Thecatman wrote:The dirt turned into playa dust

Nope.
The playa dust is multi-component - clay minerals, silt-sized quartz, and silt-sized calcite. It may also have some gypsum in it, but the older the playa dust, the less gypsum. The calcite itself is a fascinating story. Originally, it came from the tufa deposits on the shorelines of glacial Lake Lahontan. It all started out as aragonite or ikaite, and then it became calcite as the temperature increased from the Wisconsonian interglacial stage. I now have calcium isotope data that indicates it.
And Crypto,
"I remember nuthinkz." < You and Schultz related?
Back to you, catman.....
1: Blackjack chewing gum
2: Wax Coke shaped bottles filled with colored sugar water
3: Candy cigarettes
4: Soda machines that dispensed glass bottles
5: Coffee shops with table side jukeboxes
6: Home milk deliveries in glass bottles with cardboard caps
7: Party lines
8: Newsreels before a movie
9: PF Flyers
10: Butch wax
11: Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OXford9-6969) for example
12: Peashooters
13: Howdy Doody
14: 33 and 45RPM records
15: S&H Green stamps
and blue chip stamps
16: Hi-Fis
17: Metal ice trays with a lever to break the ice
18: Mimeograph paper
19: Blue flashbulbs for cameras
20: Beanie and Cecil
21: Roller skate keys
22: Cork pop guns
23) Drive ins
24: Studerbakers
25: Wash tub wringers
25 of 25 for me.
I also remember:
1. Beemon's chewing gum
2. an all-glass percolator
3. dray horse or mule-drawn scaper pans
4. Hollerith punch cards
5 The IBM 1120
6. The Timex-Sinclair 2kb computer with a 16 kb add-on chip
7. The Altair 8800 - made by Southwest Technical Instruments out of Albuquerque, NM
8. Manual two-lens stereoscopes for topographic mapmaking
9. Edsels and REOs.
10. Charlie Chan
11. plaster on lath wall construction (pre-sheetrock)
You're only as old as you feel, and I feel 35.