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.
Twenty years before George Vernon Hudson proposed daylight saving time, Father Time advanced the clock in Father Time's Story Book by Kathleen Knox (1873).
An illustration from an 1879 issue of Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly magazine. The caption reads: "He grew into a fashion of dropping his pen, or holding it idly in his fingers, and picturing dreamily sketches not written out for mortal ken, but only for his heart's comfort."
Our work on Platonic solids tumbling through time is entitled Astragalomancy. It's all about how to divine the meanings of 21 discrete dice throws.
Knowledge of ancient Greek divination rituals is unnecessary. The simple interpretations are clear-cut, based upon specific, indisputable references to history, mathematics, literature, mythology, and arcane sciences from around the world.
[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.]