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.
During Daylight Saving Time, you set your bookmark one chapter ahead if you're reading The Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour by Thomas-Simon Gueullette, 1893.
We paint all of our "minus colors" with a "minus paintbrush" onto a "minus canvas." It just simplifies everytrhing. From Popular Mechanics, 1933. Speaking of "minus colors," see The Minimalist Coloring Book.
This is typical of the "New Inquisition" mindset behind vintage Popular Mechanics: "Poison gas guards 'health' of art treasures." If only Big Science could gas all the arts, this toxic sentiment suggests. It's an example of why Robert Anton Wilson called Big Science the New Inquistion. The headline is a variation of the old witch test -- if she sinks, she's not a witch, and if the art survives the poison gas, it's "healthy." Yikes. From 1932.
Here's Big Science telling you not to trust your intuition. There's one phrase here that we actually do agree with -- "it pays to be dubious," to which we would add "of everything published in vintage Popular Mechanics." It's all hogwash! From 1931.