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.
You've heard of "retail therapy," but did you know that it originated with the superintendent of a St. Louis insane asylum in 1907? From the Duluth Evening Herald, 1907.
We onceadmitted that we get all our news from a 1941 edition of New England Goat News. It's not so unusual -- you've seen the Addams Family's Uncle Fester get all his news from last year's newspaper. And you've seen Gilligan's Island's Thurston Howell III repeatedly read the same stock market report in the only newspaper available after the shipwreck. Here's a precursor to all that, in which four fishermen in 1902 get all their news from an 1879 edition of the New York Ledger that they purchased from a Norwegian farmhouse. From the Duluth Evening Herald, 1902.
Nearly four decades before the short story that inspired "The Fly" science fiction films, boys were developing into human flies in Duluth. From the Duluth Herald, 1920.