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.
City dwellers have seen this bizarre phenomeon, in which advertisment posters seem to "feed" off each other, especially in the presence of a wizard-themed poster. From Lustige Blätter, 1904.
“Possibly—just possibly—he might derive comfort from the liturgy, and even strength. The gods whom he had worshiped might be unworthy of his worship, or of anyone’s; but the worship itself must have counted for something, weighed in some scales somewhere, surely. It had to be, or else the Whorl was mad.” —Gene Wolfe, Caldé of the Long Sun (and though we’re Wolfe fans, this particular series of novels pales unforgivably next to the Book of the New Sun)