One of the clues in yesterday’s puzzle was “Unlike Pi.” (It printed the Pi sign (π).) And since Pi is an irrational number, the answer was RATIONAL. As we all remember from third grade, Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It works out to 3.14159, give or take. It is an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction (a ratio of two integers), although 22/7 is commonly used for it. (A more accurate approximation in fraction form is 245850922/78256679.) Because of this, its decimal representation never ends (i.e., it goes on forever), nor does it enter a permanently repeating pattern. OK, back to English.

“Piphilology” is the practice of memorizing large numbers of digits of π, and world records are kept by Guinness. The record for memorizing digits of π is 70,000 digits, recited in India by Rajveer Meena in 9 hours and 27 minutes on 3/21/2015. In 2006, Akira Haraguchi, a retired Japanese engineer, claimed to have recited 100,000 decimal places, but the claim was not verified by Guinness. To be honest, I’m pretty full of myself just for remembering 3.14159. (F**king nailed it!)

One common technique (“common?” really?), is to memorize a story or poem in which the word-lengths represent the digits of π: The first word has three letters, the second word has one, the third has four, the fourth has one, the fifth has five, and so on. An early example of such a mnemonic for pi, originally devised by English scientist James Jeans, is “How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.” When a poem is used, it is sometimes referred to as a “piem.”

A few authors have used the digits of π to establish a new form of “constrained writing,” where the word lengths are required to represent the digits of π. The “Cadaeic Cadenza,” a short story by Mike Keith, contains the first 3835 digits of π in this manner. Even more amazing, the full-length book “Not a Wake,” also by Mike Keith, contains 10,000 words, each representing one digit of π. That book is a collection of poetry, short stories, a play, a movie script, crossword puzzles and other surprises.

Since Pi begins 3.14, the date March 14 (3/14) is called Pi Day by some. A recent puzzle had the clue “What comes before the Ides of March?” Since the Ides of March falls on March 15, the answer it was looking for was PI DAY.

If your head hasn’t exploded yet, how about this? — Albert Einstein’s birthday is March 14th (1879).

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Today’s puzzle had a clue “Extra amount for a waiter,” and the answer was TIP. It led to a discussion of tipping “philosophies” among the commentariat, too boring even for this blog. But I couldn’t let this comment go: “Another plus when I started bartending was that our TIP income was tax free. We just paid taxes on our hourly wages. That changed when they started to tax the estimated TIP income based on the total $ amount of sales.”

But tipping was always includable in gross income (i.e, not tax-free). It’s just that there used to be no reporting mechanism alerting the IRS to it, so waitpeople never reported it. As my old tax prof used to say (Dean Bernard Wolfman, alav hashalom), the Code provision on gross income was written by Gertrude Stein: “Income is income is income.” Even if you find money on the street you are supposed to report it, if you want to file an honest return.

Did someone mention waiters? Here’s a joke told to me years ago by my dear friend Roy (Hi Roy and Pam!). It’s so wonderfully ridiculous, it’s always been a favorite of mine.

This guy is dining by himself in a nice restaurant and just when he’s ready to order, the waiter appears and takes his order. His drink arrives promptly, and just when he’s ready for his salad, it arrives as well, as does his soup shortly thereafter. He’s impressed by the service, even more so when he dropped his soup spoon and, within seconds, his waiter arrived with another spoon.

He says to the waiter, “I must tell you, I’m very impressed with the service here. How in the world did you get that soup spoon to me so quickly?” And the waiter explained that the restaurant owners commissioned a study by an efficiency consultant to see how they could improve their service. And one of the things the study discovered was that the most frequently dropped utensil was the soup spoon. So every waiter keeps an extra one in his jacket pocket.

“That’s brilliant,” the customer says. “I’m very impressed.”

A short while later, he noticed that the waiter had a white string hanging down from his fly. At first he thought it was just random, but then he noticed that every waiter had one.

“Excuse me,” he asked. “I notice that you and all the waiters have a string hanging down from your fly. What’s that about?”

“Oh yes,” the waiter explained. “That was another suggestion of the efficiency people. They found that time was lost when we went to the bathroom to relieve ourselves. Since we touched our penises to take them out of our pants, we had to wash our hands which took time. So, now, we each have this string tied to it — so we just pull on the string to take it out, never touch ourselves, and we don’t have to wash our hands.”

“Brilliant!,” the customer said. “Very impressive.”

But after thinking about it for a bit, he called the waiter back over. “I just have one more question,” he said. “When you’re done, how do you get it back into your pants?”

And the waiter said, “I don’t know about the other fellows, but I usually use my spoon.”