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.
[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.]
"One Iowa home broken up by the pancake question." Her husband's facial expression while eating her pancakes "was such that it might work permanent injury to her health." From the Duluth Evening Herald, 1906.
The pancake hub of the universe -- it may sound farfetched, yet physics posits a "cosmic pancake scenario" (composed of unrelaxed superclusters aligned along strings in which galaxies and clusters of galaxies are embedded, as per Schaeffer & Silk's "Large-Scale Inhomogeneities and Galaxy Statistics"), and in Buddhism, a cosmic pancake is one of the fundamental elements of the universe (see Chogyam Trungpa's Journey Without Goal, p. 137). Ironically, once you reach the Pancake Hub of the Universe in Liberal, Kansas, "you're not in Kansas anymore."