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.
"We have found a strange foot-print on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the foot-print. And Lo! It is our own." —Arthur Eddington, qtd. in Cosmic Trigger, Vol. 1 by Robert Anton Wilson
Thanks to Beth Ritter-Guth for praising our Strange and Unusual References site for offering facts not found on any other site, for offering free e-books, and for aiming to teach as well as to entertain. See her full discussion here.
This collage is in honor of the new cosmological model that the universe endlessly expands and contracts without any Big Bangs. The foreground photo is from the blissfully funny series Arrested Development.