but it still looked just wonky enough on the readout that I was told I should have a cardiac catheterization to see what's what. I joked with the team that they wouldn't find anything, but I woke up to hear that I had one coronary artery that was 99% blocked and I was given two angioplasties and a stent!
I still don't know how I was functioning so well with that much of one blocked, it was "the middle one" so maybe it was an extra feature on my model, but I will say that my feet don't freeze from cold anything like they used to, maybe the ol' ticker pushes the blood a bit harder now. And now that I no longer consider sausage to be a major food group, my cholesterol is where it needs to be, so hopefully this little scrape with death will be my last for a long time!
Now I joke that my hiatal hernia probably saved my life!
I have a very early memory, I must have been like two, because it was soon after my parents bought their house on Lake Winnebago, and they were having a housewarming party. One guest arrived ready and raring to go swimming, and before anyone could warn him, he ran out on the dock and dove head first into water only about two feet deep!
Well, that broke his neck and a bunch of his teeth, and little me got to see him carried past on a stretcher with blood pouring out of his mouth, which is the part I remember very clearly. I was so little that I didn't realize the gravity of the situation and was not even upset by it!
The good news is the guy made a full recovery, I was told whenever I brought it up later. I hope they weren’t just protecting me from a sad truth, but it's too late to ask them now.
1 week later
Quoted from cottonm4:Coca-Cola Classic !
I looked several months ago and the "classic" part of the name is gone. I have no idea how long ago Coca-Cola revert to just Coca-Cola. I never paid attention
Hey, it only took you 12 years to notice! (2009)
1 week later
Quoted from zr11990:If there’s red on the head there’s fire in the hole.
I always say: Hair of red, nuts in bed.
In my experience, anyway.
Re: that Farrah poster, I always loved Steve Martin's bit:
"Farrah Fawcett-Majors is sooo conceited. (scoffs) She has never called me once. (pauses, scoffs again) And after the hours I spent holding up her poster with one hand."
While I'm on the subject of comedy, I recall the year I had one of my Christmas gifts rescinded. My sister and I had practically worn out a copy of George Carlin's Take-Offs and Put-Ons, and I got his Occupation: Foole under the tree. I was 12. Well, if you're familiar with his catalog, you know where this is going. I guess my parents weren't clued in by the album cover, where he looks like a freaking hippie all of a sudden. The hippy dippy weatherman comic was now a hippy dippy comic. I did get it back when I was a little older.
Quoted from zombywoof:I grew up using Log Cabin syrup. Sadly, today the product doesn't even mention maple in its list of ingredients. No cane sugar either. It's straight corn syrup now.
Mmmmmmm, artificial (maple) flavoring!
Wow, back in my great-grandparents' day, it was 100% pure maple syrup, backed by a $500 guarantee (worth $15,000 today!) if you could prove it was adulterated. Never knew that!
Who cares what they sweeten it with now, though? Sweet is sweet, except to some self-deluded folks. And it's not like you can't find pure maple syrup any more, if you want to dump a couple dollars' worth on your flapjacks. I've had it, it's almost vile, I far prefer fake. Just keep that low cal crap away from me, with the consistency of saliva! Yuck!
Quoted from mooch:At IHOP, I usually choose the Strawberry syrup for my pancakes. It probably has no strawberries in it.
[quoted image]
Quoted from BMore-Pinball:lol - probably??
100%
Lol -- 0%! It's fun to be cynical, I know this better than anyone, but as a matter of fact their strawberry syrup does contain strawberry puree.
1 week later
They were idiots for banning them. Contrary to their fears, it did not record anything. New words were unlocked with continued play.
Don't use Google Chrome if this stuff bothers you!
Look into DuckDuckGo, their browser tries to block all traffic with Google servers.
Myself, I don't really care, I'm good at ignoring ads anyway. Ads are evil. They are ruining the internet. They are also why we have opposing news networks and so much division. And they waste sooooo much time.
