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.
"World needs to-day not a new religion—but an understanding of true principles that inspired all great faiths." From the Bombay Sunday Chronicle, 1935.
"Most people like reading about what they already know--there is even a public for yesterday's weather." —Nancy Mitford, "Reading for Pleasure," 1961 [Hat tip: the winsome Jonathan.]
We onceadmitted that we get all our news from a 1941 edition of New England Goat News. It's not so unusual -- you've seen the Addams Family's Uncle Fester get all his news from last year's newspaper. And you've seen Gilligan's Island's Thurston Howell III repeatedly read the same stock market report in the only newspaper available after the shipwreck. Here's a precursor to all that, in which four fishermen in 1902 get all their news from an 1879 edition of the New York Ledger that they purchased from a Norwegian farmhouse. From the Duluth Evening Herald, 1902.
Since we can no longer trust the lamestream media, we choose to read old issues of Goat News and get just as much pertinent information out of it about the state of the world.