"I know what that is," said Mr. Ginley. 

photo attribution below

He pointed to the television, where a YouTube slide show displayed a series of outdated knickknacks, widgets, and doodads. 

Essentially, it was a memory test for Baby Boomers.

He hit the pause button. I knew what it was, too: a 45 record adapter.

Back in the day when albums were king, record players had spindles that were designed for LPs (aka, long playing albums). LPs, as everyone knows, have a single small hole in the middle that holds the record on the player. 

However, single records (aka 45s) had a big hole in the middle that required an adapter. Hence, the photo he was pointing at, a yellow plastic disk with a small hole in the center that snaps into the big hole in the 45.

"We just had a black plastic piece that fit on the stereo, we didn't use these things," said Mr. Ginley.

"Well, you would have if you wanted to play multiple 45s," I said.

Back to the time machine. Stereos used to have a tall spindle that dropped one record at a time. You could put a whole stack on the spindle and let 'em play one after the other.

Of course, all of this technology is now obsolete, along with 45s (and 78s, which were a holdout from my parents' generation). 

Feel free to follow me for explanations of other outdated gewgaws and trivial nonsense. 

Photo attribution: User Dpbsmith on en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons