What's the deal with all the 'P's?

Looked down at my To-Do list this morning and was blinded by ‘P’s.

Pick up Prescription.
Deliver Paul’s Post.
Buy:
Pillows.
Plant Pots.
Peat free Potting compost.
Print Cartridges.

What’s the story with all the ‘P’s? Is there anything significant in the letter, other than its many appearances being a natural coincidence?
Any ideas, please let me know!

While I was daydreaming about the significance of ‘P’, I remembered a City Tribune colyoom I wrote way back in August 2007, inspired by the Sun newspaper, which had finally solved Pi!

With Murdoch closing down the News of The World, a Sunday edition of his Sun (perchance called ‘SunDay’? Call me a genius if you must!) is inevitable, so this feels like a good time to celebrate the wonder that is Britain’s Brashest Red Top newspaper.

While you’re at it, check out the piece's second section , where I don’t mind saying, your colyoomist was incredibly economically prescient.


August 2007
What a relief - The Sun has solved Pi!
Thank goodness for the Super Soaraway Sun ! Why on earth do I buy a copy of Britain’s best-selling newspaper only once or twice a year?

If only the world’s greatest scientists and mathematicians had bought the same issue that I did, they could all be sleeping soundly in their beds tonight.

For aeons mathematicians, engineers, mystics and artists alike have wrestled with that old conundrum: the relationship between a circle's diameter and its circumference.
Could you put that more simply, my son?

Well, The Sun does ‘simple’ better than anyone. On page 6, they ran a fifty question quiz, rather ingeniously called  ‘Feeling Brainy?’

Possibly looking for their more cerebral readers, the quiz was placed opposite the paper’s Editorial Comment, which, by the way, read exactly thus:

“Load of Bull?
The search for Ireland’s most beautiful cow was unveiled yesterday. They might look the same to some, but for some a sprightly bovine can be moo-tiful. But a sexy cow? Pull the UDDER one!”

Tempted to see if I qualified as brainy for a Sun reader, I stormed in, until I reached question 8, where I have to admit, I became a bit stumped.

‘How many times does the diameter of a circle fit into its circumference?’

All power to the question setter. He or she could so easily have just asked “Imagine you’ve drawn a line from one side of a circle right across to the other side. Now, how many of those wee lines do you think will fit around the outside of the circle?

But they didn’t, because they want to believe that their readers are not idiots. I didn't want to be an idiot. I didn’t want to come up with the wrong answer, and a part of me just hoped it would suffice to say Pi, or even the symbol (π).

Just how clever did The Sun want me to be? After all, from the little I understand, (or to be honest, just learned from the internet), as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter in Euclidean genome, Pi is a mathematical constant and a transcendental and  irrational number.
Also known as Archimedes' constant and Ludolph’s number, its exact size has never been ascertained.

On the 20th November, 2005, a gentleman called Chao Lu became the world record holder for reciting decimal places of Pi, having memorised it to a  truly unbelievable 67,890 digits.
In September 2002, Dr. Kanada’s team at the University of Tokyo calculated Pi to 206,158,430,000 decimal places, and still didn’t get an answer.

Foolish ignorant men. If only they’d had half a brain cell to rub together, they’d have gone down the shop, bought The Sun, some tea bags, milk and a packet of chocolate digestives, and whilst dunking their biccies in their mugs, they could have found out that they had been wasting their time.

‘Cos there it was, in the answers, upside down on the same page.

3.

That’s how may times the diameter of a circle fits into its circumference. There is no need for decimal places. The Sun has released us from centuries of mathematical purgatory; delivered us from scientific  torment and philosophical agony.

It’s official. Pi = 3.
The Sun. We love It.

***

Actually, I’m being a little unfair to The Sun.
Now, that’s a challenging concept!

Whilst that item about the cow was true, it did not run alone. Above it, the red top ran an editorial about the economic disparity enjoyed and suffered in unequal measure in our so-called Tiger Republic.

Running with figures recently released by the Central Statistics Office, the paper complains quite rightly that our society cannot be called ‘fair’ when the top ten percent of this country’s earners bring home €2,233 each week after tax, while the lowest ten percent earn only €157.

What kind of boom is this, where the rich get richer and the poor become inexorably poorer?
Allow me to introduce you to the Thatcherite boom, just like the one Britain endured in the 1980’s.

Then, as now, small groups of people living within a tiny geographical area became immensely rich, while the rest of us were bombarded with propaganda about the economic miracle in which we were living.

Then, as Bertie and his PD charioteers do now, Thatcher encouraged the marriage of an unbridled belief in the beauty of the free market to a young and hungry population, greedy beyond all precedent.

Then, as now, all you end up with is the disgrace of a society we have today.

If you tell enough people how well off they are enough times, they will start to believe it themselves. They will go out and buy 46” HDTVs on their credit cards, and take on 100% mortgages, because they feel financially secure.

Sure, aren’t we richer than we have ever been?

Watch and wait as the global corporate greed that encourages sub-prime mortgages begins to collapse, bringing us all down with it. Before you can say ‘Negative Equity’, the two most dreaded words in a free market economy, the house you bought is worth less than you paid for it.

Already I dread the start of house repossessions that I saw in mid-’80’s England.
But more than that, I fear for those families (and don’t forget, we’re talking about 10% of the earning population here!) who earn only €158, and yet have to spend €217 each week to survive.

