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.
Are any ghosts watching? We roll in the Spirit Applause-O-Meter to find out. It's Prof. Oddfellow's Penetralia. Thanks to KlingonCaptain who wrote, "I just realized that a lot of sitcoms from the days of analogue film probably have a lot of ghost cast members but we just can't see them. Can you imagine what The Andy Griffith Show, Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Flying Nun would be like if we could see the spirit cast members?! If only the Sylph Scope was real and we could use it to see ghosts."
"A round of hard, stony applause broke out" (Carol Dawson, The Mother-in-Law Diaries). Stony applause is quite rare, and this illustration of it is from Lustige Blätter, 1914.
[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.]