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 eccentric hand intellectual." The caption doesn't say this is the hand of an eccentric and intellectual person but rather that the hand itself is eccentric and intellectual. Therefore, the illustration is transformed into a talisman, akin to the Hand of Fatima. From New Discoveries in Palmistry by Joseph Bryant Hargett, 1901.
Craig Conley tells me that in the 1970s at Mark Twain elementary school in Webb City, Missouri, he had no dress shoes other than tap shoes, so on picture day he was in a situation much like this poor fellow (illustration from Daily Universe, Jan. 16, 1969)
While trying to find the source of this image, based upon the caption, "He may live in your house," we encountered this:
"Things that never happened can tangle with things that did, an imaginary being can hold hands with the flesh-and-blood real, he may live in your house, as a Henry of my own once did, he may read all that you have read and even make love to your wife. The atheist may lie down with the believer, the encyclopedia with the poem. Everything absorbed and wondered at in the faithless months – science, maths, history, law and all the rest – you can bring with you and put to use when you return yet again to the one true faith" —Ian McEwan, "When Faith in Fiction Falters, and How It Is Restored"