THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, June 9, 1995 TAG: 9506090046
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E9 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: JENNIFER DZIURA
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
LIKE LOIS LANE and Clark Kent on ``Lois and Clark,'' some journalists frequently endanger their lives, jobs and secret identities to uncover corruption and crime.
Unfortunately, however, not everyone can expose the Watergate scandal. In fact, many of us reading (or writing) the Teenology section weren't anywhere close to being born in 1972, the year in which the infamous break-in occurred.
But, in the name of investigative reporting, the next 16 inches of column space will be dedicated to answering those questions that just kind of curl up and take a nap in the back of your brain. For example, when you put a quarter into a public telephone, your call doesn't go through and the machine refunds your 25 cents, do you get back the same quarter you put in?
I have wondered about this ever since it occurred to me that I could be depositing clean, shiny, silver-tone quarters into pay phones, and, on the occasions that my calls were greeted with busy signals, I'd reach into the coin return slot only to end up with a quarter that someone used to scrape gum off of the bait box in which he carried a large collection of bloodworms.
Since this question, if left unanswered, could continue to prod and poke at humanity's collective unconscious until telephones become obsolete, I decided that someone had better investigate. Using the scientific method firmly impressed upon my brain by a series of assiduous science teachers, I formed a hypothesis (that the quarter inserted into a pay phone and the one coming out of the coin return slot are in fact the same quarter), and devised my experiment.
I apologize to our nation's first president, but research demanded that I color a quarter blue with a Crayola crayon. Experimental procedure was simple enough: insert quarter, dial number where line is busy, hang up, press coin return lever. If refunded quarter is blue, I'm right. As the scientific method demanded the presence of a control group, I executed the same procedure with a plain, unaltered, silver quarter, presumably to make sure that Bell Atlantic hadn't been trying to stifle my experiment by filling its pay phones with handfuls of blue quarters.
I am happy to report that the father of our nation was blue when entering the phone, and blue when exiting. As one random bystander so aptly stated, until a person or answering machine picks up the ringing phone on the other end of the line, your quarter sits in ``quarter purgatory,'' awaiting its fate.
Another question that has been planted in the deep recesses of American brains is the following: Just how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop? After prolonged exposure to devious advertising in which a cartoon owl poses this question and then never answers it because he just couldn't resist biting off half of the lollipop in order to reach the murky, gooey brown center, the world needs an answer.
Investigating the matter, however, poses a problem. Does ``getting to the center'' of a Tootsie Roll Pop entail unearthing the entire big brown blob in the center of one's confection, or merely uncovering some small sign of an unsightly brown mass beneath the colored candy shell?
Extension experiments involving a bag of Tootsie Roll Pops and a small gathering of teenagers revealed the following: It takes, on average, 480 licks to first uncover the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop. It takes an average of 812 licks to completely free your saliva-coated, ugly, yucky brown Tootsie Roll on a stick from its candy coating.
Now that these questions finally have been answered, perhaps some of you will sleep more easily. Oh, and in case you were wondering - the blue stuff came off of George's head quite nicely. by CNB