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.
The day meteorologists took their heads out of their asses long enough to discover what everybody else always knew: "Temperature found to vary with solar changes." We wonder if meteorologists of today have forgotten this bombshell (given their track record). From Popular Mechanics, 1930.
Here's one of the only legitimate things we've enountered in vintage issues of Popular Mechanics, and it's only because they stole a page from the great Charles Fort. "Queer things that fall from the sky" was a topic Fort studied in tremendous depth. From 1930, two years before Fort's death