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.
The trunks got switched, but at first glance we thought this was a precursor to those diet advertisements in which a newly slim person holds up massively larger clothing. From Le Journal Amusant, 1892.
Here's Santa as the Easter bunny. The headline reads, "Eat your Easter candy at Christmas." It's a precursor to holidays colliding in The Nightmare Before Christmas. From The Rotunda newspaper of Longwood College, 1971.
"Boring Weekend Nights. Inside some of the unexciting and not so unusual weekends." A headline from the College of William and Mary's yearbook of 1984.
"Swim meet smoked out by fire scare" -- a precursor to the episode of The IT Crowd in which an aquatic park catches on fire in spite of all that water. From the University of Mary Washington's Bullet, 2005.