Two weeks ago, I told of finding a pile of rusty old razor blades in the wall behind our medicine cabinet and waxed nostalgic about other long-vanished items and customs.

After running down a list that included curb feelers, party lines, four-digit phone numbers, Toni home -permanents, antenna rotors, rabbit ears and two-color typewriter ribbons, I invited readers with -memories of other obsolete curiosities to share them. A number did.

"Remember when we made popcorn over the fire or in a pot on the stove and not the microwave?" wrote a website commenter whose handle is OldSpook. "Microwaves were something that Ming-the-Merciless used on Flash Gordon. ... I remember my dad had a remote control for his television, but it was his three sons, who understood: 'Boy, go change the channel!' After all, we had five channels up here in the city."

In response to my mention of four-holer Buicks, OldSpook wrote: "I remember the cool kids would reorder the letters to 'CIKUB' (Can I Kiss You, Baby?) on their cars. These were the kids that also used spark plugs on the end of their exhaust to ignite the gas fumes for some really cool flames."

Hmm. Those are new ones on me.

"I remember when my grandmother was the 'soda jerk' at the local drugstore and the straws were actually made of paper," wrote a Web user called LoveMooreCounty. "They usually didn't last as long as it took to drink the soda."

Now, those I do remember. The end of the paper straw in your mouth would soon become as soggy and limp as a piece of spaghetti, and it was a special art to make anything come through it. This was a -particular problem with thick milkshakes. I've always thought the plastic straws, besides being non-biodegradable, are too easy. No challenge at all.

IntrepidReader contributed this in -reaction to the early thread of Web -comments:

"Guys, half the stuff you remember from the Stone Age is still around today, like rabbit ears, antenna rotors and Zippo lighters (all the cool dudes in movies still use them). And for reasons absolutely beyond my ken, self-adhesive fake chrome portholes are a big fad these days, showing up on every make of car except Buicks.

"One of the interesting things about living in a house that's been in my family for nearly 70 years is coming across things from past eras that would baffle kids today. In a forgotten recess of a kitchen cabinet, I found a stack of three-partitioned aluminum TV dinner trays. Alongside them was a -coffee percolator - remember those? How they'd fill the house with the smell of coffee, or as the ads always said, 'fresh-perked coffee.' Seeing the magnificent simplicity of this utensil makes me wonder how we were talked into consigning it to oblivion in favor of complicated, expensive, counterspace-gobbling, hard-to-clean coffee makers.

"And don't get me started on Christmas decorations, but there are boxes of Shiny Brite ornaments from the World War II years, illustrated with Santa shaking hands with Uncle Sam."

Wow. Those would probably be worth something on "Antiques Roadshow."

My mention of the deposits we used to put down on soda-pop bottles prompted this update from commenter SCC Student: "There is a law still on the books in North Carolina making it a misdemeanor to -contaminate a reusable soft drink bottle. People used to put their filtered cigarette butts in the bottles - which were difficult to wash out, if not impossible."

Clodfelter37 offered this:

"In Carthage, the fire siren would wail at 12 noon to let the workers at the sawmill and the sewing plant know it was time for lunch."

The exact same thing happened in the Carthage I grew up in (the one in Missouri), except that the siren signaled lunchtime at the marble quarry outside town. Farther toward Joplin was an Atlas powder plant that signaled shift changes with a window-rattling explosion. Now they probably just send out a text blast or something.

Clodfelter37 wrapped things up like this:

"How about the ice man delivering ice for the icebox? [Yep, we had an iceman who cameth to our apartment when I was very small.] Houses had porches on the front so you could sit in the cool evenings before we had air conditioning. The bicycle with small front tire and large basket delivering groceries from the store. Candy cigarettes. Wax lips. Evening in Paris. Pea shooters. Black Jack chewing gum. Little wax bottles with sweet liquid inside. Catching lightning bugs - where did they go?"

Nowhere, actually. I've been seeing them around our house on many recent evenings, winking on and off evocatively there under the trees like always.

Steve Bouser is editor of The Pilot. Contact him at (910) 693-2470 or by e-mail at sbouser@thepilot.com.