I was surfing the barrens of youtube land one night and came across a curious “factoid” claiming that sharks are absolutely immune to cancer.
This excited a memory of the 1999 film called Deep Blue, which was really horrible and included Samuel Jackson in the cast (wasn’t he in every movie during the 90s?). I was only 11 when I first watched it, but I recall that this movie also claimed that sharks were immune to cancer.
I was impressed by the article. I started to read more. I got hooked. Nowadays I search this site 3 - 4 times a day, and yet there is still so much content left to explore.
How about you guys? How did you Dopers discover the Straight Dope?
My mom chanced upon the original book in a bookstore. Then her and I chanced upon the short-lived TV show and said, “Hey, that’s the title of that new book we bought, let’s check it out.” Lo and behold it was based on that new book.
That lead to buying the rest of the books, some of which contained snippets from the message board voila. Lurked from 2004 until last year.
Back in the Dark Ages, I was browsing in a book store. I picked up a copy of The Straight Dope (there was only the one at the time) and looked through a couple of columns. The one that hooked me was the pigs’ corkscrew shaped penis. So I bought it. In one of the collections, there was a note that the SD was on AOL, so when AOL went to the all-you-can-surf pricing, I joined AOL and became a member of the message boards available there. I still miss the old Archives we had back on AOL.
I found the original book at my local library when I was a kid, and loved it. Kept up with the subsequent books when they were released, and eventually made my way to the message board once I was in college and had Internet access. I lurked for a year or two before actually creating an account.
I read the column in the Isthmus free newspaper in Madison Wisconsin in 1980 and there after for a couple decades. From there I bought the books as they came out. I also searched the internet often for the column going to a web page. The AOL board required an AOL subscription so all I could access was the articles, and not the message board. The cartoon always made the column. Sorry Cecil you we great too. The Onion was also a free paper I had to pick up everytime it was available.
When first learning the whole “how to google” thing, I was looking for information on Fiestaware. I chanced upon Cecil’s column on the topic of poisonous Fiestaware glazes. The rest is history.
The Straight Dope column used to be a regular feature in the Eugene Comic News, a weekly (or maybe it was biweekly) comic/humor newspaper in Eugene, OR. Found my way to the SDMB via the Dope website.
When they used to run SD on AOL, from time to time there’d be a little blurb on the home page. I signed on one day and there was a link on the home page to the article about if you could die from picking your nose. After that I started following the articles and eventually found the forums. When the SD left AOL I followed them here and the rest is history.
I remember MPSIMS being one single giant thread.
I got here from Bored.com when I was about 11 years old, in 2001. Wow, that means I’ve been reading for nine years, almost half my life. I didn’t think it’d been that long.
A coworker had the first Straight Dope book, and let me borrow it overnight. I spent part of the evening reading aloud to my then-housemates about the pig penis (hi, Lynn Bodoni!) and Catherine the Great and the horse.
I found the first book in a local bookstore and was hooked. Eventually, I had them all. Then one of my local free papers began to carry the column and I loved it.
Several years ago, I followed a link from Snopes and voila! I lurked for a couple of years before signing up, but I’ve been posting now since 2007.
Same story here, I was probably 12 or 13 years old, but Cecil’s wit really resonated.
I remember questions from Joyce K from Seattle and a great column about Betty Rubble chewable vitamins in response to a query from an obviously troubled, unbalanced Straight Dope reader…
Though I read the Dope sporadically in the San Jose Metro, I only visited the site when a discussion in talk.origins noted that a good evolution discussion was going on here. Connecting to usenet servers at work was increasingly a pain, and the volume was killing me, so the Dope was relatively nice and quiet, and possible to stay up with.
It was kind of a case of alt.atheism having such high volume that no one posted there anymore.
I honestly do not remember. I did have an AOHell account when I first got my first PC [I had amigas for about 8 years] so I may have found my way here through AOL, I also used to read bored.com and News of the Weird, so it could have been one of them also.
I was using stumble upon and looking for humor sites. It brought up that post about the killer blimp. I spent the entire day that day reading threads here. After that I became a lurker for years. I don’t recall why I decided to register back in Feb., but I’m glad I did.
I found the Dope about a year ago when I was googling something. I was linked to an article and so I started reading them. I only discovered the message board recently, though.