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've seen the three wise monkeys of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" fame. Wise frogs, on the other hand, can hardly be bothered. From the Southern California Academy of Sciences Bulletin, 1975.
"Making idiots is one of the sea's favourite games. But when it tires of this from time to time, it casts up instead a supernatural being on an unwelcoming strand, who ever afterwards, spends his nights asleep at the bottom of some vast watery gulf." —Ithell Colquhoun, Goose of Hermogenes
"I’ll never finish this book, I think. It is a succulent to carry through life. It is so playful and smart and rhizomatic. I love the virtual game structure: just enough structure to give it a 'plot' but not enough structure to turn your cactus into a tree. This Book is a Cactusis really inspired and excellent." —Lawrence Hass, Ph.D.
"Many think that Egypt is upside down [because the Nile flows from south to north]" (Marci Haines, Ancient Egypt). And it's true. Our photographic proof is courtesy of the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives.