The Theory Driving Relativity

in all fairness I should divulge that I first heard this punch line uttered by Carol Jones, administrative assistant at and graduate of the International Development Education Program (IDEP) at the University of Pittsburgh in the early 1980s while I was a student in that program. Carol applied the line locally by saying, “in Pittsburgh the shortest distance between two points is under construction.” That’s funny enough, but I thought it might also be funny for Albert Einstein to say it; he’s appeared on portfoliolongo.com before.
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Binder Clip

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Technical: My own iPhone photo of the binder clip on white kitchen table imported into Procreate iPad drawing app and used as a reference photo in a side by side, free hand drawing, and then exported to crop out reference photo and re-imported into Procreate for final, minor tweakographics.

The Letter of Paul to the Procrusteans

Greetings brothers and sisters. I’ll keep this relatively short in anticipation of my visit to your homeland. Please feel free to accommodate your image of me as you see fit, but once I am in your company, keep your hands off of me and my actual details and dimensions. Yours in ambiguity, not either/or, but both/and, for Pete’s Sake, Paul

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N.B. I’m adding this additional information several days after the original posting date to shed some additional light on this rather esoteric post for the benefit of my brothers and sisters, ethnographers and evaluators, cartographers, food critics, and exegetes. Knowing something about temptation and Procrustean Solutions will help you better understand the post, but that will only get you so far. For the rest of the story, much more of it at least, it might be helpful to know that, before my monastic exclaustration, I was also a seminarian, and that I had a classmate from the Pittsburgh Diocese named Robert Barie. Bob was a gem of a person…and a hoot! Remember Norm Crosby and his malapropisms? Well, Bob suffered from the same inflection, as it were! One day it was his turn to read at mass, and so he heads up to the lectern. Now, because Bob was Bob, we’re sitting there, his classmates, already chuckling sotto voce. He gets to the microphone and without looking up, without even a pause he says, “A reading from the Letter of Paul to the Macadamians.” Naturally and somewhat explosively, our subdued chuckling rose up from the crypt and filled the chapel in a collective, sidesplitting belly laugh. After only completing his third year of theological studies, Bob died of cancer in 1988. May he forever rest in peace.

The “Tiny Store” Post Went “Canonsburg Viral”!

Many thanks to my Canonsburg Friends who visited portfoliolongo.com yesterday to view the Tiny Store post. The guy in the stats department had to borrow a step ladder just to keep up. Memory Lane is being widened and renamed to Memory Boulevard.

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What’s the big statistical deal?
The Tiny Store post registered 396 views on Jan. 20, 2015, something very unusual for this illustroblog! That’s well over ten times the average number of daily views. Incidentally, the previous daily high was 143 views on Sept. 14, 2014 for this post; but, who’s counting?