Pi Day Transcends St. Paddy's

Do not stop reading.

The mere appearance of the symbol (π) or the word "Pi" is enough to bring back trembles that began in Junior High.  But you know perfectly well that you haven't thought of Pi for years.  If you had or have kids, you just let it rest at "Use 3.14, for God's sake!" and let them do their own damned homework.  If they still have homework.

Today is 3.14, as the Europeans would have it, and, therefore, is Pi Day.  But not as cool as five years from now when it will be 3.1415 (ironically no rounding here).

Pi Day has traditionally been lost in the run up to St. Patrick's day, just like your car keys or, for that matter, your car.  Mathematicians are too busy working on the next generation of mortgage-backed-security derivatives for Goldman Sachs to loose on us when the SEC stops looking, probably next week.  They can't be gathered in one Irish bar easily, like the rest of us.  You try talking about multi-dimensional space with pretzels in your mouth for five hours.  Such words, aside from, Pi maybe, do not flow as readily as green beer.

Unlike St. Patrick, however, Pi can wait.  Pi is as infinite teenage angst, for which it is partially responsible; as transcendental as a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay (see teenage angst above); and as misunderstood as Alan Greenspan's legacy (see teenage angst above but apply it to a 401K).

So, what is Pi, you having long since forgotten it and the teenage heartache that supplanted it?  Pi is the product of the circumference of a circle (that's the round part) and its diameter (the straight-through-the-heart part, the heart not being on the ring itself).  Something like that and, no, you don't need to remember these things when you move to the next blog.  They are just approximations, just like 3.14.

It should be noted that 3.14 is a very weak approximation.  (Think this blog versus, say, literature.)  Pi has been computed out to 1 trillion digits and it keeps on going.  Like a circle, Pi has no end.  That is a real circle, not the oblong-looking things you are doodling right now.  In that endless sense, Pi is just like God or the usual Megan Fox obsession.

Pi is not restricted to circles, either, which are as two dimensional as any Jim Cameron character. It even had its own smaller-than-Avatar-grossing movie.  And Pi is in the middle of all kinds of objects. like baseballs, and equations, like the volume of a baseball.  Add steroids to get multi-dimensional equations with Pi, equations that reach $30 million a not-endless-season.

Let the celebration begin!  Let it run right through St. Paddy's Day.  Hell, let it run all the way to next year.  Pi is like that and deserves no less.

But, don't try a Pi Parade at home without a bucket of Dramamine and shift-designated bartenders.  Each of whom can double as your spotter.

The Blog in the Forest

If you posted a Blog on a avatar of a tree in a virtual forest and no one reads it, is it a blog at all?

Well, it is now.

Those of you have visited before--you don't have to raise your hands; I think I know you all pretty well--you will note that this blog site is kind of mucked up with commercialism.

Sorry about that.

Life is no day at the beach.  But the Haitians already knew that. The truth is, it's hard to make any money as a writer who does not have a current novel to sell or does have a screenplay about eggs that are neither robots nor primed to explode after the opening credits.

My mother had always wanted me to be a surgeon/columnist.  But I hated the idea of putting my opinions in writing less I decide to run for President and I literally could not pith a frog in high school bio.  My middle school aptitude tests told my guidance counselor that I was best suited for farming potatoes and, after shipping most of the spuds during a blight to England, swapping sacks of them for babies in the dead of night, all the while operating from a Gypsy caravan.  Maybe, the Irish-Romanian heritage thing trumped my uncanny skill with long division and isosceles triangles.

So, I had to pursue other work, with screenplays and/or fiction getting some limited attention.

Along comes Blogging and those maternal dreams may be partially fulfilled.  At least, it is fun.  Of course, the gods who oversee jobs and executive compensation do not figure that doing something you like is acceptable homage to them.

I guess Google operates in a cloud above those gods.  Google's Blogger told me I could "monetize" my blog.  That sounded really good since I am not monetizing anything else at the moment and Christmas is taken.

So, Google was nice enough to place some ads on my Empty Glass Full blog site.  If enough people click on the ads, I get about 30 cents a month in nano-dollars.  Hey, more than I had coming in.

Then there was Amazon.com.  Great place.  I use it all the time and their Kindle operation was the first place to offer ebook versions of my, uh, twentieth century novels.  So very yesterday, I know, but I appreciate their willingness anyway. When Blogger offered to monetize my site further via an Amazon associates program, I figured, Wow, maybe, 60 cents a month.  And I may get to share my page with Taylor Swift.

So there it is, off to the side, but real obvious and... colorful.  Amazon access through my blog site.  Pretty cool and very convenient.  It ain't pretty, but making money usually isn't, unless you're, say, Megan Fox.