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.
You're aware of "the complex ways we distract ourselves from our inevitable demise" (Doug Bower, From Horseback to Desktop PC, 2007). One of them is bobbing for apples while a witch peers through one's window. Date uncertain.
You've heard of those "starry apple orchards that bloomed perenially under the lime-light" (Willa Cather, Youth and the Bright Medusa). Here's what a starry apple looks like, from the J. Van Lindley catalogue, 1899.
René Magritte's "The Son of Man" (1964 ) finds a precursor in the bumble bees of the Kashmir Himalayas. Our image (left) is from 1954 and appears in the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Entomology. It goes without saying that "Apples depend upon bees to pollinate their flowers so that the tree will develop fruit."
Here, finally, is an illustration of what Tim Brough calls "the anti-apple or the negative apple." (And this may surprise you, but the opposite of an apple isn't an orange!) This image of anti-apples appears in Apple Storage and Packing Facilities for Southern Illinois, 1963.
Here's a precursor from Ninifaye's "If life gives you lemons, pack them up in your suitcase and make a nice cake when home." From the University of Maryland's Terra Mariae yearbook, 1908. (For some unbelievably weird yearbook imagery, see our How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.)