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.
"It's this October softening the burning sun that fills the air with a new element, an element like a great melted pearl, through which you see everything." —John Cowper Powys, Porius
"Oh overflowing cask, you give drink and fill to drunkenness every loving desire. You give joy and illumine all our understanding" (Catherine of Siena, 1347-1380, qtd. in An Anthology of Christian Mysticism by Harvey D. Egan).
The keg/cask/hogshead imps appear in Punch, 1860. The spigot fairy appears in Fairies and Folk of Ireland by William Henry Frost, 1900.
"You may be quite surprised at how much you can get for that old painting that's been sitting in the attic for years." —Green Your Home All in One For Dummies(2009)
Librarians have acquired tastes. (That's a Googlewhack, but surely the joke's been done?)
(Thanks to New Hampshire's Keene Public Library for acquiring our Tarot of Portmeirion. We can hardly imagine a lovelier home for the deck than a Victorian mansion!)
The Keene Public Library occupies a Second Empire mansion built c. 1869 by Henry Colony.
"Unless you have heard it yourself you may find it hard to believe that the woodcock, that long-billed, bug-eyed eater of earthworms, can sing a song as sweet as a nightingale's."
—Field & Stream (April 1972)
At first glance, I could've sworn that one island off the coast of Alaska had the shape of an eight-limbed cephalopod... but it was just an octopal Aleutian.
[No man is an island: we picture below an octopal Aleutian.]