THE GIANT KILLER Part Four

I know that both Phineas T. Barnum and George Hull each possessed “the ingenuity to dupe, diddle, defraud and gull a whole continent.” But Barnum rebelled against those, like Hull, who held their customers in contempt. “I don't believe in duping the public”, Barnum wrote, . “but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them.” He always tried, he said, to give them more than their money's worth in entertainment. On the day the Cardiff Giant saw the light again on Mr; Newell's farm - 16 October 1868 - the self proclaimed “Prince of Humbug” was trying to rebuild his American Museum in New York City, after it had burned down for the third time  The man who brought America and the world “Tom Thumb”, the Feejee Mermaid, Jenny Lind “The Swedish Nightingale” (above), and Chang and Eng, “The Original Siamese Twins”, was finding the revival harder every year.

That fall  P.T.  traveled to cast a professional eye upon the giant still in the ground. Barnum saw the road south from Syracuse “jammed with wagons, stage coaches, horses and people on foot, all bound for Cardiff to take a glimpse at the giant.”  And he paid admission into the tent to gaze upon the great stone face, and feet and over sized circumcised penis. Before boarding the train back to New York City, Barnum (above) told a reporter, “They must not call me the Prince of Humbugs after this. That beats anything I ever did in my life.” But was it the appearance of the giant which made Barnum wary? Was it the presence in Cardiff of his competitor, Colonel Wood? Or did it have something to do with the immoral amoral always black clad mocking presence of George Hull?

As the money began to roll in a member of George Hull's inner circle announced he wanted out.  H.B. Martin, the blacksmith from Marshalltown, who had suffered the month long 40 mile odyssey across Iowa with George, had suffered enough. Maybe he was experiencing an attack of morality, maybe the rising publicity made him nervous, or maybe his brother Frank needed financial help in opening a planned grocery in Ackley, Iowa. Whatever his reason, Martin asked George Hull to buy out his share in the giant, whereupon he disappeared back to Iowa, and was never heard from again in this giant tale

He missed getting rich by a week. The giant had cost Hull and Martin less than $3,000 (Fifty thousand in 2014 dollars). Originally George Hull had ½ share of the giant – it had been his idea - while Newell and Martin each had ¼ share. Buying Martin out had cut into George's profits, and he needed an immediate influx of cash. His cousin, “Stub” Newell still had physical possession of the stone behemoth, and every day increased the chance the farmer would realize the old axiom that possession was nine tenths of the law. Luckily for George, an entrepreneur from Homer, New York stepped up eager to solve his problem: the square jawed David H. Hannan.

He was one of the biggest land owners in Courtland County, New York. Our old friend Mr. Andrew White, described Hannan (above) as “...a horse-dealer in a large way...” (think used car salesman) “...and banker in a small way” (think loan shark). White described Hannan as “keen and shrewd...who had fought his way up from abject poverty, and whose fundamental principle, as he asserted it, was "Do unto others as they would like to do unto you, and–do it first.”.”

Hannan's partners were a whose-who of Syracuse society. Dr. Amos Wescott (above)  was a successful dentist who had served a term as mayor of Syracuse in 1860. Amos Gilbert's family had settled in the area in 1810, and remained powerful in the Baptist church, with the pentagonal rounded out by William Spencer and Benjamin A. Son. Each had invested $5,000 (ninety thousand in 2014 dollars) in the joint venture, and the second week of the exhibition they paid Hull and Newell $23,000 cash ($400,000 in 2014) for a ¾ share of the giant. It seemed a safe in vestment. In two weeks in the out-of-the-way village of Cardiff, the Giant had sold $7,000 in tickets, at 50 cents apiece.

On Sunday, 5 November 1869, the Cardiff Giant was winched out of his temporary grave...

...and loaded into a wagon for the 12 mile journey to Syracuse. He was greeted at the city limits by a marching band playing “See, the Conquering Hero Comes” by Handel. 

His new home was in an exhibit hall on Vanderbilt square, across the street from the open air New York Central Railroad station (above). The next day, Monday, 6 November, 1869,   6,000 people paid $1 each to stare down at the impassive great stone face, and feet and penis, profiting in one day what had taken an entire week to match in Cardiff. The New York Central railroad added a 10 minute delay to all trains passing through Syracuse, long enough to give passengers time to cross the street and gaze upon the impassive gypsum.

One poet wanted the giant to explain himself. “Speak out, O Giant! stiff, and stark, and grim, Open thy lips of stone, thy story tell; And by the wondering crowd who pay thee court. In thy cold bed, and gaze with curious eyes On thy prone form so huge, and still so human, Let now again be heard, that voice which once, Through all old Onondaga's hills and vales, Proclaimed thy lineage from a Giant race, And claimed as subjects, all who trembling hear. “ One whom the giant spoke to was Galusha Parsons, a lawyer of “most excellent character, sterling integrity, and with much aggressive force”. More importantly, Parsons was from Fort Dodge, Iowa.

The 41 year old Parsons (above) was returning from Washington, having made oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Beeson  v Johns.  He had also just been elected as a state representative for Webster County, Iowa.  Taking advantage of the ten minute stop over in Vanderbilt Square to visit the famous Cardiff Giant., Parsons recognized the stone as home grown. He immediately cabled his political ally Mr. Benjaman Gue, the editor of the Fort Dodge “North West”.  Parsons told Gue, “I believe it is made of that great block of gypsum those fellows got at Fort Dodge a year ago, and shipped east.”

Gue (above) quickly uncovered the truth. The 28 July, 1868 edition of the “Boone Standard” had contained an account of the curious 11 feet 3 inches long, 3 feet 2 inches wide, 1 foot by 10 inches thick, 3 ½ tons of gypsum, shipped to Chicago. But rather than rush into print, editor Gue dispatched reporters to Chicago, to hunt down the sculpture of the giant, and to New York state, to hunt for George Hull's fingerprints.

Meanwhile, over its six week stay in Syracuse, the giant maintained an average of 10,000 visitors a week, at a dollar each. The curious ranged from day laborers to miners, politicians, secretaries, and even Professor O.C. Marsh. The latter – joined by 24 year old Fillmore Smith, a mining engineer - had the audacity to put in print that gypsum was soluble in water, which meant the smooth features of the giant could not have laid in the damp ground behind Mr. Newell's barn for hundreds or thousands of years without dissolving. Marsh labeled the giant “A most decided humbug”.

Our old friend, Andrew White (above), who would one day help found Cornell University, had touched on a more prosaic reason not to believe in the giant. Back in October, he had pointed out, “there was no reason why the farmer should dig a well in the spot where the figure was found...it was convenient neither to the house nor to the barn”  He called the giant “undoubtedly a hoax”. So why was anyone still believing in it?

In fact there was not one Cardiff Giant, there were many. In post revolutionary America, up state New York was the birth place of new religions and the revival of the Great Awakening for many others: the astounding Joseph Smith and his bookish Mormonism, the precipitate diurnal Seventh Day Adventists, the passionate celibacy of the Shakers, the faux spiritualism of the three Fox Sisters, the postponed second coming of the Millerites, and the coitus interrupters of the Oneida post renaissance utopians. These Christian sects had Genesis, 6:4 on their side, “There were giants in the earth in those days...”

To the religious the Cardiff Giant was a fossil, a petrified man, a physical validation of faith. The passionate poet Ralph Waldo Emerson called it “a bona fide petrified human being..” Another preacher explained, “This is not a thing contrived of man, but is the face of one who lived on the earth, the very image and child of God.”

A Yale Divinity student, Mr. Alexander McWhorter, viewed the giant in Syracuse and believed he was obviously a statue. As proof, he found several lines of Phonetician carved into his thigh. Luckily, Mr. McWhorter could read ancient Phonetician, and translate the tale of ancient sailors blown to a distant shore (and 400 miles inland) who had carved the giant to memorialize their survival. Nobody else who could read Phonetician could find any on the giant. But lots of people who could not, were willing to believe the ancient language was there.

At a gathering of “experts” in Syracuse, judged by an audience who paid $10 apiece to witness the debate, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes drilled into the giant's head (behind the ear, so as not to disturb the esthetics) and found nothing but solid stone. The giant, said Holmes, was a statue, but “of great antiquity.” Holmes was followed on the platform by Eramus Dow Palmer, a sculpture. He declared the giant was indeed a statue, but a really bad one, done by a recent amateur. Before Palmer could finish his artistic destruction of the giant, Cyrus Cobb, a competitor of Mr. Palmer's, leap onto the platform and announced “Any man who calls this a humbug brands himself a fool!”  The lecture hall dissolved into shouts and accusations, and one man began beating the living daylights out of the art critic, Palmer.

Once the assailant was arrested, and the hall cleared, a reporter cornered farmer “Stub” Newell, and asked what it all meant. Was the giant a petrified man, an ancient statue, or a cheat?   Newell shrugged and explained, “You pays your money and you takes your chance. They got to see my giant. They got to hear four geniuses at two dollars and fifty cents per genius, and also saw a good fight. That seems like a fair value to me.”

To the Syracuse syndicate – horse trader Hannen, Dr. Westcott, et al -  the melee was delightful news. After tripling their investment, they were ready to take the giant on the road.

- 30 -

THE GIANT KILLER Part Three

I suspect that George “the giant killer” Hull suffered from a condition known at the time as “moral insanity”. Perhaps this is why his chosen appearance - fancy dark clothes and a handlebar mustache -  became the epitome of villainy for generations. His symptoms included charm, pathological lying, promiscuity and an addiction to gambling, a lack of shame or remorse and a moral versatility in his criminal and business ventures. Today he would be called a sociopath. The primary victim of his disorder was his wife, Helen. She was 16 and pregnant when they married in 1856. And she was his niece. And George's best chance for salvation.

George had begun his criminal career in his twenties, having devised a new method for marking cards. His partner would sell the decks to saloons and gambling clubs at a discount, and then George would appear as a passing salesman, to read the cards and rake in the profits. After a couple of years, George was arrested. Released from jail, his brother took him in and gave him a job in his Bimington cigar factory. George repaid the favor by seducing and impregnating his daughter, Helen.

The family helped the new husband buy a small farm five miles to the north in Port Crane, now Fenton, New York. By the time his second child, Sarah, was born in 1860, George was growing enough tobacco to both sell to his brother, and to open his own cigar shop in Port Crane. Through the four years of the American Civil War, all of George Hull's battles were personal. When it looked like his business would fail, in September of 1864, George torched his own shop and home. With the insurance money, George moved his family to Baraboo, Wisconsin, and enlisted his Iowan brother-in-law to sell his left over cigars.

At about the same time, in the tiny village of Homer, New York, Gideon Emmon was enlisting in company E of the 185^th Volunteer Regiment. But Gideon's war lasted just 6 months and one battle. On the last day of March, 1865, his regiment occupied the White Oak Road, outflanking rebel positions south of Petersburg, Virginia. After digging in to its new position, it was attacked by Rebel infantry, causing just six causalities. History books record this as a mere prelude to the next day's Union victory at Five Forks, which forced the Confederate Army to abandon Richmond, and start on the road to Appomattox Court House and surrender. But Private Gideon Emmon did not participate in that victory. When he finally came home to Cardiff he had a full disability pension to compensate for his missing left arm and his shattered mind, suffered that 31 March, 1865.  He treated his nightmares and pain as best he could, and worked what few odd jobs could be performed by a one armed alcoholic in a farming community. All of this made Gideon an odd hire to dig a well.

His employer on Saturday, 16 October, 1869, was William Newell, nicknamed “Stub” because of his height and stubbornness. He was described at the time as “A man of pretty good intelligence...but not an educated or learned man in any way.” A modern historian calls him “a sober, honest sort of farmer,” “a private man who certainly didn't court celebrity” and “entirely unremarkable” He was also a cousin to George Hull. At about nine that cool clear fall morning, Mr. Newell led Gideon Emmon and fellow veteran Henry Nichols, down the slope from the farm house, and around the barn, to the only dry spot in the field beyond (above). It was here that Mr. Newell told the men he wanted his new well dug. .

Either workman might have asked why a farm which already had a well between the house and the barn, wanted a second well at the edge of a swampy field, bordering the reds and yellow trees lining Onondaga creek to the north. But they were happy to have the work on such a cool day. Henry Nichols just picked up a shovel and started digging, while Gideon grabbed a bucket to tote the soil away for dumping. With just one man able to handle a shovel, it was slow work, even allowing for the loose rich black soil. It took two hours for Nichols to clear three feet of earth, and before eleven Nichols' shovel clanged against a rock. Amazingly for this region, it was the first large stone encountered, and the pair began to clear the dirt to discover the size and shape of the obstruction. They stopped when a huge white toe emerged into the light.

Gideon ran to fetch Mr. Newell, who, with a third witness, ... er workman..., was gathering stones for the lining of his new well. And as a stroke of luck, a fourth witness, John Haynes, a local farmer on his way to attend a fair in Syracuse - 12 miles to the north - just happened by at this moment. All five men rushed to the back of the Newell farm to see the toe. Newell and Haynes jumped into the hole and began to assist in the clearing of more soil.   Quickly a pair of feet emerged into the sunlight. One of the men - I suspect it was Hayes – observed, “I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!” The digging became frenetic. Hayes said, “as fast as they cleared the body toward the head, I cleared the dirt off about up to the hand on the belly.”

By sunset that Saturday evening, people from surrounding farms were walking over to the Newell farm to have a look. The Syracuse Journal described the excitement. "Men left their work, women caught up their babies, and children in all numbers hurried to the scene..."  Sunday brought larger crowds, as people stopped by on their way to and from church. And, of course, John Haynes carried word of the discovery to the city of Syracuse. On Monday, 18 October 1869 the “Syracuse Standard” published the news under the headline “PETRIFIED”, and described the Giant in detail. “It has been...examined by physicians, and they assert positively that it must have been once a living giant. The veins, eyeballs, muscles, tendons of the heel, and cords of the neck are all very fully exhibited...Mr. Newell proposes now to allow it to rest as found until examined by scientific men. It certainly is one of the connecting links between the past and present races, and of great value.” The telegraph spread the story in minutes across the country, “A NEW WONDER” and “THE PETRIFIED GIANT” Added the Syracuse paper, “ The story has passed from one to another till very many, probably ten thousand of our citizens, have already heard of it.”

Monday morning the look-y-loos where met by large tent (above)  erected over the giant, which a “Dr. Boynton” declared was actually a statue, “of a Caucasian. The features are finely cut and are in perfect harmony.”. To enter the tent and gaze upon the giant for fifteen minutes, visitors now paid 25 cents. Mr. Newell took in $220 that Monday. And with 400 visitors a day making the trek down from the rail head at Syracuse, the crowds kept growing, the average day's take was well over $500. One visitor observed, "The roads were crowded with buggies, carriages and even omnibuses from the city, and with lumber-wagons from the farms — all loaded with passengers.”. That second Sunday after its discovery, 2,600 curious viewers shuffled through the tent, now paying 50  cents each..

The visitor quoted above, Mr. Andrew White, tried to maintain his scientific detachment once he was inside, but “with the subdued light from the roof of the tent...and the limbs contorted as if in a death struggle...An air of great solemnity pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper."  The town's one hotel did a month's worth of business every day. Stands to sell sweet apple cider and gingerbread suddenly appeared, to tend to the crowds, a few even renting space on Mr. Newell's farm. Pamplets appeared (above), almost magically, detailing theories about where the Cardiff Giant had come from. Almost unnoticed in the crowds, George Hull slipped into the village, as did H.B. Martin. They brought with them Colonel J.W. Wood, one of P.T. Barnum's competitors.

Joseph H. Wood (above) claimed the title of Colonel thanks to his experience as an 18 year old  in the 1835 “war” between Ohio and Michigan territory. He spent the next 15 years operating a “traveling museum” out of Cincinnati, then opened a stationary one in Philadelphia's old Bolivar Hotel. When that burned down in 1857, he opened a new one in St. Louis, and with a partner in 1859 opened “The Great Burlesque Circus - A Pantomimic and Acrobatic Exhibition of Dogs and Monkeys” in Chicago.

In 1862 J.H. Wood opened another museum (above) on East Clark Street in Chicago. Observed the Colonel's own publicity, it was “remarkable for its specialties.” For a mere 25 cent entrance fee, you could gaze upon “...more than sixty cases of birds, reptiles, insects, and objects from around the world, all arranged somewhat haphazardly.” On display was a model of the Parthenon, Daniel Boone’s rifle, mummies and a 96 foot long whale skeleton. Some of his exhibits were even real. “Col. Wood, the proprietor, knows he has a good thing, and that he does not hide it in the dark.”

