annhandley’s posterous

Remember AOL disks? If you owned a mailbox in the late 1990s or early-2000s, you know what I mean, because American Online's aggressive direct mail strategy probably distributed CD-ROMs and diskettes into it with irritating frequency. More than a billion disks were mailed between the late 1990s and 2006, when AOL stopped the mass mailing. Or mass irritation. However you look at it.

In fact, the end of that era likely came without you being aware that is was, in fact, the end of an era. But that's how evolution is, right? One day you have to bungee-wrap your trash cans against the bands of marauding wild animals outside your cave, and the next thing you know you can't remember the last time you saw a mastodon happen by.

Things change. Technology evolves. And suddenly you're dealing with a whole different set of problems. When was the last time you got a busy signal? Or went on (or heard of anyone else going on) a true "blind date"? Looked up a number in a phone book? Had one of your kid's friends call the house phone? PC World compiles a list of these and other obsolete things here.

Which brings me to the real point of this post. The other day I unearthed the item pictured below from an old desk drawer. It didn't seem that foreign an object to me, but my 12-year-old daughter had no idea what it was. "Is it some kind of violin bow?" she asked.

But you guys know what it is... right? Anyone...? (Shout it out below!)