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.
We draw a daily waking dream card from the Self-Intuiting Polarity deck, and only when the Cloud View card comes up do we perform cloud busting with the Original CloudBuster app. Needless to say, we never dissolve clouds in times of drought. In the photo, there was a 70% chance of rain, so we dissolved clouds until the National Weather Service changed the forecast to 30%. Foggy mornings have proved difficult to clear, and we admit total defeat in our face-off with a tropical storm, but we walked away feeling we had given it our best.
"Up, up, up in the air I went, so that I counted the spots on the morning sun." From In the Green Park by F. Norreys Connell and illustrated by F. H. Townsend, 1894.
"My advice is to turn your back on the sunset and see how its warm glow is magically lighting up the people, objects, and scenes around you." —The Trustees of Reservations
Our illustration is from On Blue Water by Edmondo de Amicis, 1898. The caption reads: "He turned his back on the sunset."