His arrival within a week of the “discovery” of the Cardiff Giant, as it was now being called, testified to Wood's deep involvement in the creation of the fraud. And it guaranteed the rapid collapse of the entire scheme.

- 30 -

A PLATE OF HUMBLE PI

I suspect the problem begins with the oft quoted but not well understood phrase, “pie are squared.” In the first place, it’s not. It is a fact that you cannot square a circle, and yet it is done everyday, out of sight for those of use who are math-impaired. This is so because  pi is the relationship between the length of the line forming a circle, divided by the distance across that same circle. And this relationship somehow always works out to be 3.141592653589793238…etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitas, add nfelicitous, and never ever repeating. This makes Pi an irrational number, which is confusing again because I find all numbers irrational, even on Pi day (3/15).

To find the area of a living room you simply ask a realtor, and then add  10%. But to find the area of a circle you must  measure the radius of a circle and then square it -  or to put it another way, the radius of the circle times the radius of the circle times the radius of the circle - three times.  In the shorthand of math-speak that becomes, A(rea)= pi Radius squared. This is true math-media.      

What this mystery formula really means is that you can never turn a circle into a square of the exact same size: close, but never exactly. And it doesn’t matter if it is a great big circle or an itty-bitty one. Pi is always 3.141 etcetera, etcetera, etcetera..

If you are a math freak this is obvious, while the rest of us have to be satisfied with accepting that Pi is an irrational number and live with it. But I ask you, what is the value of knowing pi? 

I had a fourth grade teacher who was so obsessed with having her students memorize the value of Pi to twenty decimal places that she had us memorize the following poem: “Sir, I send a rhyme excelling, In sacred truth and rigid spelling, Numerical sprites elucidate, For me the lexicon’s full weight”. Each of the 20 words of that poem has the number of letters required to read out the first twenty digits of pi, in order. . I had to memorized that poem again in my thirties because as a ten year old I couldn’t spell the word Nantucket, and as a sixty year old I rely upon a spell checker to detail any word long enough to rhyme with  “elucidate”. So this poem was as much a mystery to me then as the number Pi remained for years.

But I am older now and I have grown so used to making mistakes in public that I hardly notice the embarrassment anymore. So I openly admit that I still find pi a puzzle. Besides, every time I make a mistake, I learn something new. Things my mistakes have taught me so far include, never turn down a chance to use the bathroom, never loan money to attractive women, never invest in Nigerian lottery tickets, never give out my social security number over the net, and never question the value of pi. But, why pi?

Legend has it that the great Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse was struggling over the solution to pi when a Roman soldier blundered into his garden. The old man supposedly snapped, “Don’t touch my circles!”, whereupon the chastised legionary pulled his Gladius and separated Archimedes’ head from his face. I suppose that if Archimedes had been sitting in his bathtub, as he allegedly was when he discovered that displaced water could be used to measure density (Eureka!), something else might have been separated. But, suffice it to say that before computers, finding pi was a great big pain in the Archimedes. He managed to figure out that pi was somewhere between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7. He might have done better if he had invented the decimal point, first. But...

About the year 480 CE the Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi figured out that pi was a little more than 3.1415926 and a little less than 3.1415927. After that the decimal point zealots took over. The German mathematician and fencing instructor Ludolf van Ceulen worked out pi to 35 decimal places. And in 1873 the amateur geek, William Shanks, worked it out to 707 decimal places. But William made one tiny little mistake in the 528th number and that threw everything else off. But it was such a good try that nobody noticed his screw up until 1944. Today computers have figured pi out to one trillion digits to the right of the decimal point and still no repeatable pattern has been detected, and still it never reaches zero. It is still a little bit less than 3.15 and a little bit more than 3.14. All that has changed is the definition of “a little bit”. It keeps getting smaller and smaller -  but it will never be zero.

But what does that mean? What does Pi mean, beyond its face value? Well, it turns you can find it in the   curve of the double helix of a DNA molecule, the chemical code of all living plants, animals and bacteria, and the behavior of light coming from distant galaxies, or out sun. Einstein himself realized that if you want to describe why and how a river "meanders"  to the sea, you need to use Pi , because the actual length of a stream, with twists and bends is usually between 1.3 and 1.4 times the straight line distance - called the "meander ratio".  All the geologists have to do is plug in the variables for soil type, and angle of slope and latitude and drawing rivers on a map becomes predictable. Pi is why why so many rivers look the same when seen from space or on a map. Pi is what all rivers have in common with DNA. And airplane wings. And sewer pipes. And eye balls, human and otherwise. 

