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.
We almost didn't notice the cat staring through the decades, at the bottom left of the photo. It sees you through the mists of the time, and (in the enlargement) you can tell by the look on its face that it understands something about you that no one else does. From Worcester Polytechnic's 1971 yearbook.
We analyzed this photo with our custom Uncanny Detector app and confirmed our suspicion that a second full moon is glowing from within the building. From Kent State's 1954 yearbook.
We checked, and it turns out to be true -- happiness is, indeed, an overhead projector, and as this technology becomes increasingly obsolete, sadness spreads across the globe. From Wake Forest's 1975 yearbook.
[Inexplicable images from generations ago invite us to restore the lost
sense of immediacy. We follow the founder of the Theater of
Spontaneity, Jacob Moreno, who proposed stringing together "now and then
flashes" to unfetter illusion and let imagination run free. The images
we have collected for this series came at a tremendous price, which we explained previously.]