Column ideas 4/6/23

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
41

I would say that making new columns by updating old chestnuts does give the site plenty of ideas for new columns, like when I notice a column that should be updated:

While I see that it was, mostly in jest, in that column Cecil concluded that it “was possible”, but nowadays, YouTube videos about the lack of success (some with hilarious results) and videos from ranchers showing how impossible it is, point to the idea that people like Robin did want to see city folk do what it amounts to farmers making a classic prank to the newbies in their mist. Like savvy military guys fake reacting to outgoing fire in front of the new guys to see how hilariously they react.

If local fakelore is not enough, I recommend also to look at the ones that are coming to America, this one should be explored as I have seen it first hand in the old country and in the US, it is a very old fear that advices to not open the refrigerator after ironing because it will cause your muscles (specially the face ones) to spasm. Causes a lot of issues in workplaces like restaurants when Hispanic workers have a beef about going to the fridge for more food. Important to know for the American audience as a way to be culturally aware. (And yes, is taking longer than I thought to get my wife to dismiss this old wives’ tale :slight_smile: ) It has to be noted that articles in English about issues like this are hard to find. One can look at Spanish ones that debunk this with a translator.

Another idea, is making a column on how anti vaccination was turned from a thing a few anti scientists followed, to be frighteningly followed more by one political party in the US. . Not about the politics, but to point out how it was that anti vaxx disinformation got to do that.

And while also political, I think a column should be made about the dismal ignorance shown by many sources of information about Critical Race Theory, it was still amazing for me to find many dopers to be completely unaware of how CRT researchers were using the framework, posters grossly ignored how CRT was being used by minority researchers allowing them to also be critical of the bigotry in Asian, African countries and with other ethnicities. Although it was amusing to see, many didn’t have any good replies when finding about that.

So there is a need to counter ignorance in many issues. Not only based on old columns that need updates, but also with issues that seemly have been “chewed over hundreds of times here”. Many issues IMHO do have many areas that were not touched about, like in the CRT issue seeing a lot of the media not dealing with what CRT researchers were actually doing, ironic to look at when on many occasions it would have helped conservatives to denounce the abuses of human rights in China, but they can’t use that research because they banned the teaching of it… :thinking:

42

Having given the matter a wee bit of thought, I think Cecil needs to decide who the audience for his new columns is.

If the audience is current Dopers, an eclectic and possibly hard-to-please group of well-read curmudgeons**, no one topic is going to please everyone and someone here will probably know more about it than you do. Not a bad thing, necessarily.

If the audience is the average Joe or Juliette, you literally have two decades of interesting questions on any number of topics, together with many witty replies. If making another book, the decision is easy - use the best of what has already been done. I don’t know who owns the rights or other important details, but most here would likely be happy with modest credit if appropriate.

A combination approach updating old questions seems like a good mix of easier (if lacking time or staff), interesting and topical. I like the big speculative questions, but not everyone does. It is hard, and an undervalued skill, to neatly summarize history or complex topics. If your goal is to foster debate, this could be a good choice.

But what is your goal, @Cecil_Adams? Who is your intended audience? What is the ideal reaction?

**Plus a few total dipsticks…

43

@Cecil_Adams

An article which may or may not be of interest.

44

Snooze functions on clocks appear to default to a value of nine minutes. Why such an arbitrary-seeming duration, rather than some multiple of five minutes?

45

If trying to come up with new questions never featured anywhere, including here, you are going against thousands of people (or more) who have spent twenty years trying to come up with innovative questions. This seems a tall order. By all means do whatever you wish. It won’t please everyone in any case.

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Dante, in his Divine Comedy/Inferno, describes 9 circles of Hell.

9 circles of Hell vs. 9 minutes to snooze before waking up to another hellish day? Coincidence? I think not!

48

Is it really an advantage for hockey teams to pull their goalies in the final minute or two when they’re trailing? If so, why isn’t that the strategy for the rest of the game? This seems like a non sequitur. It’s either your best chance of ending up plus-one within a two-minute time frame, or it isn’t.

