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.
We encountered these books one after the other today — wild animals described by a Wolf alongside Hawkes' tenants of the trees. We've seen enough examples like these to wonder whether a career could possibly be shaped by one's name, as in that meme about how a disproportionate number of dentists are named Dennis. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry from Forbes tries to bah-humbug the fun by countering the report in the New Republic, saying: "Even if it were true that there were more dentists called Dennis, there would still be no evidence for having the name Dennis causing people to become dentists." Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry doesn't address what exactly caused him to write about probability over a career in dentistry, and we wouldn't dream of mentioning that another fellow named Pascal just so happened to have founded the theory of probabilities.
Back in the day, one didn't need high-tech heart lenses to communicate "I love you" in a spectacular fashion. (Though one did need a bellows-wielding four-legged henchman.) From The School of the Heart by Francis Quarles, 1845.