#1054 Cones and Donuts

Geometry was always my worst subject in high school. Not because I hated geometry, but because I had one of the worst geometry teachers on the globe. The guy had been teaching 30 years and you could tell he had hated the last 29 years and 365 days of it. He was just slogging through.
It’s axiomatic that such enthusiasm is often infectious.
In any event, between nodding off events, I still managed to learn about cones and cylinders and the topological shape of the donut. Which is known as a torus.
The key thing about a torus is that the surface of the inside is continuous with the surface of the outside. The hole in the donut is a continuation of its exterior. Like us. Our digestive system is essentially a long tube. The gut starts out in the embryo as an indentation in the skin and then goes from there. Follow the hole from the mouth to the anus and we are nothing more than a fleshy misshapen donut.
At least we’re not cones.
Nor, I noticed the other day, are pinecones. Pinecones are really more egg-shaped. Slightly larger on one end than the other and bulging in the middle. A true cone has a wide circular base which tapers down to a pointy tip. A true geometrical cone looks more like the waffle cones and not the pale beige crispy flat-bottomed cones. The beige ones are more like cups. Cups are more like cylinders. As are pinecones.
Most of the pinecones I’ve seen look like pinched cylinders. Like beer cans with a little crimping at either end. So I suppose we should call them pine cylinders. Of course that totally screws up their scientific name, which is conifer.
So should we call them cylinder-fers, or cylin-fers?
But a cylinder is essentially a wide tube. So maybe we should call them tube-ifers. Not to be confused with tubers, which are potato-shaped.
Actually, potatoes and pinecones are shaped quite similarly. The only plant that’s really shaped like a cone is a carrot.
My point? The guy who named all these plants and vegetables probably fell asleep in geometry class too.
America, ya gotta love it.