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Your rubber band ball is in danger of another unpleasant fate. Believe it or not, a ball can get too big. Most rubber bands have a stretch limit. Eventually, as you build your ball, it will exceed the stretch capacity of the common rubber band. Eventually, it will grow too large for common rubber bands. At this point, you must resort to the rare industrial-size rubber bands that can stretch many feet. Even the most diligent rubber baller faces a terminal slowdown of ball growth here. You must wait and wait for a big band to appear at your feet, like manna dropped on the Israelites as they wandered lost and hungry in the desert. In the meantime, you can proudly weigh your ball and measure its circumference. You can compare your ball with a friend's. And you can admire your ball's surface shape. You will notice that a rubber band ball is not truly round, but bumpy and slightly askew. If you broke out your calculus formulas, I'm sure you'd find that the ball approaches roundness much like a curve approaches the asymptote of an ideal endpoint. It is in this approach toward roundness that a rubber ball's true beauty lies. The ball is not round and never will be round, thank God! The imperfections make the ball the miracle that it is. This is a moral lesson that each of us can take to heart, just one more of the joys of rubber balling.

From Mole (#12). Subscriptions: $10/3 yrs. (3 issues) from Box 2482, Merrifield, VA 22116.

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