Hey, I first read it in The City [del]Squeeze[/del] Paper too, until 1983 when I moved!
What were you doing in Bawlamer then? I was there 75-83.
It started with my cow-orker and I coming up with possible middle names for Jeebus. I was fond of “Howard.” He looked it up and found Cecil’s column which he sent me the link to. I thought it was interesting, perused his other columns and bookmarked the site.
A month or so later the same cow-orker and I were wondering what would really happen if someone spoke up at a wedding after the officiator did his/her whole “Whoever has reason these two shouldn’t be joined in holy matrimony speak now or forever hold your peace” speech.
I thought I’d return to the Dope and ask the man himself. I found myself joining, (it was free at the time) then I found myself pouring over every inch of the boards, and I’ve been a junkie ever since. I visit this site more than any other in all of world wide webdom.
The column was published in a free paper. Not any more tho.
Found the Straight Dope website a few years back because I love the books, but didn’t have good access to any papers that carried the columns. Never bothered with the SDMB for some reason. Found the board itself when someone forwarded me a link to Scylla’s classic “The Horror of Blimps”. Registered because I wanted to see what other gems he’d posted.
I Googled the word “colitas” from The Eagles’ “Hotel California”, and the first hit was Cecil’s column on it. I learned what it meant, and read the rest of the archive, and then clicked on the link for the message board. I’d never heard of Cecil Adams or the Straight Dope before, nor been to a message board. The thing that sucked me in was Auntie Em’s missing co-worker story. Shortly afterward, I joined when it was still free, and here I still am, because you guys are cool. And you spell pretty well, too.
I, like most, bumped into Unca Cece’s column through a Google search for something. I saw the archive and read every single one of them, just for knowledge’s sake. I didn’t jump into the message boards immediately. I think it was Threadspotting. Mr. Briston’s famous sheep thread, if I remember right. I poked around in Great Debates for a while for my guest subscription period. My first post was about the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and I was impressed by the knowledge that some of the other posters had as well as the content of the discussion itself.
I poked around the **In My Humble Opinion ** forum for a little while as well. To this day, I’ll juggle a half dozen threads in one forum, and then not participate in it for a couple weeks. In that time, I’ll ravage another. **Great Debates ** is good for it, but I like being on the ground floor for most debates before it turns into a discussion about something wildly different than the original question.
Very seldom do I venture into General Questions. I’m not sure why, but it just is. I like the diversity of the posters, although I do wonder about the lack of influx of new people. I’ve seen a couiple new people, but I’m getting greedy. I wanna see more, dammit.
Aguecheek told me about it.
It must have been in 1988, when the second one was published, though it seems like it was 1986, when the first book was reissued. I would have been eleven in 1988. I saw Bryant Gumble on the Today Show talking with someone (Little Ed, I assume, but I have no memory of it) about how they got the Ms on M&Ms and how to make wintergreen Lifesavers spark. I was intreagued and remembered the name of the book he was talking about. That summer (or Christmas, depending on which year it was), my family flew to Scotland to visit my grandparents and uncles. I needed a book to read on the plane, so I went to a newstand in the airport, and there it was: The Straight Dope!
Thanks to jet lag, I must have stayed up half the night each night fo that trip reading and rereading the book until the spine cracked and the pages started falling out. Being young and precocious, the bad language was quite tittilating, not to mention morbid things like what happened in an electrocution and spontaneous human combustion! (The whole concept of oral sex no doubt went right over my head, though I did manage to retain the information until it became meaningful.)
As a teenager, I followed the rest of the books, and eventually found the column published in the Little Rock Free Press. In college, I searched (I almost typed “Googled,” but that was before Google!) for the Straight Dope on the Internet and found the site, I think even before it had transfered over fully from AOL. I would have been one of the very first posters, but it was my first on-line community, and it took me a few weeks to think of a good user name.
A couple of years ago, I met Dopers in real life for the first time (and made my first real life Doper friends), thanks to a thread Candid Gamera started on role-playing groups. Not long after, I attended my first Dopefest at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.
I started reading the Dope in the Chicago Reader as part of my Saturday-Morning ritual at a local diner. This was back in 1997, I think.
Truth be told, I had no idea there was a site (OK, someone please remind me that the site address is listed at the bottom of each column!) until around 2000. I lurked for around 3 years, and then paid up.
The diner’s gone, I live in the suburbs, and Cecil and the Dope remain. Viva La Cecil!
-Cem
I came in via the “If the Lord of the Rings was written by someone else” thread. Then I browsed around.
I can’t recall. I started reading the Straight Dope columns and was vaguely aware that there was a messageboard, but didn’t even look at it, or even post.
Then I had to join the board because I wanted to comment on one of Cecil’s columns. (About “The Jupiter Effect,” IIRC.) And then I went a while without really looking at the boards for a while. Then the Pit sorta sucked me in and I started reading and posting to the rest of the fora.
I read the book back in the 80’s, and when I first subscribed to AOL back in the mid-nineties I found the original AOL SDMB…I was even quoted in a few of the books but under my old AOL screenname (ltcontrols)
I think I was one of the first regulars and was there until Cecil and AOL parted ways, but I didn’t much care for the web board format so I never got into the message board here.
Then AOL dropped their Usenet feed and frankly, I can’t be bothered with newsreaders and “Google Groups” suck.
So I decided to give this board a shot, I’m still not crazy about the format but the content more than makes up for it. Should’ve done it sooner.
I saw 2 books, the first & second, & then went online.
I’ve still never seen a copy of the newspaper version.
I had read one of Cecil’s SD books and when the web site went live I started reading the archived articles online and keeping up with the new ones. I discovered the old message board (I think it was on AOL or something like that…hard to remember) and lurked there for a while. Then the board just before this one I lurked on for a bit before finally starting to tentatively post now and again, until I got a bit more comfortable.
-XT
Same here. I just read that thread and then forgot about the boards though, until I became a ULMBer, and many folks cross over between here and there, so I eventually drifted over.
I found the link on bored.com and slowly read all the columns until I was caught up. Then a Threadspotting title caught my eye, so I started reading those. Eventually I started reading current board threads. I intended to browse a little longer before jumping in, but it looked like such fun that I didn’t wait as long as I’d intended to join.
If anyone reading this recalls having a personal webpage with a lame joke about the 3 Little (Guinea) Pigs and a link to the SDMB - you’re the person who steered me here. It was October 2001, and I was at work googling for a drawing of the big bad wolf trying to blow down the brick house. I don’t recall much about that person’s webpage - but assumed from it’s general tone its owner was female.
I was directed here by an online friend.
A friend told me he went to The Straight Dope almost every day to read the columns. (I think we were talking about something that Cecil had addressed and my friend told me where he’d gotten his information.) He said I should check it out. I read a few columns and eventually clicked the link to the boards. Sucked me right in, although I lurked for about a year before feeling brave enough to post.
GT
On a different message board (I think it was a digital camera board) someone posted a link to the column “Is it true a duck’s quack won’t echo?” I bookmarked the home page and read the articles, but I didn’t check out the message board for a few months. I lurked on the SDMB for a few more months and then joined.
I can’t believe I’ve been a member this long! I don’t post an awful lot, but I do read the boards daily.