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.
"And thinking back about times gone by … the beginning and the end seem only small projections in time." This photograph may be used to faciliate time travel. From Taylor's 1973 yearbook.
We wish this for you, too: "Then there was dancing and lemonade." From The Wonderful Land of Up by Olive Roberts Barton and illustrated by Neely McCoy, 1918.
She's apparently recycling her empty Stroh's beer cans into her library's book return slot. And it's her official yearbook portrait. From Queens College's 1973 yearbook.
Are books actually the same as beer? Consider: "Pouring knowledge into yourself from the books like beer into a big mug until you were saturated, brimming" (Engineering and Science magazine, 1950), and "Books, like beer, have gone up in price but down in quality" (The American Oxonian, 1968).
The so-called "news" that technology changes us was actually fresh back in 1889. In this panel, the length of a man's legs adapts to the height of his pennyfarthing, and another man's ears have grown bigger due to his use of the telephone. From Le Charivari, 1889.
"There are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine." —Marianne Moore