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.
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.
Here's a frightful example of a text not reading its reader's mind. It even predicts that you don't live in a painted caravan and stare into a crystal ball for hours (we do!) and that you aren't a mind reader (we are!). It's a classic case of "what you say about others is what you mean about yourself." From Baked Beans & Somtam by Rick Kirtland, 2016.