I suspect, after giving this my normal level of research for such matters (none), that this might be like sacrifice bunts in baseball—i.e., discredited by the stat guys, but stubbornly clung to by the old school guys because “that’s how you play the game.”

49

I think it’s more like the “Hail Mary” in football. A very low percentage play that you wouldn’t want to do all the time, but when it’s all you have left it’s better than nothing.

50

A Hail Mary, though, is when the team literally has no other option. Time for one more play, 60 yards away. Not so in the final minutes of a hockey game.

Again, if pulling the goalie is the best chance of going plus-one, why not do it, say, in the first two minutes of the first period? Why not for the whole game (other than defensive face offs)? Bad strategy then? So why is it good strategy in the last minute?

The world will appreciate my hockey genius one day, mark my words. :smile:

51

It occurs to me that the OP is asking for column ideas without answering a fairly basic question: What is the reason for resuming the column, and what is it intended to accomplish?

Two years ago, Cecil floated the idea of resuming columns on a kind of subscription basis, both to generate column topics and to raise funds for the board. As usual, many posters liked the idea and others were critical, but Cecil closed the thread after three days, and ultimately nothing came of it.

This was before WBEZ acquired the Straight Dope and the Chicago Sun-Times in January 2022. I may have missed it, but ISTM that the SDMB’s financial status has not been much discussed since then. But there have been threads about the declining membership of the board, and what can be done about it.

Then a few months ago, the columns resumed as a “dry run to see if the Master can still endure the grind of producing 1,000 scintillating words every week,” according to @engineer_comp_geek. But AFAIK, there has been no explanation as to why they have resumed, or what the goal is.

Obviously, if the goal is to help raise money or increase membership, at least some consideration should be given to whether any proposed questions would work towards those ends. Likewise if there are other reasons. If it’s just to fill Cecil’s spare time, then I guess anything goes.

So what is the purpose of the column, Cece?

That said, here are my thoughts about future columns and the latest batch of new ones. I came to the Straight Dope sometime in the late 1970s when it was published in the Baltimore and Washington editions of the City Paper, an alternative weekly newspaper. I loved the column’s snarky humor and its tackling of questions that you might have wondered about but couldn’t easily research. I read the column religiously for as long as the City Paper was published, bought all the books of collected columns, watched the brief TV show, and even had one of my question answered by Cecil.

I joined the SDMB in 2003 after @C_K_Dexter_Haven advised me that Cecil was not going to answer another question I submitted, and suggested I ask it on the board. I quickly became addicted, and signed up a charter member while that option was still available.

Let’s take a look at some random columns from the first few decades:

In the song “Hotel California,” what does “colitas” mean?

Where did two-letter postal abbreviations come from?

Is it dangerous to eat magic mushrooms before they have dried out? What mushrooms are safe to eat?

How dangerous are cows?

How does my nose produce so much snot so fast when I have a cold?

These are light-hearted but interesting questions that many people might have wondered about without pursuing on their own. And perhaps most importantly, they had arguably verifiable answers that Cecil could assert authoritatively. (Not that he wasn’t subsequently corrected on occasion.)

Now a sample from the past few months:

Is longtermism the world’s most dangerous belief system?

Could artificial intelligence replace journalists?

Why does an induction cooktop heat iron and steel pots but not copper or aluminum ones?

What was neoliberalism, is it dead, and was it really so bad?

The first is about an obscure so-called philosophical theory that is absurd on its face and doesn’t deserve the airtime Cecil gave it.

The second was an enjoyable romp at trying to get ChatGPT to write a Straight Dope column. But that was followed by another speculative column about the dangers of AI.

The third was one of the only new columns that I felt really followed the style of “Golden Age” Straight Dope columns. A little dry, perhaps, but not bad.

The fourth was yet another examination of a ludicrous theory unworthy of Cecil’s attention, and was the first Straight Dope column in 45 years that I didn’t bother to finish reading. TL/DR. As Cecil himself said, “This is making my head hurt.”

