Thursday, 3 March 2011

Whatever Happened To...? 7


“live” yoghourt which had magic powers that plain old “dead” yoghourt lacked
apple doughnuts
asparagus soup
Bates eye exercises
Berkertex
black cherry jam

character defects or flaws (became bad choices)
chat rooms
collections of dolls in national costume
commemorative thimbles (and the idea that they were a good investment)
Commer lorries
complaining about women drivers (when all the evidence shows that they are safer drivers)
Danish pastries
disc cameras
dominos
drives as in whist drives
ecotowns (now being “quietly abandoned” according to spiked-online.com, Mar 1 11)
Everton mints
extracting gold from seawater
flavouring food with rum
flotation tanks

hake and chips
hiding computer knowledge from employees
Hooray Henries
huzzifs
Idris orange juice
leotards
Les Bottines Souriantes
ley lines
magic realism
manganese nodules
mass media
miniature televisions
mink farms
moussaka
Mr Softee

negative ions which were supposed to be so good for you (given off by kitsch water feature in your living room)

nouvelle cuisine
nuclear deterrence
Oat Crunchies
office memos
past life regression
paternosters
PDAs you controlled with a “gestural language”
poetic truth, emotional truth, a higher kind of truth
premium-rate phone lines
punnets made of wood strips
puzzling over what the “information economy” could possibly be
pyramid power

rock and chips ("Rock" was dogfish, now "cat shark".)
slide projectors
split screen
TCP
terrible Web ads for tooth whitening

the new paradigm (that was going to supplant the old, scientific paradigm any day now – back in 1975)

the prefix "cyber"
the sound of fingernails on a blackboard
walkie talkies
wearing curlers under a scarf
whingeing about computer jargon
whingeing about the difference between uninterested and disinterested

More here, and links to the rest.

1 comment:

  1. I'd forgotten about the Disc Camera - a sort of round Instamatic for the 80s (the picture quality wasn't any better).

    What about the Advanced Photographic System? Like an idiot, I believed the hype and took my new APS camera on a trip to Chile. You can imagine my disappointment when I picked up the photos from Boots.

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