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.
When is a white elephant gift not actually a white elephant? When it's a slime mold. We were gifted Slime Mould in Arts and Architecture (in honor of our love for Philip K. Dick's character Lord Running Clam, an intelligent slime mold who speaks and has telepathic powers, from the remarkable Clans of the Alphane Moon). To our surprise, conversation turned to how slime molds urge the legalization of marijuana and an open border to Mexico. (As the spokesman for the Plasmodium Consortium put it, "Their advice is objective, and transcends our polarized political environment, because they don’t belong to our species.")