I was an Art Major in the mid-70s. Then I was graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arizona. Then I became an Engineering student, in a special program for non-tech undergrads. It was fun at first, and I got all Bs in my three semesters of Calculus, and an odd A here and there, but my horrible study habits caught up with me and the fall semester of 1977 saw me taking Incompletes and Withdrawals from my classes. I wrote a letter to Dear Abby, an internationally-acclaimed advice columnist, about my misery, signing myself “Round Peg in a Chi-Square Hole.” I doubt if she got the Prob&Stat reference; she may not even have gotten the letter, since she never answered it publicly or privately, though I think I included a self-addressed stamped envelope.

Then I went rogue, sort of. I entered a drawing I made on an Etch-A-Sketch and signed “Johnny Incredible” in the 1977 U of A Winter Show of Student Art. (My Etch-A-Sketch tied for third place among more than 80 entries.) And for the Spring 1978 semester I took advantage of a loophole in matriculation to take, not engineering classes, but Poetry, Special Problems in Drawing, and Lithography. Somewhere in there I got a letter from then-Dean Robert Svob telling me that Professor Ferrell (Russ Ferrell, smart, great guy, taught ergonomics, published in the IEEE Transactions with his “Models of Man-Computer Interaction”) had expressed concern about me. I answered cryptically and included a five-minute line drawing of a plump man falling off a tightrope at the circus.

Long story short: Got A in Poetry, A in Lithography, and B in SpecProbDrwg. Decided to take a semester off from the stress of the U of A. That “semester off” is now 41 years, 5 months, 13 days, and counting.

Today’s images are an atypical diptych. The title might be “Art and Engineering.”