The recent zombie column is excellent, but I can’t help being struck by the notion that Cecil read The Zombie Survival Guide of his own accord and then wrote a question-answer style book review for us. I’m not doubting that many or almost all of the columns are real questions, but I recall having the feeling that the QAs were sometimes faked while reading the SD books. Not a huge deal - just something I think I noticed.
I can’t speak for Cecil, but I’ve heard advice columnists say, in effect, “You can’t make this shit up, it comes from the readers.” Why is that so preposterous?
I don’t think any of them are made up. With the amount of people that visit the forums alone he has enough questions to answer for a hundred years.
It doesn’t seem preposterous - I admitted that most are probably real. But some of this shit seems made up.
I’ve moved this thread to IMHO per request of the OP.
The questions are really from readers. I’ve seen them ahead of time and I see who they come from. (I haven’t written a staff report, but I hope to some time.) Somebody’s going to post and wonder if you can trust “them” on this, but aside from Ed and Cecil, only mods and SDSAB get to see this stuff.
I heard that about the “true stories” in Playboy. It broke my heart.
As SDSAB members, we get to see a lot of the questions sent to Cecil.
You have no idea.
Seriously, you should see the pile of questions Cecil doesn’t answer. 
Interesting. These should get their own forum so users can see/answer/comment on them!
“Cecil’s Inbox” - all pre-approved of course. Getting permission to post them is easy. Anytime someone sends an e-mail to Cecil their e-mail is ignored until they reply “agree” to a TOS e-mail.
I’m dreaming, but this sounds like fun and profit:)
My personal favorite is the one about whether swallowing a Mexican’s semen would be a useful technique for inoculating oneself against Montezeuma’s Revenge.
That was you?
I don’t need to actually detail the horrific revenge that particular remark mandates, right? I mean, I’ve been posting here for years; everybody knows to step away from Gfactor till the monkeys are done with him, surely. 
Here’s one I submitted. I’m the last question. So I know they are real.
I don’t know why you think any of them are fake. It would take a lot more effort to make up weird questions than just answer the ones that get sent from other people. Just as a guess, I imagine that the number of questions sent in versus those answered is well over 1000 to 1 and probably much higher. There is no need to make up weird questions on his own. Read GQ to see just the tinniest bit of fodder is. What do you think pan fried semen would be like?
That would be the “true stories” in Penthouse.
Or so I’ve been told.
Read The Master’s response to an allegation he made up a letter.
I knew a pornoisseur would come along and correct me if my memory had let me down!
Count me as another person who doesn’t understand why you would think any of the questions are fake. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s a pretty big world out there, with all sorts of free-thinking individuals (and that’s being nice) whose brains work differently than most. Sometimes that makes them a genius, and sometimes it just makes them curious about bull semen.
After reading the column in question, a few thought spring to mind (in addition to the already mentioned “people ask the darnedest things”):
He probably gets a dozen zombie questions a day. Fantasy is a popular topic amongst the users of this site, and presumably the readers of his column.
The Zombie Survival Guide is not the only reference mentioned. He could have just as easily have watched the movie White Zombie and decided to make a review.
The knowledge from the book he could have just read on the local bookstore after getting the letter. There is no need for him to have actually read the book.
Someone with a range of interests as wide as “Cecil” could have had already read the book and known it by heart. Or know about the book and referenced it.
And he sure can get away with a lot of political commentary on his column. You try and sneak 3 Iraq comments on a zombie themed thread and enjoy the warning.
All in all, I think it is quite a stretch to single out this particular thread. If I had to, I would be more suspicious of threads about actual trivia. That’s the type of stuff you normally learn of and want to run and share.