How do sperm banks get sperm from the donor?
candidate?
Worse still, the OP links to a column that seems to be no longer available on-line. It says:
Could we get that one back on line, or get Cecil to re-publish it? I want to know too.
Yeah, quite a few of the columns have different URLs, but they’re all still up. Google can find em.
I remember back in 1987, this girl brought a Straight Dope book to school (we were in 11th grade), and I thought this column,on gay animals, was so witty… especially the phrase “carnal union with a mango”. (Band name!)
Funny how the same amount of time has passed between that day and this thread’s initial post, as between the thread’s initial post and today. It feels to me like the first stretch of time was much longer. Maybe that’s because of my own personal life history, but I also suspect it has something to do with a real world-changing divide between the pre- and post-Internet eras.
Oh yeah, about downshifting. I think about that one a lot (or did, until I finally gave in to the automatic-transmission life, a year ago.)
I especially liked how he admitted that, since there really wasn’t much technical advantage to downshifting, the real reason to do it is because it’s fun – you can pretend you’re “Mario Andretti.” But when I checked your link, no mention of Mario – his name had been replaced by somebody named “Al Unser, Jr.”!
I’m guessing Little Ed “updated” Cecil’s newspaper/book version for young-'uns when he put it online, about ten years ago. Noble gesture, BUT isn’t that a perpetual problem? What, is someone going to “update” every column, every few years, to give the whippersnappers more currently known topical references? I mean, where does it end?
Seems like a lot of work. Perhaps someone has already invented some software which does this automatically (and fetches periodic updates from some server). It would be fun to program such a thing. You’d have to make some interesting choices. Things like, “Okay, who’s the Miles Davis of the 2010s?”, etc., etc.
(Answer: It’s Janell Monae. No, she doesn’t play trumpet, but she occupies a similar space in the cultural universe.)
First, I’ve gone through and fixed all the links that were broken. I think every referenced column has a link now.
Second, on updating. Cecil does sometimes re-address old topics, so if you find some particular column that really needs updating (not just minor crapola), write Cecil about it. Otherwise, columns get majorly re-checked and updated when they’re republished for a book. Otherwise, there’s a tiny bit of updating SOMETIMES when a classic column is re=posted and the person doing the posting knows of some update. That’s pretty much hit and miss, but it does explain why some columns seem to be extremely good at predicting the future. Otherwise, we don’t try to update on any sort of regular basis. It would take way too much time, for too little return.
Thank you, Dex, both for this concise explanation and for fixing those links.
But I wasn’t talking about updating factual content – new scientific findings, etc. (I agree that that sort of thing need only be done once in a while. I mean, we don’t expect the 1920 Encyclopedia Brittanica to tell us about Nazi Germany, right?).
I was talking about occasional updates to references to people (or, conceivably, events) which Cecil uses in an offhand way, just to illustrate a point (or merely make a joke). Somebody went to the trouble, at some point, to change “Mario Andretti” to “Al Unser, Jr.” in the column cited above, I assume just so that younger folks could get the gentle wit of the piece. I assume that this kind of change, too, is done in an occasional, ad hoc way, and that’s fine. I was mostly just pointing out that the definition of “younger folks” changes gradually every day, so someday the effort of changing “Mario” to “Al” might seem that it was sort of for naught.
Those are the kinds of changes that are sometimes made when a classic column is re-posted.
This happened also in Cecil’s [del]recent[/del] May 6, 2009 column about the Higgs boson “What is the “God particle”?”
And thank you, PaterDeus for posting the correct link, and Dex for fixing whatever you’ve fixed.
Thanks for fixing the links Dex! I still say we should move this thread to CS 