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.
As we exclusively revealed here, the glowing trees in old yearbooks constitute a worldwide forest that has to this day eluded the study of arboriculturists. From North Carolina Wesleyan's 1998 yearbook.
"Spacemen inhabiting human bodies are apparently able to distort photographic film and to make normally invisible forces appear seemingly out of nowhere." From UFO Review, 1980.
We take great pains and risk eye damage to capture lens flares in our photos, and stamping "flare" in the vicinity of the sun is cheating. From Infantry magazine, 1980.
As it spans two pages, one might say this is a cracked hall of mirrors. It brings back nightmares from that time we, too, were trapped within a shattered hall of mirrors.