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 amorphous blob of politics is here very accurately depicted on the chalkboard. While Florida is shown flatteringly thick and long, the peninsula in truth suffers shrinkage from all the surrounding water. From Eastern Kentucky's 1975 yearbook.
"Schoolmasters ... are like animal tamers; the latter think it is important for lions to jump through hoops, the former spend all their time getting children to remember that the late lamented Hannibal lost his left eye in the Pontine swamps; the one turns the king of the desert into a circus clown, the other a divine flower into a bunch of parsley." —Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican