Saturday, December 12, 2020

Weekend Post

What’s the dumbest holiday gift you’ve ever received? Mine was a Fizz-nik. And understand, I really WANTED this thing. In my dumb kid-ness I thought this was the coolest invention EVER.

It was a plastic straw with a big bubble in the middle. This was actually two half spheres that twisted together with straws on either end. You put a scoop of ice cream in the bubble and twisted it shut. Then you jammed one end into a bottle of root beer. That was it. Voila! Instant root beer float!

You would take a swig and (in theory) the root beer would mix with the ice cream and by the time it reached your mouth you were in soda fountain heaven. And the best part – no muss nor fuss.

Except for one thing…

It never worked. To mix the two elements you had to hold the bottle at almost a 90 degree angle and crane your neck way back. Not exactly ideal.

And then there was this tiny flaw – there was no way to stop the rushing ice cream float as it hurtled its way to your mouth. What a mess. Within a week my mother had confiscated my beloved Fizz-Nik.

Let’s just say that as a result of the Fizz-nik I have more empathy for hookers.

Hope you get what YOU want this holiday season.

26 comments :

  1. I was always considered to be a thrifty person in my youth. My aunt, therefore, thought she had found me the perfect gift. So this fifteen year old opens his present from his aunt to find -- a roll of toilet paper with $100 bills imprinted on the toilet squares. The roll had about 50 sheets. Understand this was not real money; just printed on the paper. She was so proud, I was so confused.

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  2. ROTFLMFAO!
    I had one too. Ken, you describe the experience perfectly!

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  3. "Let’s just say that as a result of the Fizz-nik I have more empathy for hookers."

    You do that first thing in the morning and you set an impossibly high comedy bar for everybody else to meet for the rest of the day.

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  4. Fizz-niks were before my time. A Google search says it was heavily promoted on local kids shows. Ah, that explains it.

    Dumbest holiday gift? Probably that electric football game I wanted- another case of falling for the promotion.

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  5. An advantage of apartment living was recycled toys and gadgets from the incinerator room. Noisome stuff went down the chute, but big stuff like Astro-Space Station, Frog Man and Vibrating Football Games got dumped on the counter. We got all the trendy toys a bit late, but never felt bad if they were disappointing. From the incinerator room they came, to the incinerator room they went.

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  6. When I was 5 or six years old, I desperately wanted a "Six Finger Gun" for Christmas. It was basically a gun with a barrel shaped like a finger, which, when held just so, looked like a sixth finger. Oddly, my parents granted my wish, and I had a Six Finger Gun on Christmas morning. After I shot a projectile at my older sister, my prize was confiscated. I was only allowed to use it as a pen thereafter.

    https://youtu.be/ElVzs0lEULs

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  7. That reminds me of a childhood memory item: Fizzies. They were Alke-Seltzer like tablets that you put in water and they fizzed and carbonated the water with various flavors like Root Beer and Chocolate. They were awful.

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  8. I remember kid-show hosts getting the contents of the Fizz-Nik all over the place -- themselves, their clothes, the table, their little puppet sidekicks, everything. Kids probably loved it.

    As for Fizzies, they were okay right after you opened the package. Fizzies were packaged on a card with a foil overlay. Even though each tablet on the card seemed independently sealed, once you took out one or two, all the other tablets went flat after a day or so. Air must have been getting in there somehow.

    In re nothing at all, Sonny Boy was a flat tube of brightly colored sugared water that you froze and then consumed.

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  9. Oh I had a Fiz-Nik, as did both of my brothers. (They were heavily advertised on "The Soupy Sales Show," so of course we had them.) Never used it with root beer, as I never liked root beer, but I did use it with Bubble-Up, which was exactly like 7-Up except it came in 16-oz bottles instead of 12-oz bottles. I don't remember having the problems you've described, but it was 60 years ago. I did note that it was in no way an improvement over just dumping a scoop of ice cream into a glass of Bubble-Up, and that after that one summer (1960?), I never set eyes on one again. The one problem I do remember, which my brother had but not I, came when you didn't screw it back together tight enough after adding the ice cream. You tipped up the bottle, the Fiz-Nik came apart, and a scoop of ice cream and 16 ounces of Bubble-Up came pouring down on your face. You had water-boarded yourself, but using ice cream and Bubble-Up instead of water.

    Water-boarded with ice cream and soda pop; oh death, where is thy sting?

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  10. I remember liking orange Fizzies, but only the orange ones. And you had to use two or even three Fizzies to make a drink with a taste strong enough to please me. I never had (That I remember) the going-flat problem another poster described, but maybe I didn't leave mine un-fizzed long enough to go flat. After all, when did a card of (8?) Fizzies ever survive our home for two whole days?

    Maybe now I could add some sugar and "fruit flavor" to my denture-cleansing tablets, and have Fizzies that clean my teeth.

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  11. Rewatching Monk I've noticed a how often they don't even try to pass off the LA locations as SF, even including local landmarks and streets like Sunset (sometimes showing the street signs). Other than Malibu for Korea, do you have any favorite examples of LA not playing itself?

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  12. I remember a paper straw that had a bit of chocolaty cardboard in it. The idea was to make regular milk into chocolate milk as you sipped, but to get any real flavor the milk had to go through the straw multiple times and while that was doable, it upset parents for some reason. Ripping the straw open and sucking on the cardboard wasn't much better.

    In recent years I've taken to attending toy & collectible shows, occasionally finding an affordable bit of boomer nostalgia (early Disneyland lunchbox for $35! The missing plastic Pogo figures!) but those are more like museum experiences. I've accumulated books and bookmarked web sites about old toys, having discovered I don't so much crave the toys themselves but want proof certain things existed. As a kid I never even knew Marx put out a "Ben Hur" playset, but now I can imagine kids playing with the little tiny "slave market" it included. And it's a load off my mind to finally discover the Remco drive-in movie theater was actually pretty cruddy compared to the catalog illustration.

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  13. Six Finger! Six Finger! Man, Alive! How did I ever get along with Five? I remember the commercial so clearly - and I know I wanted one, but didn't get one.

    And I liked the Root Beer Fizzies. You can still find them occasionally.

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  14. My grandmother gave me a “Merry Monk” which I’m sure seemed cute to her. Unknown to her though was when you pushed down his head a large boner popped up under his robe.

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  15. DBenson: You're talking about Flav-R-Straws (spelling a guess), which I used in the 5th grade to encourage me to drink milk. They also came in strawberry. There wasn't enough flavor to make them worthwhile.
    Also, those Marx Ben-Hur playsets are worth more than $1,000 these days. And if you can find a Mickey Mouse lunch box for $35, grab it.

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  16. Ere I Saw Elba12/12/2020 10:11 PM

    Man, just even thinking about all the sugary garbage I grew up with makes my teeth want to fall out in revolt.

    Nerds, Gobstoppers, Bottle Caps, Capri Sun, Smarties. But I'm kind of a nerd, a bit of a smarty, so I guess I got something out of it.

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  17. Looking forward to your review of MANK on Netflix.

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  18. as a result of the Fizz-nik I have more empathy for hookers.

    Yeah, but I think their "toy" was called a Fiz-dik.

    Oh, to have the toys now that I had when growing up...what they'd be worth. Back in the 60s I had a Lost In Space toy robot that my mom ended up tossing when I wasn't looking. Saw it in a collectibles store in the mid 90s going for $600!

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  19. “What’s the dumbest holiday gift you’ve ever received? “

    In the “be careful what you ask for department” —
    back in ‘94, when I was ten, I requested and received the head of Alfredo Garcia. For starters, I should have specified “which” Alfredo Garcia, as it’s nearly impossible to return the wrong one. But on the plus side — in a Christmas lesson straight out of Dickens — that year — as a consequence — the salaries of the undocumented in my neighborhood rose substantially.

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  20. Som basically, it was a (root) beer bong for kids. Nice training for college.

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  21. Troy McClure12/13/2020 5:28 PM

    Friday question. Disney this week announced its slate of film and TV shows for the next few years, including ten new Star Wars series, ten new Marvel series, new series based on the Mighty Ducks and Alien movies, two new Star Wars films, a reboot of Fantastic Four, prequels to Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Toy Story, remakes of Three Men and a Baby, Turner and Hooch and Cheaper by the Dozen, and a live action Pinocchio.

    Would you agree that, thanks to Disney, this is the greatest time in the history of Hollywood for inventive, intelligent and ambitious storytelling and that Disney has in no way poisoned the cinematic landscape with its products, making it impossible for original, grown-up films to be made?*


    *I'm being sarcastic in case anyone is wondering.

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  22. But Fizzies are useful at swim meets...ask Dean Wormer

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  23. thomas tucker12/14/2020 10:05 AM

    I just remembered today, that the dumbest Christmas gift I ever gave, was to my uncle back in the 1970's- advertised as a way of delivering hot lather for a shave, it was a device that you attached to the top of you can of shaving cream and it was supposed to heat the lather that flowed out. all it did was melt the top of the can.

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  24. "Other than Malibu for Korea, do you have any favorite examples of LA not playing itself?"

    The 50s monster movie "The Beginning of the End", about mutant giant locusts, was set in my neck of the woods. At one point, thanks to the California filming, the mutants are reported hiding in "the hills around Ludlow". Ludlow, like most of east central Illinois, is flat as a pancake: think the cropdusting scene from "North by Northwest", set not so far away in Indiana, but actually filmed in Wasco, in Kern County, CA.

    Cineastes note: this may be the first time these films have been in the same paragraph.

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