In the waste-bin at the foot of the stairs on the northwest corner of the Dearborn Street stop on the El.
Why?
YAY!
My first threadspotting!
9000+ posts of pure crap and in one felled swoop I not only get Threadspotting, but The Perfect Master to respond.
Thanks, Cartooniverse!
Whooooo Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
No, we’d be the Cybermen. Normal humans enhanced beyond our limits. 
That’s similiar to what I first heard years ago: that “Cecil Adams” is the nom de guerre used by the Straight Dope Advisory Board when they unanimously (or nearly so) agree on the answer to a question. When there’s significant opposition to the majority viewpoint the reply gets attributed to a named individual on that board. Over time the SDAB membership will change but the SDAB as personified by Cecil will be eternal.
I have no idea if this is true and don’t expect we’re going to get an answer here, but it’s something to consider. Nor for that matter do I recall who made the claim initially, it’s not my original theory. For all I know he’s really a highly-evolved decendant of the old Eliza/SIMP program from decades past.
<------------kneels down, bows over , prostrates self before Shirley. To quote Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man
" One is pleased to be of service. "
Cecil Adams is a per curiam opinion!? :smack: I love it!
My theory: Cecil Adams is a pseudonym under which someone with an unusual name – call him Zbigniew – writes columns. Like Esther Pauline Lederer’s pseudonym, it is not the intellectual property of the individual using it, but of the Chicago Reader, Inc. Others, including Ed Zotti, have from time to time generated prose under the name (whether original or adapting Zbigniew’s “Cecil Adams” work, I don’t know). Because Zbigniew does not care for the limelight, other than this board, the individual we know as Ed Zotti does, or did, the occasional public appearance as “Cecil Adams,” as well as being Zbigniew’s longtime editor.
This accounts for all the facts we know about him, including the insistence that he is a single real person who is not Ed, and also the evidence pointing to its being a Reader trademark and to the “real Cecil Adams is Ed Zotti” evidence. (But is “Ed Zotti” really someone named Ed Zotti?)
That’s all I have, other than the fact that Ed Zotti anagrams to “tit doze”
I think I just choked on a strand of philotic twine.
Straight Dope? You thought it said Straight Dope. Nawww, this is The Straight Pope. No one loves catholics more than Unca Cecil. Take his word for it:
Here’s your answer to that bit of lore, directly from the mouth of a mod/SDAB member.
Cecil answers questions at his whim. While we have access to a board that lists all of the questions that have been sent to Cecil(and you can’t BELIEVE how many he gets!), we in no way influence what he chooses. We have no input. We just do our thing, and he does his.
You give the staff too much credit, suggesting that we co-ordinate enough as a committee to do the work of THE PERFECT MASTER. Hell, it’s hard enough for Dex to find someone to write a Staff Report. Just ask him.
Oh my god, the moderators believe in Cecil too. So much for the USPTO!!
Too bad I know an editor from the Reader…he told me there was no Cecil, that is was a group of people and that they “farm out” the questions. He was drinking though and was probably trying to throw me off.
On my moderately busy message board, I’ve given my site “vitals” – DNS registrar and binding information, software registration information, Web hosting information, control panel URLs, and all associated usernames, serial numbers and passwords – to a very trusted third party.
In case of my extended absence, the mods and admins have been instructed to contact my parents. The third party will also confirm. In case of a worst case scenario - death, coma, incarceration or anything else that would stop me from continuing the site – the third party will release the vitals to the mods.
No. That is saying that Cecil Adams never existed as a person. “Cecil Adams” was a trademark, and the paper could use anyone to write as Cecil Adams they wanted to.
How accurate the above is I don’t know. For whatever reason, the Reader abandoned “Cecil Adams” as a trademark.
No worries, i have already cloned Cecil and will decant him upon the great one’s death
So, you’re saying he doesn’t have Porphyria? 
An utterly risible idea. I’m sure that Dex’s job in coordinating the SDSAB is rather akin to herding cats as it is.
While I answer Mailbag questions in my own field of expertise, and may occasionally provide some information to Cecil on such subjects, I don’t think that I’m qualified to “agree” or “disagree” on most of the reports submitted by other Staff members, much less on Cecil’s columns on the many other kinds of topics he covers.