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 first illustration below is from Poets' Wit and Humour by William Henry Wills, 1882. The second is from Departmental Ditties by Rudyard Kipling, 1898, and its caption reads, "Pagett was dear to mosquitos, sandflies found him a treat."
"I tell him to raise the music, and it's 'Hang on Sloopy,' my favorite song of all time, and I remember thinking, Oh my God, it's really happening." —Urban Meyer, qtd. in Buckeye Rebirth by Bill Rabinowitz
The foreground of this collage is from the extraordinarily brilliant comedy series Arrested Development.
You've heard of sticking inhuman pins into a voodoo doll, but the old-school sticks human pins into a pseudo doll. From The Baby's Museum by Uncle Charlie, 1882.
Here's a precursor to Arrested Development's Tobias wondering what his daughter is thinking. The subtitle reads, "She lives her life, and I get the pleasure of guessing what that might entail." The precursor appears in The Lady's Manor by Emma Marshall, 1896. Its caption reads, "What is my little girl thinking about?"