Started reading the columns back on AOL in 95 or 96. Eventually followed it over to the web and continued reading. I didn’t join the board until I was spending the summer waiting for epoxy to dry.
I found the SDMB after reading this column by Cecil in May of 2000. I read all of the mesages in the message board before I decided to join in July of 2001.
I bought the book back in the 80s sometime. One day I remembered the book and thought “Hmmm, I wonder if they have a website”?
Plugged “the straight dope” into Webferret, and there it was. I joined right away.
The first thread I read was about “The SUVs of the sidewalk” people who have huge umbrellas and are rude and inconsiderate while on city sidewalks with their monstrous umbrellas.
I’m still using the same old AOL account with which I first went online 10 years ago. I don’t know why, too lazy to switch, I guess.
It was in 1997 I saw the AOL version of the Straight Dope. I don’t remember how it caught my attention; must have been a link from the AOL welcome page one day. The name “Straight Dope” must have impressed me as something worthwhile to check out. All I remember is the picture of “Cecil’s Brain.” I just lurked during the AOL period. The AOL message boards were crude clumsy software anyway. I read the AOL Dope enough to follow it when it migrated to its new online home. I probably didn’t imagine at the time that it would be something I’d stay with over the years. There’s only one other online community I’ve stuck with since '99, Salon Table Talk. But I was away from that for the first couple years after they went pay. A lot of TTers left, because the idea of paying to post on a message board seemed so outrageous at the time. Now we’re used to it.
I first got inspired to post at the SDMB by a Mailbag article that used the name “Tartar” instead of “Tatar” and I signed up in order to correct that error. It was the link “Comment on this article” that got me here, because otherwise I’d been ignoring the message boards. Once I’d signed up, though, I stopped posting until I’d read the whole backlog of Cecil’s columns. When I got a new job in 2000 but wasn’t assigned anything to do at first, I got in the habit of passing the time by visiting here and quickly became hooked.
A couple of years ago, I was in NY, at JFK’s International Terminal. Had to take a leak, and I noticed there was a fly in the urinal. Like any othe red-blooded male, I aimed directly for the fly, only to discover it was just a picture of a fly on the porcelain. How clever - give the fellers something to aim at, and maybe the floors stay cleaner.
When I got back home, I Googled “FLY URINAL” and wound up here.
The rest is a personal history of time-wasting and ill-used work hours.
Complete hijack, here.
Do you know what the VFW and American Legion Posts use for the purpose of that fly sticker?
This.
Hijack off.
I was driving on the Major Deegan Expressway in New York City and I started wondering who this Major Deegan guy was. When I got home I googled him and found Uncle Cecils explanation. Then I read a bunch more columns, started reading the boards & joined up.
I blame Tastes of Chocolate (who, as usual, will probably try to feign innocence).
I read *The Straight Dope * and More of the Straight Dope sometime around 1990 or so and then read the rest of the books as they were released. I found the books while buying a World Almanac or some other reference book. (I used to buy one every year as soon as they were published and the reference section of the bookstore is still my favorite part.) I watched the TV show, and would visit the AOL pages whenever I visited my little sister who had AOL. I used a local ISP and had recently moved to central PA.
I briefly subscribed to alt.fan.cecil-adams, and I think that might have been how I learned about the move the site was making from AOL to the www.
Once the site was on the web, it was my new favorite place, although for the most part I stayed away from the message board. I just reread the archives and read the new column every week. I started posting on the A&E message boards, then one night while bored I decided to check out the boards here. Liked what I saw and mostly stuck to reading GQ and GD, then finally signed up and started posting.
I found a few of the books at the library years ago, when I was heavy into a trivia phase. A few years ago, I decided to try to see what I’d find if I plugged “straight dope” into a search engine, and I found the Dope online. I’ve been a part-time, intermittent lurker for a long time; last year I decided to up & join, as it looked like a fun way to pass time when work got boring.
The Straight Dope was always the second feature me and my friends used to turn to in the pages of The Boston Phoenix alternative newspaper, the first of course being the sexually explicit personal ads placed by lonely Baby Boomer pervs. This began back in the 1980s.
Sometime after I got an AOL account, around 1995 or 1996, I got wind of the fact that Cecil had an AOL area. Read that for a little bit, then jumped over to the web site when that started up. Just visited for the columns, wasn’ t much interested in the rest of it. But then I came across a Staff Report I took issue with, and found a “Comment on this Answer” link, which took me to this message board thing. Now, in general I don’t like message boards. I don’t participate in any others except this one. When I go to a site that claims it allows to to comment on it and it’s a message board, I usually click away, because suddenly you have to learn what all the forums are and invest some (albeit minimal) learning curve time ot get the system, when all you wanted was a simple answer or to make one comment. I typed my piece with no clue what was going on. I checked back at the site a couple of times a few months later, and typed a couple of other things. Then I forgot all about it (the board, not the column) for two and a half years.
Cut to Feb 2003. My family had just gotten some horrbile news, and I needed to vent about something, anything. I was in the habit of occasionally checking Cecil’s columns online, and when I was looking for some information about the Columbia explosion, I happened across Cecil’s column on manned space flight. I took issue with some of the views he expressed about the subject, clicked “Comment on this Answer”, and found my ancient account still active. My thoughts were off-track from the existing thread, so I started a new one, and really enjoyed the give-and-take. Been addicted ever since, except for when i inadvertantly let my Charter Member status lapse one year ago today, and decided to try and get the monkey off my back. Lasted six months…
My cousin had one of the Imponderables books when I was little (Why do Clocks Run Clockwise) and I thought it was really cool and started collecting them. One day I noticed the SD books (I think there were 2 at the time) and realized they were similar so bought one of them. I was hooked! I found the webpage after whichever book started talking about it, but didn’t read the message board for years. When I finally did I started in only the comments on the columns, but I’ve drifted down into the rest now (except the Pit and rarely GD). I’ve since sold all my Imp books at rummage sales, but still have all the SD!
It was linked to on another board.
Flander told me about it.
I am yet another doper who got hooked by his column in my town’s alternative paper, FastForward, sometime when I first moved to Calgary in 1999 or so.
Well am I supposed to type my reply under this one?? Or erase it?
Anyhoo! My sister discovered the Dope whilst looking for the answer to the question of the direction which hurricanes or cyclones spin in the northern or southern hemisphere…
So here I am now… Its great… hehe :wally
I was invited in by a member and got halfway invited out by some administrators. And so it goes.
Use the peply button at the bottom right of a post that you want to quote. If you just want to reply to the thread use the reply button at the bottom left of the entire thread.
Welcome!
To settle some mindless debate, I Googled the lyrics to “Louie, Louie” and the Master’s column came up. Only after reading a few of the archives did I realize that this was the website for the article with answers to weird questions in the back of the weekly paper in San Jose that I read once every 4-6 weeks when I was there. After a couple of months of reading the columns online and poking through the archives, I got drawn into the boards by a Threadspotting asking “What is this tool?” (IIRC, it was some German thing for telephone line maintenance).
And here I am today, taking more than I give.
I have been reading the Chicago Reader for many years. I am familiar with alt.fan.cecil.adams but I am not sure how I got here. Probably google.