Things I miss

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America Online had a compelling feature last week called "The Top 25 Things We Wish Would Make a Comeback," including drive-ins, Pogo, Green Stamps and Coke in bottles.Today, I'm here to round out that list.They left out some important ones.Like Funny Face drinks, including Rootin' Tootin' Raspberry, Freckle Face Strawberry and Goofy Grape. Then again, one of the flavors was Injun Orange. Seriously. That might be less popular in 2008.But I do miss those candy buttons that used to come on long sheets of paper. You'd scrape them off with your teeth, though some would stick, and tear off, so you'd usually end up eating 30 percent of the paper.A better bet were those little wax bottles full of juice. The juice was terrific, even though you'd first have to bite off the end of the bottle, usually swallowing it. Which reminds me of those red wax lips, which we'd also chew. Those were great. But remind me why the FDA allowed America's children to chew and swallow big nasty wads of flavored wax?If I had my way, I'd bring back manual typewriters. Now those were word processors -- you could type in any language, with the satisfying smack of hammer-keys against paper. Of course, if you made a mistake, you'd have to use messy Wite-Out. Nor could you define and move sentences, so you often lived with imperfect phraseology. As I recall, there was no copy button for duplicates. You instead had to sandwich a piece of carbon paper between two pages, with the carbon always getting on your fingers, and the paper, and maybe your face.AOL didn't mention vinyl LPs. I loved the way you could stack three or four at the top of the spindle, and when the previous record finished, a new one would automatically drop down 4 inches and start. If you dropped records on each other often enough, they got scuffed and began to skip, and after a while, you just got used to pops and static, so maybe LPs weren't perfect.That's why I miss cassette tapes. I liked 8-tracks, too, but cassettes were a smaller, more elegant solution. You just slid one into the car stereo, and bingo, great-quality music, and sooner or later, it would jam, and when you popped it out, the magnetic tape itself was still stuck in the machinery. You'd try to pull it out, which caused it to spool out into a tangled mess, which broke not only the cassette but also your radio.I loved Silly Putty. It arrived in plastic eggs, was pink and had magic qualities. I loved the way you could flatten it on the Sunday comics, and when you peeled it off, there was a perfect replica on the Silly Putty. If you did it enough times, the putty turned from bright pink to a mottled gray, with tiny flecks of newsprint, and after a while it just looked dirty and you didn't play with it anymore.Superballs were cool, too. They bounced as if propelled by tiny jets. They were a blast. But outdoors, they kept bouncing away, and indoors, they careened off walls and broke things. If you threw them hard enough, the ball itself would crack or lose tiny divots out of its surface. The main thing they were good for was just dropping them out of your hand and thinking, "That sure bounced high." But how many times could you do that before bagging it?They need to bring back cereal with toys at the bottom. You couldn't wait to get home from the grocery store, so that when your mom was out of the kitchen, you could dump out the whole box into a mixing bowl and get the toy, usually something like a frogman. You'd get in trouble for emptying the cereal, but at least you had that frogman, which was suppose to sink and surface if you somehow loaded it with baking soda and put it in a stopped-up sink full of water. It didn't work too well, but it made a huge mess, and you got in trouble for that too.I'll tell you what I miss: hand-crank car windows. They never locked open or closed because of electronic malfunction, nor did you have to worry about getting your fingers or hands crushed. Then again, if you were alone in the car and needed to open the passenger window to talk to someone, you had to lean way over, which often threw out your back. And on hot days, forget opening the back windows.(mpatinkin(at)projo.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)