I think there ought to be a huge excise tax on all advertising, just to discourage it. Put the money into improving your damn product, or lower the price. Word of mouth has always been the most effective advertising, and it's free!
Quoted from pinwiztom:I buy something on amazon or basically any online marketplace,
then for weeks after i am bombarded with ads for the product that I just bought,
why would I want to buy another?!?!
Even funnier, the same thing happens to me when I look things up on eBay to see what they're worth, simply because I'm in a thrift store deciding whether to buy, at ten cents on the dollar, something to resell. I sure as hell don't want to buy it at retail!
Reminds me of when you could listen in on other people's baby monitors. (I guess you still could if someone is using an old school one, with no scrambling.) Some had microphones so sensitive you could hear conversations throughout the house.
Same goes for early ten channel cordless phones. I heard drug deals being discussed, arguments, phone sex...
1 week later
Quoted from cottonm4:I am impressed that you found this. What was your search term?
I believe I just used "spring loaded fish hook." Then once I knew it was called a "Shur Hook," I searched that and found a bunch of them. I searched on Terapeak though, eBay's search for sellers, which has a one year history.
Yes, even on that card the description is a little hyperbolic. You mean it isn't the only fishhook in everyone's tackle box?
Quoted from bob_e:not for vegans
[quoted image]
That's an old box, like I remember. Nowadays they have the animals depicted as no longer behind bars, guess they're free range cookies now.
I had a friend in Junior High who insisted that he was given any potato chips anyone brought for lunch that had any green on them. He claimed he was immune to their supposedly poisonous nature, and that he was doing us a favor!
Quoted from mooch:What’s up with that burnt to hell Frito you get every once in a while?
[quoted image]
Cooked twice, I guess. They should sell those as ReFritos!
As opposed to frijoles refritos (refried beans), which I learned recently are not fried twice, just well.
I had a job briefly where I had to go door to door in the country (where folks are not always eager to even answer their doors, I can tell you) in an attempt to get them to sign up for "Home Cable," which was allegedly "the cable industry's answer to get cable to them where it was not cost effective to run actual cable" since the homes are so far apart. Which of course entailed a giant satellite dish in your yard and receivers and descramblers and a multi-year contract to pay for it all. I guess I myself was not convinced it was a good idea and it showed, since I never sold a damn one. Well, I did have one guy saying he wanted it but I left the job before he signed up, if he ever did. Six months after I left, DirecTV debuted and I was glad I had never suckered anyone into a contract on the old tech.
Longest three weeks of my life! Driving out to BFE, trudging house to house in the snow, kicking the snow off my feet so often that my toes got all bruised! And not having any sales, the base wage barely covered the gas!
Wow, thanks! I had that last one too, and loved that popup of the LEM!
Speaking of the LEM, I always marveled how going down to the moon's surface was labeled just an "excursion" for these heroes.
I've said as much before: I love how this thread tickles brain cells that have been idle for decades!
Behold, the object longest in my physical possession, my "Secret Storage Box" from grade school, grade 3 if not earlier. To this day I don't know why I needed to hide anything in a pencil box at age 8, but I remember my friend Ken acquiring it from me somehow, as evidenced by his name carved on the side, and I just had to get it back somehow, which I evidently did! Funny the details your memory decides to skip.
Quoted from cottonm4:When a lot of drivers still had to hand signal their right turns, left turns, and stops with hand signals. Arm straight out to left turn. Arm turned up at the elbow for right turns. And arm turned down at the elbow for stopping. ( If you don't know what I am talking about you ain't old enough).
Except bicyclists are still supposed to make the same hand signals when in traffic.
... too bad "required but rarely enforced" equates to "something no one ever does."
Quoted from zr11990:There is no way in all hell they could have that now.
Better tell our local Mead Pool...
IMG_20180716_163223 (resized).jpg 2 weeks later
Quoted from mooch:I like these “Spiral Wishing Wells” which have been around since the late 1980s. Watching coins spiral downward increasingly faster into the hole is mesmerizing.
When I was a kid, I liked to spin bottles to see how long I could make one spin before it stopped in a loud shaky wobble.
[quoted image][quoted image]
Believe it or not, I have a miniature version of one of these on my bedroom dresser. This one:
vortex-coin-bank-thinkstores-640x533 (resized).jpg
I'm not kidding when I refer to "the current stage of my childhood."
Quoted from cottonm4:Well, I can see that you are easily amused
Hey, it's fun watching different sized coins race around, sometimes somehow passing each other without disturbing the spiraling. Someday I plan to record some slo-mo for a better look at how that manages to happen.
My state in general is "amused." At 60, I still happily maintain a sense of childlike wonder at the world and how it works. That way I don't require loud engines, gun blasts, killing animals or hating/abusing those different from me in order to feel something.
Quoted from zr11990:the country and life as we know it is going to end soon
What the hell are you talking about?
If you can't say, then keep stupid comments like this off of Pinside!
Quoted from HFK:My high school had a courtyard in the center where you could smoke until the early 80s.
Yeah, it blew my mind that despite the legal smoking age, our high school had a smoking area for the children! This was for 9th and 10th graders! (We had a grades 9-10 HS and a grades 11-12 one.)
Well, that was the official smoking area; there was another, unofficial one, under the trees by the soccer fields, for slightly more illegal smoking...
Quoted from mooch:Here’s a shot of the box from a 1980s release of Pass the Pigs. A buddy of mine used to have this game.
[quoted image]
That's not the Makin' Bacon position I remember!
Quoted from DanQverymuch:That's not the Makin' Bacon position I remember!
Quoted from cottonm4:Do we need to be discussing your reprobate mind
I mean there was a different position shown on the game instructions!
Quoted from cottonm4:If you say so
Well, as it turns out, my memory has failed me again. Big surprise!
The confusion was due to the renaming of Makin' Bacon to Oinker, for any time the two pigs touch. I thought the original name made more sense than it turns out it did. I'm pretty sure actual pigs need to touch in a particular way to be makin' the bacon!
I did learn however that the original 1970s game was called Pig Mania.
1 week later
My parents had a hand lettered sign, with black letters on a silver background, hanging at the peak of their garage which puzzled us as kids, with the legend
LIMBO A GO-GO
They never gave us a satisfactory explanation to us as to its meaning when we were young, and dang it, it never occured to me to ask again later once we were grown. Googling now is no help, either, other than a finding out it's the name of a song from 1986 by a group I have never heard of, the lyrics of which do not seem pertinent to why my parents would put it on a sign in the 60s. I don't even have any idea whether it had to do with the Catholic dogma or dancing under a stick!
Quoted from cottonm4:I googled Limbo a go-go and this link popped up.
Some Danish band named Fate recorded a song called Limbo a Go-Go.
Um, thanks?
Quoted from DanQverymuch:Googling now is no help, either, other than a finding out it's the name of a song from 1986 by a group I have never heard of, the lyrics of which do not seem pertinent to why my parents would put it on a sign in the 60s.
Quoted from mooch:Could it be a sign they got from a luau party?
I'm pretty sure my dad made it himself, but yeah, it probably had to do with partying on the shores of tropical Lake Winnebago.
On a hunch, I paid a whole quarter today at a thrift store for what turned out to be a like-new one of the ramps for this! I'll probably get $20 for it!
1 week later
Quoted from cottonm4:When I was a kid and on into my 20s I read Readers Digest religiously.
When I was a kid.
I was partial to certain issues of National Geographic in grade school for some reason.
We also got a lot of laffs from a certain dictionary's definition of "fart," to wit: "a small explosion between the legs."
1 week later
You guys like handheld games? It's been a while since I posted this pic, so here it is again for those who are newer to the thread.
Soon I will have pics of the 100+ VFD games and more displayed around my basement bar ceiling... Just need to fill a few more shelves and straighten up!
eb6e86b377f3308b1df3da302b47223422a4f61d (resized).jpg 1 week later
Weight gain after plastic surgery never ends well. But be fair, that pic was without makeup, walking her dog, talking on her phone. Everyone looks goofy if you snap a pic at the right instant while they are speaking. I'll stick with my youthful memory of her!
