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 many guidebooks for the dead, from antiquity to current times, presume that death is not an ending but rather a transitional journey that requires attentive planning. Seemingly ironically, these guidebooks are simultaneously about living life to the fullest, comporting oneself while keeping body and soul together, and knowing that our spiritual destination is inextricably tied to our corporeal choice making and conduct. As Ptolemy Tompkins notes in The Modern Book of the Dead, those who hate and fear death are unable to live happily, while for those who think the right way about death, "life loses that gloom and becomes something entirely different: something larger, stranger, and in- finitely more promising and positive than we might ever have imagined."
Prof. Oddfellow's Books of the Dead is a distillation of twenty-four books of the dead from around the world and across the centuries. Each book’s most intriguing, poetic, and useful revelations are painstakingly gathered here.
Though the context is extraterrestrials, this sounds like some parties we've been to here on earth. "They were nice; they said relax ... Later, one particular being was not so nice." From UFO Newsclipping Service, 1991.
It's only the two-eyed people that we're socially uncomfortable with. "The visit of a two-eyed child," from the rare Twilight Fairy Tales by Maud Booth, 1906.
If you feel that "we are living through a time of unprecedented and troubling change," recall that so did folks in 2004 (see clipping), and verily so did folks in every year of recorded history. As the archives of old newspapers, magazines, and books make perfectly clear, humanity is always at a crossroads, and it is always the "end of the world." We might actually find comfort in that, and in the Buddhist conception that past-present-future is all of a piece. Clipping from Suddenly They Heard Footsteps by Dan Yashinsky, 2004.
"What a poor soul is the late-20th-century citizen. Perhaps we see flying saucers and aliens now because we can't see angels anymore." From UFO Newsclipping Service, 1992.
This is like when bands shout the name of the city they're playing that night. San Francisco knows what you want ... or maybe it's Miami, Memphis, Chicago, or Portland, Maine. From Modern Screen, 1952.