A point I’ve noticed about the recent batch: they seem to be longer on average. Obviously, on the Web we no longer need to be concerned about fitting into a limited space on a printed page, but longer is not necessarily better. Brevity is the soul of wit, and wit is a feature I’ve always associated with Cecil Adams, although, sadly, somewhat less so since January 2023.

I haven’t closely read all of the suggestions in this thread, but personally I would prefer to see columns closer in theme and tone to the old days, rather than long dense essays on speculative, philosophical, or political issues. Although these are common and welcome on the SDMB, in their proper places, they are not what I have come to expect from Cecil’s columns over the past five decades.

If you want a concrete suggestion, I still haven’t gotten a good answer to the question that brought me to the SDMB in 2003.

52

Pulling the goalie is a risky strategy and a very mediocre one. Of course the idea is that if you can keep the puck in the opponent’s end the extra man will increase the chance of a good shot on net and a goal. But all the opponent has to do to score is clear the puck and get a half-decent opportunity.

If down by one it is a “nothing to lose” strategy. More often than not, the opponent scores another goal. Knowing this, it does give a surge of adrenaline to the team trying it.

No coach would ever do this earlier in the game. This is for two reasons: it is a weak strategy and because due to conventions the coach would be blamed if done in the first period but not at the end.

These carry more weight than you think, a lot of times NFL teams punt when they might go for it on 4th down and 2; and Canadian football teams are probably even worse in this regard on third downs…

As for the columns, the danger is wanting novel questions. These existed two decades ago.

53

Yep, that’s how it seems to me. In case it seems as if I was advocating that a team should pull the goalie for the whole game, no—ISTM that the best chance of winning is to NOT pull the goalie. I just need some statistician to confirm this and I get a Nobel Prize for Hockey.

54

During the last regular season game in 1970 against the Blackhawks, the Montreal Canadiens pulled their goalie with about ten minutes left in a game.

The Canadiens could have clinched the last Eastern playoff spot with a win or a tie, but they fell behind 5–1 in the third period. If they lost the game, they would finish with the exact same record as the Rangers, 38–22–16, tied for the fourth and final playoff spot in the East.

The next tiebreaker at the time was total goals scored on the season. The Rangers had 246. Montreal started the day with 242. So they decided to play 6-on-5 to try to score three more goals, no matter how many they gave up in the process?

The Canadiens scored a goal, but the Blackhawks scored five empty-net goals and won 10–2.

That tiebreaker was changed for the next season.

55

For the record, I would recommend doing research to figure out some of the top googled questions on mundane topics and then pay to promote the articles and Factual Question threads that answer those questions.

It’s liable to be fairly cheap and be a pretty solid way of bringing in new readers/posters.

56

Or you could find out the most googled questions and see if any would make an interesting column. I would say to also include the questions frequently searched for on the dope itself, because those sort of things can be random and crude enough that they would be interesting, but that would be easily gameable once people figured out what was up. Then the randomly crude searches would be replaced by deliberate trolling.

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Hi, Beck. How’ve you been?

58

Holy crap!!

I just died!

Hi, sweetie. I’ve been kinda ok.
Much more better now.
:smiling_face::heart:

59

Based on preliminary inquiry, I’d say there’s definitely a column here. The question of interest is what Johnny Appleseed actually accomplished vs. what’s just myth. Bits from revisionist accounts published over the last couple decades have now gotten mixed up with the earlier fairy tales in things like Wikipedia and the result is a complete mess. Time for the Straight Dope to get things cleared up. I’m collecting research materials of varying degrees of obscurity and hope to have something publishable in a couple weeks. Thanks for a good steer.

60

Another column idea occurred to me over the weekend: what’s the difference between a caffe latte, a cappuccino, and a flat white, and what justifies the difference in price? They’re all basically espresso plus foamed milk. Online accounts tend to be mostly blather, a characteristic of foodie writing in general. I did find one relatively straightforward explanation (the amount and distribution of foam seems to be a major variable), but it seems incomplete and possibly misleading. Consultation with coffee experts is clearly in order; hope to have something soon.