Yes, ralph to the contrary notwithstanding, they’re gum*. They’re all over the place in public areas, especially near places that sell gum, they last forever, and they’re damned near impossible to remove. They look incredibly ugly.
Places like DisneyWorld/Land have full-time staff removing this stuff.
*the number of them alone shows that they’re not due to paraffin wax novelties, which are nowhere near as common today.
I’m addicted to gum, but I never chew it at work and I always wrap it in paper and put it in the trash. One exception I will make is tossing it in in the middle of thick bushes while hiking.
It is rude to spit it where someone can step on it.
For a first offense. After that, say bye bye to a hand.
Gum chewers never get just how disgusting their disposal habits are to the people around them. It’s like they think they’re the only person in the world who might toss their gum on the ground or stick it to the underside of a table.
When I taught, any student I caught chewing gum got to scrape it off the underside of the table they were sitting at. A couple of them complained to me but shut up when I asked them sweetly if they’d ever stuck their own gum beneath a table or desk. The rest were so comprehensively grossed out (though I supplied gloves and a knife), they stopped chewing gum.
If the principal caught them dropping gum on the sidewalk, they got to spend an hour after school wearing gloves and a mask and using a chemical gum dissolver to get those black spots off the sidewalk. One kid completely refused to believe the thousands of black spots could possibly be gum until the janitor showed him what the underside looked like when it was scraped off.
I’ll chew gum if my ears ache or my mouth is dry, but I keep the wrapper to put it in afterwards. Gum litterers should have their orifices plugged with their leavings.
Too lenient.
Ha! I just got back from Philadelphia and I got chewing gum on my shoe while on the train.
At least people don’t chew tobacco anymore! Spitting tobacco saliva is horrible!
Really? Tell that to my cousin who was at the family reunion last weekend. Or the shithead who was collecting his spit in a bottle on the train a few weeks ago and it was all I could do not to vomit in his lap.
I saw some young guy doing that on the NY subway a few weeks ago! He was holding an empty soda bottle that he kept spitting into. Absolutely disgusting!
At least he was using a bottle. When I went to Beijing I saw a number of men just spitting right on the floor of the subway car. Yeah, cultural differences, but I was appalled.
I ride the green line (Chicago CTA) to work and every morning I see every manner of littering you can imagine. I see kids wait for the next stop when the doors open to throw their pop cans/McDs bags/coffee cups/ect. out the door right onto the platform. I used to admonish these people untill one really got in my face and I realized that even if I could take him, showing up at work all tusseled up and with a shiner was not a good idea.
I finally retired those shoes and got a new pair. Today is my second day wearing them.
Fuck! Already?!?
Forget the chewing gum; you retire shoes after just four months?
Mike tackled that on “Dirty Jobs” once (in NYC). Getting gum off a sidewalk was more complex than I’d have thought.
Oddly enough, as a result of stomach surgery, it’s a very bad thing for me to swallow gum. Even if gum swallowing would cause instant death to every chewer, that’s no reason not to dispose of it properly. So sayeth me and my new shoes with the gum on the soles within the first two hours of wearing them.
I’m hard on them.
Visit the rural south some time. Dip , snuff, and chewing tobacco are all still used here. You want disgusting? Try stepping barefoot in a pile of used chewing tobacco that someone spit out on the beach and kicked sand over.
As for gum, I had people leaving used gum in their plates and drink glasses at the pub I worked at. At least once a week I would stick my finger in gum I hadn’t noticed when I went to remove a plate. I was never bothered by gum before then.
IIRC nicotine gum is availible by prescription.
Just as long as they cane the women too. It’s sexist to cane men, but not women. Just train some of the female guards so they can cane the women.