Is A Part Of
Warning: the following blog post contains severe topic drift and excessive amounts of Internet clichés. New readers are advised to proceed with caution, and those with a low tolerance for Wendell’s many quirks may be advised to go here.
Why is it I can’t watch the Homestar Runner Deck Bit [flash video, but if it's HR it always is] without thinking of the Blue Collar Comedy Deck Bit [youtube, future dead link] ?
And it was inevitable that Mr. T would get a ‘celebreality’ show [more imbedded video; what's this internet coming to?]. Yeah, this Mr. T:
NOT this one:
Yep, Mr. T and Tina, starring Pat Morita and some gal. Because sometimes you need to be reminded that there was life before the ’80s and guys who called themselves Mr. T before Mr. T. Still, the recent Sheldon comics with the T-guy as a ‘guest star’* was a good reminder of the Power of Positive Weirdness.
But it was one T-centric strip that really caught my eye, when the former bouncer/boxer/wrestler/semi-actor applied his rock solid beliefs to an old question:
Ah, the classic Tootsie Pop question, raised by the classic Tootsie Pop commercial [YouTube again], which I suspect nobody really thought about before the commercial appeared. And which probably did more damage to the image of the “wise old owl” than anything until…
But meanwhile, the question remains:
Many have tried, some put their results up on the Web (some with rather poor CSS). The Official Tootsie Site reported that engineers from two different universities (Purdue and Michigan) constructed ‘licking machines’ to get a definitive answer, but their results varied by enough that the Tootsie Site could continue to gloat “the world may never know”
But people are still asking, and thanks to web-based resources like Answerbag, Faqfarm, Google Answers or Yahoo Answers (where it has been asked 382 times), we have learned that the answer is somewhere around 300 or 450 or 250 or 3. Surprisingly, Cecil Adams’ Straight Dope has not yet addressed the question.
Well, now you can learn for yourself as you can now purchase (from the appropriate stupid.com), your own Tootsie Pop Lick-O-Meter (why let Purdue and Yahoo have all the fun?)
Meanwhile, another one of my childhood memories has been turned upside down. According to the Evil-In-A-Good-Way Lore Sjöberg, we may have all been misunderstanding that classic Charlie Brown Halloween quote:
“I got a rock”???
or 
* Normally I save the comics for my Comics Blog, Clowns Around, but I’m working on a major piece for there on the many ‘guest stars’ that have been featured on Sheldon, and it’s gonna be awesome.
