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 are three types of spurious solar eclipses (and they actually constitute our very favorite eclipses):
The assimilated eclipse. A chronicler shifts the date of an eclipse by a year or more to relate it to some other event, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The literary eclipse. A work of fiction features an eclipse that is later taken for a real eclipse by an over-eager reader.
The magical eclipse. A solar eclipse or other celestial sign dramatizes an important battle, the death of a great personage, or the beginning of a wonderful enterprise.
Here's a precursor to a Koopa next to a Warp Pipe in Nintendo's Mario universe. From the August 1942 issue of the Old Line magazine, as scanned by the University of Maryland Libraries.
"I remind myself the St. Louis Arch is not accessible, and I'm going to have to walk back to one of those little Nazi elevators" (We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?). (Our illustration depicts a sort of St. Louis Arch without little Nazi elevators.)