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 already know the futility of taking "coals to Newcastle," but indubitably it's Bristol that's left cleaning up all that coal spilled on the road and laybys, as we see in Picturesque Antiquities of Bristol by John Skinner Prout, 1893.
Pictured below: "Bringing in the Lump of Coal," from a 1918 issue of Life magazine.
If you got a lump of coal for Christmas, here's how to change it — one letter at a time — into the "Jelly of the Month Club" (the gift that keeps on giving):