We noticed straight off that the cans of cold drinks had old fashioned ring pulls. This is Lipton's Peach Iced Tea (in Arabic). It was purchased while we were filling in our dive log books. You can see George's hand scribbling away in the corner. Emily and George had never come across them before and needed to be shown how they worked. We old folks explained that when we were young (back in the olden days) all cans opened like this.
Waxing nostalgic we told them how once you had opened your can you could do a number of things with the ring pull. You could tuck it into the can. Most mothers hated when you did that because "you could swallow it". I recommended that they just lay the ring pull on the table and put it inside the can after finishing the contents. You could collect a bunch of ring pulls and make a chain out of them. I tried to demonstrate this, but my clumsy old fingers couldn't do it and I sliced my thumb quite badly. I needed a bandage for a couple of days. See? The old ways were not necessarily the best. These ring pulls can be dangerous in the hands of people who feel the need to fiddle with small bits of sharp metal.
1 comment:
How do they open them now?? Back in the bad old days (long before the good old days), we used what we called a church key....you hooked one end on the rim of the can, then lifted so that the sharp pointed tooth punched a hole in the can. You needed to punch a second smaller hole so the liquid would run out of the big one. The other end of the church key would lift bottle caps off pop bottles. (Science lesson: Kids, this was an example of a LEVER in action. It was also an example of the need for air pressure to allow liquids to flow from a container.)
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