π Day again! Since I’m talking typography lately, I’ll hash and rehash a couple items from 2019.
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Thinking about Trump as Pied Piper. When the metaphor first appeared in those DNC emails I didn’t quite understand it. After learning that Trump is Roy Cohn’s protege, I understand it PRECISELY. Agents Provocateurs are Pied Pipers. Their job is to lead a specific group of people into PUBLICLY VISIBLE CRAZINESS so Deepstate can conveniently exterminate them.
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In the printing context, a pied form is the desired result of all Sorosian leaders. Turn a purposeful ordered LIVE organization or person or country into a jumbled chaotic DEAD mess. So Trump is the Pied Piper or the Pie-ing Piper, depending on metaphor.
The apprenticeship of a printer’s devil inevitably includes some pi:
Pursuing the etymology leads into more self-completing circles.
Pie as food:
From Middle English pye, pie, probably from Latin pīca (“magpie, jay”) (from the idea of the many ingredients put into pies likened to the tendency of magpies to bring a variety of objects back to their nests).
Pie as chaotic letters:
Some sources think it comes from the “black-and-white appearance of type” resembling the feathers of the magpie. Wrong. Lead type is all gray.
Other sources evoke the randomly assorted magpie’s nest, which makes immediate and complete sense.
The pastry analogy is especially strong because a pied form is normally seen in a galley, which is identical to a baking pan or tray.
The Latin base for all of these is pica, which included crows and woodpeckers along with [mag]pies. The pica pole is the basic measuring tool in a printshop. And then, of course, we have the multicolored part of the trio. (Online etymologies disagree with this, but it seems to be an inevitable semantic convergence.)
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Well, what about the Pied Piper himself? Early illustrations show his costume as multicolored, not black and white. He could have been called the Harlequin Piper.
Why was he dressed in harlequin style? Do rats like multicolored surfaces? Was he trying to catch rats?
No and No.
Rats don’t care about color.
They perceive colors rather like a human with red-green colorblindness, but their color saturation may be quite faint, and color appears to be far less important to them than brightness.
His job was to catch children, not rats.
Although research has been conducted for centuries, no explanation for the historical event is universally accepted as true. In any case, the rats were first added to the story in a version from c. 1559 and are absent from earlier accounts.
Some sources think the original Pied Piper was a fake “cause” for an epidemic that killed most of the kids in town. [2023 footnote: Hmm.]
So it all pulls together. Trump is the Pied and Pie-ing Piper, transforming orderly civilization into multicolored chaos and blaming RUSSIAN_BOTS and Deplorables for our pied nation.
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Polistra's Mill 
