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, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. 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.
Revealed at last: our actual age, as well as how to use a spooky old mirror to test whether you're dreaming or awake. We didn't know how this video would end ... until we posed a question to the mirror and then had to face the uncanny answer.
If you like our video, please leave a thumb-up so we know. It's lonely out here in cyberspace!
Jim writes: "Definitely by far your very best video yet... it's hysterical... it leaves you completely baffled at the end... posted it on Facebook."
Marja writes: "I can see this over and over and over. Your story, the way you tell it, leads me away from all the ordinary things. Love the non-ending. Grace Jones might not be impressed. I am. Thank you."
J writes: "So entertaining! The 'lucid waking' premise is terrific, and I LOVE the concept of your appearing only in stained-glass lighting (and, of course, carrying the windows around!!). And then the way the hilarious recursiveness paradigm morphs into a salad bar, hahahaha! (Oh, and you're really rocking the fedora, by the way.) Bravo!!"
George writes: "What a f#$#%$g treat this clip was!! Loved the sliding in and out of reality both in script and video. Great structure leading us in, adding the glitches that woke us up, creating the shock of a non-mirrored reflection except for the ?, and then diving into what that means and leaving us with a haunting last image. Brilliant!"
G writes: "Oh my! The visual and SFX in this are great! Loved the little echoes and jumps; timed perfectly. The mirror writing was unexpected and fun, and the ¿ definition was the perfect ending (complete with old school incremental zoom steps on your shocked face!). I love that you’re getting some good mileage out of the haunted mirror, and I enjoyed using it to reflect the window, which of course is symmetrical, so it nicely foreshadowed the ending. Oh, and finally, the title of the video on YouTube is, of course, so up-to-date. I laughed out loud and how well, sadly, it fits into the moment. Thanks, I enjoyed it! A good way to start the new year."
A Retroactive Lifetime Goal*: for our tireless crusade against the toxicity of vintage Popular Mechanics magazine, Johnnyola2000 toasted us as "the one brave man on tumblr."
This is easily our favorite presumption of the centuries, that everyone has seen a Japanese crystal ball raised on the wings of an impossible dragon. Would that it were so. From "Of Camera Obscuras and Japanese Crystals" by Herbert Copeland, 1892.
This book title is ready-made for any currency, though exhangers of Japanese yen, for example, might think less of it than traders of American dollars. By Amelia Edwards, 1866.
Although Craig Conley’s delightful little book A Dictionary of One Letter Wordscontains an entry for every letter of the English alphabet, the only two (aside from “a” — an article), that get used with any regularity seem to me to be the ubiquitous and egocentric “I” and the “J”, which is now legal for recreational purposes in at least four states.
Here's our demonstration of three unusual ways to enhance the mystery of a spooky old house. Please show your support with a thumb-up and by sharing the link with your friends who are into old dark houses and urbex adventures.
Wolf said: “This world is made of clouds and of the shadows of clouds. It is made of mental landscapes, porous as air, where we are as trees walking, and as reeds shaken by the wind.”
But the skull answered, “To turn the world again into mist and vapour is easy and weak. To keep it alive, to keep it real, to hold it at arm’s length, is the way of gods and demons.”
Wolf cried out: “There is no reality but what the mind fashions out of itself. There is nothing but a mirror opposite a mirror, and a round crystal opposite a round crystal, and a sky in water opposite water in a sky.”
“Ho! Ho!” laughed the hollow skull. “I am alive still, though I am dead; and you are dead, though you’re alive. For life is beyond your mirrors and your waters. It’s at the bottom of your pond; it’s in the body of your sun; it’s in the dust of your star spaces; it’s in the eyes of weasles and the noses of rats and the pricks of nettles and the tongues of vipers and the spawn of frogs and the slime of snails. Life in me still; and honey is sticky and tears are salt, and yellow-hammers’ eggs have mischievous crooked scrawls!”
—From the divine Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys [with slight edits for brevity]
Here's a conversation of a preface in which the author mentally has a line and the reader does, too. From Ghost Stories and Phantom Fancies by Hain Friswell, 1858.
Just as the goddess Diana showed that the hunter and the stag are one, this vintage window display shows that the pumpkin and the knife are one in the jack-o'-lantern. From One Hundred Easy Window Trims, 1913.
