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.
"There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity." —Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch
Commenting on our video about the weird secret of rolling blank dice, George Parker (author of The Little Book of Creativity) said: "Great piece! Thanks. My mind went to two places. Well actually a million places but the two that passed: I will start to look at coins as two-sided dice and metal disks as a two-sided blank dice. The other one was triggered when you talked about how blank dice may call out occult, as in hidden, powers. Since 5% of the universe consists of things we can observe, with and without instruments, and the rest is hidden (27% dark matter, 68% dark energy -- and we have little clue about what it even is) we should throw blank dice way more often."
Though it's famously said that we can see farther than a giant when we stand on his shoulders, that may be an exaggeration. Consider this evidence: in the case of one sitting on a log held by a giant's shoulder while he wades in a river, nobody sees very far.
From "The Three Giants" by Mrs. Marcet, in Eyes and No Eyes by M. V. O'Shea, 1900.
