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A toy that had 128 bits came in a big box, took all day to put together, and five minutes to destroy.

E.
Keep it going

I made a hand held windmill fashion fan with pieces from a straw mat and ran around my grandparents village during the summers trying to make it work....

Colouring books and a new box of Crayolas - espcially the box with the built-in sharpener! Sweet!

....we kicked a real football around on a real pitch instead of pressing a button on a screen

elv

The few hours between the end of the school day and bed time seemed like an eternity and you could buy a huge bag of mixed lollies for only 20 cents!

on the 4th of july, one could buy small plastic monkeys that 'smoked' (not well enough to satisfy my imagination) tiny paper cigarettes...

there were no dept of transportation approved car seats (to be fastened with a shoulder harness in the middle of the back seat!) My grandfather stapled a beach towel to a piece of plywood which he fit between the two front seats of his buick, so I wouldn't fall through the crack when riding between him and my grandmother.

When I was a kid....there was actually such a thing as "Candy Cigarettes"....mock-packaged up to look just like the various real brands of adult cigarettes. Twenty Cents and you could buy ya'self a pack a candy smokes.

Wow!

I bought 'em all the time.

They are still available, by the way.

Jaysis....in my original post, I almost wrote "at least we've evolved that much".

But they're not available in candy store/convenience store type places, right? Now they're (I hope) a novelty/e-bay type thing.

Right? Right!?!!!??!!!!

I'm afraid not.

When I was a kid... I cheated while playing 'Duck Hunt' by pressing the fake gun directly against the screen and shooting the flying ducks.

What? Like I'm the only one.

quote:

Originally posted by Rachelmh:
What? Like I'm the only one.

Guilty has charged.

E.

Is it strange that, even though I am a teenager, I can relate to most of these?



I swear I was born in the wrong decade...

...I thought the original Atari was the COOLEST.

...played outside.

...walked to school up hills both ways, in the snow, with no shoes.

We walked to school by ourselves with no adult supervision. Have you noticed that even if the school is a 5 minute walk, parents drive their kids??? Walk and get the excersise!! We had no cable tv, and we actually had to get up and turn the (2 channels we got) MANUALLY!!!! What will the kids today reminisce about?? Gameboy scores most likely, or how big their plasma tv was!!

I had a bigwheel. We had the steepest driveway in the neighborhood so everybody would come over and ride down. The brake would always get worn down on it and then the tires. Good times though

We respected adults old people and teachers and if we didn't we would get a good hiding. Never did us any harm.

We had to walk to the park ourselves if we wanted to play tennis...Riding your bike was the fastest way to get to dance class...trick-or-treating was still fun and not dangerous.

When I was a kid....
The bus driver slapped me for picking the foam out of the back seat of the bus. I went home crying and told my dad and he slapped me for picking foam out of the back of the bus.

Me and my friend started a pile of leaves on fire and when the fire trucks came, the fireman let me check out the firetruck. His friend's mom took me home and my mom was afraid to tell my dad what happened. So was I.

We played tackle football on the asphalt playground at school and when someone would get hurt, the playground lady would say, "Now you boys be careful."

The cops would chase us for being mischievious and then lecture us if they caught us.

I carried a Swiss Army knife at school to sharpen my pencils and the teacher thought that was "creative".

We swam in pools without parental supervision and drank Pop Shoppe pop. It mad Jolt look like heroin.

We'd "surf" down hills on our banana seat bike, standing one foot on the handle bars and one on the seat, in shorts, no helmet approximately 25 mph. Rides typically lasted between 3-5 seconds.

The first time I told my mom something "sucked", she sent me to my room for swearing.

When I was a kid the coolest things were dinosaurs. You could buy model kits of skeletons of dinosaurs, and assemble them in a kind of paleoarcheoligist way. The onl y way to figure out how to build the T. Rex or whatever was to FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS and glue Bone A to Joint B,as laid out in the instructions. Trouble was I was too eager and ended up always prying off the numbers attached to the bones. The result was a genuine archeo-hunt to figure out which bone was connected to which. My parents hated doing this, but couldn't abandon the project. We would figure out how to build the damn thing even though the EZ way was short-circuited.

The lesson I learned was that compulsion has its uses.