How would Leonardo have sliced a pizza?
by Brian Morrison
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: Professor of Ancient Symbols and Master Codebreaker, Dan Lambert, woos his new girlfriend in the only way he knows how. He is helped along in this quest by one of the “Little People”.
_____________________________________________________________________
Professor of Ancient Symbols, Dan Lambert, and his newfound girlfriend, François, stopped to gaze across the Charles river towards the north and east side of the historical city of Boston. The waterway swung round in a gigantic lazy bend which started at Harvard, then wound its way past Fenway Park, home of the famous Boston Red Sox. The colossal prudential building could be clearly seen pushing skywards on one bank, overlooking the basin of the river. The sprawling Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked on from the opposite side. One of the ever popular World War Two converted amphibious vehicles passed by to their left. The tour guide’s voice could just be heard above the growl of the diesel engine as it motored down the slipway from the road straight into the water. Tourists would wait in line for hours to board one of these Duck tours. An abbreviated history of ‘Beantown’ awaited the hordes of sightseers; some who were genuinely interested in the birth of Colonial America and the famous names from the past such as Paul Revere and William Dawes. Then there were the others who just wanted to plunge into the river in vehicles that had once stormed onto Omaha beach.
‘Tell me a little about yourself, François,’ said Dan as they left the Esplanade area and walked towards the Cheers Bar at the north-eastern corner of Boston Common.
‘What could I say about me?’ said François. ‘Well, I come from Canada and my mother was born and bred there.’
‘I knew that accent. I just knew that you were Canadian!’ said Dan triumphantly.
‘My father was Norwegian,’ continued François. ‘Sadly he is no longer alive, but he was a goldsmith to trade.’
‘Yes, your surname was a little unusual, as I remember.’
‘Valkyrie.’
‘Yes, that’s it. What does it actually mean?’
‘It comes from Norse mythology, Dan. I am the “chooser of the slain”. I decide who is going to die in battle. Then I present them to Odin in the afterlife.’
‘Quite a high profile position then,’ said Dan smiling.
‘You better believe it, brother, so just go easy or I may just make a snap decision on you.’ François playfully dug her fingers into Dan’s ribcage making him double over. Defending himself, he threw his arms around her. It was their first embrace. Somehow it felt good. Neither of them pulled away; instead they clung on to each other and eased through a small opening which took them onto the common itself.
A perfect view of Downtown Boston opened up before them. Multi-faceted skyscrapers rose majestically like the Emerald city in Oz. The common itself was Boston’s answer to Manhattan’s central park; a green-pastured paradise with bronze statues of pilgrim heroes, lakes, crosswalks, flocks of birds; a haven for joggers, street entertainers, poets and artists. People from all walks of life converged here. People of all shapes, all creeds, all colours; the parkland was a virtual melting pot.
The influence of the Irish community was never far away. The St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Boston ran a close second to New York City and Dublin itself.
As if to enforce this notion, a diminutive dwarf dressed as a leprechaun, complete with emerald green top-hat and carrot-coloured beard, danced a jig along the footpath towards them.
Just a drifter, thought Dan, only this one has gone to some effort to entertain the crowds. It occurred to him that the midget may not be so small after all. He was well aware of the trick of tying shoes to one’s knees and pretending to be three foot something tall. On closer inspection, Dan could see that this guy was indeed a dwarf. Those little shoes had real little feet inside them. Dan peeled a dollar from a roll of bills that he had in his corduroys. He imagined that the fuzzy green top-hat probably had the capacity to hold a couple of hundred bucks. Not a bad day’s takings.
The little entertainer did not, however, remove the headwear. Instead he produced three juggling balls from his coat pocket and began to toss them expertly from hand to hand.
‘Top of the mornin’ to you, sur,’ he called to Dan. ‘’Tis a fine day, is it not?’
‘It sure is buddy,’ Dan resisted the urge to call him “little guy”.
‘And where would you be off to – if you don’t mind me askin’?’ The dwarf’s arms continued snaking circular shapes whilst he spoke; each ball landing solidly in his cupped hands. ‘I am sorry for being so inquisitive,’ the little guy continued, ‘I believe dat I get the nosiness from me mammy, you know.’
Dan ignored the question. He already had the dollar bill in his hand, but he had nowhere to place it on the dwarf’s person. He felt that it would be too rude to interrupt his juggling flow and he didn’t really want to lift the dwarf’s hat off to add to his day’s takings either. The other cash that he had stuffed in there might blow away in the breeze. He decided to bide his time and enjoy the impromptu show that was being performed for his pleasure. François seemed to be enjoying it anyway.
‘Tree wishes,’ the dwarf announced out of the blue. ‘Tree wishes for you. What would you say to dat, sur? One, two, tree balls, gives you one, two, tree wishes.’
‘I-I don’t know what you mean,’ stammered Dan. Who is this little guy? A genie or something?
‘Ah now don’t you fret there, sur. I am deadly serious. This is what you might call your “lucky day”. You see, we leprechauns are a very benevolent race. Aye, dat we are indeed, sur.’
‘Oh Dan, he’s so cute,’ said François.
Dan was inclined to agree, but he still felt slightly awkward. The dwarf continued to engage Dan’s eyes through the looping balls. There was something unnerving about his stare. It was almost hypnotic in nature.
‘I tell you what, sur,’ the dwarf continued. ‘You can choose any one of these tree balls. You can take it away with you, but you must keep it, sur. That is all I ask. If you do dat - well, bejasus, you will be sure to have good luck for the rest of the day.’
‘Oh this is just like something from a fairy story,’ François exclaimed. ‘Go on, Dan,’ she needed no further encouragement from the dwarf, ‘go ahead and choose a ball.’
‘Ah now, there is a girl dat knows a good ting when she sees it, sur. You may tink dat you have been lucky today, but you haven’t seen nothin’ yet.’
Once again the dwarf numbered the balls as they fell from hand to hand, ‘One, two tree, one, two, tree. Which will it be? One, two . . .’
‘I’ll take dat one! . . . sorry, that one,’ said Dan, pointing to the juggling ball that had just landed softly in the dwarf’s left hand.
At last the performance had ended, and like all worthwhile performing artists, the little man bowed graciously. ‘It is all about trajectories, isn’t it?’ said the dwarf as he carefully placed the ball into Dan’s hand.
‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’
‘Trajectories - throwing the ball from one hand to another, rather like a sine wave, wouldn’t you say so?’
Now Dan was really confused. Why would a dwarf talk to him about sine waves and trajectories? Was this guy some kind of midget mathematician? ‘How would you know about stuff like that?’ asked Dan eventually.
‘Oh we leprechauns know lots of stuff, but that’s not important right now.’
The hairs on the back of Dan’s neck were now standing erect like thousands of tiny inquisitive meerkats.
‘So what is important?’ said Dan.
‘Tree.’
‘Tree?’ repeated Dan.
‘Yes, sur - tree. You picked ball number tree. Dat is tree free pizzas for you and your lovely girlfriend, sur – and remember, you can also keep the ball.’ The dwarf relieved Dan of the dollar bill that he held in his other hand and pushed it up under his hat. ‘I’ll bid farewell now sur,’ he said before skipping away.
When Dan looked more closely at the ball, it had a logo stamped just beneath the number three. “Ped’s Pizza Emporium, Quincy Market, Boston.”
‘So all that was just to advertise a Pizza Parlour?’
‘How awesome,’ said François. ‘That must be a sign. We must go there now for our free lunch.’
Dan gave his shoulders an exaggerated shrug in mock submission. ‘Okay then, we are off to Ped’s Pizza Emporium, I suppose.’
‘Pepperoni pizza must be my favourite,’ announced François. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Oh I would have to agree with you on that one,’ said Dan. ‘I enjoy them, but only if there are equal amounts of pepperoni to each slice. Is it pepperoni or pepperonis? I’m not sure what the correct term is in plural.’
François’ eyes rolled, ‘Yeah, I’m not too sure either. They both sound right.’
‘Anyway,’ said Dan, ‘as I was saying, there has to be the correct number of pepperoni or part pepperoni to each slice. I don’t know what the reason for this strange fad of mine is, I just feel uncomfortable if the pepperoni aren’t spread around the pizza base evenly. You know sometimes you get a slice with four and a half pepperoni on it and another slice has something like six or seven. Some even overlap!’
Dan’s mouth raced ahead of his mind. Pizza pies, like all other things visible or invisible, had a ‘symbolic shape’ - and shapes were what Dan was very much into. He knew the formulae for trigonometry inside out, even when it came to slicing up pizzas. He knew the exact angles for a six slice pizza pie piece and an eight slice one. He knew the sin, cosine, chord, and hypotenuse values for every eventuality. It irked him greatly when the pizza was sliced unevenly. It gave him so much of a headache that he inevitably tossed the uneaten pie into the trash. His comment about the haphazard positioning of the pepperoni on the pizza base was a clear indication of his torment. Sliced up pizzas were triangles inside a circle, and pepperoni slices were circles inside a triangle. They presented Dan with so many symbols in his mind that he was in danger of going into overload. In a sliced-up pizza pie he saw signs for cosmology, the occult, trigonometry, freemasonry and the Holy Trinity. Dan couldn’t look at a pizza pie without seeing an image of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man stretched across its surface. His mind would go back to Christ’s last supper and he would ruminate over how the circular loaf of bread was equally divided up into thirteen pieces. Okay, it wasn’t a pizza, but it was round – and round is a universal ‘shape’.
‘Do you like them with stuffed crusts?’ said François, invading Dan’s thoughts.
Dan’s reply was met with a vacant stare, ‘2Πr stuffed? That sounds good to me.’
‘2Πr? . . .What is 2Πr?’
‘That is two pi times the pie’s radius which gives you the pie’s circumference.’
‘You like to eat two pies?’ said a confused François.
‘No - when I say two pie, I mean 2Π, as in the Pythagoras’ equation.’
‘Did he make pizzas?’
‘No, but if he did they would have been perfection, I’m sure! Put it this way, if Pythagoras prepared a perfect pizza pie, I would probably eat the whole Πr². That is “Pie R squared” to you.’
‘A square pie? . . . not a round one?’
‘No, I mean . . . well . . . what I meant was . . . Look, what do you say we just head off to Quincy market right now, François?’
‘I can see that all that brainwork has made you hungry,’ she said, ‘but who is going to eat the turd?’
Dan was confused, ‘The Turd?’
‘Yes,’ said François, ‘the leprechaun said that we have won tree pizzas, so that’s one for you – one for me, and then there is the turd one!’
Swearwords: None.
Description: Professor of Ancient Symbols and Master Codebreaker, Dan Lambert, woos his new girlfriend in the only way he knows how. He is helped along in this quest by one of the “Little People”.
_____________________________________________________________________
Professor of Ancient Symbols, Dan Lambert, and his newfound girlfriend, François, stopped to gaze across the Charles river towards the north and east side of the historical city of Boston. The waterway swung round in a gigantic lazy bend which started at Harvard, then wound its way past Fenway Park, home of the famous Boston Red Sox. The colossal prudential building could be clearly seen pushing skywards on one bank, overlooking the basin of the river. The sprawling Massachusetts Institute of Technology looked on from the opposite side. One of the ever popular World War Two converted amphibious vehicles passed by to their left. The tour guide’s voice could just be heard above the growl of the diesel engine as it motored down the slipway from the road straight into the water. Tourists would wait in line for hours to board one of these Duck tours. An abbreviated history of ‘Beantown’ awaited the hordes of sightseers; some who were genuinely interested in the birth of Colonial America and the famous names from the past such as Paul Revere and William Dawes. Then there were the others who just wanted to plunge into the river in vehicles that had once stormed onto Omaha beach.
‘Tell me a little about yourself, François,’ said Dan as they left the Esplanade area and walked towards the Cheers Bar at the north-eastern corner of Boston Common.
‘What could I say about me?’ said François. ‘Well, I come from Canada and my mother was born and bred there.’
‘I knew that accent. I just knew that you were Canadian!’ said Dan triumphantly.
‘My father was Norwegian,’ continued François. ‘Sadly he is no longer alive, but he was a goldsmith to trade.’
‘Yes, your surname was a little unusual, as I remember.’
‘Valkyrie.’
‘Yes, that’s it. What does it actually mean?’
‘It comes from Norse mythology, Dan. I am the “chooser of the slain”. I decide who is going to die in battle. Then I present them to Odin in the afterlife.’
‘Quite a high profile position then,’ said Dan smiling.
‘You better believe it, brother, so just go easy or I may just make a snap decision on you.’ François playfully dug her fingers into Dan’s ribcage making him double over. Defending himself, he threw his arms around her. It was their first embrace. Somehow it felt good. Neither of them pulled away; instead they clung on to each other and eased through a small opening which took them onto the common itself.
A perfect view of Downtown Boston opened up before them. Multi-faceted skyscrapers rose majestically like the Emerald city in Oz. The common itself was Boston’s answer to Manhattan’s central park; a green-pastured paradise with bronze statues of pilgrim heroes, lakes, crosswalks, flocks of birds; a haven for joggers, street entertainers, poets and artists. People from all walks of life converged here. People of all shapes, all creeds, all colours; the parkland was a virtual melting pot.
The influence of the Irish community was never far away. The St Patrick’s Day celebrations in Boston ran a close second to New York City and Dublin itself.
As if to enforce this notion, a diminutive dwarf dressed as a leprechaun, complete with emerald green top-hat and carrot-coloured beard, danced a jig along the footpath towards them.
Just a drifter, thought Dan, only this one has gone to some effort to entertain the crowds. It occurred to him that the midget may not be so small after all. He was well aware of the trick of tying shoes to one’s knees and pretending to be three foot something tall. On closer inspection, Dan could see that this guy was indeed a dwarf. Those little shoes had real little feet inside them. Dan peeled a dollar from a roll of bills that he had in his corduroys. He imagined that the fuzzy green top-hat probably had the capacity to hold a couple of hundred bucks. Not a bad day’s takings.
The little entertainer did not, however, remove the headwear. Instead he produced three juggling balls from his coat pocket and began to toss them expertly from hand to hand.
‘Top of the mornin’ to you, sur,’ he called to Dan. ‘’Tis a fine day, is it not?’
‘It sure is buddy,’ Dan resisted the urge to call him “little guy”.
‘And where would you be off to – if you don’t mind me askin’?’ The dwarf’s arms continued snaking circular shapes whilst he spoke; each ball landing solidly in his cupped hands. ‘I am sorry for being so inquisitive,’ the little guy continued, ‘I believe dat I get the nosiness from me mammy, you know.’
Dan ignored the question. He already had the dollar bill in his hand, but he had nowhere to place it on the dwarf’s person. He felt that it would be too rude to interrupt his juggling flow and he didn’t really want to lift the dwarf’s hat off to add to his day’s takings either. The other cash that he had stuffed in there might blow away in the breeze. He decided to bide his time and enjoy the impromptu show that was being performed for his pleasure. François seemed to be enjoying it anyway.
‘Tree wishes,’ the dwarf announced out of the blue. ‘Tree wishes for you. What would you say to dat, sur? One, two, tree balls, gives you one, two, tree wishes.’
‘I-I don’t know what you mean,’ stammered Dan. Who is this little guy? A genie or something?
‘Ah now don’t you fret there, sur. I am deadly serious. This is what you might call your “lucky day”. You see, we leprechauns are a very benevolent race. Aye, dat we are indeed, sur.’
‘Oh Dan, he’s so cute,’ said François.
Dan was inclined to agree, but he still felt slightly awkward. The dwarf continued to engage Dan’s eyes through the looping balls. There was something unnerving about his stare. It was almost hypnotic in nature.
‘I tell you what, sur,’ the dwarf continued. ‘You can choose any one of these tree balls. You can take it away with you, but you must keep it, sur. That is all I ask. If you do dat - well, bejasus, you will be sure to have good luck for the rest of the day.’
‘Oh this is just like something from a fairy story,’ François exclaimed. ‘Go on, Dan,’ she needed no further encouragement from the dwarf, ‘go ahead and choose a ball.’
‘Ah now, there is a girl dat knows a good ting when she sees it, sur. You may tink dat you have been lucky today, but you haven’t seen nothin’ yet.’
Once again the dwarf numbered the balls as they fell from hand to hand, ‘One, two tree, one, two, tree. Which will it be? One, two . . .’
‘I’ll take dat one! . . . sorry, that one,’ said Dan, pointing to the juggling ball that had just landed softly in the dwarf’s left hand.
At last the performance had ended, and like all worthwhile performing artists, the little man bowed graciously. ‘It is all about trajectories, isn’t it?’ said the dwarf as he carefully placed the ball into Dan’s hand.
‘I’m sorry, what did you say?’
‘Trajectories - throwing the ball from one hand to another, rather like a sine wave, wouldn’t you say so?’
Now Dan was really confused. Why would a dwarf talk to him about sine waves and trajectories? Was this guy some kind of midget mathematician? ‘How would you know about stuff like that?’ asked Dan eventually.
‘Oh we leprechauns know lots of stuff, but that’s not important right now.’
The hairs on the back of Dan’s neck were now standing erect like thousands of tiny inquisitive meerkats.
‘So what is important?’ said Dan.
‘Tree.’
‘Tree?’ repeated Dan.
‘Yes, sur - tree. You picked ball number tree. Dat is tree free pizzas for you and your lovely girlfriend, sur – and remember, you can also keep the ball.’ The dwarf relieved Dan of the dollar bill that he held in his other hand and pushed it up under his hat. ‘I’ll bid farewell now sur,’ he said before skipping away.
When Dan looked more closely at the ball, it had a logo stamped just beneath the number three. “Ped’s Pizza Emporium, Quincy Market, Boston.”
‘So all that was just to advertise a Pizza Parlour?’
‘How awesome,’ said François. ‘That must be a sign. We must go there now for our free lunch.’
Dan gave his shoulders an exaggerated shrug in mock submission. ‘Okay then, we are off to Ped’s Pizza Emporium, I suppose.’
‘Pepperoni pizza must be my favourite,’ announced François. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Oh I would have to agree with you on that one,’ said Dan. ‘I enjoy them, but only if there are equal amounts of pepperoni to each slice. Is it pepperoni or pepperonis? I’m not sure what the correct term is in plural.’
François’ eyes rolled, ‘Yeah, I’m not too sure either. They both sound right.’
‘Anyway,’ said Dan, ‘as I was saying, there has to be the correct number of pepperoni or part pepperoni to each slice. I don’t know what the reason for this strange fad of mine is, I just feel uncomfortable if the pepperoni aren’t spread around the pizza base evenly. You know sometimes you get a slice with four and a half pepperoni on it and another slice has something like six or seven. Some even overlap!’
Dan’s mouth raced ahead of his mind. Pizza pies, like all other things visible or invisible, had a ‘symbolic shape’ - and shapes were what Dan was very much into. He knew the formulae for trigonometry inside out, even when it came to slicing up pizzas. He knew the exact angles for a six slice pizza pie piece and an eight slice one. He knew the sin, cosine, chord, and hypotenuse values for every eventuality. It irked him greatly when the pizza was sliced unevenly. It gave him so much of a headache that he inevitably tossed the uneaten pie into the trash. His comment about the haphazard positioning of the pepperoni on the pizza base was a clear indication of his torment. Sliced up pizzas were triangles inside a circle, and pepperoni slices were circles inside a triangle. They presented Dan with so many symbols in his mind that he was in danger of going into overload. In a sliced-up pizza pie he saw signs for cosmology, the occult, trigonometry, freemasonry and the Holy Trinity. Dan couldn’t look at a pizza pie without seeing an image of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man stretched across its surface. His mind would go back to Christ’s last supper and he would ruminate over how the circular loaf of bread was equally divided up into thirteen pieces. Okay, it wasn’t a pizza, but it was round – and round is a universal ‘shape’.
‘Do you like them with stuffed crusts?’ said François, invading Dan’s thoughts.
Dan’s reply was met with a vacant stare, ‘2Πr stuffed? That sounds good to me.’
‘2Πr? . . .What is 2Πr?’
‘That is two pi times the pie’s radius which gives you the pie’s circumference.’
‘You like to eat two pies?’ said a confused François.
‘No - when I say two pie, I mean 2Π, as in the Pythagoras’ equation.’
‘Did he make pizzas?’
‘No, but if he did they would have been perfection, I’m sure! Put it this way, if Pythagoras prepared a perfect pizza pie, I would probably eat the whole Πr². That is “Pie R squared” to you.’
‘A square pie? . . . not a round one?’
‘No, I mean . . . well . . . what I meant was . . . Look, what do you say we just head off to Quincy market right now, François?’
‘I can see that all that brainwork has made you hungry,’ she said, ‘but who is going to eat the turd?’
Dan was confused, ‘The Turd?’
‘Yes,’ said François, ‘the leprechaun said that we have won tree pizzas, so that’s one for you – one for me, and then there is the turd one!’
About the Author
Born in Saltcoats, Brian Morrison has a day job at the Hunterston Power Station. But in his other life he is well known as a caricaturist and comedy sketch writer. More recently, he has become a novelist and a writer of children's stories. His dark comedy, Blister, is available on Amazon.