Tom Dark shrewdly conjectures:
If you want to think I’m the world smartest human being - the man who knows everything and is never wrong - don’t expect me to object.
The truth is, The Straight Dope is really written by Dave Barry. He started it as a source for a future column (some week when he’s short on ideas).
“…and millions of people (I swear I am not making this up) believe that the world’s smartest human is writing a column for a paper. Not a major paper like The New York Times or Grit. He’s writing for a free alternative weekly…”
It is too clear, and so it is hard to see.
GO, ED!!!
So! There we have it! Ed Zotti has confessed!
Proudly, I raise my gruesome trophy before the “teeming millions” for all to see… shaking it by the hair for emphasis.
<h1>THERE IS NO CECIL ADAMS.</h1>
Oh, he’s a clever one, that Zotti. Wants us to presume somebody WANTS to “think of him as the world’s smartest man.” But that’s how this ruse BEGAN, DIDN’T IT? (shake, shake)! (No answer)
(oops… what’s this that fell out of the ear… why, that’s the smallest pocket calculator I’ve ever seen!)
That’s right. Zotti’s objection to anyone thinking he is the smartest man in the world is so small, he’ll even create a fictional character that purports to be, just so others can suspect it’s him.
There is no Cecil Adams. Case closed. Slammed shut. Door Barred. Key Swallowed. Tumbler spun. Furniture lodged. Lights out. Gas off. Mail and newspaper stopped. Change of address cards filled out. (I’d have even rebuted all those who’ve made tedious little cases against my reasoning through their own semi-literate misunderstandings, but Zotti has rendered this unneccessary. Kudos to SingleDad, a man of High Comprehension.)
Hey. Dave Barry doesn’t even write his own columns. He told me so. I have that in his own writing. He says it has to do with a picture of the Miami Herald publisher and a pony. If he was being funny, none of you would see that, therefore, Dave Barry doesn’t write his own stuff, and there is no Cecil Adams.
PS, Jill, I got your e-mail and I know you’re rankling. But screw you! You already played one game of nyaah-nyaah with me and killed a good debate that people were reading. Nyaah nyaah back.
Gee golly, and here all this time I was assuming that it was Cecil who was real and “Ed Zotti” who was made up! Thanks for clarifying this for me, Tom! :rolleyes:
Oh, and Tom? I surely would appreciate seein’ you back up the following quote with some hard evidence, seein’ as how I’m just a wide-eyed lil’ newbie, just a-thirstin’ for information on this Strange New World of the Straight Dope Message Board. Enlighten me, woudja?
And say, that’s mighty gracious of you to admit that hey, some of your best friends were Italian-Americans (but you wouldn’t want your sister to marry one, right? ;))
Why am I bothering with this?
I haven’t had my coffee yet, that must be it. Coffee–bring coffee!
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Hey, I get it! I get it!
:::doing victory dance:::
I GET IT! I GET IT! I GET IT!
Tom Dark is the April Fools’ Day joke! I knew the fake “ED ZOTTI” posts were too obvious, I knew there had to be a real April Fools’ Day post somewhere, and I SPOTTED IT!!
:::more dancing around:::
Hooray, hooray, hooray!
.
.
.
.
.
.
…so, what do I win?..
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Living proof of the power of caffeine.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
I, for one, don’t care if there is a Cecil Adams, whether Ed Zotti is Cecil Adams or even if one person is responsible for the column or if many people contribute under one name. If you read any of the replys in Cecil’s Mailbag submitted by the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board, you can see the answers are just as enlightening and entertaining, and more surprisingly, the style is pretty much like Cecil’s, even his caustic wit. Many of the columns would pass as Cecil’s if they weren’t signed by their respective authors.
I think the bottom line about the column isn’t if Cecil exists, or if he is the world’s smartest man, but that the column is entertaining and provides well-researched answers to questions that a lot of us have wondered about.
“The truth does not make a good story; that’s why we have art.”
[[PS, Jill, I got your e-mail and I know you’re rankling. But screw you! You already played one game of nyaah-nyaah with me and killed a good debate that people were reading. Nyaah nyaah back.]]
Just looking for clarification on the AIDS thing, but never mind. No rankling here!
Carry on. Or don’t. Sheesh.
Jill
And originally posted by Lagged2Death:
That’s the true point, folks.
Any similarities between your reality and mine are purely coincidental.
JillGat, sweetie, I can’t just sit here and hear you calumnified (is that a word?) So I went rummaging around, and I believe I may have found a plausible explanation for Tom Dark’s “AIDS thread” that you supposedly “shut down”.
There was an old thread on AIDS from April 1999 that was abruptly resurrected in Feb. 2000, called “AIDS in the bubble”, http://boards.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000040.html, and which was abruptly dropped. At the end of the thread, a poster named xtnjohnson asks Jill,
and he follows this with another post asking,
There is no return post from Jill.
Then, there was another thread in March 2000, called “AIDS without HIV”, http://boards.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000555.html, that similarly came to an abrupt end, again with JillGat’s post being the next to last one.
Perhaps Tom Dark is assuming that because JillGat never posted back with any examples for xtnjohnson in the first thread, or that she was the next to last poster in the second one, that she had closed the threads, for whatever private nefarious reasons.
Does this help?
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Aha! I’ve figured it out! JillGat is actually Cecil Adams AND Ed Zotti!
Or is Lynn Bodoni actually Ed Zotti - both Italian names, you know. But of course, if Lynn wants to keep this a secret, she’ll call her cousin Vinnie . . .
Wait! I have it! TubaDiva is actually Ed Zotti and Lynn is Cecil - the Italian name thing is a ruse to throw us off the track. 
But what if Nickrz is really Cecil and DavidB is really Ed Zotti, and Dex is really Tuba, and manhattan is really Guadere and Guadere is really manhattan, and Lynn and Jill are identical twin sisters separated at birth, with one raised in the forest by elves and the other abducted by aliens? Then Tuba must really be the Tooth Fairy!
You’ve got a point there, brother - and one of these days I’m going to figure out what it is. - Cecil Adams
OK guys, fun is fun, but it is time to pay the piper. Shut up & do the survey.
not until Cecil gives us his info!
not until Cecil gives us his info!
not until Cecil gives us his info!
not until Cecil gives us his info!
not until Cecil gives us his info!
not until Cecil gives us his info!
not until Cecil gives us his info!
not until Cecil gives us his info!
not until Cecil gives us his info!
not until Cecil gives us his info!
I’ve been getting up extra early to do important, valuable things, like clip my toenails, and what happens… some strange pica sirens to me from the Straight Dope…
That’s right, K2Dave, stick to your guns! Contributors here are missing the point.
Let me reiterate the point: “Cecil Adams,” a fictional character with no more substance than Snubby the Squirrel, purported to be smarter even that Marilyn vos Savant, whose IQ is spread wide open in the Guinness Book of World Records for all to ogle, wants vital private information from all of us… to hand out for non-fictional uses.
Hi, boys and girls! I’m Officer Snubby the Squirrel! Don’t do drugs! Now then, how much money do your mom and dad make? What are their social security numbers? Major Credit card numbers? Expiration dates? What’s the spending limit? Remember, boys and girls, this is just for verification purposes only!
Go look it all up! Don’t tell mom or dad what you’re doing or you could risk a spanking! Sssh! I’ll wait! Tum-te-dum dum dum tee dummm…
Thusly, this… “’”’“Cecil Adams”’"’" fiction wants our stats. I could be wrong, you know. He may not be Ed Zotti. He could really be a computer in the HUAC division of the Census bureau. Or some experiment in a near-forgotten basement in the Smithsonian.
But there is no Cecil Adams. None. Zilch. Zip. Zero. Squat. Nada. Ninguno. Nolto. Nein. Nyet. Ba. Doh.
Cut it out, Notthemama. My best pal IS Itam. And my sister didn’t marry one, she married two. Both stupid. My best pal is genius-level for facts and such. Unlike Ed Zotti, he doesn’t need a low-paid staff to make him look smart. And his name is so long and curlicued and Calabresiate, he had to change it before he could even find a decent job. True.
While we are at it, it is plain that Jill Gates is a Mayflower-quality white person (underscore “person”). What other breed of seething American would deny having emotions about anything? (excepting maybe heroic pc causes) I told you, Jill, nyaah-nyaah, and I meant it. You’ve been nyaah-nyaahed. You’ll have to look up what I meant by yourself. It’s there. That’s how a nyaah-nyaah works.
Toenails now.
Nope, Tom, that may be how it works if you tell the person off privately. But absent a link, the rest of us have every reason to believe you’ve got no legitimate gripe with Jill. So put up or shut up, already.
Getting back to the subject, I found out about the old SDTV show about three weeks after it died. I gather ‘Cecil’ never showed his face on the show. Exactly how did they handle that?
“Living in this complex world of the future is not unlike having bees live inside your head.” - F. Scott Firesign
There was this really hot bald host whose name escapes me. I want to say “Dave,” but then I always want to say “Dave.” Dave. See? Am I correct in thinking that “Dave” had an Australian accent or were my ears blighted by lust? Are there any pictures online of “Dave”? Is “Dave” on these boards? Will he be my boyfriend?
OK, that’s a valid point. But now consider the unflattering way that Slug Signorino always draws Cecil. Why would Cecil tolerate that for years unless Cecil was really Slug?
The FAQ’s say that Slug’s real name is nor Slug. But I’m not that easily deceived. Slug’s real name is Slug and Slug is really Cecil! Ed Zotti was just invented to confuse lessor minds.
So to recap, I know this is confusing: there is no Ed, Ed is actually Cecil. But there is no Cecil, Cecil is actually Slug.
Just for the record, in case anybody is interested, I did fill out the survey, and nobody asked me anything at all about my credit cards. All they want to know is basic stuff like age, marital status, sex (and there’s a blank for “trans-gender”, too), average annual income (within a range), how often you use a computer, what’s your favorite part of the SDMB, how did you find the SDMB’s website, stuff like that. I didn’t find any of the questions offensive or invasive, and I am notoriously picky about what kinds of forms I fill out on the Internet, and what kinds of information I give out.
As an added attraction, there’s a reply window at the end where you can tell them how you think they can improve the SDMB. I should think that would be incentive enough for some people.
The purpose of the survey, granted, is to give marketing information to the SDMB’s advertisers, but hey, the advertisers are what makes it possible for us all to be here in the first place.
Click the ad!
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Otto, the guy you’re lusting after is Mike Lukas and he’s straight, bud. I was going to say “sorry to say,” but I’m not.
Tom Dark, your frustration about how I handled some AIDS discussion is inappropriate to this thread and this thread is inappropriate to this forum. I am moving this to the Pit and note that you are bordering on being a Jerk.
- Jill