Mini-Portlandia

Portland's World Trade Center has a miniature Portlandia statue, if you know where to find it. (Building 2, Naito Parkway entrance, just inside the door.) So here's a little slideshow of it. It's supposedly an exact copy of the main Portlandia but vastly smaller, so this is your one chance to get a better look at it, from a less neck-craning angle. Apparently this is one of a limited edition of this size; the Oregonian recently printed a vintage photo of one in the studio, and it seems the Portland Building (home of the full-size Portlandia) has a miniature one as well, somewhere inside the building.

Dave Knows Portland called the WTC one "Portlandia Junior"; one comment below the photo mentions that the Wells Fargo Center has an even smaller Portlandia somewhere on the second floor, and wonders if ones even smaller ones exist elsewhere. Just imagine. An infinite regress of ever-smaller matryoshka-like Portlandias, scattered here and there around the city. I imagine the microscopic ones would be kept in a lab at Portland State, or OHSU perhaps. And if you knew the right people, and it was nighttime or a weekend, and you brought them enough donuts, they might fire up the electron microscope and let you take a gander. And you could say, yep, that's her alright, and check another one off the list. Soon you'd wonder if the rumors are true, and a subatomic Portlandia is out there somewhere, formed from an unnatural blob of quarks and gluons, and below that, an unimaginably small one that only string theorists could truly appreciate, existing in either eleven or twenty-six dimensions, depending on which version of the theory is right (if either one is). I mean, creating a statue smaller than the known laws of physics allows is probably going overboard, if your main goal is to create a huge one for the city office building. Still, if you're doing multiple sizes anyway, you might as well include an extremely small size, because... ok, I can't think of a reason why you'd want to do that. But it would still be cool. You have to admit it would be cool.