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.
"I remember a pill that had as side effects — if you took an overdose — convulsions, coma, amd then death. And in the literature, right after it told about the convulsions, coma and death, it said, May Be Habit Forming. Which always struck me as an anticlimax. ... It's a strange world ... very strange." —Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death
Here's an intriguing choice, inspired by one Eartha Kitty, who would plop herself atop whatever random objects happened to lying on the desktop that day (including pointy, lumpy, hard, and otherwise "uncomfortable" objects: a stapler, scissors, a tape dispenser, a box of paper clips, a quartz crystal). We might posit two possibilities:
A. Eartha Kitty had an instinct to mark her territory, so it was her duty to bodily lie atop foreign elements until such time as her claim was legitimized, however painful that process proved itself to be. She endured the ordeals of her work without complaint and then left when she knew it was time to leave. To be clear, the irregular landscape of objects she laid upon could in no way have been comfortable for her. A comfy bed was available nearby, and any creature would surely know the difference. She quietly suffered an unpleasant trial because her dominion was inseparable from her greater well-being.
B. When Eartha Kitty encountered a new set of circumstances in her world, without hesitation she collapsed upon the ragged terrain and physically experienced the contours, ever-mindful of the pokes and prods. Like so much Braille, she "read" the objects. Before reacting to the new set of circumstances, she literally slept on it. It was a twist on the old idiom, "You made your bed, now lie in it"; someone else made her bed, but she laid on it just the same. Upon truly facing, contacting, and coming up against the foreign elements, upon participating in their exact placement, upon gaining an awareness of the nature of their existence and contextualizing them into herself, Eartha Kitty would rise and go on with her day.
Do either A or B.
[Our illustration is from More Tuck-Me-In Stories, written and illustrated by Enos B. Comstock, 1922.]
What happens when we die? It's a fair question, but this is from a magazine for military chaplains, and we'd have assumed they already had a pat answer for this. It turns out that most everybody is confused about everything. God help us. From The Link, 1962.
When our new hall of mirrors was delivered, there were cracks … and we had to either process a return or face a shattered infinity. We chose the latter … but weren't prepared for what it actually entailed.
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Ken responds: "The mirror is cracked in an amazingly artistic way! Radiating heavenward, with occasional communication between the rays. Fortunately it wasn't right in the middle, which would have been "conveniently conventional", but not so far to the side, as to not draw attention to itself. Much more interesting and unique than if it had never been cracked. The video made my head swim, but I got a warm feeling from it."
This is what we think when critics attempt to mar our workmanship. "Could it be dissemination of some wicked defamation of our blameless reputation by some imp of hell's creation?" From the Ole Miss yearbook of 1898.
Have you ever encountered an old list, in your own handwriting, that you have absolutely no memory of? Our most dedicated reader shared this one. The items read:
