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.
"'It's nothing,' the maid says calmly. 'Don't be upset. These are just the silly stories her papa tells her'" (Eugène Ionesco, Story Number 1, 1968). From Washington College's 1971 yearbook.
"When I dance amid the striking lightning, he dances with me too." He'll dance with anybody, but please don't prove that for yourself by going on during an electrical storm. From Weird Tales, 1939, illustrated by Virgil Finlay.
It is simultaneously 4:00 and 8:00 in this temporal anomaly from Serbia, documented by Bicanski. We might note a bit of irony: although time at that clock tower is unstable, the numbers four and eight happen to be symbolic of stability, symmetry, and squareness in Chinese culture. Though we weren't on location to discover the exact cause of this timely weirdness, we offer this photo to help hone the insights ofwould-be investigators of temporal anomalies. The more clocks one sees that are "on the fritz" (Fritz being the German clockmaker who first went "cuckoo"), the better attuned one will be to time warps in the wild.