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20 jun 06 "How many lick does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll pop?" the original question was, in fact, "how many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop?" who literally licks their hard candy lollipops? kids in the 50s? maybe doing it efficiently was against god's law back then. everyone i've seen sucks on it, putting the entire body of the candy in his or her mouth, dissolving it in a bath of saliva, with the assistance of pressure from the tongue and roof of the mouth. by the time someone licked the pop down to the core, ie, held the candy at a distance and periodically lifted it to the mouth, giving it a once-over with their tongue, he or she would be dead. well, at least it would take several hours of continuous licking -- you'd likely have to fast if you didn't want to interrupt your project for meals. your tongue would also become painfully abraided by dragging something across it every second. i remember childhood halloweens, and how tootsie pops were a middle-ground between the dissappointment of hard candy suckers, and the gluttenous delight of miniature snickers bars. with tootsie pops you have the hard candy, which is demoralizing, but at least it's chocolate flavored. but finally (after licking it down?) you get a gummy, chewy thing in the middle (chocolate-flavored nougat, i believe), which almost passed for real candy. so, the tootsie pops were the second things eaten, after the snickers bars but before the sad little colored suckers. i'm sure the reader remembers his or her halloween basket after a week or so, and how it had been depleted of all that is delicious, and now contained only a meager ruin of cheap, razor-thing lollipops and pepermints, strewn across the bottom. i remember that commercial starring "mr. owl" and the toothless turtle, made so by unrestrainedly biting countless tootsie pops before he was able to lick to the center. i remember it practically verbatim: cartoon kid: how many licks does it take...etc? it aired during my saturday morning cartoons, which, in 1978, were still decent. they included old warner brothers' "looney toons", old tom and jerry, and even old popeye cartoons. i think later these were deemed inappropriate for children. and actually, when those cartoons were shown in theaters before a 1930s feature, they were indeed intended for adult audiences. one centered around someone...possibly elmer fudd...who imitated dr. livingston by exploring africa in search of the african bunny or something like that. flying across the continent was demonstrated in that classic cartoon way where they show an aerial, map-like view of some place, and draw a little plane over it, flying, along with propeller noises. a dotted line trails after it to indicate its path. bits of africa were labled as elmer flew over them: dark africa, darker africa, and finally darkest africa. each area was literally darker than the previous, until darkest africa was just about pitch black. you can't just show kids that sort of stuff if you're trying to implant some sensitivity there. "darkest africa" is up there in the runnings for "least PC thing", along with an episode of "star trek: the next generation" in its first season, airing in 1987 or '88, which featured a race of Black People from Outer Space, dressed in turbans and harem pants, who lusted after white women, and kidnapped one (tasha yar) to be one of the leader's many wives. i couldn't believe it when i recently saw it again. star trek <-- PC <-- old cartoons <-- tootsie pop commercials <-- tootsie pop question ...a question i never answered. i'd guess probably 6 hours or so, at maybe 8 licks a minute on average, so about 3,000. probably less. i'd say 500. maybe. i don't know. it occured to me that this is a similar iconic question to "what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?", and that it's likely been addressed. indeed: Tootsie Roll Industries has received over 20,000 letters from children claiming to have solved the riddle since the commercial first aired in 1970. The typical range of responses is between 100 and 5,800 with an average of 600-800. -- wicked-pedia it seems my estimate wasn't far off. dear lord: A group of engineering students from Purdue University recorded that their licking machine, modeled after a human tongue, took an average of 364 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. They tried the same licking test on 20 volunteers and found that the average licks to the center were 252 licks. -- unsolvedmysteries.com the question "how many blah blah blah?" was contrived to demonstrate that "tootsie pops are so wonderful and delicious that one can't help a frantic and uncontrollable attempt to experience all of the tootsie pop pleasure at once", when in reality, no one has gone all the way with a tootsie pop because licking and sucking a piece of hard candy for hours is really boring. whatever it is think i see, becomes a tootsie roll to me. |
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