2 weeks later
Humor based on stereotyping is uncreative at best and harmful at worst. Still...
Quoted from zombywoof:We call this our "racist lamp."
Which one? The lava lamp, which obviously makes light of the danger of volcanoes and of the resulting tribulations of people near them?
What could be the problem with the other one? Do far eastern people not exist? The eyes are a tad exaggerated, big whoop. I wonder where it was made. 
Harry Belafonte is 94, as mooch reported in this very thread back in March.
1 week later
Back to catalogs... JC Penney did have toys in their Christmas catalogs. I don't remember whether the stores had a toy department; they very well may have, but we had no money so Mom would have steered us clear if they did. My home town had a Penney's and no Sears, so Penney's was the Xmas catalog we pored over every year.
Here's a link to their 1969 catalog.
https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalog/1969-JCPenney-Christmas-Book
This site has a lot of old catalogs. Dunno if it's been pointed out before, but clicking their Home button will give you quite a list!
3 weeks later
We caught some tadpoles out of the lake and put them in an aquarium. It was so cool watching them turn into frogs.
One year we had two ducks from a farmer's market. Henny and Penny. My dad must have kept their flight feathers trimmed, since they had an outdoor pen and a chicken wire fenced swimming area in the lake. My sister and I were still pretty little/clueless, and it's not like you could play with them, so I don't remember any trauma from the fact they wound up on the table that Thanksgiving. We were probably told they flew south for the winter.
In 6th grade we also had square dancing in the gym, but we also got to do some freestyle modern dance. Somehow I was singled out, along with one girl, as an example of a "good dancer" and we were ordered to demonstrate as such in the middle of everyone else sitting in a big circle. I remember being horribly mortified, and to this day I believe it gave me an aversion to drawing attention to myself and damn if it didn't negatively affect my subsequent success with the fairer sex. Hell, all I did was actually move to the beat, I dunno what the big deal was. If only it hadn't been before disco and Saturday Night Fever, I might have known to run with it and use it to my advantage.
Thanks for listening, this is cheaper than therapy!
When I was a wee lad, we in Wisconsin weren't allowed to purchase yellow colored margarine, just unappetizing white stuff, in order to "protect" dairy farmers and their butter. I think it came with the coloring separate in case you wanted to mix it in. Law was repealed in 1967.
1 week later
And now that they are no longer manufactured, the prices for VCRs are taking off on eBay, especially NOS ones.
Screenshot_20220118-122431_Chrome (resized).jpg 3 weeks later
Quoted from pinwiztom:I remember at a family reunion at a karaoke night bar
picking and singing Dynamo (Dinah Moe) Humm
The looks on the audience faces were priceless.
What, they didn't encore with Keep It Greasey? Or Stick It Out?
1 week later
One day when I was around ten years old, I brought in the mail and noticed an envelope from Readers Digest had arrived unsealed. Looking back, I don't even know why I did such a mean thing, but I took that opportunity to play a little joke. I got out our typewriter and created a new insert, congratulating the recipient on having randomly won an extra prize and that they could expect a check soon for $100, I think it was. I stuck it in the envelope, sealed it, and put it back in the pile of mail.
Both of my parents were present when the mail was opened, and my glee soon turned to disdain as they were completely sucked in by my little subterfuge, despite the hokey typewritten note being on plain white paper. I had half expected them to see right through it, or at least question it, but they were so excited that I felt I had to come clean right away, and I recall they were quite hurt. I learned the important lesson that day that mean humor is not so funny. I knew we weren't rich, but at ten I didn't appreciate just how tight money was, and for all I know that $100 would have helped them out of a jam.
Sucks that I think of all these stories now, when it's too late to ask my parents about them. Revisiting this episode with them might have given us a laugh and assuaged my guilt. For that matter, I sure wish I had spent more time talking with them in general. Ah, hindsight...
If you still have your parental units, assuming you get along, talk with them now while you still can! You will be glad you did.
Quoted from HFK:[quoted image]
Hand grenades! Made my head feel like it had been through a war more than once in my younger days.
1 week later
Quoted from littlecammi:Just waiting for someone to bring up using a stick to roll a barrel hoop to complete the trip down memory lane.
It was discussed 3 years ago...
Quoted from DanQverymuch:I only had the stick, I was stuck just playing with that while imagining what the hoop must be like.
1 week later
Quoted from girloveswaffles:Here's the simplest way to get it connected.
Here's the RCA to type F adapter:
amazon.com link »
...The interference filter
amazon.com link »
And if you need it, a replacement Switch box.
amazon.com link »
Then you still need a TV that can tune analog channel 3 or 4, which not all new sets bother doing anymore, since TV no longer broadcasts in analog.
By feeding the Atari into a VCR's antenna input, you can tune it in and send it to a newer TV's composite video or S-video input. (By the way, I've never heard it suggested or done it myself, I just know it would work, I heard the problem and came up with a solution.)
Scratching my head about anyone needing an original style video game switchbox these days, which uses the old 300 ohm balanced twinlead. That's what the first adapter you listed was used to avoid, way back when TVs switched to coax antenna inputs. We used to have to put a 50 ohm unbalanced to 300 ohm balanced balun on both sides of that switch, did wonders for the antenna signal strength let me tell you...
None of which makes anything I said incorrect.
Some of the newest TVs can't receive analog, which is what I believe the problem originally asked was about. I have yet to see one with no composite video input, though. If you want to use a computer monitor, then yeah, an HDMI converter will be needed.
We're on the same side here! I was flabbergasted that someone would imply anyone should "trash" their Atari!
4 weeks later
In grade school every spring we had a kite day, and in 6th grade I was all set to become a legend. I had rigged up a dual string kite with a secret compartment, with the second string rigged so that, when yanked, it would strike a match and ignite a cherry bomb!
I don't remember if I chickened out, or if my mother put the kibosh on it or what, but I have regetted ever since that I never got to pull off that stunt. Cripes, these days I wouldn't even consider it...
We were pretty poor, but my parents managed one summer to buy me and my sister brand new bikes. It was such a big deal to have extra money for such a purchase that they made a whole thing out of it, with a series of hidden clues, each clue leading to the next, culminating in opening the garage door to find our new bikes! They were just Huffys, but I loved mine, green metallic flake with a banana seat and a cheater slick! I wore that bike out riding up and down our driveway and the neighbors'. I now wish I had told my parents when I was older how much I appreciated the treasure hunt and the bike. No recollection of what my sister's looked like, but here's the closest thing I could find to mine:
cheater (resized).png 3 weeks later
I have those same Bob & Doug figures NIP. I might just have to commit the sin of unpackaging them, seeing how cool it all looks set up! They aren't exactly highly valuable, anyway.
Cool! Yes, old batteries are the scourge of the vintage electronic game collector. It's noble of you to rescue that one!
Speaking of electronic games, keep your eye out, I plan to start a thread about them soon. I searched and one has never been started here. I'm going to start it off with my vintage electronic pinball games...
1 week later
Quoted from Luckydogg420:think “ice bucket challenge” but hot water. The idiot dumps a big ol’ pot of scalding water right over his head
All those challenges are pretty inane.
2 weeks later
Quoted from pinheadpierre:Not that California does not have its share of fast food grubbing, lard ass people, but I kid you not: in California my preferred shirt size is XL. I had to buy a shirt in a Wisconsin Walmart once. The same size there was labeled “medium”.
Har har, I wear XLs here in Wisconsin and I don't even weigh 200. I can't imagine squeezing into a medium.
