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 draw a daily waking dream card from the Self-Intuiting Polarity deck, and only when the Cloud View card comes up do we perform cloud busting with the Original CloudBuster app. Needless to say, we never dissolve clouds in times of drought. In the photo, there was a 70% chance of rain, so we dissolved clouds until the National Weather Service changed the forecast to 30%. Foggy mornings have proved difficult to clear, and we admit total defeat in our face-off with a tropical storm, but we walked away feeling we had given it our best.
From The Rhododendron yearbook of Appalachian State University, 1969. This recalls: "I was looking for a ghost from the past—the picture of a classmate" (Elizabeth Welt Trahan, Ten Dollars in My Pocket, 2006). See How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook.