I've decided to take a break from defending our city's great monument to political transgression from the brilliant barbs of my colleague to ask a basic question about this wad of resistance: how do they plan to dispose of the gum?

I called up Emily Crawford, director of communications at Pike Place Market. She said they plan to throw the gum in the landfill.

"There’s a lot of trash that accumulates on the wall," Crawford said. "The wall looks colorful and pretty in those artistic photos. But if you look in those buckets, there’s a lot of garbage in there."

Gross. Lots of the garbage isn't organic, so you can't just toss it all into the compost.

Then I wanted to know how much gum was on the wall in the first place.

Crawford got excited and told me that she didn't know, but she had a guess. "I've heard estimates that there's about one million pieces of gum on the wall," Crawford said. "Let’s just say that each chewed piece of gum weighs a gram. That would be 2,200 pounds."

The real answer won't be known until after the gum is totally cleaned off the wall and weighed, but I called Kelly Foster, general manager of Cascading Building Maintenance, the local company tasked to clean the wall, to ask how much they cleaned off yesterday.

Foster said he guessed his team cleaned off 25 percent of the gum yesterday, which amounted to 180lbs. Multiplied by four, that gives us 720lbs of gum, a lot less than Crawford's estimate.

This calls for a scientific Slog poll.