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.
Dictionary.com traces the expression "to have a monkey on one's back" to 1930s narcotics slang, but we can do ever-so-much better with this illustration from Old and New London by Walter Thornbury, 1873.
We're pleased to offer an Internet first, having painstakingly transcribed a subtitle track for the brilliant absurdist comedy stage show Birdstrike (2000) by the incomparable Harry Hill. The show is not currently available on DVD (only VHS), and the YouTube upload does not feature accurate subtitles (only very garbled captioning). If you download the file, play it on your computer via VLC or Plex and put the .srt file in the same folder with the same name as the video file.