CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, and a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.

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A Turkish Delight of musings on languages, deflations of metaphysics, vauntings of arcana, and great visual humor.
Professor Oddfellow's Forgotten Wisdom

Printed collections of Forgotten Wisdom diagrams are available: Volume I from Lulu and Volume II from Amazon.  Selected posters are also available via Zazzle.

September 7, 2010 (permalink)



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September 6, 2010 (permalink)



For Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.
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September 5, 2010 (permalink)

Charles Fort explains his eerily marvelous theory that ours is a ghostly realm—that when spirits die they become human beings:

My suspicion is that we've got everything reversed; or that all things that have the sanction of scientists, or that are in agreement with their myths, are ghosts: and that things called 'ghosts,' are, because they are not in agreement with the spooks of science, the more nearly real things.  I now suspect that the spiritualists are reversedly right—that there is a ghost-world—but that it is our existence—that when spirits die they become human beings.

I now have a theory that once upon a time, we were real and alive, but departed into this state that we call 'existence'—that we have carried over with us from the real existence, from which we died, the ideas of Truth, and of axioms and principles and generalizations—ideas that really meant something when we were really alive, but that, of course, now, in our phantom-existence—which is demonstrable by any X-ray photograph of any of us—can have only phantom-meaning—so then our never-ending, but always frustrated, search for our lost reality.  We come up chimera and mystification, but persistently have beliefs, as retentions from an experience in which there were things to believe in.  I'd not say that all of us are directly ghosts: most of us may be the descendants of the departed from a real existence, who, in our spook-world, pseudo-propagated.  (Wild Talents, 1932)
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September 2, 2010 (permalink)



Inspired by William Keckler.
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August 23, 2010 (permalink)



Inspired by Gary Barwin.
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August 4, 2010 (permalink)



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August 2, 2010 (permalink)



Inspired by Gary Barwin.
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August 1, 2010 (permalink)



Mal Content writes:

Thanks for this. It makes me miss writing those supernatural instructions and apothegms that you always made so much better (and more convincing) with your artwork! I keep wanting to do a New Dark Proverbs blog and make it work, and I think that's mostly your influence. I love the higgledy-piggledy metaphysical horse races ideas which constitute your various dissections of the game theory which language inevitably reveals itself to be (as it tentacles its way into its various convincing irrealities). I mean your diverse "series." I'm getting an image of the threads on a radial tire interweaving in space in a car commerical next to an image of the Three Fates and their threads. If I met the Fates, I think that would be the first thing I would ask them. "What is the thread count on my fate?"
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July 28, 2010 (permalink)



The four chambers of the star are similar to the four quadrants of life, but they surround a degenerate helium core.

(Inspired by Gary Barwin.)
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July 25, 2010 (permalink)



For Gary Barwin.
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July 19, 2010 (permalink)



Inspired by Gary Barwin.
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July 15, 2010 (permalink)



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July 14, 2010 (permalink)



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July 11, 2010 (permalink)



FUN: a gleam in the eye, reflected in the faces of others.

This diagram was inspired by Jonathan Caws-Elwitt and Bernie DeKoven.
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July 9, 2010 (permalink)



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July 1, 2010 (permalink)



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June 28, 2010 (permalink)



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June 20, 2010 (permalink)



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June 18, 2010 (permalink)



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June 15, 2010 (permalink)



Inspired by Gary Barwin.
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