Never heard of the show, but one of tonight’s new episodes is titled The Straight Dope. I’m sure Google searches for the term will spike a tiny bit, I wonder if traffic here will see a miniature uptick?
The show IS set in Chicago…
Particularly now that you’ve got both terms in a thread title? I’m thinking yeah…
Wow, what the hell happened in May 2004?
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=the%20straight%20dope
The link doesn’t work for me…
And I’m not sure-- My first guess was the epic “If LotR were written by someone else” thread, but that was in 2002.
Was that the “What if The Lord of the Rings was written by…” thread?
ETA never mind. June 2004 specifically. Hmmmm.
Wait, Happy Endings is on Fridays now?
Abu Ghraib? Final episode of Friends? Alan King died? Phish breaks up?
Or, is that just the first full month that it was possible to search the Dope, and all the search engines in the world were indexing like a mofo?
Happy Endings has been everywhere. The poor show is tossed around more than pizza dough in Luigi’s Parlor.
We watched the first episode, and now we’re watching the second one - no Straight Dope message board references yet.
Yep they’re burning off the remaining episodes on Fridays with some improbable “save Happy Endings” tagline in the commercials informing people of the move. They actually showed two episodes this week, and I assume for the remainder of the run it will remain twofers.
I don’t believe so. I started an ATMB thread back in September 2005 when I noticed that Dope threads were, for the first time, showing up in Google searches. However, that was apparently an accident connected to the then-recent adoption of Google ads, and the robots.txt file was set to disallow searches again shortly thereafter. It wasn’t re-enabled until more recently.
A little birdie gave me this:
http://crosswordtracker.com/clue/wri...straight-dope/
The Sunday, May 2 New York Times crossword puzzle included the clue: "Writer Cecil of “The Straight Dope”