Tootsie Pop-ularity 2011

OKAY, if there's one thing that gets me bloggin', it's WORKPLACE HALLOWEEN EVENTS. And I'm talking about LAST year's Halloween, because I haven't reported on it yet, and it's already October 26. I simply can't keep two Halloweens in my memory.

So I went ahead and bought all of the Tootsie Pops and made a Pops Pile.

And again, I set out a sample of equal numbers of each flavor out where kids could reach them, and I encouraged the costumed children of my coworkers to take one of the color of their choice when they came a-trickin' and a-treatin'. I recorded each preference and replaced the appropriate lolly.

Go ahead and look up my last Tootsie Pop-ularity post, which, embarrassingly, is only a few posts ago. The winner of Halloween 2010 was the new blue raspberry flavor, which was predictably absent in 2011. In its place was a green apple flavor, which, as you can see, was the runaway winner.



















So I'm not going to go too deep into how I made an awesome spreadsheet that allowed me to quickly and effortlessly track the progress of each Tootsie Pop. I'm just going to say that it was awesome. As is self-evident, the greens ran out first, so I started a new graph for the remaining colors, post-green.




















It's interesting to me that the grape and chocolate flavors did so well. The grape flavored ones (whose wrappers are plainly blue) didn't do well at all in 2010, although that was an awfully small sample size. Also of interest is how badly the raspberry/dark red Tootsie Pops did once there wasn't any green on the table. So if you are trying to sell a dark-red product, try placing it near a green product and watch your sales numbers rise.

I notice the orange bar doesn't look very orange. I wanted a pretty good contrast among the two reds and the orange. And it sure looked orange when I picked it. Hmm. Stay tuned for this year's results, which will be in soon. How will brown do? HOW WILL BROWN DO??

Three letter combos

Here are some combinations of three letters. Try to think of a word that uses those letters in order.

Examples!
itm
mpa

And you could think of words like bitmap and compass.

So here you go!

adt
edt
ilu
hyt
rsi

I'll post answers whenever. Here is a picture of some turkeys wandering around near city hall in Clayton, CA.
















Click to embiggen. You can't really see them that well.

Tootsie Pop-ularity

Last Halloween I went to my grown-up job, only to discover that the grown-ups that I work with are all more grown-up than me. In the afternoon, they brought in their spouses and shorter versions of themselves, dressed up in elaborate costumery. The shorties then proceeded to trick-or-treat at all of the cubicles, and since I am a grown-up with my own cubicle, they ALSO CAME TO MY CUBICLE. I looked to my left to see that I had anticipated this event, and I opened some bags of Tootsie Pops.

















I put some handfuls of Tootsie Pops on the corner of my desk.

















Kids came by and said "trick or treat." I motioned toward the pile o' Pops and said something like "What's your favorite kind?" And in most cases, the kids would look over the pile and then select a Tootsie Pop for their bag.

What they didn't know:
1. I was trying to maintain an almost-equal-if-not-equal mix of all of the colors in a friendly, unbiased pile. The photos are not a good example of this.
2. I recorded what flavor they chose after they walked away and replaced the appropriate Tootsie Pops into the pile.

What I didn't know:
1. Blue raspberry was to be the landslide victor!
















I didn't know blue raspberry was even a flavor. It's apparently new. (or at least it was last Halloween.) It whupped all of the other Tootsie Pops' little lollibottoms. I ended up running clean out of blue raspberry ones, but I kept giving out the leftovers for hours.

1st place: Blue raspberry
2nd place: Orange
3rd place: Chocolate
4th place: Raspberry
5th place: Cherry
6th place: Grape

So blue raspberry is the most popular Tootsie Pop. Even more than regular raspberry. Raspberries aren't blue.

A lot of the kids gave me sincere thank-yous. One even tapped me on the knee and waited until he had my attention before looking me in the eyes and thanking me.

Two-syllable words

Sometimes Alan cannot maintain steady blogging habits. Okay, Alan never maintains steady blogging habits. Alan admits knowing about Alan's hist'ry without normal bloggy postings. Forthwith, Alan attempts anew, posting pictures, pizza flavor kneecap keyboard, chipper SpongeBob SquarePants table bucket marble dolphins. Bagel pillow. Ancient sandal jelly.