As a little guy, I had a lot of fun with this cheesy plastic train set. But it was not while using it as intended, instead I would create Rube Goldberg-esque setups using mostly the straight pieces, with steep ramps and launches, and wow, I just realized I was basically using the tracks like Hot Wheels track before they invented Hot Wheels track (which was in 1968, so yeah, this was before then)! I would tape pennies to the train to get more oomph! So, I guess when I was 5, I was an inventor and experimenting with physics!
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Jaws was the movie that taught me not to go see a movie for the first time with someone who has seen that movie already.
I'd still like to punch that kid. I'd have jumped high enough without his "input!"
3 weeks later
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This toy hasn't been mentioned since o-din did so six years ago... and what ever happened to that guy? I was surprised to learn his id's been deactivated for a year and a half.
Anyway, I unexpectedly found this, a vintage Whee-Lo, in an auction lot I recently won. It is missing its yellow stabilizer bracket, but works fine!
Whee! Lo, it magically sticks to the wireform!
Quoted from mooch:Holy crap— The fastest I’ve ever heard this song played.
If you want to hear it even faster, crank up the playback speed on YouTube!
Quoted from mooch:My Grandpa had one of these novelty wooden crank gizmos.
I had a blast playing with it when I was 8 or 9 years old.
I don’t remember what he called it, but it’s known as a “Do Nothing Machine” or a “Bullshit Grinder.”
[quoted image]
1 week later
Quoted from mooch:This eBay seller calls it a paperweight.
If that paperweight isn't a "joke puzzle," it should be.
"Move two balls from the left side to the right."
Solution: turn it over!
But the two-channel one, "Odd Balling," has a "hidden" channel between the two sides.
ebay.com link: itm
Quoted from RichWolfson:I need to get my hands on the one my bud has. The construction on all of these look too similar to be coincidental.
///Rich
I noticed I had a related puzzle on a shelf:
PXL_20220910_025147226.MP (resized).jpg
This one requires you to get the two marbles spinning in the two channels in opposite directions.
1 week later
Quoted from ultimategameroom:I didn’t even notice that it’s not 180 proof anymore.
It's not a matter of it not being "180 proof anymore," different states simply have different maximum allowed alcohol contents.
It was, and still is, bottled at 60%, 75.5%, 94.5% and 95% alcohol by volume (120, 151, 189, and 190 U.S. proof respectively).
According to Wikipedia, anyway. Doesn't even say anything about 180 being an option. *shrug*
Interesting, I didn't know 200 proof was not possible to make, as distillation stops working past a certain concentration of alcohol to water.
Wow, man, I don't think I ever heard that one, man.
They had one earlier non-album single which I had memorized at one time, "Santa Claus and his Old Lady."
"Magic dust?"
"Yeah, magic dust, man! He'd give a little bit to the reindeer, a little bit for Santa Claus, a little bit more for Santa Claus, a little bit more for Santa Claus..."
Now's the time to procure one of those 12 ft skeletons from Home Depot, they show as available on their website. Only $300!
1 month later
To this day, one can write a "check" on any ol' piece of paper, as long as it has all the pertinent info. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be on paper!
Quoted from cottonm4:Try buying groceries at Walmart with something like that.
That's their prerogative, they only accept checks from a check printing outfit. You even have to have those verified at customer service ahead of time these days, apparently.
But the point is that your bank would honor such a check if presented to them. It may take a while to clear, though!
Quoted from cottonm4:He still has this game. It is by Milton-Bradley. It is called Cathedral. Object: throw all the pieces on the table and then try to get then all back on the board. They only fit one way. I never could complete the game. Good puzzle.
Um, that is not at all what Cathedral is about. Two players take turns strategically placing buildings, trying to control the most territory. Maybe take a gander at the back of that box? I think maybe your cousin's kid was pulling your leg back when, and still didn't come clean when you asked about it! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_(board_game)
Also, I never said you could get a bank to cash a check handwritten on whatever on demand. You can deposit it, though, and be prepared for a wait for the funds to become available.
Quoted from cottonm4:It has been 30 years. The memory bank might be a little weak.