Before we become obsessed with interest rates, bricks and mortar, let’s not forget our neighbours, who lie awake at night full of fear. They might well be worried about their mortgages, but as their spending on simple groceries and utility bills sends them €3,000 into debt each year, they are, more than anything, worried about putting food into their childrens’ mouths.

And there was me, thinking Ireland had left those dark days behind.

You might well laugh when I call myself a Socialist, but the trouble with Capitalism is that the philanthropic dream of a so-called Drip Drip Drip effect of wealth distribution never existed in the real world.

The rich became rich in the first place by hanging on to their money. The poor become poorer, and will stay poorer as long as we turn our heads, vote for the status quo, and sleep happily whilst not giving a damn.

© Charlie Adley
August 4th, 2007

I've gone from curious to furious,and now have to find a new Butcher!

Oh poopers! Relations with my Butcher's shop just went down the drain, and none of the badness needed to happen at all.
For over 25 years, as often as possible, it has been my absolute pleasure to cook a roast dinner on a Sunday.
Sunday roast was always a central occasion in my childhood week. We all love food like mama made it, so even when I lived on my own, I found nothing easier than to shove a chicken leg into the oven with a couple of spuds. Steam up some fresh crunchy veg, and Bob's your uncle. A veritable feast.
Now that I make my own Yorkshire pudding too, there are few mysteries left for me in the process.
A couple of months ago I popped into my Butcher's, an award-winning establishment on the western side of the city, and bought a rolled beef rib roast. This a cut I'd never buy in the supermarket, but on the day that was in it, I found myself pointing out a lump of meat to the young man behind the counter. He assured me that it was a lovely tender piece of meat.
At that time I wasn't even sure if we had guests coming, so thinking it would be relatively inexpensive, I told him I'd have it.
When I found out that the meat cost 20 quid, I wished I'd invested in a bit of Silverside, or even better, rib on the bone. But I trusted my Butcher. They had never let me down .
Come Sunday, there were five hungry mouths at my table, and although we all feasted on crunchy roasties, yummy Yorkshire pudding, roasted parsnip, braised onions, and a plethora of veggies in wine gravy, none of us were able to enjoy the meat. There was so much sinew and gristle that I had to plead with my guests not to be too polite, but spit it out and leave it.
How disappointing!
Aware of all the good years' service I have enjoyed at said Butcher's, the next time I was passing I popped in and told one of the blokes behind the counter what had happened.
To be honest, I felt a bit embarrassed, and I told him so. Clearly there was nothing much he could do. Nevertheless, he was very sympathetic, and told me that the next time I came in to buy something, I should tell another member of staff, and they'd see what they could do.
Can't say fairer than that. As it happens, what with trips to England, at least a month passed before I was back in the Butcher's, to buy a free range chicken.
Clutching my intended purchase, I explained to the bloke behind the counter how his colleague had asked me to tell my tale of woe when I next made a purchase.
'Oh well, that's the way it goes. Sorry about that."
"Yes, I know. But why do you think your colleague asked me to tell somebody the story again?"
He gave me a big warm smile and told me that maybe he'd said that because they were always interested in feedback.
Up to that moment, I hadn't really been bothered how this all turned out. Certainly, I hadn't gone in there to get a refund.
I had gone in there to get a chicken, and follow the advice I was given the last time, if the mood took me.
But now my mood was overtaking me. As I approached the woman at the till, she asked me how I was.
"Not the best!" said I, relating the whole story again.
She then proceeded to tell me, at great length, what I already knew. Maybe it was because I have a penis. I do find that women in Irish shops seem to assume that if you have a dangly thing between your legs you cannot possibly understand food and the cooking thereof.
She told me how it wasn't a good cut. I told her I knew that.
She told me that it was just the fat that was the problem. I told her that this was not fat, which would have rendered down in the cooking. It was sinew and gristle and inedible.
She told me that if I had only brought it in so that himself the Butcher could have seen it, then she might have been able to do something about it.
I asked if that meant she didn't believe what I was saying.
Oh no, she said, of course she believed me, but there was nothing she could do if she hadn't seen the meat.
By now, I really couldn't be arsed to inform her how incredibly unlikely it was that I would have either the time or inclination to wrap up the shitty leftovers of a very disappointing dinner and bring them back to her shop.
Yet she persisted, and in the process her inability to help and generally patronising attitude managed to turn my mildly disappointed ambivalence into a raging fury.
Once again she told me that it wasn't a good cut of meat to buy. She told me that she would never buy that cut. And once again, trying to be a better human being, I declined to point out that her own employee had told me what a good piece of meat it was, how tender it would be.
Neither did I mention that it cost 20 quid, which is a juicy chunk out of this household's grocery budget.
It just wasn't worth it.
Finally, I'd had enough. I paid for my chicken and made for the door. She called out.
"You do understand, don't you? There's nothing I can do!"
"I do I do I do. Oh, and you'll understand that I won't be back."
A few minutes earlier, I'd walked into that Butcher's shop, feeling there was no real reason why they should refund me any money.
But in an astonishing inversion of customer service, by simply following the advice of their own employee, I had been dragged into an argument I didn't want to have. I had been treated like a moron, and ended up furious, wondering why she hadn't just given me a couple of quid off the chicken I was buying, for no other reason than to save a little goodwill and customer loyalty.
Now I have to find another Butcher's . What a bloomin' shame!

Double Vision
Caricatures Ireland