A fairly trivial thing lately noticed – but occasioning slight surprise for me. In the couple of years since my joining SDMB, I had somehow missed Scylla’s celebrated comic piece The Horror of Blimps. A passing reference to it, caused me to seek it out, using the Search facility, keyword “blimps”. Having envisaged this as a fairly rare word, unlikely to be of frequent incidence; I was a tad surprised to find it yielding the “Search” ’s maximum five pages’ worth of references, spanning the period from 2003 to 2017 – Scylla’s tour de force having been posted in Feb. 2003.
I would reckon nearly half the threads “Searched” as above, to be on the themes of favourite / funniest threads, and what first attracted people to the Dope; and another nearly-half, airship / unmanned balloon-related – literally; or metaphors / similes about things resembling said aerial devices. (With my not being into matters of aviation, I hadn’t imagined there being such a degree of interest in airships and the like; or there being that much potentially to say about them.) Plus a few threads containing references to “blimp” as a figure of speech for someone ultra-conservative, old-fashioned, hidebound and unimaginative – yet fundamentally a decent person: after the long-ago British comic character Colonel Blimp.
Altogether, more action on the “blimp” scene, than I’d ever have imagined…