In days of yore, a traveling journeyman would have to pay off a wizened troll before he could cross a precarious bridge slung over a yawning gorge. "THREE GOLD COINS!" the troll would yell, flecks of saliva and goat meat dripping from his beard. Our modern-day equivalent is the Massachusetts Turnpike, where the trolls have now been replaced by automated toll-collecting baskets -- although you can see from the picture at right that their hygiene hasn't improved.


Experiment #4. This time, instead of throwing in $1.00, I decided to tape two pictures of rap superstar 50 Cent, because that adds up to a dollar:





As I drove away, I kept nervously glancing in my rear view mirror for the Toll Booth Police, or 50 Cent's posse, but the sad truth is that nothing happened.


Experiment #5. For my next experiment, I made sure to check the toll booth sign, which reads "$1.00 COINS ONLY NO BILLS PENNIES OR CANADIAN COINS." (With all that toll money, you'd think they could afford some punctuation.) Fortunately, the sign makes no mention of other foreign coins, which is the loophole I used for my next experiment. I consulted an online currency calculator to get up-to-the-minute exchange rates, then tossed in the following coins:

1 Indian Rupee ($0.02 U.S.)
15 Thai Baht ($0.36 U.S.)
11 Singapore cents ($0.06 U.S.)
1 Finnish Marka and 200 Italian Lira (no longer used, since the Euro came to town)

That only added up to 44 cents, so I threw in a couple of Chuck E. Cheese tokens as well.



When I went through this time, I heard the toll booth operator shout something that sounded like, "WALP!" I had been trying my little experiments at the same toll booth, so maybe he recognized my car, or maybe he was choking on a thick slice of ham. I didn't stick around to find out -- I got the WALP out of there.


Experiment #6. In olden days, one could directly barter goods and services without the aid of money. So I bought a couple of oranges from a local convenience store, which cost me about a dollar.



In my next run through the Mass Pike toll booths, I threw in the oranges.



They sat in the bucket, where I assume they remained until a Fruit Collection Officer came by to pick them up. I'm sure he enjoyed their plump, juicy wedges -- after he removed the thick, encrusted peels that had been defiled by thousands of nasty-ass coins.


Next: the apology!