Someone on at the Bronze - the Buffy the Vampire Slayer message board - used “Fighting Ignorance Since 1997” (The year Buffy first aired) as her signature. I googled “Fighting Ignorance since” and was led to the front page.
StG
Living in Chicago, 1983. Read the column, bought the book.
I remember that it was a column in the Denver free paper back in the '80s when I was at the university there. (Westword?, IIRC, was the paper’s name). And I ran into it again in the '90s in the DC-area free paper when I used to ride the Metro into town for work.
One of my kids brought home a copy of the alternative Montreal Mirror and I discovered it there. After that I made sure to get a copy every week, until the Mirror dropped it, no explanation. This would have been in the early 80s. Then when the I-net started I searched hoping the weekly column might be available online. Instead I discovered TSD and the weekly column.
I discovered Cecil when the first Straight Dope book came out in paperback, May 1986. Browsing in the bookstore (either Pickwick or B. Dalton, in San Diego), it caught my eye. Bought it, loved it, watched and waited for the sequels, read each of them 2-3 times, and still have them all.
I “got into” computers in 1993, and not too long afterward discovered the Straight Dope usenet site. Had a look-see every so often, and once the website we know and love arrived, I became a dedicated lurker until finally joining as a guest in 2008. Began paying the token membership fees a couple of years ago, should have done it sooner.
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My favorite Beatle is George. Since 1964.
Cecil’s column ran in one of Raleigh NC’s long-lost, weekly newspapers, The Spectator. I remember reading my first one in the early nineties.
In the 1970s, the column ran in an alternative newspaper in the Springfield, Massachusetts area called the Valley Advocate. That was where I first read it, but it was many years after that before I encountered it elsewhere or ran into the books.
Around 1986, my friend Matthew and I were on the trivia team and high school newspaper staff together. He found the paperback at the library, and we used it to dig up trivia and to borrow ideas for newspaper columns. (We didn’t plagiarize, but we did use the column as a jumping off point for more teen-centric questions and answers.) By the time I was in college, in 1987, the column was printed in at least one of the local alternative newspapers, so I read it most weeks.
Stumbled upon the books in the early(?) 80’s. Recalled the name and went looking for this site about a decade ago.
Same here. Fall semester, 84.
Columns in the Dallas Observer weekly, late 80s-early 90s.
Another reader from the free alt-weeklies – City Paper, Baltimore, 1980/81, got hooked pretty fast (the Baltimore City Paper no longer carries the column).
Bought the paperback at the Pittsburgh airport in June of 1986. I was 13, almost 14, flying Peoples Express up to Maine to spend the summer with my dad.
Been reading the boards since mid / late 90’s. I’m not very talkative. (I used to have a different ID in the early 2000’s, it didn’t have many posts either)
In the 90’s, it ran in the New York Press, a good free weekly paper then (as was the Village Voice, which still prints today but resembles a newspaper only in its physical/chemical composition).
I read the column in the Portland* Phoenix for 2 or 3 years before I ever got around to looking up the message board.
- Maine
Good old bored.com
I was linked to the website version on either the Snopes message board or possibly the site proper. I read the column being linked, saw some interesting ones in the side bar, and looked at them.
Then I had something I wanted to say about one of them, and having recently found the Snopes message board, I looked for one for this site–and then waited for pay to post to end. By the time I did, I forgot whatever SD article was I wanted to comment on.
I think I waited like 3 months. And I came in exactly a month before P2P went away, using the free month of posting. So May or June 2008 when I found the column.
This specific article was on the homepage of AOL one day, I clicked on it and some how made my way to the AOL boards.
Discovered the book somewhere around 1990 or 1991.
In the school year of 1983-4, I was in a seminary in Chicago. We were right across the street from the University of Chicago. There was a school paper and it carried the Straight Dope. I was hooked on my first column. “Do male pigs have corkscrew shaped penises?” I read it over and over and, without checking, can still recite big chunks of it.