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.
There's a fine line between the window at the white cat and the white cat at the window. From The Window at the White Cat by Mary Roberts Rinehart, 1911. Photo courtesy of Sonicsonia.
As we've mentioned, the famous six-word story popularly attributed to Hemingway, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," can't compete with the two-word Southern expression, "Mama tried." Hemingway's is a short story while "Mama tried" is an entire Southern Gothic novel. Pictured: Professor Oddfellow.
There is an "ephemeral New Zealand" in Tobias Conrad Lotter's 1762 map of the world. "Now you see [New Zealand], now you don't." From UFO Newsclipping Service, 1972.
At 7:35, the "Geneva" clock is two hours early and the others are five hours early. (By the way, in the city of Geneva itself, the time would have been 1:35.) This temporal anomaly in Manhatten was documented by Jag9889. Though we weren't on location to discover the exact cause of this timely weirdness, we spotlight 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.