I can relate! It's actually an intriguing game, sort of an evolving puzzle, and it is indeed reminiscent of many "get all the pieces to fit"-type puzzles. I have the version shown, as well as a version made of wood...
3 weeks later
I have vivid memories of slogging through the snow with my giant pouch of newpapers slung over my shoulder, delivering them directly to most subscribers' front doors, inside their screen doors so they didn't even have to go outside to retrieve them. And still I got very few tips! I just thought it was required, and not just in the winter, as it had always been delivered to our own door in the same fashion year-round. I used to envy kids on TV in nicer climates and in higher population density areas, who got to just wing them somewhere in the customers' yards or driveways.
Nowadays the same stretch of homes is a motor route, and the customers have to go out to the road and get their papers from a secondary plastic "mailbox" the newspaper company gave them. I wonder if any of them remember the good old days when I would save them the trouble of having to get dressed just to be able to read the damn paper!
I will still sometimes wake up from a dream where I am ten years old again, back at a bar my parents used to stop at in the morning when I guess their friend was cleaning (or maybe it was them), and I am finding change dropped under the tables which I am allowed to keep, and it's funny/sad how exhilarating it is, just like it was when it happened back then for real.
Reminds me how poor we were...
Shout out to the no longer existent Surrey Lounge in Neenah, in the basement of Lakeroad Lanes, also gone as they razed the building and put up an apartment building decades ago which somehow doesn’t look big enough to take up the same space...
1 week later
I recall 7th grade Industrial Arts with curly-haired Mr Schindhelm, who (at the time, inexplicably) always wore a pink dress shirt, and wood shop with the ancient, how-is-he-not-retired Mr Vogt. Wow, I just remembered jigsawing the end of my finger in class, I had completely forgotten about it! I can still just barely make out the scar on my ring finger.
Quoted from Azmodeus:Is it me or is that a bong
Must be you! That there is a Parker Brothers Sea Diver toy.
Screenshot_20221231-103908_Chrome~2 (resized).jpgQuoted from EdisonArcade:Yes! Slow Donnie
"Chicken pot, chicken pot pie!"
I really ought to apologize for the spoiler, that whole episode is so funny (and probably wouldn't fly these days) and the clip I posted is just Donnie's denouement. (I was really just after the "tubes" thing...) Cross really treads a fine line here, as he also does in many Mr Show skits.
Quoted from smalltownguy2:life expectancy of 40 years
A common misconception, as that includes the awful infant mortality back then. Someone who made it to adulthood could expect to live well into their 70s on average. My own great great grandparents mostly made it into their 80s and 90s!
2 weeks later
Today I remembered this song they used to subject us to in gym class back in grade school.
There were others, so maybe another will come drifting up into consciousness someday.
Hey! One already did! But it's the obvious one, the Hokey Pokey. Much less of a workout!
4 weeks later
Quoted from Invictus:ROBO 1 by Tomy…[quoted image]
Sold in the US by Radio Shack, under the name "Armatron."
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Quoted from littlecammi:no record of anyone named Crunch attaining the rank of Captain
It's not "Captain" Crunch, anyway! It's "Cap'n"!!!
Back in the day, it was even crunchier than it is now, in order to "stay[s] crunchy, even in milk!" My sister and I would see who could get the longest strip of, um, mouth roof material (it's not really skin, is it?) to hang down from the roofs of our mouths. Good times.
I forgot about Ghost Gun! We had one and had a lot of fun with it as I recall.
My parents had a copy of this painting on the living room wall. Except, it had no glass and was extremely yellowed from nicotine staining, in case it wasn't creepy enough already.
PXL_20230404_192033356.MP~2 (resized).jpg
No kidding, the painting's title is "Where have all the children gone?"
Quoted from Azmodeus:Curious...
I'll say. The artist, Robert Addison, has several other similar works.
I was astonished to find this one at a thrift store, nicely framed and matted, for under $10! It's a keeper, but apparently it could bring a couple hundred on eBay.
1 week later
I learned to read before Kindergarten, and could often be found reading Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books in the john.
One time my parents were so fed up with me hogging our only bathroom that they banned comic books from the bathroom entirely. Well, I continued to spend an inordinate amount of time in there (get your minds out of the gutter, this was still Pre-K!), so they asked what I was doing. "Reading," I replied.
"But we took away all the comic books."
"I know, I'm reading Reader's Digest!"
Then they had me come out and read some of it to them, to their surprise.
Anyway, those comic books were from the Carl Barks era of Disney comics, and his clever humor permeated his stories and laid the groundwork for my offbeat sense of humor. My little sister as well.
Over the next several years we graduated to Mad magazine, eventually followed by National Lampoon. We also just about wore out a George Carlin LP we had, his "Take Offs and Put Ons," which was recorded before his counterculture transformation. At age 12, I got his "Occupation: Foole" record for Christmas, my parents being unaware of his having gone blue. I got to listen to it once before it got ungifted and put away for a few years! I did get it back eventually.
But the most profound influence on me was that of Monty Python's Flying Circus, which began airing on some PBS stations when I was 13. We had a TV antenna with a rotor, and we would turn it south to pick up the Milwaukee PBS station after the Green Bay affiliate decided the show was too racy for them. We audiotaped some of the episodes as well, with the microphone picking up our howls of laughter too, and we listened to those cassettes a lot, even after we forgot what was going on during the non-verbal sections, especially Gilliam's cartoons. It was a revelation finally seeing those again on DVD, and now it seems it's permanently on Netflix.
Here we are almost 50 years later, and my brain is still just as prone to silliness as ever, thanks to those wacky Brits. Even now, I'll just let the shows run as background noise while I'm futzing around the house. It never gets old.
montycastjpg-7ef393e2355a42aa (resized).jpg
I forgot about Ketchup Races! This one is the original, it says: https://www.marketwatch.com/video/heinz-original-ketchup-race-ad/82D98BCF-20C4-4CCD-96D4-723FA72B3A93.html
But I certainly remember a subsequent Heinz ketchup ad campaign featuring a Carly Simon song!
(Can you believe some of those outfits?)
Quoted from RCA1:Dear clumsy bellboys, brutal cab drivers, careless doormen, ruthless porters, savage baggage masters, and all butter-fingered luggage handlers, all over the world... Have we got a suitcase for you.
Remember the Samsonite commercials with the ape throwing a suitcase around? (RCA1, you sure do, you quoted it!)
Me, too, except it wasn't Samsonite, it was American Tourister!
(I have to think perhaps Wisconsinites are more prone to this error due to the name of the Gorilla that was at the Milwaukee Zoo for, like, ever: Samson. Sadly the old guy passed away clear back in 1981!)
2 weeks later
3 weeks later
Another thread reminded me of the time my dad, who worked at the railroad, brought home some of the extreme weed killer crystals they used at the time to keep the railroad tracks free of any sort of vegetation whatsoever, like it's been nuked or something.
Well, he proceeded to sprinkle some around the wire fence in our front yard, and sure enough it rained shortly thereafter, and half the lawn died inside the fence where it washed down, and it didn't grow back for a long time. Hey, less to mow!
1 month later
2 weeks later
Quoted from Azmodeus:Toys that were unobtanium when I was a child in the early seventies. These are amazing in my opinion.
[quoted image][quoted image][quoted image]
I guess they still are, so pricey they've been bootlegged!
4 weeks later
Bad clam-related joke:
What's the difference between an epileptic oyster shucker and a hooker with diarrhea?
... the first one shucks between fits.
3 weeks later
Quoted from cottonm4:One match and within 5 seconds at least 15-20 were up in flames. I never saw fire travel so fast
I heard that, the ice fishing club next door to my parents' house loads up on used trees every year in order to mark the lake roads they plow out on the ice, and when there are leftovers at season's end, whoosh!
1 month later
I don’t remember my bus being rowdy per se, but we did sing some inappropriately risqué songs, like Barnacle Bill the Sailor and a naughty version of A Bicycle Built For Two.
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