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.
They say that Walter Raleigh brought the potato to England, but it was actually the other way around, as we learn in the J. M. Smith's Sons 1899 seed catalog.
Here's a precursor to Carl Sandburg's Potato Face Blind Man from Rootabaga Stories. It's "a supposed specimen of aboriginal art" discovered in New Brunswick, 1851, from the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1881.
Here's a precursor to this line: "It might be a case of, 'any chance of a baked potato?'" (Charlotte Williamson, "My Private Chef," The Guardian). Our illustration appears in Joseph Breck's Annual Descriptive Catalogue of Seeds, 1896.
Potatoes from heaven, apparently, and a precursor to this 1949 story of firefighters in the Sierra Nevada Mountains who dumbfoundedly watched as a supply plane dropped a hundred-pound sack of potatoes directly atop a full-sized iron stove that had been carried by mules to the peak. Our heavenly potatoes illustration appears in Prodigiorvm ac Ostentorvm Chronicon, 1557.