Pi reveals the underlying structure of the universe, the lines of force - magnetic,  gravity, chemical or electrical.  Pi is like a master key, that with a little jiggling, can be made to open just about any door. The mere fact that such a key exists, tells you that everything we can see, hear and feel is connected to everything else, even the stuff we can't see. Pi tells you the chaos inside an exploding super nova is governed by the same laws that control the budding of a flower. It is the mathematical proof that there is a logic to the entire universe, and that logic is 3.141592653589793238...etcetera, etcetera.        

Thus pi is the “admirable number” according to the devilish little Polish poetess Wislawa Szmborska. While being infinitely long it includes “…my phone number, your shirt size, the year nineteen hundred and seventy-three, sixth floor number of inhabitants, sixty-five cents, hip measurement, two fingers, a charade and a code, in which we find how blithe the trostle sings!” (…and no, I have no idea what or who the hell a trostle is or what makes it blithe or unblithe. Do you?)

Daniel Rockmore, in the pages of "The Chronicle of High Education" for 12 March 1999, wrote that Pi was "Foreign, unpredictable, otherworldly, yet as common as a circle...it's easy to find, but hard to know. Among mathematicians there still rages a fierce, unsettled debate about whether pi is a "normal" number--that is, whether each of the digits 0 through 9 each occur on average one-tenth of the time in the never-ending decimal expansion of pi...making...Pis...a veritable poster number for the fashion world's ambiguous and androgynous advertising campaigns."  And you thought mathematics had no sex appeal  Why, if Pi was plain old 3 or dull old 4, there would be no sex. Sex is made possible by being 3.14159265358979.... etcetera, etcetera.. And it cannot be and will not be controlled. And certainly not owned.

A physician and a crackpot amateur mathematician from Solitude, Indiana named Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin thought that he had “solved” pi to the last digit - and none of this irrational numerical horse feathers for him!  He decided to make Pi his own personal private property by copyrighting it.  But in order to profit from his discovery (you know how wealthy the Pythagoras estate is) Dr. Goodwin needed a legal endorsement. And rather than subject his brainchild to the vagaries of the copyright peer review, the good doctor instead offered his theory as an accomplished fact to the local politicians. The proposal, Indiana House Bill 246, “…an act introducing a new mathematical truth and offered…to be used only by the State of Indiana free of cost…provided it is accepted and adopted by the official action of the Legislature…”. this insanity actually made it through the Committee on Canals and Swamps (Perfect place for it!) in record time, and was passed by the full Indiana house on 5 February, 1897, by a vote of 67 to 0.  Who says politicians don't spend time on important issues?

Unfortunately, in the Indiana Senate some wiseacre showed the bill to a visiting Purdue party- pooper, Professor of Mathematics C.A. Waldo. And now we at last know where Waldo was, at least in 1897. The lawmaker asked if the professor would like the honor of meeting the amazing Dr. Goodwin, and Professor Waldo replied that he already knew all the lunatics he cared to know, thank you very much. And with that comment Dr. Goodwin’s brief bubble of fame was burst. On 12 February, 1897 any further vote on the bill to copywrite the perfect definitive solution to Pi was postponed indefinitely.  Hoosier lunatics have since moved on to more productive fields.

It was not a victory for logic so much as an avoidance of a victory for ignorance, which is pretty much the same thing that happened in Tennessee about 30 years later when they tried to make evolution illegal. Don't tell the whales. They'll have to go back to being dogs. 

Still pi remains one of the most popular mathematical equations, if mostly poorly appreciated by those of us who aren’t trying to generate a random number or navigate a jet plane across the North Pole, or predict the next stock market bubble, or launch a satellite, run a radio station, process an X-ray or a Cat-scan, drive a submarine, drill for oil, purify gold or etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitas, add infelicity.

Just trust me, and always trust pi. It lifts your spirit, gives you a sense of security and keeps your circles on the square. To share it just try singing..."Pi, Pi, Me oh my, Nothing tastes sweet, wet, salty and dry, all at once, ...oh my, I love pi!

- 30 -